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Chapter 1: What happens when the inmate wakes up in a sealed room?
Who wants to pitch in for new Greg's birthday? The hardened criminals sitting around the bolted-down table in the communal area stare daggers at me. They're playing cards, betting cigarettes, and I've interrupted their game. That old bastard is still alive, Chunky says, the folds of fat comprising his face coming together in what passes for a grimace.
Not for long, Lonnie says, pulling a cigarette from behind his ear. Yeah, that's why I want to get him something special from the commissary. I'm pitching him my last ten bucks. He wants to help. Sulk whips one enormous arm out, backhanding me in the chest. It knocks my breath away. The other Khans laugh at me as I struggle to breathe.
Once my capillaries are sucking up sweet oxygen again, I clench my fists and step toward the galoot. He lurches up from the table and faces me. Before I met Salk, I was sure they couldn't stack shit so high, but he proved me wrong. The towering, veiny man has arms like legs, and legs like well-fed pythons. I'll have a line of bruises down my chest from where his craggy knuckles hit me.
But that's not why I shake my head and loosen my hands. I don't fight, I say. Not anymore. Chunky guffaws. I wouldn't fight him either. He's a Buddhist now, Lonnie exclaims snidely to the others. Or so he says. Funny how the little guys always find religion when they get here, ain't it? Sulk's eyes follow me as I walk away to ask others if they'll chip in.
I should have known better than to ask that table. In the end, two other guys agree to transfer ten bucks to my commissary account. It's better than nothing. I head out of the communal area and up to the third level, where new Greg's cell is. The rectangular cell block makes it so I can look over the railing at the collection of tables below.
Sulk has long since taken his seat, but his small, stone-colored eyes follow me while the other Galoots wait for him so they can continue their game. Approaching New Greg's cell, I spot something lying on the concrete walkway. At first, I think it's a piece of trash, but the colors and designs are familiar. Walking with a hesitant sense of hope, I close in. No way.
I breathe as I look down at the $100 bill. Cash is rare in here. Most of the commerce is done through a barter system or commissary transfers. I'm guessing the bill came from a guard. I'm about to glance around to see if anyone's paying attention when I feel Sulk's eyes still on me.
Making it a point not to look at him, I crouch and snatch the bill up, shoving it into my sock while I pretend to fix my slipper. Straightening up, I can't help but smile. With this kind of money, I can get new Greg what he really wants, which is a book that's not in the library, a book from when he was a kid. The book is out of print and therefore more expensive than your average paperback.
But with this $100, I can pay for the book and the shipping. Books are one of the few items that prison authorities won't turn away. Still smiling, I walk to new Greg's cell and knock on the concrete next to the open door. Knock, knock. New Greg lowers the book he's reading and peers at me from where he's lying on his bunk. His nickname is ironic because he's the oldest guy here.
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Chapter 2: How does the strange wooden box produce money?
His 85th birthday is in four days, but if I didn't know better, I would peg him for 20 years older. He's frail in the body, but his mind and spirit are strong. Hey, Zen. He rasps. How's your inner world? I smile. It's what he always asks. I'm trying to expand it, but I don't read as fast as you. Yeah, well, it's about the only thing I do fast these days. I step into a cell.
The top bunk is packed with books and notebooks and a chess set. Wanna play a game? Sure. After I take a dump, you got real shitty timing. New Greg grins at his joke, revealing his prison-issue dentures. He eases himself up, setting his book aside before pausing. I would offer to help, but we've been down that road before. His pride is as intact as his mind. Still, I ease closer just in case.
He takes a deep breath and stands. The toilet is a few feet away at the back of the cell. As he turns that way, he lists to one side. I dart forward and grab him before he can fall and break a hip or something. For once, he doesn't grumble at me for helping. Once I get him situated on the toilet, I step back out of the cell and turn left to give him some privacy.
But I see one of the guards, a real hard case nicknamed Flattop, trudging right for me. I turn the other way, making it a few yards before Flattop shouts, Stop right there, Denson! I freeze and then turn, adopting a look of deference.
Did you just pick something up off the floor?
I'm not sure what to do. If it's his money, I'll happily give it back to him. Well, not happily, but I will give it back. But if I tell him, yeah, I found a hundred bucks, he'll say it's his even if it's not. Flat top mocks, closing in.
You heard me, shit stain. What did you pick up?
Did you lose something, boss?
Yeah, I'm about to lose my foot up your ass if you don't tell me what you got.
