Page 4 of Homebound
Ruby paused her unenthusiastic rubbing of the wall where something left dark skid marks. “Two years? Closer to three. Yeah, almost three years.”
Simon had come to the prison at about the same time Gemma had arrived in the city. Strangely, she found the coincidence significant.
She approached the alien’s cell and peered inside through the bars like it was an animal lair. The stench emanating from within made her nostrils burn. It was bad even by prison standards.
“Did no one think to clean him in all this time?”
Arlo gave her a funny look. “Are you serious? Who do you think is gonna police the aliens’ bathing habits? No one cares. But if you do, he’s all yours.”
With a derisive sneer, Arlo slapped his multi-purpose rag into Gemma’s hand and moved his rolling bucket along to the elevator for a trip downstairs for a water change. He did it a lot, go up and down the elevator, changing water much more frequently than cleaning dirty surfaces.
Gemma dropped the rag into her own bucket and rolled the galvanized steel contraption outfitted with a crude handle welded to it toward Simon’s cell door. The squeaky casters, rusty and wobbly, turned with reluctance, requiring Gemma to push hard at the bucket to make it move.
The small onyx plate, similar to the one that allowed access to the prison from the outside, hung next to the narrow barred door. Its smooth surface gleamed in the weak filtered light of the hallway. It beckoned Gemma and repulsed. She wanted to press her palm to the slate to gain access, yet hesitated to do so. The neurotic chatter of the Birdies, as she started calling them, unnerved her. Ruby had moved around the corner of the corridor. Arlo had left.
Gemma stood alone in front of thick iron bars, and behind them, the unknown creature breathed the rank air, covered in nothing but a tattered thin shirt under the freezing draft.
Gemma lifted her hand and placed it on the onyx palm reader. The scanner beeped its agreement, and the metal lock released with a clang. The door squeaked as it opened, and Gemma walked in, bucket and all.
“Hello?” she said loudly enough to wake the alien up in case he was sleeping. He might have been. She couldn’t tell.
She left the broom propped against the wall and came closer, holding her hands in front of her where he could see them, indicating she meant no harm like they had trained her during the crash course for new prison hires. The taser weighed substantially at her waist within easy reach providing a small sense of security.
What was sitting on the cot with his back to the wall resembled a heap of bones thrown together willy-nilly, and with a skull on top. Matted white hair that grew in thick profusion on that skull was grimy and dull.
The alien hadn’t moved a bone nor showed any reaction to Gemma’s arrival. With palms still out, she gingerly stepped around the cot to get into his line of sight.
He had a peculiar face, of what she could see from behind the wooly mess of his hair. But then most aliens did to a human eye untrained, like Gemma’s, in the great diversity of the Universe. Oval in shape, with a strange-looking aquiline nose, it was sickly pale. A slash of a mouth was equally white, with wrinkled lips and sunken cheeks indicative of missing teeth. Above the sharp angles of his cheekbones unpadded by any flesh, his eyes were closed. Skin and bones would be a generous description of his condition. The creature presented a distressing picture.
Gemma dropped her hands and leaned down to bring her face level with his.
“Hello, Simon.”
He showed no sign that he heard her nor knew she was standing two feet away. With a start, Gemma realized that his eyes were actually open. Almond-shaped and slightly hooded, they were abnormally large by human standards. Unnaturally so. And, like his everything, they were white, with a milky opaque film covering their entire surface.
Gemma was unable to suppress a sharp intake of breath. The alien was blind. She took a stumbling step back unsettled by his sightless eyes, by his silence, by the utter stillness of his angular body arranged in a loose sitting pose with knees drawn up. And by the acrid smell of stale sweat and a sickly unwashed body.
She looked around his cell, taking note of dense cobwebs in all corners and visible grime covering the floor. An untouched plate of prison gruel sat on the chair by his cot, the food crusted over and shriveled, days old. The rusty steel toilet behind a low partition in the corner of the tiny room sported a layer of dust. By the looks of it, the creature remained unmoved from the same position for days, if not weeks. Gemma couldn't understand how he still lived.
It didn’t matter. She was here to take care of the cell for him, whether he cared or not.
“I am Gemma, by the way. I’m a new custody helper. I’ll be helping you take care of your cell. No worries. We’ll get it all done in no time.”
She dutifully applied herself to mopping the floor and wiping the dust from the chair and the toilet rim. She swept the cobwebs from the corners and emptied the expired gruel into the toilet hole, pouring a little water on it from the bucket to make it go down.
“You don’t like the food? I know, it isn’t always the best, but food gives you energy. It makes you alert. It keeps your heart beating.”
Gemma kept talking but she had no idea if he understood her language. She had discovered, to her surprise, that many aliens didn’t speak it, with some possessing vocal cords unsuited to making the right sounds. Maybe he was one of those. Or maybe - the horrible thought lodged itself in her head - he was deaf. Blind and deaf. Such a fate would be worse than death. But if he was, indeed, both, then the air of utter hopelessness around him and his willful retreat from the world could be understood and forgiven.
She glanced at him with sadness.
With nothing else left to tidy up, Gemma picked up the broom and the rag. Despite her best efforts, the cell still smelled, and he was the source of the smell. The bony points of his body poked against the soiled material of his shirt. His loose pants with elastic waist, standard prison issue, were twisted around his legs, and he wore no shoes or socks. Cold as the inside of the prison was this time of year, his outfit offered little in terms of conserving body heat.
Thinking how cold he must be, Gemma pulled at the blanket he was sitting on to get it out. To her surprise, he scooted over obediently, rearranging himself into a similar sitting position. His vacant eyes never changed their pointless contemplation of nothingness.
Gently, Gemma wrapped the blanket around his shoulders.
“Goodbye, Simon. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
