Corrections

By Jeremy Miller

Part 2

8

I’ve heard that solitary confinement can drive a person insane over a long enough time. I didn’t have to find out because I have a man on the inside. Doctor K I call him. It’s not a codename, it’s just what I call him because I don’t know his real name. We don’t use codenames. It would be cool if we did.

I worked with an asset once who was half-Egyptian and half-Native American. That was the coolest combo I heard of until I met Dr. K. He’s half-Samoan and half-Italian. Those places are so far away from each other! His parents were both born and raised in America though, which is a bummer.

I was only in solitary for a couple of hours when Dr. K paid me a call but I was already pretty bored. I can see how it could drive you mad.

“Help me doctor, I have terrible swelling of the perineum, I need some Flintstones chewable morphine.”

“What happened to him?” he asked, rudely ignoring me. Men, am I right?

It’s always the first question he asks. “Him” meaning the doctor whose place he’s temporarily filling. He lives in terror that other medical professionals are being hurt or killed so he can take their place.

Dr. K is too high strung for this job but we have to make do with the people available. There are a lot of people involved in covert bullshit that shouldn’t be. Not me obviously. I’m fine.

“He and his family won a trip to Hawaii.”

I told him that because that’s what I always tell him. It’s like a bit we do. Ease the tension a little.

Dr. K gave me a knife and signed some papers to get me out of solitary for medical reasons. Why do I need a knife? Couldn’t I take out the target with my bare hands and feet and elbows and knees like a real badass? Probably. But why take the train when you can fly?

When I got back to my pod, mommy-buddy and the other podlings were amazed.

“How did you get out?” exclaimed the podling who looks like Shawn Wayans when he was pretending to be a white woman in that movie Marlon Wayans and Shawn Wayans Pretend To Be White Women.

“I just explained to the guards that I had a good reason for ripping that woman’s lip off. Theyunderstood. They’re very accommodating if you just open up a dialogue.”

9

Is luck a thing? Some cultures think so. I think I know which cultures but I don’t want to guess.

You have to be careful about cultures. If you say the wrong thing you might be an asshole.

On my third day my target and I were both on the chore wheel to wash the prison transport vans.

That’s some good luck.

Remember that scene in Cool Hand Luke? You know the one I mean. It was just like that. Only instead of being sexy it was 45 damn degrees, windy, overcast, and we were freezing our asses off.

Here’s a fun fact. A decent number of women puke their guts out when they’re being transported to prison. Maybe because of withdrawal, maybe because of stress, maybe a little of both. And it’s not unusual for some of them to piss and or shit themselves in the van from time to time as well.

Talk about NOT a cool hand.

There were supposed to be guards watching us but like most people prison guards are bad at their job. One of them never showed up and the other one wandered off after a few minutes with a stern warning for us not to fuck around.

The target didn’t look like the head of a massive drug distribution ring but the only person I have for reference is Catherine Zeta-Jones in Traffic. And there aren’t many people who look like Catherine Zeta-Jones, so add in the rarity of big time narco traffickers and you end up with a small Venn Diagram.

Plus, there’s the fact that she may not be the head of a massive drug distribution ring. That’s what they told me. They may have said that to try to make it easier for me. She might just have some dirt on the Governor of South Dakota. It might not even be that serious, she might just be someone who got their kid into a prep school ahead of someone else. Plenty of people with connections use them for the pettiest shit.

In Grosse Pointe Blank the guy who I always think is Ron Livingston but isn’t plays a hitman.

He’s supposed to be the good guy so they have to give him moral justification for hitmanning so we can enjoy the movie. His justification is that if you piss someone off enough for them to pay money for you to die then you must be an asshole so it’s okay.

It’s probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You know who can afford to pay money to have people killed? Rich people. And you know who rich people like having killed? People who are trying to make them less rich.It’s okay though because Not Ron Livingston’s love for the woman I always think is Amy

Brenneman but isn’t is so powerful that he gives up his murderous ways so they can be together forever.

I understand why they tell me my targets are bad people. It makes sense for them to do that.

Truth is I don’t care. What’s my justification? What makes me a good person you’d want to root for and not a monster?

I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

10

In the movies and on TV they usually go for the throat slit. I suppose it looks dramatic. Or maybe it’s just easier to light. It’s harder to cut a throat than you think. People survive a cut throat at a decent rate, especially if the cutter is doing it for the first time. As long as the cuttee gets medical attention.

