I am Gideon: Chapter #4

The Place.

Shame became the word that meant, me. 

“Shame on you.” 

“What a shame, you’re…”

“What a shame he’s…”

That last one hurt most, because I ceased to exist.  I was a case.  I was a number. I was not a person, but then, I didn’t really expect to be.I wondered if Brother Darwin would come to visit me.  He didn’t.

I thought about wondering if my mother would come to visit me, but immediately gave up the notion.  I did wonder if she knew what had happened to me, and decided she probably didn’t.  Didn’t know, didn’t care.  Just another bleary puzzle.

There were long rooms with walls that had probably been white.  They had lots of marks on them, where beds and night stands had been banged against the wall over the years.  Most of the time it was eerily silent – not many people in where I was. Every once in a while, they’d catch somebody and drag them in there.  Sometimes they stayed, sometimes they didn’t.  No matter who they were, they never talked.

The doctors pawed me, and questioned me, and dipped me in various things that stunk of chemicals.  I had a long white garment that they took off of me every day or so while they tried some new treatment on me.  I took pills that made me very sick.  They gave me enemas, and put probes in my private parts and some of them hurt.  There were times I couldn’t urinate, couldn’t defecate for the probing they’d done, but I was already used to that.

The up side to all of it, was that I had a bed.  With a sheet – something I’d seen only once or twice in my visits to other sex venues – and I had a real blanket.  A whole blanket.  And a pillow.  I was not awakened from sleep and dragged out to be molested.  I was allowed to sleep, which was an unspeakable luxury.  I was given soup and bread, or some kind of cooked, watery gruel – but it came regularly, and I was no longer desperately hungry. 

Sometimes I heard screams at night, and cursing and the crashing of things in another part of the building.  When I asked, I was told that some venereal diseases made people crazy.  Those people would never leave here.  I was one of the lucky ones.

One morning as I was being returned to my room, the attendant said, “It’s a shame you don’t know how to do anything but be a tyke-whore. How would you like to work in the laundry?”

I took this as a great kindness on her part, and nodded enthusiastically. “Tell me more,” I said.

Every day after that I went to different parts of the building and stripped off dirty sheets and blankets and took them down to the huge washers that sloshed and growled in the basement.  I was only attacked once – in the wing where the people were who were never going home.  It was a woman.  She grabbed me by the hair and crushed me to her, biting at my neck and screaming that it was my fault.  She was shaking me like a rag when two attendants rescued me and took me to the infirmary.  My wounds were cleaned with antiseptic, plasters applied, and I went back to gathering up dirty sheets and blankets. 

“It’s good you’re learning a trade,” the laundry master nodded. 

“Tell me more,” I said.