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Chapter 3: What violent experiences does the inmate relive with each transaction?
I fold and twist and duck, trying to get away, but he lands hit after hit, driving me to my knees. My head is down, my arms draped over it, when the hits suddenly stop in time with a familiar grumble. Glancing up, I see New Greg gripping Flattop's baton, as if he caught it mid-swing. I don't think he had it in him.
Flattop discards his surprise, jerks the weapon away, and then cracks the old man in the head with it. New Greg collapses, head colliding with the railing, and once more with the concrete floor. All the zen work I've done over the last year flies away like a bird from the exercise yard, free at last. New Greg is either dead or a vegetable now, and that knowledge comes with a heaping pile of rage.
Before Flattop can return his attention to me, I scramble up, hook my arms under his legs, and lift. The guard grabs for the railing as I flip him over it, but he doesn't get a solid grip. The fall from the third floor doesn't take long, but I watch him the whole way down. He hits with a bone-crunching, ligament-tearing, skull-cracking thud. The prisoners go crazy, yelling and screaming.
Alarms blare, guards start locking down the wing. I stand at the railing, all this activity buffering me but not breaking the surface. My gaze moves between New Greg and Flat Top as I try to make sense of what just happened. Guards come rushing down the walkway from both sides. The hundred dollar bill stuffed in my sock seems to have grown a thousand tiny mouths that are all biting me at once.
I beard through the swollen eyelids at the closed wooden box. It's about eight inches long, six wide and four deep. Carved into the lid is 1 Timothy 6.10. A Bible verse? I'm not familiar with the book of Timothy. I'm a Zen guy, and turns out I'm pretty shitty at that. Other than the bolted down table on which it sits, the box is the only item in the room I've awoken in.
Last thing I remember before waking is killing Flattop after he killed Nugreg. Well, no, that's not true. The last thing I remember is four guards beating the hell out of me. My head is a collection of lumps and lacerations. I tongue the fresh scab on my split lip. My nose whistles as I breathe through it. Even the passage of air causing pain must be broken.
But my limbs and digits are amazingly intact. I'm surprised they didn't stomp my hands into useless mangled claws. I haul myself into a standing position and peer around the room. It's a rectangle, like the box, maybe 20 feet long, 10 wide. There are two formidable metal doors, one door in each of the two short walls.
The long walls each have two grated windows, kind of like prison visitation windows. The last time I used one of those was when that young woman came to thank me for what I'd done, helping her and her mom like I did. During that same visit, she told me her mom had slipped away. She was gone just like that after almost a year in a coma.
I remember thinking, well, what the hell are you thanking me for? I was too late. I couldn't save your mom. But of course I didn't say that. After all, God knows what those men would have done to the young woman, Monica. Nothing good. But as the good book says, no good deed goes unpunished. That's the Bible, right? Must be.
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Chapter 4: How does the inmate's relationship with New Greg evolve?
Yeah. I took it too far, as I often do. I had incapacitated both of the men, but upon seeing what they'd done to Monica's mom in that gas station parking lot, I thought temporary incapacitation wasn't nearly enough. So I walked back over to them, calm as could be, and finished the job. That was the prosecution's phrase. Calm as could be.
The whole thing was caught on camera, and the sharp-suited man set his grim face on the jury after they watched the footage. Calm as could be. But anyway, the windows. Unlike the visitation windows in the prison, these have a gap at the bottom between the smooth concrete sill and the bottom of the metal grate. Like they're designed so you can pass stuff through from one side to the other.
Meals maybe? But then why are there four of them? One at a time, I peer through the grates, looking into rooms much like mine, but dark, unoccupied, and each one only featuring the one window, as far as I can tell. Four separate rooms, all with grates leading to mine. Back at the wooden box, I ease open its lid and find a stack of bills inside, neatly bound with a rubber band.
It makes me remember the $100 bill I found, the thing that caused all the ruckus. I reach down and feel for it, gone. Thinking this is some kind of trick, I close the box, sit against a wall, and wait for something to happen. A few hours later, my stomach growling and my throat parched. Something does happen. A door in one of the adjacent rooms opens. Lights come on.
I stand with a wince and go to the corresponding window. A guy in an orange jumpsuit walks down from the now closed door, carrying a plastic tray of food with a water bottle on it. Is that for me? I ask. Yeah, the guy says. He looks strung out. I've never seen him before, but I know the look. Good, I'm starving.
