r doesn’t care for travel. what is there to see that we haven’t seen in a magazine or on line?
r’s dispirited. his face looks like bad breath.
i hope it gets better, a young woman said.
it will, r said.
does it get better?, a young woman said.
r discloses a disease that can be treated.
they hold the detainee’s hand and take walks.
r tries very hard to feel something he hasn’t felt.
they give r a weapon. he has a new perspective. it is a telling one. anything can happen. the world is a scary place.
i was sent a black metal chair. i had to interrogate it and get it to confess. if i didn’t they were going to let me go. the chair said it didn’t want anyone to sit on it. it had a bad back from stress. it had been used to buttress and break men. it was sturdy so it had broken many. it felt proud and guilty about it. it wanted to be of use. ideally it was a chair for a young secretary. they suspected the chair had been easy on the tortured, somehow lessening the tension of the stress position. i had the chair pin r on his back with its four legs. r’s wrists and neck didn’t withstand the pressure. we had him removed when he passed out. the chair felt horrible that it had almost killed r and hadn’t killed him because it had bent its leg. it said that it had done the same with other men.  i handed the chair to a worker. he stacked it on four other chairs.
i have had nothing in my head but fears. they sent me a woman. she has a broad forehead and a thin mouth. she said i was an asshole and that i was ignoring her. i didn’t think i was ignoring her. i’m not your family i said. she has to find another way to talk to me. i didn’t know if i was going to be here tomorrow. i didn’t know where she would be or if i would see her again. she said that they had put a plank on her and had walked on the plank. i read the same thing happening to a guard at a prison camp. i think she got it from a book and not her experience. i didn’t care that they had tried to kill her with the plank. i didn’t believe it. i have been in many of the rooms on our floor. i have never seen a plank used to torture someone. they don’t want to use me for anything she said. i don’t think she is compromised. she should go on with her life. they’re not doing anything here. they are concerned with the past. we are going to die. we have all been compromised. we have yellow and blue marks under our eyes. i dealt with the chair. what else do they want from me?
who do we work for, men like myself? we work for the state and the family.
if the detainee compromises the state or the family we take the measures needed to neutralize him. sometimes the detainee loses sight of himself. he thinks he has us in his corner. he overlooks the state and the family. it is sad to see him overcome by a delusion. we try not to harm them too badly. often we do scar them. it is what we have to do to save them. we have the future of the state to take into consideration. none of us know if we will be here to see how things turn out. we have two or three generations and then we have nothing. we forget about what happened and there is no one to tell us what happened. we have our scholars and books but no one listens to them.