Pulling Hard Time

In the maximum security VR wings of New Alcatraz, there is no light. None is needed. The prisoners are fed aerobiologically: five times a day the cells are fine-sprayed with a dispersion of microscopically- calibrated nutrients, pollens, bacteria-inhibiting spores and microorganisms, cleansing agents, and depilitants. All waste products gelate, coalesce and are sucked out of the null-gravity free fall enclosure through egress tiles in the sterile white pyrex floor. Random items of furniture -- overstuffed easy chairs, end-table lamps, swatches of astroturf, saki cups -- float relaxedly in the gentle air tides that waft through the cells.

These non-penal artifacts have been stored in the cells. For the most part, they are the property of Warden Emmanuel v. Burkis, a collector of household trinkets from the past. They have been laded in the null-g maximum security cells, where they share floating space with lifers paying their debt to society, because storage space is at a premium in the one hundred per cent automated environs of New Alcatraz. To take the job of overseeing the Rock, even at the handsome figure paid annually by the Internment Department of the United States government, Warden Burkis was gifted with unlimited shopping authority for his hobby-- household trinkets from the past. It is a lonely and quiet place, the Rock.

The lifers who occupy these cells never object to the floating furniture. They, themselves, float. They exist in a transmundane virtual reality nexus, dreaming their special dreams, bobbing and slowly turning in the vagrant breezes that play forever through the VR wings. They are serving their lifetime sentences, hanging in null-g oblivion growing more grossly rotund and discolored by the decade. They will bump against walls and wedge in triangular dead ends where ceiling meets vertical tile surfaces till one night, or one day, they will expire in the middle of the special dream. And only through a death kept long at bay, to assuage the demands of Society for retribution will their sentences be commuted. Commuted, that is, to a place (in the sentencing litany of the Universal Penal Code) "far worse than the Hell in which they have served their sentence." We are a nation in balance.

Charlie was out back, feeding the chickens, when he heard Robin scream. He dropped the tin bucket, spilling millet in a long swath. He ran back to the restaurant shack in a panic, tripping and falling once.

As he came through the screen door at the rear of the shack, he saw the four men tearing at Robin's clothes. They had her on her back on one of the tables, and one of the leather-clad bikers had already ripped her blouse off. Her apron hung off one ankle. Another had spread her legs, and was unzipping his roughout pants, pushing between her thighs as the shortest of the four, a little man with almost no hair on the left side of his head, cut away Robin's skirt with what looked like a fish-boning knife.

The fourth man sat at the counter, his back to Charlie, a bottle of Pepsi to his lips. They had come in and ordered four Sunday chicken specials. Charlie had said he'd fry up the orders, but Robin had asked him to go out back and feed the chickens. Lumschbogen's Chicken & Bisquit Shack. Out on Route 5. Charlie had kissed his wife, and smiled at the four amiable bikers whose Harleys and an Indian and a Moto Guzzi 750 were ranked right outside the front door, and he' d gone out back. At first, he hadn't heard her screaming above the prattling of the flock.

The one at the counter heard Charlie come through the screen door, and swiveled on the counter stool. He had the Pepsi in his mouth. Charlie came at him fast and with the flat of his hand rammed the bottle through the biker's teeth, shoving the neck through the back of his mouth. It came out just above the nape. The man staggered to his feet, clutching his face, and fell backward into the three trying to rape Charlie's wife.

As he fell, he struck the little, half-bald one, the one who had ridden up on the 750 Ambassador. His flailing arms struck the little man, and he stumbled against the tables driving the fish-boning knife into Robin's stomach. Her scream was worse than the ones before.

Charlie grabbed up the cleaver they used to dismember the chickens for the Sunday specials, and came around the counter swinging. In Ranger basic training at Fort Benning they had discovered the hated nickname the kids had concocted on the playground when he was growing up, and they tormented him with its use. They called Charlie Lumschbogen "Charlie Lunchbucket " and he was given an Article 15 punishment for beating up two of his barracks mates.

Charlie Lunchbucket did not stop hacking and dismembering, even after the Smokeys had grabbed him. They had to cold-cock him with their riot sticks to get him to lie still.

