In a time when the fear of being wrongfully buried alive was wholly justified, a tsar commissioned a coffin that would ensure that if he were to wake six feet under, he would be able to communicate his life to the living above.  A tube was placed from the chest to the surface so that at the first breath, a small glass ball attached to a chord would vibrate, pulling on a bell that would toll across the cemetery in confirmation of his beating heart.  Abraham Loza is my bell.

The only assurance I have that I am still alive is that his bell continues to sound.  For three years, nine months and twenty-one days, I have been held in solitary confinement.  Time has since aborted my miserable being and lives now only in the past to remind me of the duration of my imprisonment; it has no place for me in its future and despises me in the present.  Time stands still for the man in a cell and only continues to clap its hands against the minutes of his internal clock as his flesh pursues its path of decay.  Some men haunt the memories of the past or travel to the future with all its fantasies, but seldom do they return, lost in time to forever wander its circular paths.

Darkness lives inside me.  It represents the fragments of nothingness that stubbornly insist on my continued existence, consuming the life within while condemning me to live on to witness its demise.  It is no longer the transitory obscurity of night that blankets the world when the sun sleeps, for it makes no promises of light.  It has its own peculiar taste, damp and acrid, and a commanding humming sound, the queen bee, she crawls beneath my skin, whispering to my heart as she courses through my veins.

I know that I am Arturo Lazarte and that in thinking and breathing, some part of me exists, yet to all intents I am long dead.  On visiting a jail, it was Dickens who wrote that a prisoner was a man buried alive, dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.  To the outside world I am nobody.  In these walls I am someone only to myself and I exist to my keepers only as a being that displaces air and consumes the crumbs they scatter in my pen.  My life is housed not in this cell, but inside my head, conversing with my thoughts as I wander through the corridors of my mind, opening doors that I fear will soon be locked.

I have not turned to God, for I have the sense to know that he wants nothing to do with me and I abhor the desperate and more so those that beg.  It is not a matter of pride, but rather knowing one’s place in the world.  God has never asked anything of me and thus I think it would be obnoxious to request anything from him, particularly at this late stage.  We have never spoken nor made acquaintance, he has never shown himself to me nor appeared to me in others.  It defies logic that this twisted and chaotic universe could be the fault of one so benevolent and omnipotent, but if he does exist then it is within the hearts and minds of people alone and I can assure you that he is not in my heart and seldom in my mind.  Our relationship, if any, is one of mutual abandonment and quiet distrust. 

The occupant of the cell to my right is still dangling from the strip of blanket with which he took his life.  It has been days, yet no one has come to take his body, perhaps for the reason that I have already mentioned - he was dead when he arrived and so his hanging is of little consequence.  We walk into these dark labyrinths to lie in our graves until the cloaked man of death comes to relieve us, though to what relief it is we shall not know until the end and I greatly doubt it will be of any comfort.  In those final months, Jose Reyes was in almost constant conversation with God, pleading for salvation and for his Father to take him in his arms and wash him of his sins.  At night, he would howl and scream that the Devil was pacing around his room, his bloody jaws dripping from the ceiling and the daggers of his nails tearing at his flesh.  If I pressed my ear against the wall I could hear him gnawing at his skin and ripping at his hair, so convinced was he that the Devil’s plague ran through his blood.  He prayed for God to save his soul, to take him from this life, and when his appeal fell on deaf ears, he took matters into his own hands.  Despite God’s betrayal, he - for fear is great in a man’s heart when he holds death’s gaze - died with the name of his traitor still on his lips.  Marx considered religion to be an opium of the people, to alleviate the pain and depression of life as an illusionary substitute for happiness, but if my ears have bared witness to a man high on such an opiate, then it was misery not happiness that he was substituted with.

I will not take my own life, for not only do I have a greater strength of will and take pleasure in my own company, but I have come to the conclusion that in this dire universe, what waits on the other side is no greater, for nothing so radical as the pearly gates or flames of hell could exist to reward our inconsequential globe.  Instead, I imagine that nothingness is duly rewarded with nothingness.  The freedom of which my neighbour so vehemently sought is as naïve as a caged bird who lives on the hope that one day its owner will open the door and set it free.  That day comes and it stretches out its idle wings and thinks it can remember how to fly, but it has been too long and it falls to its death.

