It took me about a day to reach the point at which I didn't have to keep my eyes covered and against the wall. About twenty-three days after that, my vision was restored to the point at which I could bear to limp over and look through the opening. The hole that Perkins had managed to bash through with a jagged rock was originally about the size of a baseball. After a few days of rest, he resumed. Now that he had managed to penetrate all the way through, it made it much easier to knock out a larger hole. Newly energized, I used a hunk of concrete to take a shift whenever he got tired. Within a week of starting, I had managed to eke out a passage large enough to walk through.
I squeezed my way into Perkins' cell. There it was. The small window, up near the ceiling and out of reach. I took in the rest of his cell. No toilet. Parts of the floor were matted with residue from his shit. The floor was slanted just a bit, with a drain at the lowest corner which Perkins had been pissing through. He had been flinging his shit out the window, some of which had apparently caked and dried in the open window, allowing a hilariously unpleasant aroma to leak through. Not that I noticed or complained, as I had spent a year in a room with barely any ventilation. On the walls, written in black, was a series of calendars, accurate to the day. Evidently he couldn't remember whether it was a leap year or how many days were in March, so each numbered day on the calendars had an asterisk next to it. That made me laugh.
I looked back at the wall I had shared with him. On the wall he had drawn a chess board, complete with the pieces in their home positions and numbered ranks and files. "You cheating bastard!" I said. "You piece of shit!" He couldn't do anything but shrug and grin.
Those final two years in the cell were halcyonic. I remember them with more pleasantness than I probably have any business remembering them. The food was the same old glop; either refried beans or cold noodles. The water still had a nasty cloud-color. But we were together, and once again I felt like a human being rather than a ghost in some sort of purgatory, keeping company with Ghandi and the invisible unbaptized babies. We fashioned the concrete rubble we had made into real chess pieces. It was all we played. We staved off insanity by setting extra rules, making a larger board, and inventing new pieces. I made up a piece called the Weezer, a piece that could move eight spaces in any direction, then seven, then six, until eventually it could only stood still and was rendered completely irrelevant. He invented a piece called the Casey's Mom, a large concrete rock that took up four squares and didn't move.
I don't think we really even accepted that we would ever get out, or that we would stay there the rest of our lives. It was just irrelevant. For the most part, we were happy. We didn't hear anything from outside save for the occasional bird or thunderstorm. Ever the holdout, Perkins had neglected to mention the heat that blew into his cell as long as we propped the food hatch open.
Perkins never failed to remind me on a regular basis how much I looked like shit. We both looked like Robinson Crusoe with the uncut hair and foot-long unshaven beards, but I still had gashes and scars everywhere from my violent episodes. My ankle had healed itself at an incorrect ankle. I couldn't pivot it much and had to limp whenever I wanted to venture back into my old hell to use the toilet. My finger was gone, and I was missing several fingernails as well as half my teeth. I'll never forget that first look, that stare of pitiful revulsion, that Perkins first gave me when I hobbled my way to that hole and peered timidly out.
It had been three years. Perkins and I were sitting on the floor, playing a game of 12-by-12 chess. He was up 13-9 in a best-of-33 series. The steel door behind me clanked. The door swung open. We didn't say a word.
A man in a green uniform, a Cisco uniform, stepped into the doorway. He made a face. "Oh, shit. Oh God this is fucking foul. Fuck." He took a step back. "Get the General."
A few moments later, Wes appeared in the doorway. "Oh shit! It smells like dick in--"
Perkins and I stood up, and Wes stared at us both, leaning against our wall and then sliding slowly to the floor.