The guy stops on the other side of the window, but makes no move to slide the tray through. We stare at each other through the gate. What's the holdup? You gotta pay for it. Pay for it? How much? 20 bucks. I shake my head and walk back over to the box, opening it. I could have sworn the rubber band was tan when I last looked. Now it's blue. And the stack looks smaller. Doesn't matter.
I peel a twenty off, thinking it's not really my money. No dent in my wallet. We make the exchange. I grab the tray, salivating. But before I can move away with it, I'm ripped into another reality. I'm crouching under an overpass beneath a blue tarp. The sporadic late night thud thud thud of tires going over spacers above creates a soundtrack for the task at hand.
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Chapter 5: What moral dilemmas does the inmate face regarding guilt and justice?
Without looking, I know the underpass is crowded with makeshift shelters erected by the homeless. I know this because I'm in one of those shelters, and so is the man I'm stabbing to death. I have one grimy hand pressed over the gray-haired man's mouth, while my other hand pistons away with a knife in its grip. The blade punctures the dirt-covered skin of his neck again and again.
It meets various kinds of resistance at different depths. Cartilage from his windpipe, a taut tendon, the rubbery exterior of an artery. Blood seeps and spurts and spews. His jaundiced eyes bore into me, pooled with terror and confusion. Snick, snick, snick. Thump, thump, thump. The muscles of my face grow sore as I grimace, rotten breath hissing in and out as I stab, stab, stab.
When his eyes lose focus, when the tendons in his neck that I haven't severed go limp, I remove my hand from his mouth, wipe the knife on his jeans, and then go through his pockets. When I find a $20 bill, I smile. I back out from under the tarp, stand and saunter away from his private little shelter under the bridge. Gasping, I return to myself. The food from the tray is all over the floor.
The water bottle has rolled against one wall. Panting, I turn back to the window and look at the guy who delivered the food. He stares at me with a haunted expression.
What the fuck was that?
The man, 20 still clutched in his fist, hurries away without a word. The door opens for him. He slips out. The room goes dark again. Chest heaving, I turn and look at the food arrayed on the floor, but I find I no longer have an appetite.
No more!
I scream at the ceiling.
I'm not doing anymore!
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Chapter 6: How does the inmate's perspective on money change throughout the episode?
I wish it were the other way around. I can't stand any more killing. I would rather be killed than forced to inflict violence on another living thing. It's money. That's what every murder is about. Every time. Money. Sometimes dollars. Sometimes euros. Sometimes pesos or pounds or yuan or fucking nairas. But it's always about money.
I don't have to read the book of Timothy to know what the passage engraved on the box is about. How money is the root of all evil. There's no doubt in my mind. The prisoner now at the window continues to harangue me. I'm sure, like the others, he wants to use the money I'll give him to buy drugs, even if he has to experience death again during that transaction as well.
I try to empty my mind, to let the thoughts drift through like clouds in the sky. I don't want to control them. I just want to observe them with no judgment, no panic, no feelings. They're just thoughts. They have no power over me. They can't influence me. Like the hundreds of other times I've done this since being locked up in this cell, it works at first.
I'm able to separate myself from the deeds I've experienced, because even if they felt real to me, I didn't actually do them. Someone else did. That is, if they're even real. For all I know, they're fictional stories, part of some insane psychological prison experiment. I managed to drown out the junkies' whines.
All the killing I've experienced, the false memories that haunt me, drift under the surface of my conscious mind like a body weighed down with bricks. No, like a leaf fallen to the surface of a pond and then subsumed by water. The leaf will serve a purpose, putting its elements back into the environment, harmony, everything in its place.
Then, like the hundreds of other times I've done this, my own memories come rushing back, as if they've been kept at bay by the false memories cluttering up my mind. They scream into my mind's eye, every detail stark, every sensation inseparable from reality. Me finding the $100 bill. Flat Top coming over to harass me, wailing on me with his baton. The baton cracking New Greg in the head.
New Greg banging his head on the railing and then the floor. The rage swells me. I grab Flat Top's legs and heave him over the railing. He falls, his body smashes into the floor. I wonder if he was married, had kids. Most guards don't wear wedding rings to work. They can be a chink in their armor.
I picture a wife and a couple of rugrats at home, crying their eyes out, having to sell their house because they can't afford the payments anymore. They move into a shitty apartment. The kids are bullied. The mom works two jobs. The rugrats grow into regular rats, distorted by the world around them. The world without a father to help them through. Mom can't take it anymore.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the Bible verse on the box?