The notion of the soul is a fiction created by mankind, sprung from fear and used as a tool to inspire redemption, but life is a punishing sentence in itself.  I know reincarnation to be a ludicrous hypothesis, for I recognise that I have been no being before me and therefore I am certain that none will follow when I die.  It will simply be the end of me and there will be nothing more to mention of my existence, no memorial of my days, just the mortal coil that I have exercised this life in.  It will rot or burn to ashes, returning to the earth to be fed to worms and after they have feasted there will not be any trace left of the man I once was.  The lid of the bottle that I live within has long been closed to the outside world and my departure will have no affect on it, nor do I have the audacity or inflation of ego to expect it. 

Remarkably, I am still of sound mind, despite my endured solitude and crude habitat.  Granted, I suffer from hallucinations and voices dance around my ears, but that sort of apophenia is only to be expected when one’s senses are deprived of stimulation.  This meagre cell requires great feats of contortion to inhabit given its approximate seven feet.  I know this because I am six feet and three inches and if I lie with my feet pressed against one wall and raise an arm behind me, I touch the other.  In width, if I lie in its centre, I am able only to touch its walls with my fingertips when I stretch my arms out.  When I am standing, which I rarely do these days, there are just three fingers of space between the crown of my head and the ceiling.  The walls, floor and ceiling are all made from the same stone and can give the illusion that the floor is the ceiling and vice versa. 

There is a metal bucket filled with wood chips in one corner, for which I am forced to defecate in like the caged beast that I am.  The way in which it is changed, irregularly, is through a flap in the door, which is otherwise locked with a metal chain ensuring that the guards are protected from our snapping jaws.  This process is a small recognition of my life, that on some level I at least exist in my biological functions.  Food comes through it, into me and out into the bucket, the bucket is emptied, the food is replenished and the circle of life in this living organism continues for another day.  I have graciously been supplied with a thin horsehair blanket, as thick as a thumbnail, which crawls and jumps and for that reason I choose not to sleep on it, its only practical use having been perceptively acknowledged by my late neighbour.  As these are the bowels of the building, severed from its head above the surface, there are of course no windows and the thin air that creeps into my lungs is only that which has trespassed through the cracks in the walls.   

Light is a ghost that sighs in my sleep, permitting its remembrance only in my chimeras and as a spectre that projects its stars onto the night sky of my eyelids, taunting me with its distant planets and mocking moons that dance their pyrrhic jig.  Conspiring with darkness to work its sorcery upon my soul, it is a phantom that screams in my lungs and whispers to the shadows to blow smoke from the embers of my heart.  Though I am aware of its mischief, my eyes are less informed and watch passively as serpents writhe between my toes and the spindly legs of spiders tower above, pinning me to the floor and cocooning my frame in their webs until I cannot breathe. 

The darkness may blind me, but I see the characters it conjures up, scrawling their stories across the walls.  There are hummingbirds that drink from my ears and faceless creatures that dance with the bucket, scattering its contents across the room, drowning me in my own excrement and I have no choice but to retreat to a corner and suck in the air from the cracks until it stops.  When they are done, they take their bows and curtseys and begin again, for these are not beings that rest, their performance ceaseless, and before long there are crows pecking at my eyes and flapping their wings against the wall with a force that threatens to break the arms of my cage.  Here, shadows do not require light to form and they move their hips with a fluid motion to draw patterns and shapes, images that are peculiar to my imprisoned mind as I recognise them on these walls but cannot picture their true form in the outside world.  Memory is a fickle and deceitful thing with no respect for the truth and a curious alliance with fiction, it is only faithful in its betrayal and I no longer call upon it. 

Abraham is my guardian.  He is on duty during the daylight hours, and it is by this method that I am able to separate night from day and the bell rings each morning when his footsteps approach to inform me that I have survived the night.  He is loyal and consistent, he does not disappoint me in his authority nor does he flaunt his freedom, for the time that he his here, we are but two men living underground.  I have never seen his face, only his hands as they pass through the flap, but I imagine him to be of reasonable build, above average height and slightly younger than I.  He has a distinct scent, which is in parts made up of glycerine soap, a seaweed-based moustache wax and a naturally sweet but potent body odour.  The way in which he holds himself and walks the corridor is measured and reserved, even the placement of a chair or jangle of keys is without drama and a sneeze stifled, a cough covered – a man who uses a handkerchief and not his hand.  It is for these refinements of character that I am under the not misguided impression that he is not only handsome but also well respected within his community and takes a certain pride in his profession.

