The Watch
by Ross Ulbricht
At the edge of my awareness, I thought I heard my name. I was hunched over the metal desk sandwiched between the bright orange lockers in my prison cell. My pencil stopped its scratching as I strained my ears.
A knock on my cell door and Thomas poked his head in.
“CO’s callin’ for ya,” he said. “They’re callin’ you to watch.” He sped off. Thomas was the head orderly in the block, never without energy for cleaning or running errands for the guards. He defended his position well.
It was not my day to watch. I was not even the alternate. I put down my pencil and stepped out onto the top tier.
The cell block was a cavern of steel and concrete. The usuals were parked in front of the TVs, and a chess match with a small audience was going at one of the tables, but otherwise it was quiet for this time of night.
Bonum, our regular guard, was looking up at me from the bottom floor.
“Let me throw on my greens,” I said. “I’ll be right down.”
I buttoned up my all-green uniform, grabbed my ID, hid a paperback in my folder, and went downstairs.
“This isn’t my night,” I said to Bonum as he unlocked the front door of the block.
He smiled. “When they call, you go,” he said. “You know how it is.”
The sun was just settling as I stepped out of the block and onto the concrete walk leading to the main corridor. It put a pale pink glow along the underbelly of the overcast clouds. The rec yard was packed with prisoners from the many cell blocks surrounding it. That’s where everyone had gone, off to get the latest gossip or do some piece of business, to gamble, to fight, to struggle through their little lives on this little square of desert surrounded by high walls, high-voltage fences and gun towers.
I heard a voice:
‘Hey man, come here. You goin’ to watch?”
I did not want to stop, but when you live in a cage with a thousand other men, being rude can catch up to you eventually. I turned to see another prisoner up against the other side of the rec-yard fence.
“What’s up?”
“I got a kite for Digby,” he said. “He should still be back there.”
“Sorry, we’re not supposed to pass stuff,” I said, hoping it would end there.
“Ain’t nothin’ man, just somethin’ to help him pass the time, you feel me?”
I backed away, shaking my head. “Maybe the next one. I’m not losing my job over it.”
He turned away disgruntled, but he could not fault me for it. This was not even my day to watch, I thought. I should not have to deal with this.
The main corridor was empty and quiet all the way down to the big door leading into medical. I stood waiting by the door until the bored-looking corridor officer came out of the captain’s office. He saw the folder in my hand and, without a word, unlocked the door and let me in.
The suicide watch area was open, so I walked straight in. As soon as he saw me, the other watcher smiled like he had just found a stamp on the ground. He was ready to be done with his shift. He scribbled his last entry in the log book, and handed it to me.
“How’s he doing?” I asked.
“Just sleeping right now. He needs his meds. The corridor officer, what’s his name, said he’d tell medical, but that was a couple of hours ago.”
“Alright, I’ll ask again when they do rounds.”
I looked through the big glass window on the front of the cell at the man inside. He was on his back, covered head to toe in a thin blanket. His bed was a concrete block built into the center of the cell. Set into the sides were strategically placed bars where straps could be looped through. The rest of the cell was bare except for the remains of a dinner tray in the corner and a too-bright fluorescent light mounted to the ceiling. Next to the walls outside the cell, there were medical jugs with spring-loaded lids half filled with yellow fluid. The whole place smelled slightly of urine.
I settled into my chair, angled so I could see my guy if I turned my head, which was important. This was my job, to watch. I knew Digby, the man under the blanket. We were in the same cell block before I moved, but I had not seen him in a while, maybe a year. We were never close. He was the kind of guy I avoided. He was into all the things I was not: violence, drugs, drama.
They say familiarity breeds contempt, but I have found the opposite to be true. Despite our many differences, I had a slight fondness for Digby, simply because I had seen him daily and lived around him for a couple of years. You can’t hide who you are for that long, so I knew what I was dealing with, to a degree. Part of me wondered why he had been put on suicide watch. But, I would only be here for my four-hour shift, which he might sleep through. The guy I relieved had watched him during his shift. Same for the guy before him. Digby was under 24-hour surveillance. If he tried to kill himself, not that it would be easy to do, he would be stopped. His clothes had been taken. The only fabric in his locked cell was a tear-proof smock and the blanket he was under, made from the same stuff. Even if he could make a rope, there was nothing to hang from. More dangerous was something foreign smuggled in, like whatever it was I refused to accept through the rec yard fence. It could have been enough drugs to overdose on, or a little razor blade for Digby to open his veins with.
There was nothing in the bare cell for Digby to do to pass the time. Hour after hour, day after day, just him and his thoughts and whoever was watching him. The other watchers joked that, if you were not suicidal when you got put on watch, you would definitely become so. I flipped through the log book. Digby had been on suicide watch for eight days.
I flipped back to the front and scribbled my first entry: “Digby laying down, motionless,” and initialed it.
I was not supposed to bring anything back there that could distract me, but all the watchers did it. I guess the idea was that I was supposed to keep my eyes glued to him every moment for four hours. I pulled my book out of my folder and picked up reading where I had left off earlier. The room was dead silent, just the hum of the vent and the ticking of the round, analogue clock above Digby’s cell door.
An hour passed before a guard came by.
“He alive?”
“Yep.” I mentioned that he needed his meds.
Then another hour.
I looked over at Digby and noticed that he had rolled over on his side. It went in the log book. Every few moments, I would feel restless. I accepted this fact, and a measure of peace emerged.
