Solitaire

Solitaire

Davidson warned me about it. He said it wasn't a good idea. Now it's too late and I'm not sure how I feel. The time doesn't help any and since a human brain takes up only about a thousand cubic centimeters, you realize how small that volume is, and how little it can possibly contain, and you simply don't have anything left inside to think about. I never liked how it started, and I'm not sure if I like how it finished, but a story is a story. I am a murderer. I don't like being a murderer, and to be totally honest, I never really intended to kill. I suppose, in all fairness, nothing could be more irrelevant at this point. I just thought I'd throw it in to try and convince myself that I used to be an educated, thinking creature at one time, and try not to let society, and I suppose that includes myself, stamp me as a murderer. I'm not the unshaven, wobbly-eyed drunk that killed for money or the psychotic, crazed youth who killed for sport. I'd like to say that I was framed, but I can't think of anyone who could have framed me except God. I got into an argument at a party. One of my friend's wife's friend's deals. I went alone. I didn't even know the guy. I disagreed with him about disagreeing with me. I was drunk and raving about nuclear power. Next thing I know, push comes to shove, and I suddenly see him on the floor with blood pouring out of his eyes and a long, furrowed welt on the side of his head deep enough to hold water. I look down and see a fireplace poker in my right hand. I passed out. I won't dwell on that too much.

Needless to say, after a lengthy trial I got fifty to seventy. I never even knew what hit me. Now, if there's one thing I got out of this, it's the dim realization of how easy prison is. No shit. You have so many people screaming about mistreatment and abuse in prisons, and the government dumps out quadrillions of bucks to fix the places up, and to try and give the inmates more opportunity for growth and creative development, Lord help us all, and it's really a swell place now. I got to read a lot, and think, and do some writing, and they showed us movies all the time, and during the first two years, I began to wonder if it was supposed to be torture at all.

I was the bright guy. I could help people with financial problems, and relationships with the outsiders, and I was setting up huge CD accounts for the long term inmates whom after they got out in fifty years would discover their ten thousand dollars had blossomed into half a million. Needless to say, I was pretty popular. Maybe that's why Davidson came to me first with his news. Davidson was big on keeping track of shit on the outside. He had newspapers and current magazines spread out in his cell as though he was housebreaking a dog. He came to me because he considered me his intellectual equal. We had been designated the smart ones. He wanted my opinion. He also wanted me to go first.

He told me about the new sentencing system that the NSC was trying to put into effect. He told me about the NASA mergers and the grant funds and about how it was just in the beginning stages, and the more he talked, the more I began to feel like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, finding out about the new treatment that gets him out of prison quick, provided he becomes brainwashed. That, I think, was when the first light pangs of fear kicked in. But Davidson was constant, and he really thought I should talk to the warden. When I asked him why, he told me about a recent vote in the Senate he had uncovered, a vote attached to some other goofy bill that wouldn't show up in Newsweek, but would in the Congressional Record, for anybody bored or boring enough to sift through its all-text pages. Turns out the Senate vote was that the selection for the test orbital was to be pulled from Gladstone Maximum Security, which was the place both Davidson and I were staying at the time, courtesy of the United States judicial branch. That's why he was so interested in it. I reluctantly agreed, and went to see the warden the next day.

He was a little stunned, and wanted to know where I came across my information, and again I felt like I had just fallen onto the set of A Clockwork Orange. I just beat the bush for a bit, and then he settled back into his naughahyde chair and decided to tell me about it. The NSC and NASA were joining together to develop what they called the orbiting cell. The idea was to lock a hardened criminal in a tiny clear plastic bubble, with food and air and shit, and fire him into orbit. The idea was that he could see out, and it would feel as though there was nothing between him and space. This plus the raw boredom, the soundproofing, and just the goddamn loneliness were supposed to be really good rehabilitation methods. I wondered why and how. I guess it had something to do with the philosophy behind solitary confinement. I had been in solitary several times, and I didn't really mind it. It was relaxing. It seemed kinda fun to me, and that's what I told him. He smirked and said that he wouldn't want to try it. He said that studies had proven the orbiting cell was sheer torture, and some other studies said it could cause insanity or even be lethal. That's why they wanted to try it out.

I'm not sure why I did it. Sometimes I dream that I did it just to help the scientific research aspect of it, that I did it so the people who designed it could know more about it, but I know that's not true. I suppose it was just the short duration of it. They said that if I stayed in the bubble for one month, that the rest of my sentence would be remitted and I would be a free man. In the words of Fibber McGee, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

To make the dull part brief, I was taken to a NASA training center, specially built for the Orb. That was what they called it, the "Orb". They had built only one of them so far, and they let me see it before I began my debriefing. Apparently, it went up with the automated shuttles. It was sealed, and placed in a huge apparatus in the shuttle bay which would put it into orbit and could also retrieve it. Then the shuttle would land. The whole thing was automatic, and the plan was for nobody to be on board except me, as though they thought I might actually try to hijack a space shuttle.

