Kinked Guts

I wrote this early in 2024, before Donald Trump was elected a second time. I was anxious about what a second Trump presidency would look like. Now that’s a reality, and it seems like I was right about some details and wrong about some others. In general I think utopian fiction is more important than dystopian fiction, especially these days. That makes this piece slightly embarrassing for me. But it accurately represents what was in my heart and mind when I wrote it. I have no idea if this will be of use to anyone, but I decided to share it here regardless.

Content warnings: Discussions of sexual assault, political violence, and imprisonment.

On the forth day, a rumor went around the detention center that the guards were going to sodomize us. Depending on who told the story, one of the other protesters either had been sodomized with a nightstick, or he had overheard a guard talking about a plan to “interrogate” us and then blame it on gang violence.

I don’t know where the other protestor would have heard that. I didn’t get a tour when I was thrown in here. Diego, my cellmate I guess you’d call him, had been here longer. He had tried to explain some stuff, but I was fogged out with anxiety and depression.

I hadn’t brought my antidepressants with me to the protest. I remember the fact many times an hour, and each time feel a flush of self-anger. I try to tell myself that the militia or the guards would have taken it away anyway. I go over all the research I did to make sure the protest would be safe. None of it makes the panic any less intense.

There has to be a law, right? Something about providing prisoners with required medicine? Is there something in the Geneva Convention? The last thought actually makes me laugh out loud. I look around to see if anyone noticed, and it strikes me that I must look like a crazy person.

For the time being we’re actually being kept in outdoor pens. There’s corrugated plastic overhead that provides shade, at least in the middle of the afternoon. The pens are in a row. Some people talk, but most of us just sit. I assume the other people are as freaked out as I am. I haven’t been in a situation like this before. Never even really imagined myself in it, even when I started going to border protests. I just assumed I’d be safe. I spend lots of time thinking about privilege. The panicked animal of my mind gets to focus on something concrete when I do that, and I hate myself with a ferocity I’ve never experienced before. I carefully recall all the assumptions I took for granted and excoriate myself for each one.

When I’m not completely consumed by the lashing whirl of my thoughts, I strain my eyes trying to pick out cars on the distant road. Over and over I imagine the arrival of a van from the ACLU, or the National Lawyers Guild, or even CNN. The first day we were here, less than an hour after the militia dropped us off, a white pickup drove right up to the gate. There was some sort of emblem on the door of the pickup, but I couldn’t make it out. The driver looked like he was arguing with the guard. There was a long wait, then somebody else walked out to the pickup. Another argument, then the truck drove away. It hasn’t been back.

I spent that morning in a fog. I didn’t have anything to do so I sat on the dirt. The dry air had the skin around my fingernails peeling, and I picked at it until it bled. This happened several times. From somewhere in the back of my head, I noticed how it felt impossible to follow a train of thought. My mind was boiling with fear, different details breaking through the surface of consciousness every few seconds. I would try to follow those thoughts, only to get overwhelmed and blanked out. Until the next one.

“Hey. It was Paul, right?”

I turned and looked at Diego. I swallowed, and unstuck my tongue from the top of my mouth. “Yeah.”

“What do you do for work?” He smiled a little.

“Um. I’m getting a master’s degree in graphic design.” I cleared my throat. “But I work in a t-shirt shop part time.”

“That’s cool,” said Diego. He sounded a little too enthusiastic. “I’m a social worker, I finished my degree a couple years ago. Right now the organization I’m with only has the budget to bring me on part time, so I can kind of relate. Hey Paul, I want to do a little exercise, kind of like therapy. Would you like to help me with that?”

I took a breath and half shrugged, half nodded.

“Great. So this is a grounding exercise. It gets us in touch with our senses. The first thing is to say five things we can see. So I might say–” he glanced around for a moment before looking down at his lap. “My jeans, for example. So, give me five things you can see.”

I grunted, then swiveled my neck around. About 100 yards away was one of those wide low buildings like you see on industrial chicken farms. I thought one of the guards mentioned other prisoners in there, but I wasn’t sure. “The chicken coop thing.” I looked around more. “The chain-link fence. The dirt.” I didn’t know what else to say. “You. And-” I craned my neck until I found them. “Those militia guards walking around.”

Diego nodded slow and deep, like I was making brilliant observations. “Perfect,” he said when I finished. “Now, tell me four things you can feel.”

“My fingers hurt.” I gave a humorless laugh. I don’t know why. I think I felt stupid for picking at them. “And my stomach hurts.” It was true, but I hadn’t noticed it until that point. “Uhh. I feel hot.” I paused for a couple seconds, and Diego offered, “Do you feel the ground under you?”

“Now that you mention it I guess.”

“Perfect,” he said again. “Ok, now, three things you can hear. Like I think I can hear the chickens off in that building.”

I had predicted we were going through all the senses and had already zeroed in on the chickens as one of my things to mention. I immediately felt frustrated that Diego had taken what I was thinking of, and immediately after that felt stupid for feeling like I couldn’t pick the same thing. “Umm… Well, my voice, now that I’m talking. And your voice, when you talk.” Diego nodded. “My stomach is gurgling.”

“Ok, so the next one is smell. Give me two things you can smell.”

I sniffed. Yesterday one of the guys a couple pens down had shit in the corner of his little space. I think he had diarrhea and couldn’t help it. It happened early in the morning and it smelled terrible. The guards screamed at him, but didn’t do anything about it until that night when one shoveled some dirt on it through the fence. I smelled it less today. Or maybe I was just used to it.

