Chapter Eleven
The way I’ve been wrapping my head around things lately, you’d think my cranium was made out of ace bandage.
Seriously, over the last year or so, my life has completely flipped upside down. And now, I’m a goddamn Demogorgon.
But like, a hot one.
My life is completely different from a year ago, in terms of where I live, and what I do for a living… The people who are actively a part of my day-to-day existence. And that’s fine. I’ve since made my peace with where I am physically.
It’s me inside I’m worried about.
I’m not the same guy who lived on Staten Island, drove an Acura, worked as a bouncer at Americana, and spent ninety percent of his daily life worrying about his emotionally unstable addict mother.
He’s been slowly fading away with each moment that’s stretched in time, since the night Manuel Blanco found me covered in the blood of the two scumbags I’d killed.
Like I’m hanging onto a bungee cord that’s stretching further and further… Eventually, it’ll snap. I know it will.
The thing is, I can’t tell if I’m concerned by this, or if I just feel like I should be. I wonder this often… Given the chance, would I go back to that night?
Would I warn myself? Talk myself out of killing those rapist fucks, despite knowing with absolute certainty that they needed to die…
Would I convince myself to fight harder against him?
I guess it doesn’t matter. I have no hot tub time machine… The choices I made are mine to live with, for the rest of ever. My only option is to swallow it; the jagged pill that is this hard truth…
John Chevelle doesn’t matter anymore.
This show now irrevocably belongs to Officer Chevelle, Head Correctional Officer of Alabaster Penitentiary.
Velle… The Warden’s good guard dog. He’s completely taken over.
And that’s not to say I have no conscience left. I’m not a sociopath—unlike some people I know. But I see how easily empathy could begin to fade over time, doing what we do here. Dealing in darkness, turning a shoulder to your fellow man’s suffering, denying people the most basic of human rights.
I can feel myself becoming desensitized to it already, and that is worrying. Because if it just keeps slipping further away… where does it end?
I suppose it ends with him. And if the last stage in this metamorphosis is becoming that…
I don’t want to let myself get there. Despite everything I’ve been doing, what I have to keep doing in order to run this place the way I’m being paid to—or forced to, depending on who you ask—I refuse to ever become that callous.
I’ll never be like him.
Manuel Blanco is a stone-cold bastard. Ice in his veins and an evil smirk on his lips that would indicate very little of that pesky empathy the rest of us are dealing with.
Still, part of me has to wonder if Manuel Blanco has always been the way he is, or if he too has become hardened over time as a result of what he does—running the cartel, a position he apparently inherited before he turned thirty.
Again, I’m not privy to the details of his work, but being on this island, living and working closely with him, especially in the early days when it was just us, you pick up on stuff. And what I’ve picked up on is more or less exactly what you’d expect.
Drugs. Territory. Corruption.
Money, power, respect, as the song goes. Threats as a second language, and when they don’t stick, violence inflicted without even batting an eye.
But the most pertinent of all these things is control. Without that, the rest of it falls apart, and the one thing I noticed, almost immediately, was that The Ivory would sooner take a bullet between the eyes than give up the control he’s acquired by any means necessary.
Either way, I have enough on my plate as it is without worrying about the levels of depravity in my employer. Alabaster Penitentiary is more than just a full-time job. It’s a lifestyle, but one I didn’t choose. Lost somewhere in the vast forest between a relationship and a burden.
The prison is a living, breathing organism; a monster with an insatiable appetite that needs to be fed and tended to constantly.
Every step of the way has been an experiment, for us as much as The Ivory. A certain learning curve was to be expected, though it was stressed to me, heavily in the beginning by Manuel Blanco, that mistakes would come at a price. One he wouldn’t be paying.
The early days were like existing in a hurt locker.
I’d wake up in a cold sweat—that is, when I actually slept, rather than staring blankly into the void that was the high ceiling of my eerily quiet bedroom.
I was in a constant state of panic that I’d cut the wrong wire, and any moment, something would go kaboom.
It’d be all my fault, and I would deal with those repercussions.
But the thing I’ve learned from Manuel Blanco is that when something is fragile, you guard it with your life. And you never let anyone know the truth. Because the moment they sense vulnerability, it’s all over.
