The Four Stages of Cruelty by Keith Hollihan Page A

the hub’s major access points and the corridors of each wing. The grainy screens showed concrete,stone, and steel bars, like images of shipwrecks in deep water.
    “Wish I was home,” Cutler said, letting out a yawn. “Wish I was pretty much anywhere but here.”
    I rogered that and tried to keep my eyes from falling shut. The chicken wings, so tasty in the moment, had made me feel bloated and drugged. Soon Cutler was sleeping, his head thrown back, his bulbous neck doing something tuba-like to the snores that bellowed forth.
    Naturally, given such peace and quiet on such a blessed night, I succumbed to dark thoughts. My life at Ditmarsh had the taste if not the quality of failure. The job was a trap born of a momentous decision in my mid-thirties to enlist in the military before it was too late. But in my glorious 187 days of boots on ground in Iraq, all I did was live on a base, guard trucks, and feel grimy and sunstroked. The CO bit had not been in the plans. As soon I returned home, I looked into law enforcement, but there was nothing local going on. Then my father got sick. Despite feeling resentful about the situation that put me in, I took a job with the state corrections service to stay near at hand, and I ended up at the oldest penitentiary in the system, where none of the teachings and tactics I learned at the six-week corrections academy training course seemed to matter. The cliché of prison guard life was for real. I felt as if I too were doing time. My life outside was pared down, my belongings, my relationships, my routine all simplified. In Iraq I’d thought about friends and relatives all the time, wrote letters, sent intense feelings through e-mails, pictures, jokes. After my first year at Ditmarsh I stopped working so hard at keeping people near. And nobody seemed to notice.
    I sat and counted the reasons I wished I had said no to Baumard’s shift. Then I saw the sign.
    In the middle of the bubble was a hatch where the floor opened up, and under it was a stone staircase going down to the armaments room below, and below that to the sealed-off dissociation holding cells we called the City. Above the door, on the wall, was an old fallout shelter sign: two yellow triangles on the bottom, one on the top within a circle. Except someone with a sense of humor had unriveted the sign from the wall and secured it upside down, like a distress signal, and scrawled the letters NOYFB beneath, like a Latin expression on some crest. NOYFB meant “none of your fucking business,” and it was typical CO machismo. When I saw the mark in Crowley’s comic book, I’d felt some vague recognition, but it was not until I was leaning back in my chair at the console deck and staring at the upside-down fallout shelter sign that I made the connection. Good God, I thought. How had that sign ended up in the drawing of an inmate?
    It wasn’t my job. None of my fucking business. And still I rose from the chair, gently, so as not to disturb Cutler, and walked over to the hatch.
    Once, it had seemed like a juvenile prank, but the fallout shelter sign was ominous to me now, as though the menacing face were guarding the entrance to something wrong. The most common reason to descend the hatch stairs was to check the armaments or urinate in a corner, an unlikely act for me. We stored weapons down there along with assorted tools like fire hoses and canisters of chemical agent. Off the armaments room were four brick-sealed alcoves. Once upon atime, those alcoves were the beginnings of tunnels that led to other buildings within the complex, a means of escaping in case of dire emergency, but they were closed now, and anyone stuck in the bubble during a major disturbance would be holed up until the cavalry arrived.
    Below the armaments room was the City. The old dissociation unit had cells so small and dark and inhumane that after a history of bad incidents and suicides and accidental slips, the door had been finally closed for good. I’d