Another hour and I was approaching the end of my shift. We could not work more than four hours at a time by policy, though relief was often late.
Then, Digby pulled the tear-proof blanket down and sat up. His hair was eight days of stubble and his skin was pallid. He squinted at the overhead fluorescent, pinching the tattoos he had blasted over every square inch of his face and head.
I had grown used to it, or numb to it, but the first time I saw a man locked in a cell, I recoiled. Several emotions had hit me at once: desire to help him, to get him out of his predicament, fear of the awesome power of the system that kept him there, resignation that I could do nothing in that moment, then justification: he must deserve to be there, though I had no idea who he was.
But when I saw Digby, and he saw me, I just saw my knucklehead neighbor from my old cell block. He came over to the window and leaned his forehead against it, flattening the Juggalo girl tattooed there.
“It’s freezing in here,” he said.
I could feel the cold air flowing through the crack under the door. All Digby had to wear was his smock. No socks or shoes on the bare concrete floor. No shirt or underwear.
“They don’t make it comfortable, do they?” I said. “I haven’t seen you in ages. Where’ve you been?”
“I’ve been in the Hole six months!” He seemed shocked I didn’t know.
“Oh yeah. That thing with Johnny, right?”
“Yeah.”
I could see the wind leave his sails at my mention of his last cellie in general population. I did not know the details, but he and Digby had fought on the last long lockdown.
“Are they going to let you out?” I asked.
“I dunno. They won’t tell me anything. I might get shipped.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Doesn’t matter.” His eyes drifted off. “None of it matters.”
I was not sure what to say. I was not sure I even wanted to talk to him, but I went on with open-ended questions.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it’s true! If they ship me to a new yard, I’ll just screw up there too. I can’t take this anymore.” He let his head fall against the glass with a soft bang.
Smashing his head against the glass was about the only way Digby could self-harm in that cell. It was a tactic some guys used to be heard. I would have to immediately use the emergency line and let the guards know. If a psychologist was around they might come talk to him, or he could be strapped to the concrete block he slept on.
But Digby was not trying to hurt himself.
“What’s bothering you, Digby?”
“Six months, bro. It’s torture back there in the Hole. I can’t sleep with all the noise. They treat me like garbage. My toilet wasn’t flushing right for weeks. They wouldn’t give me a spoon. I had to eat that nasty food with my hands. Then they put me in with this dirtbag cellie. You know Orc?”
I did not.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “I told them I didn’t want to go in with him. It was getting bad, you know. I didn’t want to hurt someone again. I didn’t want to hurt him like Johnny, so…I had swiped a razor and opened my wrist in front of the lieutenant.” He held up his bandaged wrist.
We sat in silence for a minute while I took in his words.
“Did you do it just to get out of there, so you could come back here and have a break, a quiet cell to yourself?” This was actually more common than real attempts.
“I dunno. I just don’t know if I can keep doing this. I don’t want to go back. I don’t see the point in any of it.”
“How much time you got left?” I asked.
“Four years.”
“That’s not bad. How old are you?”
“I’m 22.”
In that moment, something in my heart gave way. Digby had nearly taken Johnny’s life. Now he was flirting with taking his own. Something in the way he said it, I knew he was not faking for attention or to get a break from the Hole. He really felt he was at the end of his rope. I was in my late 30s. What I wouldn’t give to be 22 again. I could live my life over. I could choose a different path, one that didn’t lead me to a maximum-security prison. I turned to him.
“You’re young, Digby. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and that’s a good thing. You’ll get through this, man. It’s temporary. If you take your life though, there’s no coming back from that.”
He started tearing up a little.
“You gotta be strong. They could keep you in that Hole for another six months, or longer, but guess what? On the other side of it, it’ll just be a bad memory, nothing more. You’ll make it.”
He was looking intently into my eyes. That look, that desperate need he had to hear what I was saying, it gave me words I did not know I had.
“I know it hurts right now. I know you’re in pain. You gotta be tough. Do it for future Digby. You know future Digby? He is counting on you to get through this. There will be good times again if you can get through this valley.”
He was openly crying now.
“You’re right,” he chocked. He wanted to believe it, he needed to, but he was wavering inside.
I started over and went through my message to him again, using different words, coming at him from different angles.
“I’ve got a life sentence, no parole. I’m never getting out. I would give anything to be in your shoes right now. Do a little time in the Hole, keep my head down, and in a few years…freedom. Sweet, sweet freedom. Don’t rob yourself of that, Digby. If I can keep going, so can you.”
Slowly, his confidence returned. He could see past the darkness all around him. He saw himself as a man who could endure it and be better on the other side for having been through it.
“You see, man? You got this.”
“I got this. Yeah, I got this.”
I put my knuckles to the glass and he dapped me from the other side.
A few minutes later, my relief came. It was odd for a third person, who had not been there for our conversation, to arrive so soon. What we had just been through was not part of the world he had just come from, where prisoners wear masks to hide the pain, to hide what they fear is their weakness.
I met Digby’s eyes one last time before I left. I could see everything in them: fear, regret, longing, courage, hope.
The compound was all stillness as I walked back to my cell block. I felt like I had experienced something significant with Digby that night. Most of the time, most people’s walls are so high, so thick and so well guarded that it is hard to do more than scratch the surface. It is hard to connect with the authentic self of another. That night, I connected with Digby as I never could have when he was chasing all the wrong things in our old block.
I never saw Digby again. He stayed in the Hole a while longer. He endured it, and was eventually shipped to another prison.
