Chapter 16

十六

Another fellow teacher, Tony, lived a few doors down from me. He rarely ate with us but would pop into the cafeteria here and there for coffee or fried dumplings.

Tony was another ninja, like the Tasmanian, who’d been in China over a decade, and was also a teacher you wouldn’t see much of anywhere, aside from his classes. I saw him more than others because I lived near him, and we’d struck up a few conversations in the hallway, became fast friends.

He was around two decades older than me, pale as flour and gaunt. His face sort of looked like Skeletor from the old He-Man cartoons. Or like a zombie. Like he’d just jumped out of a coffin.

He was cantankerous and pretty far right, Tony, on the political spectrum, while I’m more in the center, and I didn’t share many of his beliefs, such as the kooky conspiracy crap he’d spout. But since there weren’t that many other foreign teachers at the school, and since he lived so close to me, we sort of had to be friends.

Living in such close confines, if we weren’t friendly, at least on a surface level, it would have gotten awkward quickly.

At least he read books, which is a rarity in this day and age. I appreciated that about him. He was a thinker and one of the few teachers I’d met who could carry on a conversation, wasn’t halfway autistic, too weird, too alcoholic, or a pedophile ... Or all those things...

He also shared my affinity for exercise, walking, and we went out walking around the track for evening exercise, about 2 or 3 nights per week.

(Something about Tony I’d noticed, though, which was odd, was how afraid animals were of him. How birds would caw and fly away as he neared and feral cats would run in terror at the mere sight of him. Perhaps he bore a resemblance to another foreign teacher I’d heard of, one who’d run around campus, chasing wildly after the campus’s feral cats... )

Stepping foot on the track, I’d begun our walk by telling him more of the area’s background I’d learned, and our topic of conversation had soon veered to the pros and cons of the death penalty. The irony of discussing the ethics of the death penalty on the grounds where they’d shoot prisoners wasn’t lost on me.

To my surprise, Tony was more happy than shocked or dismayed as I rattled off what I’d learned of the place’s background. His eyes lit up and he perked up and smiled as I spoke.

I told him, bluntly, “I don’t believe in the death penalty. So the State is saying killing people is wrong, then the same bunch of people kill the person who killed. Murderers killing murderers if you ask me, way too eye for an eye, Old Testament...

“It’d be better to have them do hard labor for life. Or even to scrub toilets, wipe the asses of invalids, mop up puke, scrape gum off the sidewalks, take customer service phone calls, do all the most horrible things, you know. That’d be a real deterrent.”

He wasn’t convinced. Flattened his lips. Shook his head. He answered back, in his glissando, nasal voice, his Boston accent strong, “But then you gotta house them, feed them, and the taxpayer is on the hook.”

“Not if you get value from them,” I replied, “and if they’re scrubbing toilets, wiping asses, fighting forest fires, all that, they’re creating value. Simply warehousing them in jails is wasteful and murdering them is plain unethical.”

“What if the bastards refuse?” he asked, his voice rising, “what if they won’t do the work? Then you shoot them? Then we’re back to square one.”

I nearly yelled at him, “No! You don’t shoot them. You do something else. You make their life so unpleasurable that they beg to mop up puke, take customer service phone calls.”

“What’s with the customer service phone calls?” he asked, curling his upper lip, and thinning his eyes at me.

“Have you ever called a company, pissed off about your phone bill or whatever, sat on hold for 30 minutes, then screamed your head off when you finally got through to a person?”

“Of course. Who hasn’t?”

“Imagine being the poor soul on the other end of the line, getting screamed at. And taking 200 of those sorts of calls in a row. It’s like being a public toilet, taking customer service phone calls, working in a call center, everyone just coming in, pissing and shitting on you...”

He raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders. Somehow, I’m not sure customer service phone calls would bother him as much as it did me, when I did that job, part-time, many years ago, as a struggling college student.

“Back to the jail thing,” he went on, after taking a prolonged, not so subtle stare at a female Chinese teacher’s rear, “yanno, I heard about this rapist in Texas, who was robbing young dudes, then raping them up the ass, and they caught him, sent him to jail for 99 years. They sent him to jail, JAIL. For raping dudes. It sounds more to me like they were doing him a favor. Now he can rape dudes for 99 years. Being in prison is probably like heaven to him, an ass-rapist’s version of Disneyland.

“Not me, sir, no, no, no. I know sodomy is a deterrent for me. It’s always made me think twice about doing illegal stuff, having to be raped in jail. I can fight but I’m way too skinny to fight off 5 or 6 musclebound rapists...

“Look, jail should be terrible. People should be raped and killed there. That way people don’t want to commit crimes. They’re too scared to commit crimes.

“That’s why the Chinese are more law-abiding. They know how jail is. And Chinese jails are wicked horrible too, wretched, like 20 guys in one room, sleeping on a concrete floor, next to a dirty, stinky squat toilet.

“In most Chinese prisons, there’s no heat, no AC, only one cold water tap for 20 people. There’s cockroaches and rats crawling everywhere. And they keep the lights on 24/7, force the prisoners to work hard labor all day and at night they gotta sit still and watch Chinese TV propaganda. It’s Hell.”

I paused and shuddered at the thought of jail in China or in any third world country. Third world jails are probably the closest thing to Hell on Earth, and I’m sure the Chinese jails aren’t even as horrific as countries further down the Human Development Index...

“But, Tony, what I don’t understand is how anyone who calls themselves a Christian could be a proponent of the death penalty.” My eyebrows furrowed, I went on, speaking forcefully, “It’s an anathema, a gross contradiction to the Bible and to the teachings of Jesus.”

Tony just shook his head and grinned, coolly, “I think it’s been too long since you’ve read the Bible if you think Christians can’t kill. Maybe you forgot about the Crusades, too.

“It’s His work, His plan. He’s got our numbers. He’s got our data stored. Google ain’t got nothing on God, man.

“God giveth and taketh, Kim. It all happens for a reason. And I’m more on the taketh side, to be frank. I’m more of a vengeful God, spiteful Jesus type of Christian myself. And look, the Bible is like the Constitution, it’s open to interpretation.

“As for me, I interpret it like this, that some people are just shit. They’re irredeemable. That’s why there’s the death penalty. That’s why there’s Hell. There’s a Hell for a reason. We have to remove the scum, the dregs, get rid of them. Or else they’ll kill again if given the chance.