A Fitting Punishment
Everything hurts.
My nose throbs, the bags under my eyes sting, my chest, arms, forehead and scalp ache with a pulsing pain that ebbs and flows like the tide, each feature humming with that feeling. I’m consumed by the sharp scratching, the taught, raw skin of freshly healed wounds.
All I can see is white, a blank unending snowstorm. Does that mean I’m blind? No,I can blink, white to black and back again. I’m not blind.
Where am I?
“The swelling will go down of course.”
“You did a good job, he’s going to look handsome.”
A derisory snort, the sound of a briefcase snapping shut, the clasps roughly clicked into place.
“Doesn’t matter, looks aren’t important where he’s going.”
“Why bother then?”
“They told me to have fun with it.”
A pause, an uncomfortable silence, then the buzz of lightbulbs and the whirring of machines fills my ears.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, make sure he rests, the nose will take time to heal, oh and make sure he’s-
“-Under the influence, we’ll check on the implant, yes.”
Under the influence of what?
Footsteps, fading away, the snap of a door as it opens, the clatter as it closes.
I hear the tinkle of medical bottles, the plunging sound of a syringe being drawn, the flick of someone’s finger against the needle.
“This will put you under for a bit, help with the swelling too,” the short sharp scratch, deep into my arm, followed by the flow of cold liquid through hot blood, cooling my veins. I try to struggle but still can’t find the strength to move.
Then my consciousness fades, the black eating up my vision from the peripheries, until all is darkness and I slip into an uneasy sleep.
***
I wake.
The pain is a little better, not as sharp, not as intense.
“He’s awake.”
A deep, familiar voice. The doctor’s voice.
“Get those things off him.”
The white unravels, my vision returning strip by strip. As each bandage gives way I see more and more of the nurse, her pallid face and tight mouth, the cramped white room around us. It’s a featureless room, four walls with a plastic chair beyond the edge of my bed, the doctor sat in it.
“Healed well, if I may say so myself,” his eyes squint behind the horn-rimmed glasses as he leans forward, straining at the edge of his chair. The nurse moves away, hands full of spent bandages looking to the doctor for orders.
“Go.”
She leaves, scuttling through some unknown door that opens out of the blank wall, the snapping hinges reverberating as it shuts.
I try and sit up but can’t. I can’t move anything, except my eyes.
The bed beneath me is a vast sponge, a warm, globular mire that drags me down, sucking me in, clawing at my sides, enveloping me, burying my limbs slowly in a swathe of numbness.
My head is stuck to my shoulder, my neck bolted to one side, propped up by my numb arm. I look down, trying to survey the damage. My body is a sea of white bandages, unknown injuries beneath them. But I can still see my left hand, resting immobile against my chest. It gives me some strange comfort that I haven’t lost it. I roll my eyes around but I can’t see the right hand. I’m paralysed. Is this my life now?
The doctor’s looking at me again, observing.
“How did this…”
“Still verbal, great, I’ll get it in the neck for that.”
He slaps his knee in annoyance. I blink, stare, try to move my head around as he stalks about the bed to my right side, the side I can’t turn to.
“I don’t understand.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I had an accident?”
A deep chuckle.
“Not an accident no,” I feel something in my arm, a sharp pain, something pulling at my veins, a drip maybe? The doctor stands with that grunt middle-aged men adopt and moves back around the bed, eyes fixed on my face, running over my features without meeting my gaze.
“What then?” I mumble.
The doctor tuts and looks to the ceiling as though something interesting can be found amongst the spotless tiles.
“The anaesthetic can cause temporary amnesia, it should wear off soon, then you’ll remember.”
He looks down and, without warning, lifts both my lids, his fingers pressing down on each eyeball, making me grunt with pain. His scrawny claw of a hand pulls a torch from his jacket, clicks it on, harsh light flooding my retinas. I blink, try to bat his hand away with mine but nothing moves.
“All fine,” he grunts, standing and turning to leave.
“Wait,” I try to get up, to stand but my limbs are jelly, boneless, my legs full of rocks, my hips weighed down on either side. I grunt, try to lift myself, try to drag my boy but I can’t move, can’t even lift my hands to pull away the blanket. My chest is tight, so tight, like its scrabbling at my heart, trying to burst it.
I gasp with pain. Sweat running down one temple.
“Tell me, what happened?”
But he’s already gone.
***
The hand is clutching, scrabbling, scratching, blood-soaked, blood-caked, blood under the fingernails, crimson entrenched in each line on the palm, always grabbing.
I wake with a start. My mind churns with thoughts that swim in and out of broken dreams, flirting with waking nightmares. One blurry image follows another, razor sharp scenes intertwined with screaming faces, swinging from vivid clarity to raw snapshots, terrifying faces, clutching hands, blood.
I hear the squeak of the secret door as it yawns open.
Two men enter. The doctor I recognize, a halo of white hair about his brow, the watery blue eyes trapped behind his glasses.