A man of clear intellect, he shares the same respect as I for Camus and Kafka and will sometimes read aloud, which I know is for my benefit.  We do not undermine the literature by debating or theorising the author’s intentions out loud, but rather in the sanctity of our own minds.  We do not discuss private matters, and thus I know nothing of his life outside the jail, nor would I be so impertinent as to ask.  He has the grace not to talk of the outside world, for he understands that I care little for it and its politics, nor does he insult me with its trivia.  In return, I respectfully do not address him or inquire about such tiresome futilities as my case.  If I were to feel the need to speak to Abraham, I very much doubt that I would be able to as it has been many years since I have uttered so much as a word.  In the initial months, I exercised my vocal chords to prevent them from deserting me, but that was rather short-lived, for I did not want to give the impression that I was a madman.

Abraham often whistles, or hums and he benevolently positions his chair outside my cell so that I may fully appreciate the distraction.  Sinatra’s I Won’t Dance is his current repertoire and it brings me to my feet, though it pains me so, and I defy Frank and hold the ghosts of the past in my arms and twirl around my coffin as the music licks my bones.  I ride its waves to walk the walls and dance the ceiling.  Sound, my faithful servant, lends me its colours to paint the soles of my feet and I tap out the scene, sketching the notes with my toes and carving out its rhythm with my heel.  My companions, the voices that live inside these walls, are awakened by the melody and come from their beds to join me, throwing their arms in the air in feverish exaltation.  We drink in the music and take it in our open mouths as it rains from the ceiling in large, lyrical droplets that fall until its waters gather at our waists and drowns itself to silence.

Silence had its own curious sound, not all that dissimilar to a fly trapped in a glass jar.  It hums furiously as it hurls itself against my ears, then simmers before launching another attack, followed by another, until it finally coughs out its last breaths.  A moment passes, fleeting and immeasurable, and it is resurrected to beat its wings against my lobes once more with the tempo of my heart as it pounds against its cage.  Then the voices come, a word or a sentence perhaps, but when whispered on the breath of a thousand tongues it is a collective scream, a call to tear out your heart. 

I am alone again in my cell, and lying on the floor I relish in the prickles of sweat as they evaporate into bubbles that float upwards and break against the ceiling with different notes, golden spheres that burst into fine mists that come to rest upon my chest and hiss with warmth that sends steam rising from my skin and warms my blood until it boils.  The heat calls me towards it and I wander down its path, the souls of my feet burning against the dunes. 

The sun is at its zenith and radiates on my crown.  The sand swirls around me and I cough to expel it from my mouth, but my throat is so dry that when I draw breath I begin to choke.  The skin on my face is tight and pulls inwards, shrinking and cracking.  I feel the lines traverse towards my neck and watch as it parts my skin and rivers of blood run through the crevasses that it leaves behind as it works its tributaries through my body, breaking open the flesh until it comes away.  My ancient foundations waver their support as its pillars topple under its crumbling façade and its dust scatters in the wind.  The flesh peels to expose the bone as the remainder of my casing shatters like glass until all that is left of me is a skeleton.  As I stand there, naked and raw, the sand beneath my feet turns to snow and flakes begin to fall around me, rattling my shivering bones and I realise that these are not snowflakes but pieces of my own frozen flesh and I pluck them from the air and put myself back together with trembling joints but they have no grip and the bony fingers are too numb to hold the fragments.  I drop to my knees and paw at the snow, searching for the shards buried beneath as the snow persists furiously, but it has devoured them with its hungry lips and there is nothing left of me, I am gone.

