Rehabilitated
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“You mean the procedure, or what happens afterward?” Dr. Hughes says as he tightens the straps around my wrists and my chest, so I guess that’s a yes. For whatever reason, his name tag is handwritten, and the first few letters have taken up most of the place. “Dr. Hug” isn’t exactly a forward thinker.
“Nevermind.” I would’ve shrugged if I could.
“Thirty-four years old, already got twelve years under your belt.” He taps on my chart with his pen. “That’s a hell of a headway.”
“Some people make it young,” I say.
He chuckles. I have no idea where being a smartass is going to get you in something like this, but the restraints are giving me a bad itch across my arms. I don’t think straight when I’m itchy.
“You feel you’ve been rehabilitated?”
He follows with a terrible Morgan Freeman impression: Rehabilitated? I don’t know what that word means. He’s probably done this with every subject, and it can no longer make him laugh.
“I’m going to show you some pictures. Relax.” He pulls his attention back to work and makes no effort to hide his boredom.
They start with something vanilla, like a flower or a chair—you know, stuff that means nothing to nobody—then they catch you off guard.
I hear the voice of Dani in my head. He flunked this test last week. He’s only spent three winters in this place—it was not supposed to be his turn, so he was likely underprepared. To be fair to the system, the kid is barely twenty-five, but he’s got enough pages in his record to fill up a college textbook. I would’ve flunked him too.
The machine has got a few years behind it and the monitor starts running a reel of images before it gets close enough for me to see anything. A cluster of wires swims out of the frame of the monitor, with cameras, sensors and microneedles at their tips. They will find their way to your mind through your pulse, breath and sweat, and it feels like someone is trying to peel your skin off then scoop your brains out with a spoon—so I was told.
The wires reach the tip of my nose, then start moving in slow circular motion as if trying to hypnotize me before telling me a secret. I try to trace them with my eyes, but there’s no pattern to follow. “Am I supposed to feel sleepy?” I ask.
“Ugh, the dumb thing is stuck again.”
The good doctor comes over with a roll of newspaper and bashes the monitor with it. The image on the screen flips to a golden retriever puppy. From my point of view, it looks like Dr. Hug is executing some very questionable dog training techniques.
“Don’t do that,” I say, warming my voice up with sympathy.
The monitor resumes moving at an irritatingly slow speed as the image changes to a lipstick-stained coffee cup. Dr. Hug picks up the wires and manually presses the needles into my skin. “I’m not paid enough for this shit,” he grumbles.
I start laughing. He tries to open my eyes with his cold, moist fingertips, but that only makes things worse, partially because of the tickling, partially because his hands smell like overnight fish and chips. He pinches my nose hard, and during the split second that my eyes pop open, he pins my eyelids to my brow ridge, leaving my eyeballs uncomfortably naked.
That hurts; I mean the nose.
“Stay still and look at the damn screen.” He pants a little. Maybe it’s time to stop smoking, Doc.
The wires weave around my face and secure the best angles for the cameras. A red dot appears on the top frame of the monitor as the recording begins. The last time I had this many lenses locked on me was when I made national news.
Dani was right—the opening of the slide show is rather unimpressive. I feel utterly indifferent about every single image flashing before my eyes, but that shouldn’t be a problem for my assessment. After all, what are you supposed to feel about a catamaran or a pot of jam anyway? Nothing. I see a picture of a screaming orangutan. Do normal people feel threatened by this? Show fear, I tell my face.
Then there it is—the one they throw you off with.
I see a fifteen-year-old lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood. His eyes are open and his limbs rest in a position that makes him look like a 3D emergency exit sign. You can get a rough idea about the struggle right before his demise from those tears and folds in the light blue hoodie he’s wearing. Actually, I’m not sure it’s light blue—you can hardly tell with that much blood and the discolouration of an old photo. There’s a dark stain in the centre of his chest where the handle of a kitchen knife sticks out. The stain may have been maroon, but the handle is definitely black.
