The Voting Machine

Sub Specie Aeternitatis

The Special Communications Unit was a separate facility behind the main prison where I had visited Marcus in the past. Corrections officers in the visitor parking lot had already been informed of my appointment. They led me into a waiting room in the front administration office. They had me empty all my belongings into a plastic tray, remove my belt and shoes, then pass through a metal detector. Next a guard ran a wand up and down my body and patted down my chest, back, arms and legs.

Finally, I was led by a team of officers through a series of gates. Officers sitting in checkpoint stations behind thick glass activated the switch to open each gate, allowing us to proceed. With a metal clank the gates shut behind me in success. Suddenly I was walking alone along a concrete pathway to a compound in the rear of the Special Communications Unit. The trail was lined with barbed wire on either side. The compound itself was a low-slung building the size of small city school. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence and covered with corrugated steel. They told me that Marcus Davis was now the only prisoner held in this compound. In the past few days, all the other high-risk convicts had been moved to separate units. Even within a facility that was specially designed to prevent every prisoner from communicating, Marcus was treated with extra separation and restriction.

A separate team of correction officers waited for me inside a visiting room in the compound. There was a stool next to a phone facing the thickest wall of glass I'd ever seen. On the other side of the glass, Marcus was being escorted in handcuffs. He was carrying a book under one of his arms. I could make out the title, Man's Search for Meaning, but I wasn't familiar with it.

A pair of officers yanked his chain-linked hands in the air and the book fell to the cement. He mumbled something and one of the officers picked up the book and smiled at him. They shut him in the room alone and he shuffled his bound legs until he reached a booth with a slot carved into the wall. He stuck his wrists into a slot and one of the officers unlocked his cuffs and squirted hand sanitizer onto his palms.

Up close I could see his face and not much else. A brick barrier had been placed at neck level below the glass to block hand signs. Video cameras peered down on us from several angles. He was older, gaunter, as if he had aged fifteen years since our last visit over the summer. As a CEO he had always been clean-shaven in the past but now his jaw was a slope of grizzled stubble. His skin was folded into despondent wrinkles. His eyes sunken deep in shadowed sockets, staring out like a pair of buzzards perched over a desolate landscape. His pupils seemed to be changing shape, constricting, adjusting to the light in the room. Finally, he sat on the stool across from me and picked up the phone.

"They better give me back my book," he muttered . "Only thing keeping me sane in here."

"They'll give it back," I said. It was bullshit. Obviously, I had no idea what they'd do with the book. But I was nervous and didn't know what else to say.

"Ever read about about this Jew who survived the death camps? Nazis took his freedom, his family, his status. Stripped him naked, starved him. They had control over every single aspect of his life except his attitude. That's the one thing they can never take unless you let them."

"That's what's happening in here? They trying to break you?"

He shook his head wearily. "There's no fuckin' precedent for this. They take my bank away and hand it over to that hedge fund psychopath. A year later there's a trail of bodies and they finally figure out Castle was playing them all along. So of course they put the screws to me even worse"

"Unbelievable."

"What the hell are they thinking? How the hell am I supposed to be running some criminal enterprise from inside a prison? This isn't Mexico. I am not some cartel drug lord who has the warden on the payroll. Christ, I can't take a piss without them watching me on videotape."