I suck on my fingers to bring the feeling back to them and ease my body from the floor, sores run along my spine and the skin around my hips is worn and threadbare like the knees of a harlot.  The stone melts beneath me and its waters trickle towards the edges of the floor and I resist the temptation to urinate for the necessity of a warm bladder - one must not discard warmth when it is scarce.  I push the bucket aside and my fingers retract on reflex, mistaking its icy touch for that of a hot poker, yet I feel nothing.  My skin deceives me, it makes me believe that solid is liquid and smooth is rough, denied of stimulation it invents its own sensations.  It is times such as these when I doubt that I am alive, when thinking is not proof enough and I bite my fingernail until it is ragged and sharp.  Extending my forearm before me I begin to make small incisions, evenly spaced lines as if the marks of a tribe to which I am at once the chief and the follower.  I wait breathlessly for the blood to appear from my fragile body, and, when it does, I draw it to my lips and taste the reassurance of my existence.  It is then that I hear its wings beating against the walls. 

In the cell to my left a vampire dwells, he hangs upside down from his cage and his wings flap against the walls and he sniffs the air, thirsty for my blood he senses the tethered prey.  For a moment it excites me and I imagine that he breaks through the walls and devours my neck, sinking his fangs into my flesh and draining the lifeblood from within and delivering me to eternity, but the moment passes and I force my breath to slow and listen to his beat as he pounds his cell in vain pursuit of flight.  A nocturnal beast, Nestor Rada Rada need not be afraid of the light in these quarters and therefore has no cause to rest, instead sentenced to unending torment and vexation.  He is weaker now than before, deprived of the blood that is his sustenance and unable to stretch his crippled wings.  His persecution is greater than mine, for this wretched, pitiful, creature cannot perform even the basest of purposes that make up his being, whereas I, at the least, may walk a step or eat a crumb.  There was a time when he would incant a prayer in a dialect that I could not decipher, his voice rising to a screech, infected with rage, but now he is silent in defeat.  He only stirs at times to beat his wings, but this does not last for long as he need not be reminded of its futility.     

The reek of a cigarette poisons my nasal cavities and I am made regrettably aware of the arrival of the night guard, Luis Suarez.  The antithesis of Abraham, he is a lumbering mass of vulgarities, hacking up his lungs as he paces the corridor, his trunks thudding the ground and rocking my cell, the vibrations entering into my body and disturbing my insides until my cerebrum detaches from its skull and my ears scream.  His hands are broad and callous, his voice coarse, gravelly, and only capable of uttering obscenities.  It is insulting to the core that such an ignorant brute should roam free while I, of refined taste and intellect, should be cooped up like a savage.  Above all, it is his smell that I cannot abide.  It is an inhuman stench, a foul dishonour to the nose, a plethora of sewage and decay that crawls under my skin and worms its way into my flesh, culminating in an unremitting itch that compels me to claw frantically at my body. 

Since my confinement, it has been both my fortune and misfortune to have an acute sense of smell.  The slightest allusion to a scent is impressed upon me as if it were a living, breathing being beside me.  The carnival creatures that dance before me all have their own distinct odours and when they hide themselves from my sight but continue to perform, I am able to find and recreate their images from their scents.  The breaths of the tongues that whisper in my ears fill the air with burning paper, tastes of bark, rain falling on dust and honey from a comb.  Drying woodchips can imitate cowhide and the taste of water from a metal cup.  The stone of the walls conjure up the black sheen of a scarab beetle, the eyes of an owl at night, or the crunch of leaves under a foot, while bread can transform itself into a cinnamon stick dipped in coffee.  Memory, in its indulgent hours, might permit me a smell and I ride in the carriage of a train, feeling the wheels turn beneath me and the engine puffing on its fuel.  The stifling heat reaches me as the sun glares through the window but then, as if someone has snuffed out the candle of my mind, it is gone and darkness returns.  No more than a moment passes before I doubt the validity of my recollections and it is rejected, tossed aside to lie with the debris of hallucinations that live in the attic of my imagination.  The walls close in around me and push against my head like the pressure before a storm and I dig my thumbs into my temples to dull the ache.  The sound of Luis’ cough wafts the malodour of death and the pungent tang of gasoline and I know that he is standing outside, listening to me breathe.