They showed me the Orb. It was a clear plexiglass sphere about four feet across. There wasn't any hatch. They would have to cut the top off of it to let me in, then they would seal it shut again with some kind of torch. It didn't leave any seams. It was incredible. A clear, plastic bubble just floating in space. The only thing that marred it was this black box on the outside. It was about a foot on all sides, and it was attached to the outside of the bubble like a parasite. Three holes connected it with the Orb. The box contained a special algae. I could tell the goofy scientist who was there just loved to brag about it. They developed a new strain just for this project. They built their own life form, how about that. I guess it was like being God.

The box had this algae in it, and a self-contained light source that would let it grow. One of the holes was for the air. It used my carbon dioxide and made water and oxygen. Just enough for one man. The second hole was for processing urine and feces. It wasn't fancy, and it wasn't comfortable, but it worked. Through the third hole, I could sip some water mixed with algae. No shit. That was my food. I was supposed to eat this plant. They told me it was tasteless and very nourishing and the tube only let a certain amount go through. Enough to support one man. It was a little ecosystem, a controlled one. It would let me live, but it would not let me enjoy it.

It was around now that I began to get a little scared. I had no idea what it would be like, and I spent most of my four-day training period worrying. Again, to make the boring part short, they sealed me up, naked, in my little Orb, and set me up for launching. It was pretty uneventful, since I spent the entire launch in the blackness of the cargo bay. I just sat and waited. And enjoyed the lack of gravity.

The terror started when the hatch opened. There was some kind of goop in the plexiglass that would prevent nasty rays from burning up my skin, but it didn't seem to change the fact that the earth was agonizingly bright. I had to shield my eyes for about seven minutes, while the launcher shoved me out into orbit. Squinting, I looked out and saw the engines fire, and the shuttle went out ahead of me. I was in orbit. I was alone.

At first, I was impressed by the bright sun, which was tolerable now, as was the earth. I studied the motions and the shapes. I watched the shadows of the earth bounce off the moon, and I stared at the motions of cloud patterns and land shapes with hypnotic intensity. But after a few hours, you just plain run out of stuff to see. I got bored with earth and started studying some other planets and stars. Needless to say, I got bored with them fairly quickly as well. I'd say about five hours had passed since my launch, and already I could think of nothing to do.

The minutes, which used to pass by like seconds, now seemed to drag into endless days. I began to slowly lose my sense of time. I ate as much of the algae as it would let me, and I had a good shit, but then what else is there to do? I started to wonder if eating and shitting would become priceless luxuries now that they were the only real physical activities I could do. I wondered how long it would be until I could get more food. The horrible idea that the food distributor might be broken flashed across my mind. I had nothing to do but think.

I started talking to myself for a while. I began to just talk and talk about anything that came to mind. All of the background voices in my brain which are cut off somewhere before they get to my mouth just blurted themselves out. After a while, I ran out of thoughts and began to recite poetry. I'm not sure why. Little fragments of stories and plays and shit I was supposed to have forgotten after I graduated from college. Shards of Shakespeare and Dante. Verses of Homer and Frost. I babbled nonsensically for hours until I realized I wasn't even listening to myself. I realized that I had just been staring out of the side of the Orb the entire time, and got hold of my brain. I decided talking to myself accomplished very little and decided not to do it again as I wiped a river of saliva off of my chin and neck. My breathing slowed down.

I began to spend entire days with my eyes closed. It was easier to think if you didn't have to look at the nothingness above your head and the earth, a two hundred kilometer drop below your feet. I was comfortable with the blackness behind my eyelids, and that was what I stared at for the next week. Things began to play themselves out in swirling images, trying to replace the black, to cut into it like fireworks. I started to play movies in my head. Every fragment I could remember, it was flashed onto the silver screen behind my eyelids, larger than life. The sounds were totally clear, and the images flowed easily. I replayed Bogart and Jimmy Stewart. I replayed Hoffman, Redford, and Malcolm McDowell. Sean Connery. Michael Caine. Endless Woody Allen lines flashed across my mind with unbelievable ferocity, and I found myself laughing out loud more than once, half from comedy, half from shock. The second half of the week was filled with songs. Thousands of them, played back across my ears like some flawless recording system. Every move. Every note. Classical, rock, and all the Jazz I could remember. But, perhaps for the same reason why we forget a good tune in daily life, I became bored hearing Beethoven's Ninth six million times, and started grabbing at fragments of songs I had only heard once ore twice, mentally scrambling to catch hold of one or two notes that could lead to a ladder of music. It was frustrating, and I found myself crying continuously without even being aware of it.