Hmm, did I leave the knife in? I don’t know. It’s been a while.
I suppose they expected remorse, shame or even disgust when they showed me this one, but before I can react, the slide show has cut to the next image. They won't let you think; that's the point, I remember Dani said. It’s okay, there are enough pictures left to fix my metrics before this ends.
Drinks, piano, crying baby.
Food, grandma, dead body.
Train, ducks, opera singer.
Pencil, cookie, body.
Body, body, body.
I have to respect the effort they put in the photo arrangement—it picks up from the middle and the second half is indeed more challenging. It’s not a cakewalk to play emotional rapid fire while pushing down all the distracting memories that start to resurface. You actually have to focus.
Yep, that’s Gabbie; I remember Gabbie. She had always been a brat, and she kept her signature tantrum going until the last moment. And here’s Jonas. He would’ve been an accomplished wholesale drug dealer by now if we hadn’t crossed paths. And I was right: the hoodie was indeed light blue. What was the name of that kid next to him again? Something with a T. Well, he had the same hair and makeup as Billie Joe Armstrong, so I just named him “Billy” in my mind. Then he suddenly started wearing Keith Richards bandanas, which confused me till the end of him.
Of course they have Adrian as well, and I’m glad they’ve saved him for the climax of the presentation—they can tell the main course from appetizers. You’d be surprised how some kids could fool everyone with their tough, alpha persona, like they were ready to tackle anyone and get away with anything, but it takes practically nothing for them to break down, beg, and squeal when they realize you mean business. It’s fascinating.
Remorse and shame. Focus—remorse and shame.
“Interesting.” Dr. Hug pauses the slides and scrolls through my results. “I haven’t seen something so clean for a long time. Maybe a bit too clean.”
“May I be dismissed?” I ask. I desperately need to scratch my wrists.
“Oh, we are not done yet.” He gives me a wink and restarts the machine.
The monitor brings up another image. A faint click tells me we have reached the end of the reel. My fingernails cut into my palms, and I grind my teeth till my gums bleed, but it’s not enough—not enough to counter that blunt, throbbing pain rising up from a place that I thought no longer existed.
They’ve chosen the same picture of Rita that was all over the local newspapers twelve years ago. That school uniform was just a little too tight for her. She told Mom she got the size wrong when filling out the form, but I knew she did that so she could get a shorter skirt, so Adrian could see her legs.
Her hair shone with a subtle red glow. You wouldn’t notice it unless you saw her in direct sunlight. She had to keep it subtle, so Mom wouldn’t nag her too much.
The first thing I’m gonna do once I get into college is become a proper redhead, she said. You know, like Gab.
The first thing you should do is get some new friends, I told her.
Rita didn’t go to college. She overdosed in the summer of senior year.
I draw a deep breath and relax my clenched jaw. Dr. Hug’s little trick may have wrinkled my otherwise perfect chart. But that’s okay—shock and fury are exactly what you should expect when you show someone a picture of the loved one they’ve lost. Feeling that means I’m perfectly human, doesn’t it?
Then Rita starts talking.
I don’t remember this footage, but I remember that World of Warcraft T-shirt on her. She washed and even ironed it days before that music festival, then hung it on the wall, ready to go. She wore that shirt on every occasion where she needed a lot of luck, and it had never failed her, except this one time.
Rita is lying on a couch in a strange room that I don’t recognize, head on Adrian’s lap. Jonas and the Billy kid stand next to the couch, whispering top secrets under their breath. Gabbie’s voice lingers in the background. She’s yelling at no one in particular, as always. Rita lifts an arm and reaches for a bottle of beer that someone hands over from outside the frame. She’s probably had some vodka before this—vodka makes her giddy.
The camera closes in on her as she raises her bottle:
“Hey Rory, if this ends up on Pornhub, don’t tell Mom. Love ya.”
