Chapter 2

Nicholas soon discovered that no matter how bad his life had been before, things could get worse.

Much worse.

The cell was the size of a parking space. Concrete walls painted an institutional beige that had faded to the color of dirty dishwater, scarred with countless scratches from previous occupants—desperate tallies marking time, crude drawings, and obscenities etched by fingernails. Dark brown spatters stained one corner, unmistakably blood. Someone had meticulously drawn hash marks to count the days until they either gave up or left. A metal toilet-sink combination was bolted to one wall, a narrow bed with a paper-thin mattress bolted to another. A small metal desk and stool, also bolted down, completed the spartan furnishings. A slot in the bottom of the door allowed food trays to be passed through; another at eye level allowed the guards to monitor him whenever they pleased. The fluorescent light in the ceiling, protected behind shatterproof glass, flickered and buzzed like an insect was trapped inside.

The cell door closed with a heavy thud that reverberated not just in the room but deep in Nicholas’s belly. The lock engaged with a mechanical click. Just like that, Nicholas was alone in a way he had never been before—not the aloneness of an empty apartment or a friendless childhood, but isolation absolute.

I can do this, he told himself. Eighteen months is nothing.

Then they turned out the lights.

A slot opened in the door, letting in a bar of light. A guard’s mocking voice came through.

“Compliments of the Warden, Hardass. Let’s see how you like it dark.”

The blackness of the dark pressed down on him like a heavy blanket. He couldn’t breathe. The panic came and he raged. Rage was familiar, comfortable even. He raged against the crushing unfairness of his life, pounded his fists against the unyielding door until his knuckles split and bled, screamed obscenities at the guards who walked past without acknowledging his existence. He kicked at the door until his foot swelled purple with bruising. The concrete and steel of the cell absorbed his fury without comment, without resistance, until eventually, his body gave out, too exhausted to continue.

The only way he could tell time was by the little slot in the door where a bar of light would show and a tray of food would slide in. Then the light would go away and the dark would come back with its smothering weight. The panic would crash over him.

And he’d start again.

By the second week, his rage had worn out. He was reduced to begging. Begging for the light to stay.

But no one was listening.

There was no one but him.

In the dark.

The cell was unmoved by his suffering.

Nicholas tried sleeping instead—fourteen, fifteen hours a day, drifting in and out of consciousness, using sleep as an escape from the crushing dark e that pressed in when he was awake. But a healthy teenage body can only sleep so much, and soon he found himself denied even that refuge. He would lie awake on his thin mattress, staring at the blackness, watching imagined things dance beyond his reach. His mind would be off again and racing with terrors that bounced in his head like ping-pong balls.

By the third week, the dark had a physical presence. They had started to let him out for an hour to exercise. Afterwards, it took two of them to shove him back into the black.

The block was never truly silent—distant shouts, muffled sobs, and occasional laughter filtered through the walls, reminders that somewhere, life continued. But inside the cell, there was a deeper silence that pressed in on him from all sides. A thousand feather pillows muffled his spirit. Smothered him. The walls began to close in, centimeter by centimeter, day by day. Sometimes he would press his palms flat against them, convinced they were moving ever so slowly but inexorably moving.

Closer and closer.

Nicholas tried to cope by constructing elaborate fantasies in his head about what he would do when he got out—the places he would go, the people he would see, the food he would eat. At first, these daydreams were vivid, detailed, offering temporary escapes from his reality. But as days stretched into weeks, the fantasies grew harder to maintain. The outside world began to feel less real than the cell, its dimensions etched into his mind with painful precision.

At the end of the fourth week, the guards quit their games of dark and the lights came on and stayed.

Nicholas wept with gratitude. Thanking them over and over. With a voice that now only croaked.

A pair of cockroaches sometimes crept into the cell through a tiny space at the bottom of the door. In his desperation for a connection, Nicholas tried to make friends with them. He started saving crumbs from his meals, watching with rapt attention as the insects scurried over and carried them away. He named them Molly and Polly. They had full, hours-long conversations, Nicholas’s voice growing hoarse from disuse when he spoke aloud, then falling to whispers as he shared secrets with the bugs.

“What do you think, Polly? Coke or Pepsi?”

He’d wait, watching the cockroach’s antennae twitch.

“Coke? Yeah, I think so too. Has more bite, you know? My mom always bought the off-brand stuff, though. Store brands or some shit.”

Then he’d take Molly’s side, arguing with himself about these trivial things, creating conflict just to feel something other than the crushing emptiness. The arguments grew more heated as time passed, Nicholas sometimes shouting both sides of the conversation until his throat was raw, then collapsing in tears.

Other times he would have conversations with people from his past—his third-grade teacher who had once pulled him aside and told him he was smart, really smart, if only he would apply himself. The old man who ran the corner store and sometimes slipped him free candy bars when he was little, before he started shoplifting from the place. And he talked with his mom. Not the mom of his last memories—vacant-eyed and hollow-cheeked, junkie chasing her next fix—but the mom from before the accident, who would sing off-key while washing dishes and call him her “little man.”

He told her stories of the days of his life since her overdose, like he was a kid just home from school, telling his mommy about what he did at recess. Sometimes in these conversations, he could almost feel her fingers running through his hair, could almost smell the floral scent of her shampoo.

One day, he accidentally stepped on Molly or Polly while raging. The other one left and never came back. Or maybe he killed that one too and didn’t remember. Things were foggy for him now. He wept for his little friends, saying he was so very sorry. He hadn’t meant to hurt. The sobs, deep and gut-wrenching, left him gasping for air as he curled on the floor of his cell. He wept like he had never wept for his mother.

Without his two little friends, the silent solitude grew more oppressive. Nicholas found himself straining to hear anything—the distant flush of a toilet, footsteps in the corridor, the squeak of the food cart’s wheels—any confirmation that the world still existed beyond his cell door.

His daily conversations with his mother took a darker turn as he inquired about the mechanics of the afterlife and asked her for hints about how he could join her. In rare moments of clarity, he knew these thoughts should concern him, that they were dangerous, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. He was going to die here; he was sure of it. Hopefully sooner rather than later.