Taps

I found a piece of broken glass in the cell’s corner, probably left over from a beating I took. There have been so many. I lose track sleeping and praying for a way out of my eight by eight stone cell. Before I found the shard I counted my days with tiny millipede skeletons on the floor. I stacked them gently, one for each day. Between counting my hours, my minutes, my seconds, I memorized each stone and each tile. I used my own body to measure and re-measure each inch of this suffocating cell. Once, I found a crack in the back wall. I bit my fingernails till they bled, and forced each scrap of skin and nail through the chink. I wanted to know that a piece of me had gotten to the outside. When I got the shard, I took count of my days on my body. A day got marked on my leg, a month on my arm, and I have a beauty of a year on my chest. I kept counting.

I was placed in my cell high in the Pyrenees in 1938. I was a lone prisoner in the jail until fifteen months had passed, when a man was brought in to the cell next to me by two guards. He bled from the mouth and feet, head hung, legs limp. He was faintly gurgling for breath as the morning light crept in through the caged windows at the back of each cell. The rays drifted and mixed with the guards’ cigarette smoke and the dust in the air that rose from dragging the prisoner. Tiny tornadic winds swept from beneath his feet. They smelled of copper and colored the ground crimson when they passed by. I sat there, silent in my damp cell. I listened to his garbled moans as he spit from the holes in his neck and mouth. When it stopped, the guards threw something down and walked to my cell. The first guard walked in, struck me in the jaw and knocked me into the stone wall opposite the entrance. The bone above my right eye fractured sending shrapnel stumbling to the surroundings, tumbling through my muscle. The texture of the stone still remains, fixed to my skin as a sign above my eyes. I curled up and took kicks to my kidneys for as long consciousness could hold.

I didn’t know how many days I had been asleep. I opened my blood-crusted eyes and lifted my head too quick. I vomited yellow bile and red mucous, and gasped for something more to push out of my guts. And then I slept again, for days perhaps. I woke up too weak to do anything but crawl on the floor towards my stale bread, more alive than me, writhing with maggots burrowed deep within. I crawled to the plate and felt the millipede skeletons crackle beneath my knees and shatter like glass beneath my palm. I ate every crumb of bread I could and lay back down.

I woke up, and yelled out to the guard. But there was still bread on my plate. I called to the man in the next room to see if he had been awake when the guards came in. I thought he was dead from the way he was brought in, but somehow I got a response. It was a simple but forceful tap that amplified both my hopes and my worst fears. I had been alone for so long. I was tired of counting. But when the tap came, I quaked. What if I was only given a taste of company? What if he were to die on me? What if whoever was behind that wall left, and then I was alone again? What if he can’t talk, or worse yet, he speaks another language? How could I survive if I knew there was someone who could offer their help, yet I couldn’t understand their words of consolation? If I could only receive gibberish in return for my cries of hunger or pain or loneliness, I would kill myself. I would bash my head into the wall. Over and over again until I either learned his language or I rid myself of it.

But I got a response. That tap gave me new life and I put my shard down after marking one more day on my leg. Somehow, I had hope. I sat and waited for more than just the knock. I waited patiently, then called again. I asked if he was still there, still next door. Was he still alive, and if so, did he speak Spanish? I called and called but only received the same tap. So I called and spent the day calling. I asked questions, everything I could think of to get more than just a tap. If I didn’t get through to him, then I might as well have died myself. I needed more than the tap.

I yelled at whoever was behind that wall. I cursed him. I cursed his family. I cursed his children, and their children, and his god. And whatever reason he was put into the prison next to me. Then I wept for the both of us, I wept for his family I had just cursed and I wept for myself. I hoped that it would somehow save the both of us. I wept for our very souls and then denied their existence. I yelled to whatever was beyond that wall that we were actually free, or we would be once we had died, our souls simply moving from these shells. And then I lay back and I accepted the silence I got as a response.

And then the prisoner from beyond the wall knocked again, and again and again.

The prisoner beyond the wall knocked continuously for hours, as if he were going through the exact same emotions as I was. He was repeating my words verbatim for me like talking to a mirror of rhythm. He seemed to speak my words, more words even, and continued in the same cantor as my speech. Each knock was equal to a single syllable. When I spoke back I heard my voice and my words. I realized that whoever was on the other side wanted to converse, but simply couldn’t. So I ate more of the bread and I crept closer to the wall.

I spoke a word, and wrote out how many knocks it was in the dust. I sat there for days on end, knocking out a language on the walls of our prison. It was one knock for

“I”, three knocks for “Love”, fifteen knocks for “I agree” and another twelve after that to say, “But what about the tea?” I filled the dust on the floor with our words, and when I ran out of room, I went back to my body. We worked it out to a science. I knocked on the walls until my hands bled. I worked so hard to memorize each word, each sequence, and each nuance in the knocks.

And in those nuanced knocks he told me there was a hole in his wall.

So I sat closer to the wall between us to talk about what he could see. He told me the beating he had received had nearly blinded him. He saw nothing but colors and shapes. I told him it was fine, I only wanted to know what the outside still smelled like.