I started to think about what was beyond the glass. The vast, black emptiness which I could see, yet couldn't see. It was black because there was no light, but I could still see it, even with this lack. I could see the lack of light. The blackness. It was literally nothing. There was nothing out there. The fear turned into claustrophobia over the next two days. I found myself blinking too often. I found myself unable to focus on sound. I found myself tapping the glass for no apparent reason with the tip of my finger, very lightly, just tapping, and unconsciously intensifying it into a light slap and I remember sweating madly as the power of my taps increased until I was pounding on the glass with the full force of my fist and not even being aware of it. I would scream at the top of my lungs for minutes straight with my fist pounding against the side of the plexiglass with booming rhythm. I started to see things in the black emptiness of space. My mind started to play horrible tricks on me. I began getting paranoid. I kept jerking around, glancing over my shoulder thinking that something was in the bubble with me. Sometimes I would push myself away from one side of the bubble where I thought that something was outside trying to get in, then I'd think that the same thing was happening on the other side, and whirl around again, screaming with fear, yet unable to hear myself, lashing my fists and legs out into the clear, cold solidity of the Orb.

That was how I cut myself the first time. Pow! Into the side of the glass. Stinging pain in my knuckles. The red spot on the wall. I found myself staring at that red spot for hours on end afterwards for lack of better things to do. The blood tricked upwards from my hand and began to separate into little globs that bobbled in the air like tiny acrobats. I watched the blood flow into the zero-g of the Orb, a thin stream of red responding to it's own laws of physics. I jammed the knuckle into my mouth and kept it there for about an hour, staring at the red spot on the side of the Orb with shaking eyes and terrified sweat. I kept it there until the bleeding stopped. Then I passed out.

Sleep was rare and fragmented. My body's timetable had been turned inside-out, and it seemed as though I was never totally sure if I had gotten too much sleep, or not enough. My sleep was liberally coated with nightmares too horrifying to mention. Visions of evil I hadn't had nightmares about since I was a kid came back, as if to haunt me, as if to say "You thought you were scared of your closet! Ha! Whaddya think of this?!"

I think that was when my mind started to go. I think I just plain ran out of stuff to think about. I spent a day mowing lawns. Mentally mowing lawns which I had plotted out in size and shape beforehand, noting every tree, every tall weed, and when I came to them, mower buzzing furiously, sometimes I would have it choke or run out of gas, and I would mentally imagine every second of my angered, sweaty trip to the garage to get a gas can or a wrench. I spent a week building houses. Plotting out the land, surveying it, pouring in the cement foundations. I imagined every insignificant motion, every board, every nail, every stroke of the hammer. It was all flawless. I once spent five minutes on the same set of shingles. I built seven houses in all. Very big ones, too. But as I said before, you just run out of stuff to think about. You can feel your mind just slowing down, devoid of not just active thought, but creative energy too, and you simply run out of stuff to do. It's difficult to describe, I know, and a part of me hopes that none of you ever find out exactly what it's like. I started to think of HAL in 2001, and about his dying words: "My mind is going. My mind is going, Dave. I can feel it." I spent the next two days repeating his lines in my head: "My mind is going. I can feel it." Over and over again, for forty-eight hours: "I can feel it." I no longer knew where the lines were from: "My mind is going. I can feel it." I no longer had the urge to cry, or to sleep, or to think, or even to move. My joints began to stiffen up: "My mind is going."

I'm not sure how long I remained in that trance, but I do know I came out of it. It was something subconscious, something on the outskirts of my vision, something almost subliminal that made me realize that I should have been paying more attention to the planet. I remember suddenly being able to think again, and I remember my first thought being pain. Pain in my knees and back. I hadn't shifted my position in God knows how long. Weeks? The pain subsided quickly, and I whirled myself around to face the planet Earth. The first thing I noticed that was odd was all of the flashes. All over the surface of the planet, bright flashes would erupt, then spread slowly over an area the size of Brazil as their glare reduced from a pinpoint flash to a dull smoky glow. Then I saw the source. I was not the only thing in orbit. Emerging from strategic points on every single land mass, there were tiny disruptions in the atmosphere which propelled themselves in a smooth, flawless arc, leaving trails of smoke behind them, and touching the surface again to create another pinpoint explosion. It was then that I knew. I knew what was happening.

The sizes of the warheads were staggering, six thousand megatons at least. I watched slowly as the United States civilization was wiped clean off the surface of the globe, as if by God himself. I watched retaliatory strikes do the same to almost every corner of every continent, and it was then that I knew that the remaining population would be lucky to be a number in the millions.

I glanced back to the United States. There are only three shuttle launch stations, and all of them were practically in the center of some detonation radius. I am almost certain the Orb design station is now rubble, and I am starting to think that nobody even remembers my name.

The temperature in here is seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, but I still feel very, very cold.