Apocrypha

Suffer the little children

I transferred to a facility for the criminally insane in 2016.

A voluntary work detail, rumored to grease the wheels for an easy parole.

My job was simple: Sit outside a cell, document the inmate’s activity, demeanor, and position every fifteen minutes. Report anything off. That's it.

“Off” pretty much described the whole damn place.

Broken men in concrete boxes under flickering fluorescent lights burning 24/7, and a drain in the center for hosing down whatever mess they made.

I wore standard-issue prison blues. They were naked beneath Bam Bam suits—heavy, quilted, double-reinforced tunics with Velcro patches along the sides to keep them closed, although most didn’t bother.

Locked down, drugged, restrained. Some were screamers. Others simply stared.

There I was, trying to get better, watching others only getting worse.

Genesis

“No one’s perfect,” they say. “Only God is perfect,” they say. But I’ve never met Him, so what do I know?

And if I did, it was through the crack of a cell door, in the blank stares of men who couldn’t stop hurting themselves, who only wanted to feel something—anything—different.

If we’re made in God’s image, then God’s a fucked up mess.

God’s covered in shit, pissing in a hole in the floor in the center of his cell, begging for another blanket.

Judges

There’s a food chain inside. Everyone knows their place.

Shot-callers and soldiers at the top, followed by the lifers and the old heads who'd survived decades inside.

Then us.

Then a steep drop to the bottom rungs - the rats, the cho-mos, and finally… the “Bugs.”

Anyone weird, different, or unable to cope was a Bug.

Bugs muttered, twitched. Picked at their skin til it bled. Then kept picking.

Wisdom

The universe tends toward disorder. Physicists call it entropy—the slow unraveling of all things into their ultimate state.

Even chaos follows a pattern.

Hurricanes spin with perfect symmetry. Lightning splits the sky in elegant violence. Mold grows in fractals. So do ice crystals, river deltas, the veins in your wrist. Blood spatters in patterns.

Even a Bug's broken mind follows its own perfect logic. Even madness has a rhythm.

I sat with the sound of it. Logged each episode. Fifteen-minute intervals.

Quiet, then screaming. Quiet again.

The Buddhists have a word for it, too: Tathatā, loosely translated as suchness, or “things as it is.”

Reality as it truly is. Not good. Not bad. Not fixed. Not flawed. Just is.

Lamentations

One guy I sat on was a cutter, a biter, refused to bathe. His flesh rotted in patches where he'd torn himself open. They couldn't keep him clean, couldn't keep him from reopening his wounds.

The smell, meat gone bad. Like cumin. Even now, decades later, the slightest whiff puts me outside his door, watching him squirm against his restraints, desperate to get at his own meat.

They say, “God doesn’t make mistakes.” So I asked him.

“Why do you do that?”

He stared into me, through me, confused.

Acts

Then there was Officer Hawkins.

Day shift. Mid-fifties, built like a boxer gone soft, with hands that moved like he was conducting an orchestra nobody else could hear.

We called him “The Bug Whisperer.”

When the Bugs would lose it—and they all lost it eventually—other guards would gear up. Riot shields, tasers, backup called from three units over.

Not Hawkins.

Hawkins would walk right in. No mask. No shield. No backup. Just his voice, those hands, and whatever it was he understood about broken minds.

He'd talk them down. Get them to accept their meds, their restraints, their existence.

Like he knew some secret frequency that penetrated their madness.

Imagine being so far gone that reality itself has become your enemy. So desperate you'd rather tear yourself to pieces than spend another second in your own skin.

Now, imagine someone talking you into accepting that reality back, convincing you to keep living in the very cage that broke you.

Where’s the logic in that?

Hawkins wouldn’t say.

Revelations

They say God walks among us, works in mysterious ways, sees our suffering, has a plan for everyone, never gives us more than we can handle…

I think God does rounds every fifteen minutes, wearing a guard's uniform on day shift, doing his best to keep the world from completely falling apart.

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