My method is lung, lung, liver, liver (one end then the other, I know people don’t have two livers) and kidney, kidney. That usually gets the job done. The key is to wait and make sure. A few more stabs might be required. Throat-cutters often run off before they’re sure. Natural quitters they are.

This is assuming I catch someone unawares or I have them under control, obviously if they’re fighting me with any degree of real ability I take my stabs where I can get them.

The target made no such ruckus. I walked up behind her and bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam I did my thing.

She smeared blood all over the van she had been cleaning as she slumped against it and then slid to the ground. All that hard work for nothing. It breaks the heart.

The other two van cleaners were not within line of sight but process of elimination and all they would know that I had done it. They didn’t turn around as I came around the van into their general area.

“I considered killing you as well, just to be on the safe side, don’t make me regret that I didn’t.”

They just kept on van-wiping. Which I took as agreement they were going to keep quiet.

11

I don’t know what the prison protocol is for when they find someone dead. I expected something to happen.

It didn’t take me long to figure out why nothing did. A couple hours later in the cafeteria (they don’t call it that but that’s what it is) I saw the target who should have been very dead sitting at a table very much not dead from a fatal stabbing.

First thought. I got the wrong person. Unlikely but everyone makes mistakes. Even if I got the wrong person though someone still died. Why didn’t the guards have me and the two other van-wipers in solitary or being interrogated?

Second thought, she survived somehow. She wasn’t breathing when I left her there in an Olympic size pool of her own blood but you never know. Humans can survive some crazy shit. I worked with a guy whose chute didn’t open on a HALO jump and he lived. He was fucked up for the rest of his life but he lived. Unlikely things happen sometimes.

Even if she lived she should be in the infirmary at the least, evacuated to a real hospital most likely. She shouldn’t have been sitting there eating a mung bean salad.

I was moving on to thought three when buddy-mommy and one of my other podmates came up to my table. They told me that the Pod Six Crew had attacked one of “us” because of what I did – the trespassing and the lip ripping and so forth.

“Oh yeah?” I said, using the universal tone for ‘don’t care’.

“Yeah,” the podling who looks like a methhead Kathryn Bigelow said bodying up on me like a yappy little dog, “they beat the shit out of her.”

That caught my interest a little. “Did they now? I’d be curious to know what her injuries are, I hate to say it, but most women can’t hand out much of a beating. Even when it’s three or four against one. It’s just not something most women have experience with.”

“They stabbed her with a screwdriver!” chicken littled my mentor-buddy.

“That’s not bad,” I admitted. “What do you guys know about her?” I asked, chinning at the target.

“Are you listening to us?” demanded methhead Kathryn Bigelow.

“Sure baby, whatever you want, I’ll mess ‘em up good, give me some info.”

12My podmates had nothing to tell me about the target. I wasn’t expecting they’d give me the solution, but I was hoping they’d at least feed me a ghost story like she’s been here since the prison opened and hasn’t aged a day. That’s not really what women do though, not after the age of 13 anyhow.

Someone steals a magazine and this place will be hopping with gossip for a minimum of seven days. Who did it? And why? Because we ladies like to gab about real shit. We don’t make stuff up. Dudes go the other way. They don’t talk about much but when they do decide to talk it’s usually crap they made up. There’s some kind of lesson in there about genders.

Even though they proved to be useless I went on the Raid on Pod Six as I promised. 22% because I might need the podlings as allies but 77% (1% margin of error) because violence helps me think. For me fucking people up is like knitting or doodling is for some people or like driving is for morons – it keeps me occupied enough that I can let my mind wander.

So, the supernatural. Am I thinking that’s what I have on my hands? Not yet. If you talk to enough servicemen and spooks, which I have, you hear the crazy stuff. Every airman has a friend of a friend of a friend who an alien waved at out the window of a UFO. Every soldier has a friend of a friend of a friend who saw a giant in Iraq. Every sailor has a friend of a friend of a friend who got their taint tickled by a creature from the deep.

Do I believe any of it? No, see above about men and their ways.

But I don’t disbelieve it.

I don’t know if this is true, but there’s a rumor that one intelligence agency adopted a policy after a particularly bad fuckup where a bunch of people got killed that if everyone agrees on something as true one person has to play Devil’s Advocate. If everyone agrees that The Black Sword terrorists aren’t going to attack, one person has to argue that they will. It’s supposed to help stop groupthink.

