At Me They Stared

They're intermittent now. The visits, I mean.

I don't even know when he is coming, there seems to be no pattern. The guards simply lead me out of my cell, down the stairs, up the corridor and through another locked gate, a buzzer marking our entrance. I am then led to a quiet, solitary room.

I can hear him each step of the way, screaming for me to come to him. From the threshold of my cell, down the stairs, up the long corridor, and leading through the buzzing gate. All the way into that quiet room where he finally shuts up.

It's embarrassing, even in a place such as this, where we are all at our worst. I tried to make it known how little I cared about others' opinions. Some seek me out for advice, others to take out the rage they feel towards those professionals who wronged them on the outside. In some strange sense I felt isolated in such a cramped place. It was as though I was this victim being tortured and yet all anyone could see was my outcry. A guard, a cellmate, visitors holding up phones on the other side of the glass: it was all the same. Though it was he who screamed, it was at me they stared.

But his voice, his narrow, penetrating voice. It followed me until it was just us, a prisoner and his visitor, alone in that off-white room.

This wasn't always my life. I was once an extremely successful financial advisor, working with men whose names were often in headlines; names found as easily in a Forbes' list as they were in some other unmentionable list. They sought me out, making my job - my choices, so much easier. I was a "finance bro" with all the charm and yet none of the self-preservation.

In that kind of industry you see some of the poorest choices made by the richest of men. You tweak and move and sell and buy and it's all one giant game. A little to the left. A little off the top. No one notices. People get away with it all the time, including me. And that, if I were to tell the truth, becomes quite appealing. A little to the right, a little bit of wrong. Until someone does notice.

What started as a means to stick-it to the richest and most disgusting of our world, slowly became something else entirely. Too many hands touched that money, and later I found it much easier to steal smaller amounts from several of the lower-end clients: a neighborhood pizzeria business, a young girl who just inherited her grandmother's fortune...

It was never my intention, but it was as though something had whispered in the night how easy it could be - and I listened.

Evidence creates a knot in any loophole even the best lawyer can put forth, which is how I ended up here. My financial crimes, much like my successes, were only to my detriment. They were so intertwined I could hardly tell the two apart.

So there we stood, staring into one another. Like we were equals, like we both bore the same sin being able to see eye to eye in a way such as this.

"I've been hearing you," I muttered, lips barely moving from their parched stiffness and puffy eyes equally as dry from being awake too long.

He smiled at this and the room dimmed, perhaps a cloud had made its way across the sun or rather it was his presence that made all the difference in the shadows. I looked to see there were no windows.

It kept me up at night: The sounds within the prison walls. Sometimes you'd hear crying or a raspy smoker's breathing. Other times pacing or the tapping of an overused, tiny pencil. There was never a quiet moment, not unless he and I shared a room.

But lately I heard none of that, and only heard his voice at night. Luring me, calling me, whispering secrets I'd never told a soul. He knew things, knew everything, and he reminded me of all my once forbidden thoughts and actions.

He murmured reminders of how much money I stole, of how much I lied to my financial partners. He snickered unwelcome lore of how I once, feeling on top of the world, forced myself on a woman in some cheap bar. He giggled at how I stole from my mother despite being significantly richer and recalled how I once hit something (or someone) on the drive back from a bar one night, too drunk to care or maybe to even notice. A nearby city's children's charity? He knew of that skimming, too. He held no animosity, he simply recalled each infraction as though he were conjuring up some mutual memory, ones he too had witnessed or been a part of altogether.

And it wasn't just at night, no. He was in my phone calls, waiting until my mother answered to reveal himself on the line, too. The pre-approved movies, a once minimal escape, would later reveal him as a background character, waiting to turn to the camera, waiting just to bare his teeth to me. If I flipped through a magazine, there he would be in an ad, coffee cup in hand, "A DARK CLASSIC," in bold, intertwining font, and a smile across his face, just waiting for me to turn the page.

Later it would come to the point where I never knew who he was going to be. A guard walking us out to the yard could swiftly turn to me, grasping me by the throat and shoving me against the cement wall, only to show his same, rendered smile. And then again, serving me a spoonful of mashed peas in the chow hall, smiling as he filled my plate. My prisonmates in line behind me had shoved me forward, as if they saw no one and nothing out of sorts.

"Loony fuck," they named me.

"Muttering moron."

I heard every one of their disparaging names. The guards were even in on the joke, casually referring to me as Schizo Bro most days. I understood, I really did. They could not hear him like I did. His screams and wails, his secrets and lures: to everyone else it must have appeared as though I were all alone. I begged so often for him to stop, sometimes I being the one who cried in the night. Yet all their "shut-the-fuck-ups" and all their complaints seemed only to make their way to me. It was as if he and I became one, making it all the more lonely.

And yet, as he stood across from me in that quiet room, I heard nothing at all. His shit-talk and secret blabbing had finally ceased, as if it were all a trick to get me here, right now. His taunts and teases no longer drove me to anger, but instead into madness and all I could see was his permanent smile. I could feel him, too, as if I were being dunked under water - just suddenly, then entirely, submerged. Like your parents slowly closing your bedroom door after saying goodnight: just slowly, and then wholly in the pitch dark.

"I don't want you to visit anymore," I whispered, knowing he could hear me.

"Do you hear me?" I was getting louder now. "I need you to leave me ALONE," I growled.

A guard's fist pounded on the locked door, a small, square window showing his face.

"Pipe the fuck down, or your visit to the hole will be longer," he warned. I waved him off.

The room dimmed more, and for a moment I felt myself drowning before him, gagging and coughing by the weight of his presence unable to catch my breath. He said nothing and yet I could see it all: all of our secrets intertwining with this darkness he used against me. I could see every putrid choice I ever made laid out before me from an outsider's point of view. I could see myself smile and laugh at the expense of those around me but mostly I could see how much of me genuinely enjoyed it. This shadowed halo engulfed me and I realized it was not in prison he had found me, but instead he had been with me all along. As though prison was not his vessel, but rather a hindrance on his quest to infiltrate.

Suddenly I could breathe. I was no longer drowning. He knew me, he really knew me. And in that sense I think I finally grasped what he had been telling me all along. It truly was like being submerged, but now just a warm, full acceptance of what surrounded me. It was as if I had always known and always known him. Finally I found my loophole, free from knots.

He showed me one last secret, this time of something not yet to have happened. He showed me the twist and turn and hook and hang of it. A little to the left. There, right there. He had me finish it off in a single, tight bow.

And when the guards found my body, swinging so silently in that padded, solitary room, it wasn't at the smiling man in the corner, but at me they stared.

Katie Lilljedahl