Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days (12 page)

Today, George and I are going to see if we
can get out of the Pen through the tunnels. It will take us most of
the day to get through the concrete and metal bars. We will spend
the evening and possibly the night exploring the tunnels. I will
report back what I’ve found.

11/22/2056

Tunnel report: The “tunnels” are tight areas
designed in the 1950s to carry piping from the Pen to the local
sewage plant. The tunnels go the entire way to the sewage
plant.

There are a variety of obstacles to keep
people from escaping the Pen. Even now, passage through the tunnel
is nearly impossible for a living being. We had to belly crawl in a
couple of places. In one area, George had to thread himself through
one shoulder, then the next, one hip, then the next.

After hours in these cramped conditions, we
stepped out into the deserted sewage treatment plant. There were,
gratefully, no wasps. Strangely, there were also no rotted or
petrified bodies. They must have cleared the facility before the
wasps came.

No one had been there in years. It looked
like everyone had expected to return the next day, then never did.
A thin layer of dust, dirt, and desert sand lay on every surface.
The plant looked like something from the Twilight Zone. We sat at
people’s desks, peered at the photos of their families, and ate
their stale candy.

The treatment plant break room had one of
those wonderful vending machines. George shook the machine until
packages of chips and candy fell out. Kept perfectly fresh with
massive preservatives, we feasted like kings on the precious junk
food of old. (Of course, I checked every ingredient for The 146. We
burned anything made with it.) We found a bottle of flavored vodka
in a hidden drawer in the boss’s desk. We drank, laughed, and ate
junk food.

It had been at least five years since we’d
had anything like this. Caught up in the rush of caffeine, alcohol,
sugar, and preservatives, we felt like we were on vacation.

As abandoned as the plant appeared to be,
the treatment facility continued to function. Honestly, I never
gave sewage a thought. We use the toilets and showers at the Pen.
It never occurred to me that the sewage would have to be
treated.

The sewage treatment plant is on a rise
about two miles from the Pen. From this vantage point, we can see
the entire area, including the Pen. There was about five feet of
wasps pressed against the electric fence, which goes around the
outside of the entire Penitentiary campus. Wasps stumbled out of
the desert and down from the hills toward the Pen only to fight
with each other for a chance to be seared by our fence.

I’m not sure what drew them to the Pen. The
noise maybe.

I wondered if the wasps came to commit
suicide. Certainly, we’d killed thousands, and I’d sent on their
detached souls. Could the wasps have enough sense of self to long
for peace? Could they actually feel the existential crisis of
de-evolution?

We stayed at the treatment plant as long as
we dared. As the distant horizon began to show some light, I tucked
my thoughts and questions away. I would ask them on my next soul
journey. For now, they were unanswerable questions.

The trip back to the Pen was easier because
we knew what to expect. George had an easier time in the tight
spots.

And now we knew. The tunnel would provide us
with a safe journey out of the Pen, but only us. We would not be
able to carry supplies, munitions and our protective gear, or even
bring the horses. We’ve spent years preparing for this trip -- we’d
have to leave everything behind if we used the tunnels.

That’s hard.

The sewage treatment plant has vehicles but
no gasoline. We’d have to trust that we could get to our
destination on whatever rotten fuel remained in their trucks.

Trust. If we took the tunnels, we’d
definitely miss the wasps.

But we’d have to leave:

* the horses to die at the hands of the
wasps.

* our supply of dried meat, vegetables, and
all of our food supplies

* our clothing, guns, bows and arrows, and
flame throwers

I don’t know if I can do that.

It feels better to storm the gates than to
slink away trusting the “universe” to provide.

11/23/2056

Sex.

As a young man, sex meant everything to me.
From the moment I was capable of joining with a female, sex was all
I thought about. Period.

I was so sexually charged that more than one
teacher thought I didn’t have the temperament to become a shaman.
The press of sex was like a drum that beat in my brain. Bang, bang,
bang. As a shaman, or shaman in training, I held a special status
in any tribe I was visiting. Girls wanted to have my children or at
least wanted to say that they had been with me.

And trust me, if someone said she’d been
with me, she probably had.

I had mellowed some by the
time I returned from the
Wixaritari
, but I had also reached
what felt like my prime. I met a beautiful girl from the Pojoaque.
She was hot, ready, and willing, and so was I. Her uncle was a
shaman, so she knew what a weird life she was in for.

Her name was Laura. I called her Laurie. A
very Anglo name for such a pueblo woman. She wasn’t surprised when
I was sent to the Pen by my great-great-grandmother. Again, she
knew the strange path of a shaman. She was ready to wait for me.
She wanted to take her place beside me at the head of the tribe.
She loved me.

I wasn’t surprised that she was pregnant. I
don’t think we got out of bed that entire summer. Even now, with
all the years and experiences between then and now, my loins
tighten at the thought of her. I was sure that I would do my time
and return to her.

