No sooner is the morning roll call over than a commotion, like racehorses bursting through gates, comes from the end of the corridor. Outside the front window, guards, far too many to count, gallop by, with billy clubs in their fists.
The door to my cell is thrown open. A guard calls out at the top of his voice, “Inspection. Out of the cell now!”
As I’m rising to my feet, the guard shouts, “Get the lead out, Rokuban!”
I’m coming. I’m coming.
Stepping out into the corridor, I find it is none other than Mr. Congeniality himself, Bubbles, who is barking at me. And now he’s yelling at me to put my slippers on.
Slippers? What slippers?
“Oh, right,” I mumble, noticing a shabby pair of rubber flip-flops set to the side of cell door. “C-1-24” scrawled on the insteps.
Sliding my feet into them, I feel a bit like Goldilocks: the left one is far too small, my heel hangs over the back; and the right one, with its strap torn, is far too loose. Taking a step forward, the right slipper flops off.
“Oh, for crying out loud.”
“Slipper!” Bubbles hollers at me.
“I got it. I got it.” Sheesh.
“No talking, Rokuban!”
After giving me a good pat down, Bubbles gestures towards the opposite wall and orders me to stand with my face against it.
“But there’s a trolley . . .”
“I said, no talking!”
“How do you expect me to . . .”
“Rokuban! Silence!”
“But this trolley’s in the way.”
“Rokuban! Oh, you’re right. I didn’t . . .” he says. Then, in faltering English, he tells me, “Shitto down.”
When I “shitto down” on the trolley, he shouts at me in Japanese, “Get your arse off that trolley!” Adding, that he didn’t mean shitto, he meant squatto.
Whatever, Bubbles.
So, as I squat down in front of the trolley, the others guards titter and snigger among themselves like junior high school boys.
“Hey, Katō. Great English there,” one of the guards says. “I’m really impressed!”
“Oy, Katō,” another says, holding up his nightstick, “I have a pen.”
As a guard goes through the meager belongings in my cell, I take a gander down the length of the corridor where two-dozen inmates have been forced out of their cells like worms from the soil. Four-dozen eyeballs stare back at me, the only gaijin in the joint.
To my right, a broken twig of an old man dodders out of Cell Number 26. His scraggly beard and shoulder-length gray, disheveled hair make him look like a castaway, long forgotten and given up for dead. All bent out of shape, the old man’s movements are so pained and deliberate, you can’t help but wonder what on Earth a bag of bones like him could have ever done to wind up here.
Between Castaway and me is a skinny young kid, not much older than eighteen or nineteen, whose hair has been given a hack job with a mad pair of clippers. The kid fidgets restlessly with his mouth—fingering his lower lip and giving it a good tug now and again. He steals nervous glances at me, at Castaway, at the guards, and now back at me again. It wouldn’t surprise me if the kid in Cell Number 25 was mentally retarded.
Aye, the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men do, indeed, gang aft a-gley.
To my left, and much too close for comfort, stands my neighbor from Cell Number 23, a lout of a man a few years younger than myself with nearly double the waistline. Dressed in his boxer shorts and a sweat-stained t-shirt, he is digging into the crack of his arse as if he’s mining for gold. He stops scratching, then gives his finger a good, long whiff.
I think he found a nugget.
As bad as things are, it occurs to me that they could be so much worse were I forced to share a cell with any one of these gentlemen.
Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.