“The dirt again,” I said. I thought of the guy several pens down. “And my sweat.”

“Last one,” said Diego with an enthusiasm that made me think of a game show host. “What do you taste right now.”

Without thinking I said “Cherry fucking cobbler.” Diego burst out laughing. The sound made me jump, but then I laughed a little too.

When he stopped laughing, Deigo said, “That’s a grounding technique. It can be really helpful when, you know-” he made blades with his hands and spun them in circles in front of him. “Sometimes we just get going and going and we need to stop and get grounded. I’ve been feeling like that since we came here.

I nodded and sagged forward, settling my chest against my knees. I didn’t know what to say. Diego was undeterred.

“Do you know anyone here?”

“No.” I shook my head. Then, because I wasn’t sure if he meant something else I said “It just seemed wrong. At the border? So I protested.”

I thought he was going to criticize me, but he seemed to have other things on his mind. He nodded while staring a ways off. “It’s hard to know how these things are going to go. My wife was scared. She didn’t want me to come.”

I sat awkwardly for a minute. “Do you know anyone here?”

Diego shook his head. “Just you.” He shot me a smile. “I thought it was wrong too.”

“I tried to do some research, to see if this protest would be safe.”

“I guess since the president deputized militias to do border control, none of them are really safe.” Diego sighed. I felt bad, like I had deflated him a little. But then he looked up. He was staring off in the distance again, like he was in thought.

“I guess that’s why we do this.” I didn’t say anything, and after a moment he continued. “Why bother, right? If you can get locked up at any of these protests, why do it? I used to think it was for myself. I didn’t want to get used to having all these terrible things happen and not doing anything. So I practiced being active, even if it didn’t seem to make a difference.”

Diego’s words created a sort of tension in me. I focused on him, and it cut through the brain fog.

“But this is-” he waved his arms, gesturing to our surroundings. “This is real. People need to get involved. I don’t know if protesting is the best way to do it. But we need something. And maybe this changes the situation?” He switched from looking off into the distance to looking directly at me. I almost flinched. “When we don’t know what to do, we just keep trying to change the situation. Even if it’s just in a really little way. This is different now. I’m not at home. I can’t see my-” he choked off suddenly. He looked away, but not before I saw tears spring up at the bottoms of his eyes. He took several deep breaths before continuing. “We don’t know how our actions are going to affect things. But we have to try something.”

I don’t remember what I said. I was glad he wasn’t looking at me anymore, because I didn’t know what to say. I gave some lame lame acknowledgement. “Yeah,” or “Mhmm.” But I couldn’t think of anything to add. I felt bad, but Diego seemed like he was lost in his own thoughts.

I stared out at the desert. I kept thinking about what Diego said. I imagined people telling each other that I was imprisoned at a border camp. Or that Diego and I both were. And then those people would tell people, and those people would tell people, and so on. I imagined a giant crowd of people acting in unison, finally deciding to do something.

I felt bad imagining myself as some sort of main character. But I found the scenario worked just as well if I imagined the crowd of people reacting to everyone who was imprisoned in the border camp. And I remembered something I had read on a social justice blog late one night when I was researching this protest. It said it was ok to make mistakes, it was just important to learn from them. It kind of matched what Diego said.

While I was thinking about all this, I saw the white truck drive up to the gate again. “Diego!” I hissed, rising to my feet.

The truck stood there for a long time. Just as I was about to look away, a guard came out and walked up to the driver side door. They spoke for a while, and then they started shouting. It was louder than last time. The guard was making slashing movements with his arms. After several more seconds, he started to walk away, back towards the rest of the compound. The truck backed up, then started to drive around the barricade in the road. The guard spun around and started shouting again, jabbing his finger at the truck. It kept rolling forward, and he took out the gun on his hip and pointed it directly at the windshield. The truck froze.

“Oh fuck,” said Diego from next to me. I was surprised to hear him swear.

After a moment, the truck slowly backed up. It drove backwards for 50 feet then it turned and drove away. The guard kept his gun out the whole time. Three other guards walked out to him. I imagined the giant crowd of people pouring out of the horizon like army ants, tearing the guards apart. The guards stalked back towards the compound. I turned my back to the chain link fence and slid down to a fetal position.

All along the row of cells people were watching the scene. I heard Diego talk in Spanish to the person on the other side of him. I felt far away from everyone. I fell on my side, still curled up. It strained my neck but I didn’t care.

A little time went by. There was a commotion at the end of the compound. I listened, then eventually sat up and looked. One of the guards was walking along the cages. He was holding his nightstick next to him, dragging it over the chain link as he walked. Behind him was another guard, smirking. The first guard was saying mean things to each person he walked past. “Little bitch.” “Too ugly.” Stuff like that. No matter what the first guard said, the second guard laughed. Then they got to me.

The guard pointed the rounded end of the nightstick at me and moved it in small, deliberate circles. “Perfect.”

The second guard started to undo the padlock on my cage. Diego tried to say something to him, but the guard screamed at him to shut up. Everyone in the pens got quiet. They opened my cage and grabbed me by the arms. They marched me down the hall. I barely felt my feet on the ground as we walked. I tried to imagine the people coming over the horizon. The white truck. Anyone.

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