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For the benefit of our (soon to be) Attorney General  Quiet.
Cold.
Dark. Your eyes strain to see even one small particle of light. Lying on your back they openly press the overhead darkness. Your mind begins to create its own flashes of electric purple and red and blue and green, reaching to feast on a real color, to devour any color, any fleck of light. You try to pull your knees up, to bend them a little more, to relieve the ache, the cramps rising from the back of your knees spreading across the raw flesh of naked kneecaps firing into your thighs, setting them on fire. In the pit of your stomach a tingling sensation begins again: that fear of the pressure, the water, the cold, the dark, is all rising, rising again. You cannot let it reach your brain again. You stretch out pushing bare feet against unyielding, cold concrete at the foot of this short, narrow tomb. Tucking in your head, with your chin compressing your chest and straining, your neck, you can barely straighten your legs. The pressure of the merciless stone against the back of your head becomes unbearable and the darkness within your skull once again washes over you like death. Your blackness releases the dreams. The horrible dreams. Dreams so terrible you dare not remember them. Now there is the loud scraping of the concrete lid as they open your grave. Light, harsh, bright light, knifes into your eyes blinding you more than before. You blink, white and soft, like some repulsive, white worm turned out, from under a rock, covered with your own filth. Half heard obscenities scream at you. Angry hands lift your naked body roughly from your tomb and you are dragged down that familiar hall, that horrible hall, that leads to The Room. Desperately your mind tries to stop time, to hold back the clock, to hold tenaciously to each second of the hallway time. You cling to the sensation of the rough gloved, supporting hands under your armpits as they drag you, feet scraping broken toenails, down the concrete hall. One.
Two.
Three. You count your numbers, your saving numbers, the numbers that can somehow stretch time until you reach The Room and the water. Don't think of the water. Four.
Five.
Six. If only you had a chance to think, to perhaps spend a few moments in a time when it was not always like this, this hell of pain and darkness, of no sleep, and no waking, and no stretching. You can't not think of the water and the questions and the laughing, waiting men in The Room. Too soon, always too soon, you are dragged over the threshold, placed on the hard board, in the brightly lit room where they keep the board and the laughing men and the questions. Tied on the board, the tilted board, with the filthy rag stuffed in your mouth, another, equally foul, over your nose. They are all looking at you, these Americans, laughing at your penis and your body smelling like urine and feces. The Americans, in their terrible camouflage colors rendered grey, green and black under the florescent, lights are lewdly smiling down at your panic, their eyes burning yours. Your lungs push at the rag, its wet taste of someone's urine and sweat stinging your dry tongue. Your lungs are bursting with the words you cannot speak: "How can you be doing this to me? Are you not men like me?" Your mouth chews at its stuffing as it tries to cry out to them, to ask them for pity, to confess, to beg even to return to the terrible darkness of your tomb, to give them, anything, just to make it all stop. A man with a well trimmed beard and sharp rimmed glasses looks down at you, bending closer than the others. His breath smells of wintergreen. They call him "Shrink" His smile is not like the others. It fills you with a horror beyond even the fear of the laughing Marines and the other Americans. It is a warm smile, a compassionate smile. It is the smile which is the birthplace of all the horror, all the pain. "I think you said that when you were in Berlin with your wife and your youngest boy, you went to the Pergamon Museum…" Shrink's soothing words are calm, deferential, reassuring, comforting. For you they hold only the blackest terror. You close your eyes tightly, pressing your head back into the board, struggling to become like it, hard, wooden and dead beyond the pain and beyond even the desire for the pain to stop. Beneath your tightly closed lids, your eyes are giving you a little show of colors: bright orange and yellows are dancing, refracted by the blood vessels in your lids that are filtering the oppressive, green fluorescents on the ceiling. Your throat begins to gag against the muffling, vile rag as you shake your head from side to side trying to drown out the questions and throw off the rag blocking your nostrils. They flare in panic, as your lungs suck at the filtering fabric for air. These questions have been asked, over and over, day and night, awake and asleep. They will not believe you, cannot believe, you, whether you lie or tell the truth. You have no answers to make it all stop. Suddenly you hear the scrape of the bucket being lifted and the hollow clank as it lands in the sink. When the percussive splash of the water strikes the empty bottom of the pail, your body screams in terror pulling at the bonds holding you to the board . Once again you try to listen, listening intensely to the terrible sound of the water as it is filling, reaching its top. You once again ask your numbers, your precious numbers, to save you. One.
Two.
Three.
Four. Your mind sees each number growing large in your head as if filling with air, like a balloon. You try to fill your thoughts with all the air within each large, white ballooning number. You try to hold the air the way you know you will soon have hold it when they begin pouring the water. You will give anything to hold and keep this number that holds back time. Suddenly it is burst by the next number that itself begins inflating, not nearly slowly enough, not nearly large enough to hold nearly enough air to save you. And then there is the next dreaded sound, the sound of the faucet's turning, rusty cry as the flow of the water is shut off. The bucket is lifted and slowly brought over to you. Tilted at your angle on the board, you see its approach upside down and now, remarkably, for the first time, in slow motion. This same ritual is being repeated as it has been, countless times before. Only this time, time has suddenly, amazingly slowed. Have your numbers somehow magically saved you? As the water fills your nostrils and the rag swelling in your mouth, spilling over your face, its cold liquid no longer stings your eyes the way it has countless times before. As its coldness is drawn up into your burning, scarred lungs it is now as if some other body is convulsing in some distant land in a far different age. The Americans now have something else to laugh at, as even the loud sputtering, spraying of the water from the nostrils that seeps relentlessly back up into the sinuses and lungs of this other one becomes distant, almost inconsequential. Nothing to do with you. Everything is deliciously becoming so very soft, so very slow, so very blurred and remote. The Room with the men and that drowning thing below, shrinks as your body becomes lighter and lighter. Filling with air it rises up, up, up. Lungs filled with sweet soft clouds, you finally rise above the room entirely. Leaving all the horror far below you now, you follow the dreaming winds. A little later, you will settle, graceful as a glider, onto soft rounded hills covered with a golden field of winter wheat. As you melt, dissolving over these hills like poured honey, the field gradually will become the warm, beautiful body of your wife, Diana.
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