Each photo depicted a penis.
Each penis was white and flaccid.
She said, “As you can see, these are penises.”
I looked at her in puzzlement and then looked back at the three penises.
She said, “I want you to look at these penises for a long time. I want you to tell me which penis is Burke’s.”
Heidelberg looked extremely serious. She cared whether I got this right or not. I thought of the guards at the Buckingham Palace. I wondered if they were ever forced to look at penises. It occurred to me that, to work for the government, one had to look at penises sometimes.
I stared at the photos and tried to remember what Burke’s penis looked like.
Heidelberg said, “Close your eyes, see Burke’s penis in your head. See it, feel it, smell it.”
I ran through a process of elimination. Penis B had a mole which I didn’t remember being on Burke’s penis. Penis A was really dark, like maybe Southern Italian. Penis C was pale with a little bit of girth. I said, “Penis C.”
Heidelberg picked up the penis pictures without showing emotion and put them back in her bag.
“Is that right?” I said.
“Michael.”
“Yes.”
“You must learn that it is not important for you to ask questions. Nobody needs for you to ask questions. Your job is to follow procedure. Following procedure does not require questions.”
“Okay.”
“Imad says you don’t ask enough questions.”
“I don’t?”
“Yes.”
“I will try to ask more questions.”
“Good.”
Body Count
I walked into the main office at eight in the morning. I put my coat up and sat in a cushioned chair at a conference table.
I sat there drinking a pumpkin-spice latte, waiting for the staff briefing. A staff briefing happened every day at the shift changeover. The preceding and proceeding shifts would discuss any new developments. Some of the staff had already arrived, but they didn’t speak to me. We waited for Imad to arrive.
Finally, Imad came and started the briefing. “Recently we’ve had a lot of incidents. It has been pretty crazy around here. Lisa Hefner got seven meatballs for lunch instead of six,” he said.
A woman named Nisreen said, “Yup, that’s her all right.”
Imad continued. “Joe Rupert was three minutes late for his work assignment. We need to watch him.”
A man named Lawrence said, “Yeah, we really need to get on these guys. These guys really need to know who is in charge. Those work assignments are vital to the operations of NEOTAP.”
Imad continued. “Bob Packwood was joking around and called Mark Vander ‘shorty.’”
Except for Imad, everyone laughed because it was true. Mark Vander was only five feet tall.
Imad said, “But that must not be allowed. There are no nicknames in NEOTAP. We must teach them responsibility. Angie Lambert told Lakisha that she was cute yesterday. There is no lesbianism in NEOTAP. Residents need to be minding their own programs and focus on their own lives, not trying to have sex with other residents. Howard Evans got a letter from somebody who used to be in NEOTAP. Howard Evans’s mail will be sent to his case manager now. We must watch the mail of residents. Okay, let’s go get ’em.”
Lawrence pumped a fist in the air and yelled, “Let’s get ’em!”
The staff seemed really excited about guarding the residents, about watching their every behavior. It occurred to me that they really liked this type of work. It had not occurred to me to enjoy working at NEOTAP. They had a general feeling of unity amongst each other. This unity gave them power, this unity of us against them gave them a sense that they were part of something bigger than themselves. We weren’t getting paid enough to enjoy the American Dream, but we were expected to defend it.
My job for the morning was to do a body count. A body count consisted of printing out a piece of paper with everyone’s name on it. Then I had to go around finding everybody and marking their name “in.”
I went to the lower level; the residents were sitting around, looking bored. Some were reading, some were having small conversations. I walked up to a table of four and wrote their names down. One guy, Rex Tugford, had tattoos of snakes all over his head. He said to me, “I can’t wait to get out of here, I can’t wait to see my kids.”
I said, “Sounds good, Rex.”
After finishing the body count, I noticed that Sherwood Burke was missing from the paper. I couldn’t remember him leaving so I went up to Imad and said, “Where is Sherwood Burke? He wasn’t recorded in the body count.”
Imad looked at me blankly and said, “Your position does not require you knowing that.”
I stood there, confused. “Is he here or not here?”
“Your position does not require you knowing that.”
I logged the body count into the computer and then checked the NEOTAP log to see if there was a reason Sherwood Burke was missing. The log said nothing. Sherwood Burke was gone. He had disappeared.
I found Nisreen and asked her, “Where did Sherwood Burke go?”
“I’m not concerned,” she replied.
Before I could ask any more questions, Imad came up and said, “Mike, clean Sherwood Burke’s locker. Put everything in a garbage bag and stick it in the closet where we keep residents’ possessions.”
The chance of looking at Sherwood Burke’s locker fascinated me.
I put on plastic gloves and got a garbage bag. I went to Sherwood Burke’s room. The room contained six bunk beds. The rooms were not decorated. There was one window without a curtain. In the morning if the sun was shining, a bright light would come through the window and wake everybody up.
Above every bed was a corkboard where the residents could tack up pictures of their family and lovers. I walked over to Sherwood Burke’s cork board. Nothing was on it. It was empty. I looked at the other residents’ corkboards. They had pictures of their kids on the board, birthday cards, and sexy but clothed pictures of their girlfriends and wives.
I opened up Sherwood Burke’s locker. I removed the hygiene products and clothes and put them in the garbage bag. At the bottom of the locker were notebooks and folders. I looked at the folders. They were full of papers concerning his anger management classes. I threw them in the garbage bag. He had no letters. Usually everyone had letters, but he had none. He had one picture of him standing with three guys on an army base. It said in black pen on the back, “Iraq 2004.” He was smiling and looked happy. I threw that picture in the garbage bag. There was a copy of Maxim and Plato’s The Laws and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Both were old Penguin Classics versions from the eighties. And a copy of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. All three of the books had passages highlighted and notes written in the margins. Then I found a notebook with the word “Theory” on the cover. I opened it up and found page after page of handwritten theories on things. I decided to keep it. I wanted to know what it was like being in NEOTAP. Was it horrible or helpful? I brought the garbage bag to the closet and snuck the notebook into the office, folded it up and put it in my coat. I knew that cameras most likely saw me but I was hoping that no one was watching them when I did it.
Alone in my room, before I went to sleep, I opened Sherwood Burke’s notebook.
~ ~ ~
A brief excerpt from the notebook of Sherwood Burke
NEOTAP does not ask us to make our situation better, they do not train us to fight for unions or vote for politicians that may better our lives. They do not help us understand why we are poor, why our parents were poor, why there are so many of us stuck in correctional facilities. Instead they teach us to go to work for eight dollars an hour with no health care. The mission of NEOTAP is not to help us but to get us to love the system that makes our lives terrible. The mission of NEOTAP is for us to do our duty, which is to be complacent, docile like subdued children. They aren’t teaching us to make our lives better; they are teaching us to be a responsible class of Untouchables.