It’s not a bad policy. The world is a strange place and getting stranger every day. I’m not going to start sharpening stakes because “clearly” the target is a vampire but there’s no reason to rule anything out either.

Adaptability let’s call it.

13

I never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer but I heard there’s an episode where Buffy has to slay a vampire by strangling him with her thighs because his vampire power is that he can’t be killed by weapons forged by mortal hands. I guess in Buffy the Vampire Slayer each vampire has a different special power. Which is nice for them. Everyone should feel special even if they’re not.I figured I’d take a page from the Buffster and try strangling the target in case stabbing just wasn’t the right method. Maybe she just has really strong organs or they regenerate. There are people out there with hyper-dense bones who never get sick so why not? Mother Nature is always coming up with new strange shit.

It’s a cliché I know but I got her in the shower. Nobody was naked but you can pretend if you’re into that. Not to go all “crane guy” on you but strangulation is something they never show realistically in media. And like my Uncle Tim it goes both ways.

If you try for a classic grab the throat with your hands it’s going to take forever. It’s really hard and it takes a long time. This is what you call an air choke. If you know what you’re doing and you can perform a “blood choke” where you are compressing the carotid arteries it’s surprisingly quick.

When you see someone choked to death on screen it’s either too fast for a blood choke or too long for that and not long enough for an air choke. I get it, you can’t spend forty-five minutes of screen-time on a choking scene but why not go for blunt force trauma? It’s realistic, it’s quick and it’s more cinematic.

I wanted to watch for a while and see if she was going to start breathing again or get back up or her belly was going to crack open and a new version of her was going to crawl out or whatever was going to happen. But I didn’t have the chance.

Women were coming in, to shower you know, so I had to choke and then skedaddle. I considered just threatening them into silence like the van crew but decided against it. Intimidation is a method you need to use sparingly if you want it to be effective.

A few hours later I saw her sitting by the phone bank reading Southern Living, very much alive.

Just like before.

But how?

14

I’ve never had trouble killing anyone before. Emotionally I mean. I literally have had trouble killing people. Some people are hard to kill. I bet Steven Seagal is not one of them.

Killing the same person over and over is starting to make me feel things. “Arms of An Angel” Tori Amos abused dog commercial things. It started when I was bashing her head against the wall by the therapist’s office. I was talking up blunt force trauma before so I decided to put my money where my mouth is.I came up from behind her unawares because I’m great at my job but when she slumped to the ground not quite dead yet she flopped around to face me. I’ve looked people in the face before as they died, it never bothered me, but this time it got to me. There was something in her eyes. I don’t know. Maybe she reminded me of someone.

It wouldn’t be so bad if she wasn’t so easy to kill. If I really had to struggle to get her it would bother me less. So far she’s shown no ability to defend herself at all. I’ve done plenty of bad shit to defenseless people but then you move on. It hits different when you have to keep doing it.

After I saw her a few hours later, very much not dead and flirting with the guard who looks like Miley Cyrus if she was an Asian man I went to the chapel for the first time. Pastor Dave is the spitting image of Pete Carroll. Swear to god.

“So what’s the deal with the resurrection?” I asked him as he was chopping up the packages of smack he brings in for the Aryan Lassies to sell.

Pastor Dave didn’t even look up, he ordered his little baggies into a straighter line with the patience of a man laying out communion wafers.“Resurrection? Jesus was raised bodily from the dead by God on the third day after his crucifixion and burial, exalting him to the near presence of God in eternal glory. It’s the basis of Christianity.”

“Yeah, but like, how?”

He glanced at me, eyes bright, friendly, like we were at church camp. “How?”

“How does it happen? How does it work? What are the mechanics?”

He turned back to his work with a smile “There are none. That’s not what it’s about.”

“What if it was? What if I told you that someone keeps dying and coming back to life?”

“I’d say you need a complete physical and psychological exam.”

“But what if I didn’t?”

He paused and thought. “If someone gets back up once, it’s a miracle. If they keep getting back up, it’s a lesson.” He tapped his cheek for a second. “God doesn’t raise people from the dead because He’s sentimental. He’s trying to teach someone something.”

“Guilt?”

“Maybe,” he shrugged