The video goes on. It’s a poorly edited, drawn-out montage of actions that kids use to convince the world they are no longer kids. Somebody drops a bunch of colourful pills in Rita’s palm, and she swallows a whole handful like they were vitamins. “That’s my girl!” Adrian hollers and claps his hands, echoing the cheers in the background.
Rita sticks her tongue out at the camera and the video freezes on that. She’d probably use the same face on me had she come home and asked me to help her get rid of the stench of booze, cigs, and dope before Mom woke up. I left you on your own for one weekend. You silly, silly girl.
She had a very different face when we found her down the river days after the festival, tangled in rotten branches and leaves. It wasn’t the face I’d imagined. I don’t mean I ever imagined my sister dead. I guess I simply assumed it would be a mixture of terror and regret. What I saw instead was a face of total confusion. Maybe because she was still intoxicated when her heart gave out, she looked slightly surprised, even thrilled, like she couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen to her. I remember brushing the wet hair off her forehead and there it was: her blossoming youth, preserved in the thorough ignorance that nothing was ever going to happen to her again, that all her possibilities had ended there.
They treated it as an accident—she must have fallen into the water when tumbling through the woods, high as a kite. But it didn’t take much questioning to find out who was part of her last twenty-four hours. Kids talk.
“Beautiful.” Dr. Hug clicks his tongue as he goes through my latest readings. “Now we are getting somewhere.”
He rewinds the slides. Here’s Gabbie again, Gabbie without her red hair. I shaved it all off when she still had the will to fight and curse. Her shrieks had volume but not much substance. Well, maybe you shouldn’t expect a spoiled princess to come up with anything other than “Fuck you” at the moment of life and death. Fair enough.
Now, say hello again to Jonas. The cocktail I fed him probably gave him the worst trip of his life. He stripped himself naked and crawled across the floor like a crippled monkey. What are you seeing, exactly? I asked him a million times, but he wouldn’t tell me.
The kid next to him is Ted—okay, it’s all coming back. He didn’t like people calling him that. I guess a name like “Ted” wouldn’t get you to the deep end of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
It was an accident! Ted belted out his last line, and even the sound of a close gunshot couldn’t bury it. The kid did have some good vocal potential.
Adrian had a chance to run away, if only he’d paid more attention to what had happened to his friends during that very unfortunate week for this town. It’s a shame that he “never noticed anyone but himself”. Those were Rita’s words. She knew what he was, but she loved him anyway. She loved him so much she died in his favourite bra.
They left her in that filthy, lifeless water, alone.
I burst out laughing. Well done, Doc. I let out the most hysterical laugh in me so he can tell my respect is genuine. My facial muscles squeeze so tight the wires and needles break off and fall apart like my pathetic impression of remorse.
“You feel you’ve been rehabilitated?”
I turn to the voice. The warden has found his way here, and he’s brought the priest. They wait for my response to decide which one of them should speak.
“I don’t think I ever will be, my good sir.” I chuckle through the words.
“Very well.” The warden takes a step back, and the priest comes forward. “I don’t need that.” I stop him. Nevertheless, the priest draws a cross on his chest from a distance and wraps me in the radius of eternal blessing. Ain’t he gracious?
“It will be quick.” Dr. Hug gives me an ear-to-ear grin as he pushes my operating table toward the closed door at the back of the room. “You know what? We’ve got a little present for you. You’re gonna love it.”
Behind us, the warden announces his decision:
Rory Satoshi, you are now transferred to the Alternative Correction Program, where you will serve the remainder of your four life sentences. You understand that the Alternative Correction Program requires you to participate in activities that provide emotional redress to parties impacted by your transgressions and demonstrate the administration of justice to the general public, and you waive all rights to appeal, pardon, or early release. Your participation in the program shall continue until the expiration of your sentences or such circumstances that render your service impractical, including physical incapacity and death. May you find your way to redemption and peace. God bless.