“Look at these walls, Jonathan,” he’d said to me during one of our first walk-throughs of the prison. “What do you think they’re made of?”
I gave him a puzzled look, wondering if it was a trick question. He just stared back at me until I answered, “Concrete?”
His mouth twisted into a cunningly pleased smile. It brought a rush of warm pride to my chest for getting it right, which I promptly swallowed down because it was idiotic.
“And the bars?” He cocked a light brow.
“Probably… steel of some kind,” I muttered.
“What if I told you… that they’re made of Styrofoam?” He smirked. “Painted to look like concrete, stone and rebar?”
My face flung in his direction. “Are they??”
He released a rumbling chuckle. “You’re so cute.
No, dear, that would be ridiculous.” That time, I couldn’t fight the heat crawling up my neck.
“But if I told you that… you would think the walls were weak. And you would view this as a terrible place to house prisoners, because they could simply huff and puff and blow it all down.”
I snorted, lashes fluttering at the peculiarity of this man and this situation. That he could even be making me laugh, while everything around us was so dreary, seemed… significant.
“My point, Jonathan, is that perception is everything. And unbreakable is subjective.”
He turned to face me, locking those cavernous orbs of obsidian on my face. I felt as if they were physically holding me down.
Reaching out, he brushed his fingers along my jaw. My breathing went instantly shallow, shivers sheeting my flesh.
“Whether we’re surrounded by the sturdiest of concrete, or hollow plastic… Protect the illusion. Be the walls that hold it all together, Jonathan. And never, ever show weakness.”
As confusing as aspects of this island have been for me, those words, that advice was simple. And I’ve made it a point to follow it in every move made here since.
In training my team of guards and overseeing the prisoners that began trickling in only a few months later… I became the walls. Sturdy and reinforced.
That structure has kept things running and will keep everyone in line. Even if the stability is… exaggerated. Especially then. We protect the illusion. Because ordered chaos brings balance.
Whether it’s all made up of concrete or styrofoam still remains to be seen… But it works.
George Costanza said it best… It’s not a lie if you believe it.
I swear, Manuel Blanco is like Satan’s used car salesman.
Trapped on an island? Alone time is good for the soul.
Fires burning around you? You’ll never get cold.
Earthquake? Free foot massage. That sort of thing.
This fake it til you make it type attitude applies to all aspects of guarding this place, including the way we control the prisoners.
Want an example? I gotchu.
Tank Foster. Inmate #8. This big psychopath with a glass eye who loves biting the nipples off of sex workers almost as much as he loves meth.
He’d somehow escaped incarceration three times, from two different federal prisons in Arizona. But unsurprisingly, he wound up back in custody every time.
I swear, the dude’s IQ was also in the single digits.
Anyway, the D.A. in Phoenix was pissed, on the verge of losing his job over this cannibalistic tweaker.
It wasn’t until they arrested Foster for the fourth time that the D.A.
remembered he had a business acquaintance who’d recently been given a new facility on an island…
The perfect place to send this heinous criminal, to ensure he would never be seen or heard from again.
Inmate #8 was due to arrive in a few hours, and I was in the Warden’s office, going over his file to prepare for the briefing with the team…
“Man, for a toothless moron, this dude is shockingly adept at escaping maximum-security prisons…” I grumbled, frantically scanning the pages.
“Do you want a Jarrito?” The Ivory asked while hunched over the fridge in his office.
“No, thank you.”
“Are you sure? I have pineapple… That’s the best one.”
“I’m good. It says here he shit his pants on the transport bus and made a run for it when the driver pulled over to throw up.” My face was the picture of horrified.
“There’s never anything to eat in here…” The Ivory muttered, more concerned with the contents of his refrigerator than the sicko we were about to bring in. “I’d kill for Empanada Mama right now… How fast do you think the chopper could get it here?”
“Are you listening??” I barked at him. “This is serious! We have an inmate coming in who once stashed a safety pin in his goddamn eye socket and used it to escape prison for the third time!”
Releasing an audible sigh, The Ivory finally closed the damn fridge and turned to face me. “You have my attention.”
Swallowing became more difficult with him staring at me like that. It always did—still does—and I could feel myself clamming up, though I never could understand why.
Still can’t.