Before this happened, she wrote me every
week. And, I’m a little embarrassed to say, I replied to her
letters every week. Right now, all that writing back and forth
seems sentimental and stupid. But I cherished her letters. These
letters were a lifeline back to Pueblo, to my family, my child, and
my life. They still are.

For all my screwing around, I was careful. I
only had one child. I didn’t want to be tied down by children. My
life was dedicated to the shaman way, which meant I was either
helping people, advising, performing ceremonies, or journeying to
the spirit world. I barely had time for myself, let alone to raise
a child.

Laurie was remarkably sweet. And I miss her.
I can’t tell you the pain I felt when her letters stopped. Nor the
heart-wrenching sorrow when her soul appeared to say goodbye. She
did the right thing, exactly what I would have wanted her to do,
and even all these years later, I wish she was alive.

Someday, when this journey of the dead is
over, I will meet her on the other side. It’s not much comfort for
me.

Anyway, back to sex.

The sexual drive is something that a shaman
must control. Or so I was told. Sex is earthy, base, and human. A
shaman’s job was to serve as a conduit to the spirit world. Such
physical pursuits were strongly discouraged.

Not that shamans were celibate monks. Like
everyone, shamans love, live, and do have sex. They’re also
supposed to be more connected to the spirit world than the earthly,
physical plane.

I was too earthy. Or so I was told. I was
also told that my earthy nature would be a burden for me all of my
life. I guess no one realized I would spend more than three decades
in this cell -- 25 years as a prisoner, and 10 years fighting the
wasps.

I have wondered if my
great-great-grandmother sent me here so that I would gain control
over my sexual drive. Certainly control over my sex drive was a
side effect of 25 years in isolation.

The first year was hard. I missed the touch
of flesh, the gentle caress of a woman’s hand, and that
all-consuming moment when I immerse myself into her. I missed
Laurie’s laugh or sigh. I spent many hours with myself and my
memories.

Over time, I became less interesting to me.
And, possibly because I am older, my sexual drive diminished. In
the last years, my sex drive has diminished to the point of being
gone. I would say that it was entirely gone, but my interactions
with the human women tell a very different story.

I don’t think about sex anymore. Thinking
about Laurie is too painful, so I don’t. I also don’t see her. I
could call her from her peaceful rest, but I don’t. I’d rather
think of her at peace than have her see me as I am now.

I’ve never had sex with a man. I know that
most prison movies show prisons as hotbeds of rape and sex. I’ve
only ever been in solitary confinement. I don’t really know what
about prison life is like, per se. No guards came to my cell for
sex. Nor, as far as I can tell, any other prisoner’s cell.

George was very sexually
active. He had a bevy of regular lovers and a few less consenting
men. He was such a physical creature that lust became him. His lust
was the stuff of legends. But he had a lust for everything
physical: food, sex, exercise, sleep, showering
…
If it was physical, George lusted
for it.

George is a different being after healing
his soul. He’s calmer, more thoughtful. If he has a powerful lust,
I wouldn’t know it. We sleep in the same room, eat together, and
spend most of our time together. He laughs, communicates as he can,
and works.

He can work. He loves working. The harder he
works, the happier he is.

The old George would never have left the
human women alone. The old George would have had each of them and
then gone back for seconds and thirds. His lust for sex mingled
with dominance was strong. This George acted like a shy virgin. His
lust for them was as clear as my own. Yet, in place of the
aggression and need was a kind of shy uncomfortability.

Anyway,
sex
…
I
’
m talking
about sex because we have only a few more days before we leave the
Pen. I don’t know if I can take this Remington with us. If we creep
through the tunnels, we can’t take anything with us. My
documentation as the last human on the planet will end here at the
Pen. I figured I needed to cover all of the topics that might be
important if anyone comes behind us.

Maybe when the mammals return, they will be
able to decipher these ramblings. More than likely, they will curse
me for using paper and not stone.

We forget so much, our species. Our world is
littered with the ruins of cultures that lived only a few hundred
years ago. Yet, we know nothing about the people, the culture, or
the language. Anthropologists and archeologists spent minor
fortunes digging in the dirt for some clue to our human
history.

That’s what will happen to George and me. We
will blow like dust in the wind. Maybe someone will read what I
wrote here. It’s more likely that these pages will be used for a
wasp’s nest -- destroyed and devoured.

I have held on so long here with the single
idea that we would escape the Pen for the Pueblo on the 500th day
after seeing the last wasp. I have been fixed on the idea that this
day is the end of November 2046. We were so close, so close.

Now, we are surrounded by wasps. Do we
leave? Or do we stay and hope to accrue 500 days?

We cannot continue to
defend the entire Pen compound. If we stay past the
30
^th
of November, we will have to make some hard choices. We are
fond of our garden, but it’s a lot to defend. We can defend this
building, but we will eventually run out of fuel for the
generators. Once the electric fencing is down, we will never be
able to leave this building.

At the sewage treatment plant, we saw
thousands and thousands of wasps walking toward the Pen. It would
take us ten years or more to make a dent in all of these wasps. In
that time, we’d have to hide inside like hermits.