My way to redemption? I burned that map a long time ago.
My head hangs so low I can taste the dirt.
I’ve always adored the scent of damp ground after, or during, a light autumn drizzle. I will have more of this smell than I care for from now on.
“Get excited.” Somebody slaps me on the back.
How do you show people you’re excited when you no longer have any facial expressions? I reckon I can stomp my hooves and give the fence a little headbutt, like I saw on television.
Frankly, I wasn’t expecting to dive into my first fight straight away. They should’ve at least given me some time to get used to running on four legs. Last time I tried that, I was eight, and I kept it up for maybe a hundred metres.
The gate busts open and I stumble onto the fighting ground. They have built an arena the size of a basketball field, so it gives us enough room to run about, yet retains a sense of intimacy. I hold my head and horns high, parading through the shower of stones and trash from the audience, passing shapeless splotches in the dirt—it’s hard to tell what those are after they have removed all the colours from my vision. I assume they are blood.
The jumbotron starts running an intro video of me. “Satoshi the child killer”, a pretty lazy name, no? They could’ve come up with something more sophisticated, like The New Pied Piper, or Satoshi the Sandman—I took every single one of them out in the middle of the night ’cause I had to work during the day.
I take one last look at my human face. Hmm, so this is what they saw when they said I looked “uninterested” all the time. For a mug shot, the picture isn’t that bad.
I come to the centre of the fighting ring and stretch my neck—I try to howl, but bulls don’t do that, and I bet I look like I’ve choked on something. It was a bummer to find out they’d turned me into a bull. I’d make an awesome wolf, or hyena.
Do I get to choose what I become? I asked Dr. Hug. He muttered something while trying to boot up the machine. I didn’t believe he was answering my question. More likely, he was complaining about his job.
A jumbo cup of soda hits me in the head and spills all over my neck. I look up and catch the screaming face of Gabbie’s mom in the front row. “You’re dead!” She declares as she runs her forefinger across her throat. You can see where Gabbie got her fiery red hair and fiery temper. Ted’s dad holds her close, rubbing her shoulder to calm her down. All the harsh words that he’s not saying with those tight lips, he says with his glare. The guy is old money; they have a natural distaste for public display of emotions.
I glance across the front rows and find the same line of alliance that formed at the back of the courtroom twelve years ago. So it’s true—the victims’ direct families get VIP tickets.
Welcome to the Alternative Correction Program, a program that recycles convicts with no prospects of rehabilitation for entertainment, and brings closure to the wronged and the innocent. The death penalty and bullfighting are barbaric, but justice isn’t, and vengeance is poetic.
The fence on the other end of the arena pops open and the guards shove my first opponent in. He falls straight to the ground and buries his face in the dirt. Maybe he thinks if he played dead, I’d let him live. His glasses flew over when he fell and I accidentally stepped on them—sorry, still getting used to these new hooves.
Dani is bawling when he gets back up on his feet. The sword he’s holding like a magic wand is shorter than his forearm. They might as well give the kid an ice pick.
He waves his baby sword at me as I close the distance between us. All that screaming is unnecessary—I’m not doing anything to him yet. I just need a closer look at the stack of bracelets on his sword-wielding wrist. You don’t get to keep your accessories in a place like this. They must’ve returned those to him for this final moment as a gesture of mercy.
What I call “bracelets” is a stack of intertwined leather wristbands, decorated with hanging metal beads and charms. They collide with each other, making annoying clicks because their owner won’t stop shaking. They look familiar, and that familiarity draws an inexplicable rage out of me. Finally, the last human bit of my brain locates them in my memory and places them back into a scene that I saw only hours ago—
Rita cuddling with Adrian on the couch in their party house; Gab having a cigarette kiss with Ted; Jonas doing a weird dance alone in the corner; a hand with a stack of bracelets around its wrist reaching out to Rita from outside the frame; the charms dangle cheerfully from the bracelets as those colourful pills fall into Rita’s palm.
