Dear Julie,
This is going to be hard to explain, but
At 4:19 a.m., they came for them.
In the form of Pags. “Sorry, buddy,” he said, barely able to contain his chuckling, cigarette dangling from his mouth.
“What? What the…”
Pags grabbed his roommate by the shirt, pulled him out of his chair, and forced his arms behind his back. Bobby felt cold steel on his wrists.
“The hell are you doing?” he asked.
“Shh,” Pags said. “It’ll all be fine. Just don’t…”
Pags fell silent as he looked down at the desktop and saw the note Bobby was starting to compose. “Uh-uh-uh-uh,” Pags said, then reached over, crumpled the paper up into a ball, and pitched it into the wastebasket in the middle of the room. Can’t have that. At that moment Bobby’s balls started to nestle up against the bottom of his lungs. What the hell had he gotten himself into?
Soon enough he found out.
The experiment: a prison scenario.
The objective: to learn more about the psychology of imprisonment.
The real objective: classified.
What no one knew: Dr. Pritchard supplemented her meager teaching salary with consulting work for a secret quasi-governmental agency. This agency had access to an amazing array of resources, including a secret test facility, jokingly dubbed site 7734. A number that, when seen on a digital readout and turned upside down, spelled the word HELL.
But Dr. Pritchard wasn’t an evil person; none of them were at first. Just ambitious. Excited to push the boundaries. Eager for funding.
Student volunteers were immediately divided into two groups:
Guards.
And prisoners.
Pags, a psychology major, was a guard, naturally. Not just a guard; he was chosen to play the role of the warden. He reported directly to the Prisonmaster—Dr. Pritchard—who observed from a separate room in the facility.
Bobby was selected to be a prisoner.
Day One: Bobby and the other prisoners were treated to a version of extraordinary rendition and were “arrested” quietly all over the campus. Having told their friends and family no details, a cover story was prepared—a volunteer mission to build homes for poor families. Many of the volunteers didn’t have much in the way of family, or they lived on their own. Bobby had a father who had remarried and didn’t really seem to care about his firstborn son all that much anymore. As he was led away to a van parked behind the dorm complex, Bobby knew that Julie would be the only person who’d miss him. He hoped she’d understand. He wished he could have left her that note. He hoped this would all be worth it…
Blindfolded, Bobby asked:
“Where is this place, anyway?”
A voice assaulted him:
“PRISONERS DO NOT SPEAK! SPEAK AGAIN AND YOU WILL BE PUNISHED!”
The voice:
It sounded like Pags.
Oh, great, thought Bobby. His roommate was probably going to bust his balls this way for the rest of the school year.
Still, he wondered exactly where they were headed.
The van ride was followed by a forced march into some kind of larger vehicle—Bobby, making guesses, thought it might be a school bus. The trip was long. Excruciatingly boring. There was no landscape to gaze out upon, no conversations to strike up. Nothing to do but live inside your own head. The experience put Bobby in mind of soldiers—specifically, Vietnam-era soldiers, because he’d just written a long paper on Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried before the break. Bobby remembered feeling relieved (and a little ashamed) that his generation wouldn’t be drafted into a foreign war and have to deal with the senseless violence, the isolation, the loss.
Ha-ha, Bobby Marchione, joke’s on you! Hope you enjoy your Christmas break in prison!
Bobby knew the trip felt like forever because of the sensory deprivation and all that—but goddamn, this trip took forever. At one point the bus even appeared to have stopped moving. He heard metal doors clanging shut. And maybe it was the lack of sleep, but Bobby felt like he was floating a little, listing back and forth gently, as if they’d parked the bus on top of the world’s largest water bed.
A guard—probably Pags, that douche bag—pressed two pills into his palm.
“Swallow.”
“A little water, please?”
“SWALLOW ’EM DRY, PRISONER.”
Fucking Pags. Such an asshole.
So Bobby swallowed the pills. They scratched at his throat going down. After a few minutes Bobby felt his eyelids grow heavy and all conscious thought disappear into fuzzy gray.
He woke up in time for “processing.”
All prisoners were stripped.
Rudely searched, by guards, including Pags, all of whom were now wearing these brown Nazi-style uniforms and mirrored shades.
Yeah, enjoy your cheap little ball grab there.
All prisoners were deloused.
(Bobby thinking: What is this about? Like we’ve all got crab lice?)
All prisoners were forced into cold showers with powdered soap that smelled like it had been cut with dried vomit.
Which was insanely embarrassing because he recognized some of these guards—besides that rat bastard Pags—from a few of his classes. Including the girls. Oh, yeah, this was a coed experiment, apparently. Four female guards attended to the four female prisoners, and they were sort of separated from the guys, but not by much. Bobby stole a few glances, which earned him screaming from one of the guards. Ridiculous.
Afterward the prisoners received their garments:
Smocks.
Rubber shoes.
And…
…that was it.
So they were all going commando for this experiment. Interesting.
Remind me again, Bobby Marchione, why you passed up the opportunity to travel back east with your hot girlfriend, Julie Lippman, in favor of being humiliated and bored out of your freakin’ mind in a dank prison in the middle of nowhere.
Finally, all prisoners were given a number.
Bobby, first to be processed, was number 101.
Yay for him.
Bobby Marchione settled in for his first of fourteen nights of boredom.
Or so he thought.
The ten student volunteer guards—who quickly started giggling and referring to themselves as the “apostles of pain”—were broken up into three shifts of four guards each. Their sole objective was to control the prisoners in any manner they saw fit.
They decided to get busy right away.
Prisoner sleep should be erratic, they collectively decided. If the prisoners could be woken up at any moment with a bucket of water or a little jolt from the stun batons the guards were given (very low-wattage, of course), then maybe that would keep them off balance, easy to control.
So the first night there was much screaming and water-throwing…and some laughter, too. The prisoners knew this was all bullshit, so why get all worked up? Which left the guards feeling like idiots. Which, in turn, seriously pissed them off. Why the hell couldn’t the prisoners take this seriously? They were getting paid just the same as the guards. It wasn’t fair that they could just goof around while the guards did all the work.