Not even the extenuating circumstance of Robin, impaled and almost naked on a checkered tablecloth, saved him from the wrath of the law and order jury. The photographic blowups at the trial were just too grotesque. The walls of the shack had been redecorated like a pointillist canvas.

Widowed, imprisoned, lost to his own life, Charlie Lumschbogen did not do well in prison. He killed a cellmate, he crippled a guard, he assaulted a turnkey. He was reassigned without trial, in this nation in balance, to the maximum security VR wing on the Rock. Life, without possibility of parole, sharing space with other dead sticks of furniture.

"They don't seem particularly unhappy, Warden. "

"Well, Senator, that's only because they' re in virtual reality. There...that one...he just twitched, did you see that?"

"No, I'm afraid I missed it. What is he in for?"

"Ran a child pornography ring in Utah. Specialized in snuff films. Quite the monster."

"I see he's in there with an art deco credenza. "

"Yes, Maples of London. Very nice piece; I'd say about 1934. Once the Department allocates the funds for a proper estate here on the grounds, I'll be moving most of these pieces to proper sites. "

"Um. Yes, of course. Well, that pretty much depends on how my report turns out, whether or not the Speaker will recognize the bill."

"Well, I'm certainly hoping you'll think I've done a good job here. It's not easy, you know. No staff, just me and the machines, and a technician or two. "

"And you say every one of these men and women is suffering a worse sentence than the old style...where they sat in cells or worked on chain gangs or made license plates?"

"Absolutely, Senator. And may I say, apropos of nothing but my admiration, I think your new hairdo is infinitely more appealing than the way you wore it last time you visited. Makes you look taller. "

"If you don't mind, Warden... "

"Oh, yes, sorry. Well, they just float there till they die, but it's in no way'cruel and unusual punishment'because we do absolutely nothing to them. No corporal punishment, no denial of the basics to sustain life. We just leave them locked in their own heads, cortically tapped to relive one scene from their past, over and over. "

"And how is it, again, that you do that...? "

"The technicians call it a moebius memory. Loop thalamic patterning. When they first come in we send them through cerebral indexing, drain out everything they remember, and most of what they don't; and then we codify, integrate, select the one moment from their past that most frightens or horrifies or saddens them. Then, boom, into a null-g cubicle, with a proleptic copula imbedded in their gliomas. It's all like a dream. A very very bad dream that goes on forever. Punishment to fit the crime. "

"We are a nation in balance. "

"Kindlier. Gentler. More humane. But still, in need of that large, new house, here on the grounds. "

"We'll see, Warden. "

Charlie Lunchbucket loved his mother. More than anyone. She had sat beside him night and day through the whooping cough. She made him cinnamon toast for breakfast. She defended him when the third grade teacher said he was incorrigible. He loved his mother.

They had been driving to Ashtabula. The truck had been hauling lumber, and as it passed them, there on the narrow back country road along the river, the back end of the flatbed had swung out, and his mother had swerved to avoid getting sideswiped.

The car had run off the road, over the berm, down the steep embankment, through the brittle woods, and plunged into the river. But only the front end had gone in. Not enough to bring water into the car. Charlie had come to, and it was dark. The roof of the car had collapsed when the trunk of the shattered tree had fallen on them. He tried to move, and could not. He called out for his mother. "Mommy, " he called. But there was no answer. He could not move. Something heavy lay across him, and he was trapped in the corner of the door and the seat.

All that night he lay there, crying, calling for his mother, but she was gone. And when daylight came, he woke, thirsty and hungry and cold and frightened, and as he opened his eyes he was staring into the dead face of his mother, the steering wheel having crushed her chest. She was lying across him, pinning him. He could not move, and he could not look away. He stared into the open eyes and blackened mouth of his mother.

They found the car four days later. It had been August. It had been stifling. The windows had been rolled up. But the flies had gotten in. They had laid their eggs. And other things had come. When they found the car, Charlie Lunchbucket was out of his head. Eight years old. Worst time of his life.

Floating in a clean white-tiled room, dark and cool. The memory plays and replays and plays yet again, without end, without release. They get what they deserve. We are a nation of laws. We are a compassionate people. We have abolished capital punishment. No one hears, but occasionally the fat bald dying thing in the null-g cubicle whispers mommy and, once, in a year some while ago, there was a tear that dried almost immediately. We are a nation in balance.