The next thing flashing before my eyes is the all-knowing grin on Dr. Hug’s face.
We’ve got a little present for you.
Dani seizes my moment of hesitation and thrusts his sword at my right eye. My horn slaps his wrist as I dodge the jab. The sword drops like a dead snake. The kid made his name in assaults and robberies, but when it comes to real fights, he’s not ready.
Dani falls to his knees and attempts to crawl away through the gaps between my legs. I stomp on his heels and put a stop to that. He’s lost his voice and the screams come out dry. He drags himself forward with his elbows until he reaches the wall and slowly turns his body around; his back against the cold concrete. He looks up at me. A mixture of terror and regret. See? That’s the face you’re supposed to take to your grave.
I shake off the image of Rita’s muddy eyes and cast my shadow over Dani. That’s when the kid realizes this is it for him.
I lower my head and press my horn against his chest. The entry is hard; the rest is just chores. It takes a few good rounds of pounding before I hear his bones crack. The way Dani’s torso spasms when I pierce through his ribs reminds me of a roach I once caught with a plastic cup. The rim of the cup cut off its legs, yet it kept the violent twitches and jerks going for quite some time, just like Dani.
Sorry kid, I’m not making this quick.
Eventually, the twitching and jerking stop. The glimpses of light leave Dani’s pupils as strength leaves his limbs. I slide my horn out and he slumps to the ground, as dead as those beads on his bracelets.
For a moment, a hush cloaks the arena. The temporary vacuum of silence is followed by a tsunami of cheers and whistles. I look up and see the slow-motion replay of the intimate moment between Dani and me. Are they live streaming this? I have no idea, but it won’t matter either way—Mom got rid of our TV to keep all the news about Rita outside the house.
I shake the blood and residue off my horn and parade along the fence. My debut kill has not stopped the audience from throwing stuff at me, but this time, they greet me with more euphoria and less righteousness. It’s premature to call these people my fans. They could simply be Dani’s haters.
As I pass the VIP section, I feel a sudden weight on my back and a sharp pain in my shoulder. The pain shoots down my spine and makes me stand on two legs again. I fall to my side and roll over. The weight slips off and lands on the ground. I glance up—Adrian’s dad towers over me, yanking the knife in my shoulder. Not sure if he’s trying to pull it out or drill it deeper inside.
I roll back on my feet and take the knife with me, which is probably just a steak cutter. The pain is acute, but the wound isn’t deep enough to take out a leg. Adrian’s dad hops back a few steps, drawing some safe distance between him and the dry blood on my horn. Gabbie’s mom calls out his name from the front row as Ted’s dad tosses over a machete that he’s been hiding under his trench coat—they need to step up with their security checks at the entrance.
Four guards rush into the arena but refuse to come closer. They move along the fence and spit into their radio as they observe what Adrian’s dad plans to do with me. Adrian’s dad bends his knees and arches his back, clutches the machete in front of his body and stares me down as if I were a poisonous snake he just discovered in his backyard. He holds his breath, and the crowd holds its expectations. Before he makes any move, the jumbotron starts running an old film—maybe they think the man needs a little encouragement.
The sound took a few seconds to catch up with the footage. For a moment, there was nothing but Adrian’s howling face and moving lips on the screen. The dim lighting doesn’t really fit the scene. It takes the tension out and adds a moonlit glow to all the tears and snot covering Adrian’s face. The shaky hand-held filming is amateurish and nauseating—I do apologize for that. I took a short photography course in college, but the craft wasn’t in me.
What’s missing in cinematography, they’ve made up with voice over. A simple public service announcement about the identity of this volunteer matador is more than enough to unite the confused crowd. Screams and groans break out of the audience when my hatchet licks Adrian’s neck in the vintage film. Adrian’s dad is shaking, but he locks his gaze on the screen. The video is short, because I quickly realized after the first blow that I had wildly overestimated my ability to multitask, so I had to put the camera down. I left that camera in the deserted factory where I spent the night with Adrian—not as a gift or a challenge for anyone, I just forgot about it, and look where it’s got me. I guess the relief of finishing the last job brought my guard down. Well, it turns out I didn’t “finish” anything until twelve years later. What a sloppy young man I was.