The other figure is a stranger. A tall, thin man, bulging veins running up his temple to a bald head. His eerie green eyes move like some kind of reptile, jolting from one point in the room to another,
“Here he is.”
The suited man comes closer, studying me much like the doctor.
“Who are you?”
It’s all I can think to ask, though I don’t expect an answer.
The stranger tuts, straightens his suit jacket and looks to the doctor.
“We said non-verbal.”
The doctor shrugs, “it takes time, immobility first, inability to talk second, he’s still very much under the influence.”
The suited man grimaces, pulling back his lips in a silent snarl, “the taxpayer isn’t paying for something to ‘take time’.”
The doctor doesn’t answer, just turns to the door.
“If you need anything else, I’ll be outside,” and he’s gone.
***
The judge brings his hammer crashing down, though I don’t remember hearing the sentence he handed out.
I imagined my sentencing would have been more like the films. A room brim full of flashing bulbs, crying, angry onlookers, me struggling as the police take me away, chaos, drama, passion. But for all the real life drama, what I had done to that woman, the reality was woefully anticlimactic. The room was silent as I went down, without noise but for my mother’s sobs.
I saw my dad in the public gallery, his face stony. He didn’t even twitch, his features entirely unreadable. It was the same look he always wore. The one he’d worn at my first nativity aged five and at my first football match when I was eleven. Why would it be different now?
The woman’s parents were there too, her husband wasn’t, he’d killed himself before I was even arrested. The dad had been restrained twice throughout the trial but when I went down he didn’t move a muscle. Neither did the mum. They both just stood there, frozen in time, watching me with dead eyes as I was led away.
Blackness, blood, blackness, blood, screaming, crying, begging, a small, delicate voice pleading… a hand, one pale, dainty hand, crimson soaked, red fingernails, blood under the fingernails, a sharp image of a knife, lying idle on a kitchen worktop, a blurry, flurry of images, figures writhing, then lying motionless.
I wake in a cold sweat and I know.
“He’s up.”
“You don’t say.”
The suit and doctor are back. I lured that woman into the wood and killed her, after I’d had my fun.
“You want to tell him?”
“You should explain your side at least.”
The doctor sighs and approaches me, a bored expression on his face. I fucked her first, tied her to a tree before killing her but I’d made it slow. Slow and painful.
The doctor holds up a small mirror to my face.
I would scream if I could but my tongue is a hunk of swollen gristle in my mouth, non-verbal he had said and now that was me. I try to speak but all that comes out is a gurgle.
The reflection in the mirror is not my own. I can see sharp, angular cheekbones where my face was rounder, strange green eyes that were once brown. My nose is now thin and hooked, not the flat and brutish thing I had inherited from my father. Who is this stranger?
I killed that woman and this is my punishment? Is this the sentence handed down to me by the judge? To have my identity changed forever?
“We started with the eyes, a nip and tuck here to get rid of the bags,” the doctor was talking as though he was instructing a teenager on how to change the oil in his car, a step by step journey through a mundane task.
“Then we angled up the cheeks, changed the facial structure, finished by drilling the teeth, changed those dental records for good,” the doctor licked his lips, stuck out a hand, pointing a single pinky finger at the curve of my new nose.
“Broken, restructured, much thinner nostrils, we made it rather pointed. The eye colour and hair were simple procedures.”
“Won’t the hair grow out?” the suited man had one hand under his chin, surveying me from his chair like he would an interesting painting.
“No, we’ve manipulated the follicles, same with the eye colour, it will stay like that for life.”
“Impressive.”
“He’ll be under the influence twenty-four-seven, no issues.”
Under the influence, that phrase again? The influence of what?
“Is that part of the genetic manipulation?”
“No,” he moves the hand away and presses on my right arm, I feel something alien touch against the bone, a sharp pain follows.
“A simple implant, it will keep him under the influence for the next twenty years. You can replace it then using a straight forward procedure, local anaesthetic.”
“He’ll be immobile, non-verbal and healthy?”
“Exactly what you asked for, what the MOJ demanded.”
The bald man shrugs, “a fair punishment, you know what he did. He can spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, without freedom, without comfort, without happiness.”
“Why the face though? The change in identity? I have to ask.”
Immobile for life, non-verbal for life, no prison cell but my own body, no guards but my own paralyzed limbs.
“We can’t have the public knowing where he is, who he is,” the suit stands.
“He’d be dead within a fortnight, you know how people get.”
“Wouldn’t he be better off dead?”
The suit leers, his gash of a mouth opening, teeth showing, “the MOJ don’t want capital punishment back and for good reason, it’s easy to die, the pain goes away instantly. I thought you would know that as a doctor. His pain will go on for life, trapped in his own body, what could be a more fitting punishment?”
The doctor frowns. The suit gets up to leave, I try and speak again but there is only a gurgle.
My eyes flit to the doctor’s own and, for one fleeting moment, his gaze meets mine for the first time. Then he turns away and leaves.