She swallows a bottle of pills, checking out. So long, smell you later. The kids, now in their late teens, fall prey to drugs. They grow up and grow desperate. They do awful things for money, like rob, steal, kill. How much more suffering did I put into the world when I killed Flattop? Am I the butterfly that flaps its wings and causes a hurricane on the other side of the world?
No, more like a bat that causes a global pandemic. Shaking, now with desperation and hunger, I cry out again, my shriek ripping through my bone-dry throat. I can't take it anymore. I'll do anything to escape this guilt, my guilt, even if that means taking someone else's on for a little while. Getting to my knees, I flip the damn box open and look inside.
A single, hundred dollar bill rests inside. I grab it, push myself to my feet, and head toward the window where the junkie waits, his hungry eyes fixed on the Benjamin jutting from my fist. I'm so weak, I collapse halfway there. There's no telling how many pounds I've lost. I'm all skin and bones and guilt. I get back up, stumble to the window, make the exchange.
And I'm looking down at myself through someone else's eyes. I'm curled up on the walkway outside the cell. The body I'm inhabiting hits me with a baton. I'm flat-topped. The $100 bill. It was the same one? I can sense the glee in Flattop as he wails on me, and I realize that I'm not a killer anymore. I got my wish. In this scenario, I'm the victim because I, the real me, killed Flattop.
But no, I don't want to experience this. I don't want to be killed by myself. Seeing both sides of it will only make things worse. Please, no. This notion drags my mind to the precipice. It teeters on the edge, an abyss waiting to swallow it up, to consume the last dregs of my sanity. But then Flattop stops hitting me.
I watch through his eyes as he turns his head to see New Greg standing there, one wrinkled hand gripping the baton. The storm inside Flattop intensifies, right along with the joy of inflicting violence on others. He rips the baton from New Greg's grip and puts all his strength into the blow to the old man's head. Greg's lights go out.
He falls, cracking his skull on the railing and then again on the concrete walkway. Flat Top turns back to deal with Old Me. With stomach-churning whiplash, I jump from Flat Top into Old Me as I grab his legs and lift. I watch him drop the baton as he grabs for the railing. It's too late. He falls. Down. Down. Crack. Crunch. Thud. Bones shattered.
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Chapter 8: How does the story conclude with the inmate's final realization?
Limbs contorted. A moment later, I'm back in my fragile, starving body. I've fallen to the floor, the water bottle I paid a hundred bucks for still in one hand. Turns out I was wrong. I wasn't the victim. Or at least, I didn't experience it through the victim's eyes when the time came. I was the killer. Both of them. Pushing up to a sitting position, I peer around with new eyes.
But my focus is on remembering how it felt to be flat-top for those few moments when he killed new Greg. Zen practice would be to treat it like the fleeting moment it was. Don't dwell on it. Don't judge it. Don't label it. It would be to concentrate on questions that have no answer. What's the sound of one hand clapping? What was your original face before your parents were born?
But as I relive those few moments, another Zen proverb comes to mind. No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place. I didn't waste a moment of my life feeling guilty for what I did to those men outside that gas station. Didn't care if they had wives or kids. Maybe I should have cared, but I didn't. I still don't. So why care about Flattop's death? In Zen, all life is sacred.
Zen teachings urge you to practice non-harm through empathy. That old thing about walking a mile in a man's shoes? Well, I've been in Flattop's boots. And as far as I'm concerned, the scales of justice have been balanced. All that stuff about his hypothetical wife and kids? I have only one thing to say about that. No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.
Smiling, I unscrew the bottle cap and take a swig. The water feels like heaven in my mouth, down my throat. It sits heavy and cool in my stomach. I wonder what's for dinner. SCP-8508 is a small wooden box with the words 1 Timothy 610 carved into the back of the lid. The box's interior consists of a single compartment.
Whenever the lid is opened, this compartment will contain a quantity of currency, both the amount and type of currency change each time it is opened. If the currency is left inside and the lid is closed, the money will dematerialize. All attempts to utilize tracking devices in conjunction with this effect
have failed when any currency from the box is used as payment for any good or service all parties involved in the transaction undergo a parapsychic hallucination or vision wherein they witness a death linked to that currency thanks for listening be sure to click that follow button with all notifications on to get notified every time a new episode is released
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