Adrian’s dad and I face each other, ready for the duel. He moves first and swings the machete at my front leg. I hop out of his path and let him dash past me. Before he turns around, I charge from behind and get him in his lower back. He stays in midair for a little while until gravity reclaims him. The respectable thing for me to do would be to wait for him to find his legs again, but who’s here to see respect anyway? So I plow forward while he’s still catching his breath.
He rolls out of my path before my hooves land on his head, then gets back on his feet with the help of the machete and limps to the side, trying to walk off the rest of the impact. He dodges another charge as my horn scratches his waist, then he seizes the moment and sinks the machete into my hip while I run past. Off balance, I crash into the fence. He gains momentum and rushes to me, pulls the machete out before I get up, and strikes down hard. One blow after another. Blood leaks out of the side of my belly like a warm spring. He leaves no breathing room between strikes, for me or for himself. I hear distant laughs from Gabbie’s mom, laughs that are so hysterical they sound like wailing.
I curl up against the fence and stay still. It feels even the tiniest move would squeeze more insides out of me. Adrian’s dad pulls back, panting. Then he circles to the front of me, lifting the machete like a sword over my head and aiming for my spinal cord—that’s a standard kill move in real-life bullfighting. He probably saw it on TV.
The chaotic howling and yelling in the audience turn into organized chanting.
Kill! Kill! Kill!
Adrian’s dad holds the machete high, looking for the right angle, or maybe the right moment. His breathing synchronizes with the cheers.
He thrusts the machete forward. Right then, I drop my body to the ground. The blade scrapes my back and pierces through the fence behind me. It’s stuck in the wood panel and Adrian’s dad won’t let go. His chest is close enough for me to hear his blood pumping through his veins. I push my front legs against the ground and elevate my body. My neck stiffens, and my horn goes right into his loin.
There’s a deep groan over my head, then he falls like a sack of potatoes. My hind legs come back to life, and I’m standing again.
Adrian’s dad lies next to me in the fetal position. I flip him over and lay him on his back so we can make eye contact. The way he screws up his face in pain reminds me of his son. His tears seem to contain as much regret as Adrian’s did, but for different reasons, and they stir up something inside me in a way that Adrian wasn’t able to. I think it has something to do with his age—it’s always hard to see an older man cry.
All I need to do is lift my hooves and stomp on his forehead, then we can both be done with this.
I feel a bee sting in my rear. No, not exactly. Bee stings don’t crawl along your spine and seize your heart. I tread the ground, attempting to maintain my fragile balance, but it’s impossible with those melting limbs. I collapse on the dirt reeking of blood, next to Adrian’s dad. He’s calmed down a little now.
I watch two guards carry him onto a gurney while the others circle around me, clutching their tranquilizer guns and batons. Several throw their lassos around my neck and tighten them from different directions, while a veterinarian patches up my wounds. Sorry, not a veterinarian. They’ve sent a human doctor. The kid is Rita’s age, if Rita were still around, and he has no idea what he’s doing.
“He . . . it will live, I think,” the kid doctor mumbles. So the guards pull me up and make me walk toward the exit on my buckling legs. The jumbotron starts running the credits and information of the sponsors, and the ending theme drowns out the protest from the audience. Today’s show is over, but it will continue tomorrow, until there’s no more tomorrow for me.
I see trails of my blood in the dirt. Line after line, as if crossing off items on a list of sins. How many fights would I need to offset four dead kids—well, five now? It’s not for me to say.
I will think about that tomorrow. It’s not like I’m going anywhere anytime soon.
September 9, 2021