I no longer sleep at night and only lightly during the day when I am protected by Abraham, for I have felt Luis’ eyes watching me through the flap at night while I pretend to sleep.  Luis throws my daily feed through the slot and it sloshes onto the floor, but it matters not as I refuse to take the diluted broth for I have tasted the bitter taste of hemlock that he poisons it with.  Instead, I allow myself only to eat the stale bread and sip from the cup of water; it is he who is to blame for my emaciated frame, but I will not relent.  I take the crumbs and dip them in the water so that I may swallow, pushing them past my pursed and desiccated lips.  My stomach, weak and despondent, churns away to process this necessary toil.  It tastes of nothing but my own breath, and I pick out the weevils and make sure to chew them with care; their flavour never fails to disappoint with its blandness but the sustenance that they bring must not be ignored.  While the broth is still warm, I take the bowl and pour it over my body, massaging its warmth into my skin and painting patterns, circles that spring from my naval and spiral outwards to crawl across the stone.  My left hand takes leave of me and darts across the floor as I kneel down on the ceiling and watch the artist at work.  The image grows and shrinks, pulsing with its own life and breath and it is Luis - a grotesque caricature, an animated doll.  I take the skewers in my hands and plunge them into his flesh and watch the fat dribble out as he howls in agony and blood floods the room, his organs balloons that burst and resurrect in the gurgle of gas as the air is expelled from him and takes his life with it.

As I admire my masterpiece I hear murmurs coming from Nestor’s chambers and I press my ear against the wall.  He is whispering to Luis, conspiring against me, trying to broker a deal for my blood.  I know that Luis sometimes feeds him the bloody remains of bones, for I hear them rattling across the floor when he has sucked the marrow dry.  A pathetic wretch, he shamelessly accepts Luis’ abuse in return for these scraps, wagging his tail moronically as if a starving stray.  I hear him moaning, crying, gnawing and he comes to the wall, his hunger awakened but not satiated, he smells me and all that separates me from his jaws are a few inches of stone.  Emboldened by my murderous designs, I do not move my head but press it only closer, taunting the beast with my scent.  I open up the wounds on my arms and smear the blood across the wall and I can hear the saliva rushing from his fangs as he beats his wings into a furious crescendo.  By some dark means he takes over Jose’s cell and for a moment I hear him on the other side, feasting on the remains.  Then there is silence.

The dying fly brushes my face once again with its wings and gibes my ears with its drone.  The inertia of my plotting neighbours plagues me and I turn and skulk into the shadows, towards the plains.  The Steppenwolf, exiled and alone, I wander the desert of my mind.  A winged hourglass hovers above and noths, creatures of nothingness, moth-like shapes cut out against the landscape, flutter in my wake.  I scavenge the ground for life but I find none, my orphaned self searches for a womb to crawl inside for shelter, but the land is barren and offers no hospitality. The wind cries and entreats me to return to where I came from, but there is no path behind.  An abandoned house appears before me, derelict and exposed.  As if a doll’s house, its body is cut in half to reveal its ruined innards.  I explore its limbs, the rooms of which are decorated with memorabilia of my past and the sins of my life hang framed upon its walls.  The corridors of its heart are empty, the dry air having peeled back the paint to reveal the destroyed brick behind and I feel its foundations sway beneath me.  My stomach growls and I climb the steps and search the rooms for morsels but my quest is fruitless.  A distant howl calls to me from the horizon and I turn in its direction and pursue it with all the energy I have left.  It is not until I arrive, panting in my cage, that I realise it came not from another, but from within and I am alone, condemned to my unceasing thoughts.

The beast is silent, its wings still.  I push myself against the wall but he does not stir.  The absence of smoke in the air heralds his departure, but in his place Abraham’s bell does not toll.  I wait for his footsteps, prick my ears for his song and inhale with anticipation, but I am met with nothing.  No sound, taste or smell greets me and when I touch myself I am numb.  Darkness is all that is left and it does not even court light to cast my shadow. 

I wait, and wait, yet I do not know how long has passed.  Time continues to clap its hands, as it does even after death, applauding decay and replacing the rhythm of the drums that no longer beat against a heart.  If they have truly abandoned me, then no one knows that I am here, and if I have only my thoughts and nothing else to prove my existence, then I concede that I am dead, for I cannot even be sure of my breath.  The bell no longer tolls and I live on only in the coffin of my mind.  If this is death, then I have been proved right, for it is the very nothingness with which I began.

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