The Four Stages of Cruelty – Excerpt
Let’s say your name is Joshua. You’re eighteen years old, a quiet student who likes to draw and an otherwise normal person, but you’re going out of your mind because your ex-girlfriend won’t talk to you anymore and has been hooking up with another guy. You know her parents are out of town and you know she’s with him in her living room right now, lying on the couch, shirt off, jeans unzipped, because that’s exactly what you would have been doing with her on a Friday night a month or so before. You take your father’s gun because you want her to know how painful it feels and how far you’d go to get her back. But when you’re finally there, standing in the middle of the living room, nothing works out the way you’d planned. Not that you had any plans. The girlfriend, you realize, is no longer your girlfriend. She’s screaming at you to get out, and there’s a look in her eyes that doesn’t fit with the way you feel. Meanwhile, her new boyfriend has decided to go all Rambo. It gets crazy. You’re both fighting over the gun like it’s a live snake, and it’s pointing this way and that. You just want to get a firm hold on it, put it away, and go home. But Rambo won’t let go.
And then he does, and you’re both out of breath, and all the emotions have drained away, and you just leave. You drive home, numb and shaky, praying no one calls the cops or your parents. You’re terrified for a month and ashamed for about a year. You bounce back a little in your second year of college and switch majors, dropping pre-medicine to work on a degree in psychology with as many fine art classes as you can squeeze in. Once in a while you think about that Friday night. You even gain some perspective on it. In one of your classes, you read some statistics about violent crimes and young males. It’s practically an epidemic, except no one acknowledges it. At seventeen to twenty, the human brain isn’t developed enough to fully distinguish right from wrong, reality from fantasy, but the young male has all this emotion and power and little ability to express it except through physical violence or acts of self-destruction. That’s how soldiers and suicide bombers get recruited. Sitting there in the library, drawing pictures of her along the margins of your notebook, you think about that gun and what it felt like holding it, and how it slipped around in your hands when you were fighting, and how goddamn scary those few seconds of uncertainty were. And you put down your pen, cover up the drawing, and thank God that nothing bad really happened.
Now, let’s say the gun went off.
Stage I
I can think of no gentle way to begin.
I need to explain why the biggest mystery for me was not how an inmate could go missing inside a maximum security penitentiary, nor what the drawings meant, or even who was involved in the murders. The thing that stays with me, like the memory of a limb now gone, is the mystery of human compassion. The twisted variations of it, the love and the hurt, the obsession and the neglect, the abuse and the need, all commingled and bound. Although I am as cynical and skeptical as can be expected, given my experience, I am not one to deny that genuine relationships can form between inmates and corrections officers. I do know, however, that those relationships are almost universally based on some form of trade, a commerce of getting by. You need them as much as they need you, and I will admit that debts accumulate and sometimes must be paid off in ways that compromise what you think is right. This can happen to any of us.
My name is Kali Williams. I doubt that my parents, when they changed a few letters in the more conventionally spelled Kaylee, knew they were naming me after the many-armed Hindu goddess of darkness and destruction. But out of that dull midwestern instinct to be safe but slightly different, I sprang: a personality of sharp edges and bruising elbows.
If this were just a story about Ditmarsh Penitentiary and my work within it, I would probably start by discussing the routine and even the incidentally interesting aspect of being a thirty-nine-year-old female—one of only 26 women on a corrections staff of 312—providing daily operational security over 950 (plus or minus) hard-core assholes, sex offenders, addicts, liars, serial felons, white-collar dick suckers, gangbangers, and relatively honest murderers. I enjoyed my job. I liked the bang and clang of the cellblocks, the armored ease you needed to show in getting by, the acute attention to psychology and mood. For the most part, the bullshit bounced off me, the rat-a-tat routine of jokes and looks, the subtle grind of male criticism disguised half-assedly as helpfulness. I never questioned the right and wrong of the work—it was pretty goddamn clear to me, and still is—but there were times when I got stuck wondering how I’d become this person who wore the belt and jangled the keys and relied on the way the quick decisions got backed up by the remorseless rules. Nothing good came of those moods, however, and I avoided them as much as possible. I have an irritable impatience for the overly steeped, self-pitying emotions of anyone with too much time on their hands, including, and perhaps especially, myself.
This is not about my job, though, or about me; it’s about what happened, and all those mysteries I mentioned, and the mystery of compassion most of all. Even when I found the body dangling from a door in the abandoned cells beneath the prison, so terribly abused, it was the absence of compassion, the lack of pity in the place, that hit me hardest. Though surrounded by the dark output of violent lives, I had never before seen the ravages of such unrestrained brutality. I forced myself to edge past, pressing up against the cold wall where the scrawled drawings were most tangled, in order to see the face. In that dead gaze, was I the delayed rescuer or another tormenter? I’m not sure I can answer without sorting through the events that led up to it. As I said, I can think of no gentle way to begin.