The Long Middle

Here is the day. I am going to give it to you once, properly, and then I will stop, because it did not keep changing and I am not pretending it did.

They wake you. There is food. There is… The honest word is rape. Repeated rape, every day, for a year. They called it training.

Sometimes there is the other thing, which is the punishment, and which does not happen every day and does not need to. Then there is more training. Then they let you sleep.

That is it. That is the whole architecture. You could put it on one line and I have just done.

Except I have left out the waiting, which is most of it.

They sat in the next room. There was a door, and the door stayed open, and there was a table, and they played cards.

It was what they did in between. It was their job and it was also their evening, and there are a great many hours in a building like that, and they filled them the way men fill hours anywhere.

They settled the order at that table. Not us. Them. Who went next, and to which of us, and for how long, all of it decided between hands by four men who were mostly thinking about the cards.

So the sound of the cards is the sound of it. I no longer know what that room smelled like. I still know what each of the men smelled like, and what they were drinking. I can tell you exactly what a deck being shuffled sounds like through a wall.

And I could feel them the whole time. All night, the entire game, through the door. I knew who was winning. I knew, before anybody stood up, which of them had lost enough to want something, and roughly what he would want, and I got about four seconds of that before the door.

The men got very good at cards. They had the practice.

We were the chips.

What I didn’t expect, and what nobody tells you, is that this is the part that does the damage, more than the first week. The first week I was a person having something happen to her, which is terrible and which is also a situation. A situation has edges. You are in it, which means there is an outside of it, which means there is a you that is separate from it and is currently having a bad time.

Somewhere in there the edges went.

I cannot give you the day it happened, which is the point, and I have come to think that not being able to give you the day IS the answer rather than a failure of the telling. There was a long stretch during which what was happening to me stopped being a thing that was happening to me and became simply what there was.

I have heard people call that acceptance. It is not acceptance. Acceptance is a decision and this was a subtraction.

The count went down.

Nine when I arrived. Eleven by the end of that first week. Fourteen at the highest. Then twelve, then eleven, then eight. I kept the number the way you keep time when there is no clock, which is badly and constantly.

Nobody announces it. There is a girl and then the arithmetic is different and you do not ask, because asking is a thing you did in the first month before you understood what the questions cost.

Some of them died of it. Just of it. The whole of it, over months, until there was not enough left to keep going. One simply stopped eating, which took a very long time and which nobody interfered with in either direction. And one just went, out of the room with two of them, and did not come back, and I do not know, and I will not guess.

That is three. I am keeping the fourth.

The man who kept the paperwork called it a fail rate.

He was talking to somebody else, on the far side of the room, about a different matter entirely, and the phrase came out of him the way a number comes out of anybody who has said it a hundred times, with no weight on it at all.

I remember what my body did. I have thought about that a great deal, because it was the last time for quite a while that anything anybody said in that building got a reaction out of me.

Then I went back to what I was doing.

I stopped counting the days somewhere in here.

That one I did notice, because I had been doing it since the road and it was the only thing I owned. Forty something. Sixty something. Then a stretch where I would try to get the number back and could not make it hold, the way you cannot hold a name you have just been told, and then a morning where it occurred to me to try and I thought: what for.

What for. That was the whole of the reasoning. Despair would at least have been an event. What I ran was a small cost-benefit analysis, in my head, on a concrete floor, and the count came out on the wrong side of it.

After that I used the bruises. They come up green, then they yellow, then they go, and if you pay attention you can read about a fortnight off a body. There was always a fresh set arriving on top of an old set leaving, so there was always a clock. I didn’t have to do anything. I just had to look.

So. The middle is not dramatic. It has no shape. There is nothing in it to tell.

And that is the part I would take back first, if anybody were offering, ahead of the worst day. The worst day is a story and I can carry a story. It is the four months I cannot give you a single sentence about, because they were the same, and I was there for all of them.

Except one week.

That one I can give you day by day, because she earned it and because there is nobody else left who can.

Monday she said something to the one with the bad teeth about his mother. It was the flattest and most available insult in that room and she delivered it like a woman reading off a list, and he hit her, and she said it again.

Tuesday she did it to two of them.

By Wednesday she had worked out which of them could not stand which word, and she had them sorted, and she went round that room like a woman doing the shopping.

Thursday she started telling them to hit her harder. Out loud. In the middle of it, in front of everybody. I watched a man stop because of it. I felt him stop. He did not know what to do with a girl who was asking.

Friday she laughed at them.

I could feel her the whole week and she was the calmest person in that building. She was working. It was the only piece of work available to her, and she was doing it properly, and every night she lay down and rested and got up and did more of it.

Saturday they put her on the floor and I thought that was the end of it.

It was not.

Sunday she finally got what she had been trying to purchase all week.

They said afterward that they had lost their temper. One of them was worried about the paperwork.

They had not lost anything. She used them. She was the only one of us who ever got a thing out of those men, and what she got was the door, and on her way through it she handed them a bill.

I think she knew that part was coming. I think she counted on it.

I felt her decide, six days before. I felt her working at it. I felt it when it went through.

I did not get up.

She is out of it now.

I said that to nobody. There was nobody to say it to. And I meant it kindly, and I still mean it, and if you think that is bleak I would gently suggest you have not thought it all the way through.

I envied her.

I wanted to do what she did. I had wanted it for months by then and I had thought about the arrangements, and watching her manage it was watching somebody else’s plan come off.

But it was not only me.

If I stopped, they had no reason to keep him. He was worth keeping for exactly as long as I was worth keeping, and I could not check that, and I could not argue it, and it was the only load-bearing fact I had.

I needed to live to keep him alive.

So I did.