Shadow Baby by Alison McGhee

to the left. “Enough, enough, enough.”

Chapter Seven
     
    T he old man was a hero for many reasons, not the least of which was that he once escaped from the solitary confinement to which he had been unfairly sentenced. Most often a solitary confinement is a hole in the ground, covered with a wooden door. Such was the case with the old man. When a prisoner is bad enough or, like the old man, unfairly sentenced for a fake offense—backtalk to a guard—they chain his legs and arms and drag him to a hole in the ground. They remove the chains and throw him in. They lock the wooden door in place and that’s it. Once, possibly twice a day, the door is opened and a bucket of water and another bucket of slop are lowered into the hole. That’s what the old man lived on. There was nowhere to go to the bathroom in the old man’s solitary confinement except in the mud at the bottom of the hole.
    I can picture the old man as a young man, crouched in the bottom of the muddy pit, curling himself into a fetal position on the filthy scrap of old horse blanket that the guards had thrown down on him. I can see that poor young man so clearly, reciting stories and poems from his childhood in an effort to keep from going insane.
    If you can see it so clearly in your mind, it’s real. Isn’t it?
    Few prisoners survive more than a few weeks in solitary confinement. If they are not allowed into the light of day within a fairly short time, they start to rot. Once you start to rot death comes quickly. People need light. They need sunshine in order to keep on living. They need sound, which is another thing that does not exist in solitary confinement.
    How did the old man survive? He had a secret life. He knew from the very first day in the hole of solitary confinement that he would not be able to survive unless he had two things: a dream and an escape route. The very first night, he broke off a tree root that was growing into the side of the hole. For the next year, he used that root to dig silently at night. Using mental maps, he tunneled his way directly underneath the prison kitchen. Eventually, by tracking the vibrations of the ground above his head, he figured out where the prison kitchen root cellar was and tunneled up to it.
    This took a total of eleven months. He kept track of the passing days in his head. Each night he made up legends and myths and stories. Georg Kominsky knew that unless he exercised his brain as well as his body, both would atrophy. What kept Georg going? What prevented him from giving in to despair?
    His dream.
    He dreamed of his metalworking tools.
    Georg Kominsky had a vision and he did not allow himself to swerve from that vision. Despite the cockroaches that swarmed over his pallet at night and the pale worms that writhed in his nightly food bucket, he forced himself to eat and sleep and exercise and make up legends. He did not onceallow the thought of death to enter his mind. Night after night, day after day, the old man kept on going.
    It might seem that a dream of metalworking alone would not be enough. It might seem that someone would need more than the thought of tin snips, a solder iron, and a forge to stay alive.
    Not if you were the old man. I know this because that’s what he told me. Once, a few weeks after I told him about Baby Girl Winter and how I hated being without her, the old man looked at me and said, “You only need one thing, Clara.”
    “One what?”
    “One thing to keep you going. One thing will do.”
    I looked at him. We were outside at his forge. He was working on a lantern, soldering decorative strips to the sides.
    “Well, what’s your one thing then?” I said.
    He pulled his safety glasses over his eyes and touched the tip of the solder iron to the tin. Gray metal-melt trickled down the side.
    “This. Making useful and beautiful objects of metal. This, and the memory of my mother in a dark room, singing to my younger brother.”
    “That’s it?” I said.
    “That’s