I listened to his wheezing. I asked him, in thirty-two consecutive knocks why he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak. So he told me his story. He had lived on a farm to the south and harbored a refugee from Madrid who had arrived one night with a broken leg that bled and suppurated. He told me that the refugee was ill and he kept him in his cellar, treating his wound as well as he could. But the refugee was too far gone by the time he was in the cellar. The refugee’s wound had begun to fester and stir like my bread, like the silence that had invaded my prison when I was alone. Then he told me how soldiers had come to his house looking for the refugee, but he stood firm and said nothing. The soldiers took him prisoner and tortured him for not giving any information on the refugee. One soldier cut out his tongue for his reluctance to speak. The prisoner on the other side told me in forty-four raps on the wall that the refugee had probably died in that cellar after my prison mate was tortured and taken to me. He was so ashamed to admit that he had killed the refugee; he cursed himself for not getting help earlier. He was still haunted by the refugee’s face wasting away in his cellar.

I lay on my side, with my stomach against the stone wall between us, among the broken millipede glass. I slipped a hand through the bars at the bottom of the door and rapped on the walls to tell him where I was. He did the same and I took his hand, cold and slightly damp with blood, and held it. I rapped on the wall again, eighty-two times to tell him we would make it out to his farm. And he knocked on the wall another fifteen times.

I held his hand longer. We exchanged stories about our lives until we were so close that we could have been mistaken for the same person. We committed each other’s patterns to heart. We told the same stories as if they were our own. We shared a story about summer melon on the bank of a childhood river twenty-four times, and each time the story was repeated it was more engaging than the last. We embellished each time so that as we memorized each new version, we lost the previous one and all that we were left with were the embellishments.

Each story became grander until my companion beyond the wall told me that it was night and we should sleep. But before I slept, I tapped out one more question. I asked him in a simple twenty-tap rhythm if he could see a way out.

The next morning I awoke to the same five taps repeated over and over. I woke and tapped on the wall; seven taps, asking how long he had wanted me to get up. He replied in thirteen taps that he had been at it for four hours and thirteen minutes, since dawn essentially. I asked him what he found, and he said a way out. Twenty-three taps was all it took to make me happier than I had been in weeks, years, decades even. I was happier than I had ever been in my life perhaps, happier than any time in the prison for certain.

He tapped that he had been working on the way out since we had talked. He tapped that he would be through in a month. He would take me with him. He promised.

We started talking about the future. I was so desperate to be released that we talked about the times when we would be free from our confinement, and I began to bargain with him. Bits of my bread for some soil he could scratch from the outside. A feather, one fell close, for an entire piece. I sold him and traded away my sustenance for smaller pieces of freedom. With each piece of freedom, I felt myself get farther and farther from the cell. I stopped tapping on the walls and I stopped talking to him. I handed my bread through the bars as he brought more and more back for me from his hole to the outside. We stopped talking completely for weeks, but the outside still arrived with each piece of bread.

Then our exchanges stopped entirely. One day, I handed my bread over and nothing came back and my worst fears were realized. I tapped on each wall of my cell, the bars too. When that didn’t work, I tapped on the floors, on my chest and skull. I took every bit of freedom I had scraped together from my partner and handed it back. I threw it back through the bars in what I thought was his face. I ate the bread I was saving and I opened my mouth for the first time in what felt like years. I wailed, cursed, and bargained my life away to whatever was behind that wall.

I cursed him for leaving me. I denied his original existence, by telling myself he was just a piece of me that I had pushed away finally. He was one last vestige of my need for others. I accepted that perhaps he had never been there or that he had died. In fact, for a brief second I felt joy that he had escaped. Then it struck me that if he had left then he had broken our covenant to leave together.

I opened my mouth one more time and I told the empty prison that I would give it my soul and my eyes if it could only free me from where I was. Just let me to live on the farm from my youth and smell the coppery earth around me. I would give the emptiness behind the wall my sight if I could only sit on the bank of the stream next to my house and eat melon. I would do anything if it meant I didn’t have step on tiny dead bodies and shred my feet and knees with their tiny bones.

As soon as I said that I heard a knock, then a second knock, and a third. It kept repeating louder until each knock was deafening. I backed away from the wall and curled up as I had done so many years before. I was on my hands and knees, ears covered and eyes wide as the wall before me fell. I heard the stones fall and knock against each other. Fifteen knocks in that pattern meant one thing; twenty-two in another pattern meant something else. I heard the fall. The stones replayed my pitiful weeping, my weak arguments for freedom. In the cacophony that was the collapse of the wall, I heard my own voice come resounding back.

I climbed the rubble to the next room and felt a drop of rain touch my forehead. Another and another hit my face as the blood crust washed from my lids. I could see clearly. The wall had collapsed upon whoever was behind it and only a leg was left sticking out. But from what I saw, whoever it was had been dead for some time. The leg was nothing but crushed bones in pants torn by animal’s teeth. I discovered that a tree had demolished the entire cell weeks ago. Plants and ferns had overtaken the cell. Mushrooms clung to the bone beneath the rubble. I climbed through the hole the tree had made. I gathered some sticks off a branch with which to make a cross. I left the body as it was, under its stones, but at least I had buried it somewhat. I stumbled out of the hole left by the tree, and when my feet touched the mossy spring ground, my vision went white.