I Used to Be Tom B.

By Jacob Magitsoh

Tom B. was born into the socially, economically and upwardly mobile middle class. His generation largely knew nothing of suffering and hardship. Tom B., a typical young man in his thirties has everything that life ever promised him: the college degree, the cushy office job, the beautiful wife and the quaint suburban home. Yet he finds his existence increasingly empty and surreal. Somewhere either imprinted on his DNA or emanating from scattered memories of youth, Tom B. once knew what it was like to feel alive. As he starts to engage his more primal and animalistic self, we watch Tom B. mentally and physically diverge from societal norms. Tom B.’s descent into the full, guiltless, unrepressed man eventually leads to his spiritual and physical fulfillment and yet his ultimate demise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Aug 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781483424279

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MAGITSOH

Copyright © 2019 Jacob Magitsoh.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-2426-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-2441-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-2427-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019910080

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 07/22/2019

For Jude

CHAPTER 1

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The Present, Somewhere in Virginia

I walk towards the bars my shoulder grazing the side of the cell. Reaching the bars, I pause to look out and up to the windows above. They are shaded by a screen of plastic yet natural light manages to permeate the narrow hallway. I turn and face the steel toilet against the opposite wall and the bunk beds on the left. My muscles are sore and in a perpetual state of fatigue. I sit on the lower bunk. Above a bluish-grey fluorescent bulb bathes the cell overpowering the natural light from outside. I hear two sets of footsteps, one belongs to the firm bulky boots of a guard, the other to the soft slipper shuffle of an inmate.

The guard calls out something I can’t understand, and the bars swing open.

In here, the guard barks. In steps a tall, dark Hispanic man in an orange jumpsuit.

Hey, Amigo, he said without any trace of an accent. I don’t respond.

Which bunk you taking? I still don’t respond.

Hey, what’s your problem, Man? Are we going to have a problem here? The man moved closer, his shadow casting a darkness over the lower bunk where I was sitting. I remember feeling a flash of being threatened, a surge of adrenaline pumped into the twitching muscles in my arms and legs. With lightning speed I jumped up jamming the heel of my right hand into his lower jaw. There was a crack and the man managed a garbled, toothy scream through his bloodied mouth. I grabbed his head with both hands and charged his body backwards towards the bars of the cell. The back of his skull rattled the steel. Still holding his head, I kicked the bars and propelled us towards the other end of the cell. We both fell, but in doing so I brought the front of his face hard against the steel toilet. The man went limp. I released my grip around his head and neck allowing the lifeless body to slide to the floor. I stood up slowly. The rim of the steel toilet bowl was red with bits of white teeth and bone suspended in a vicious fluid. My new cellmate was motionless on the floor at my feet, a pool of dark maroon colored blood expanding on the concrete around his now misshapen head. I remember seeing the reflection of the overhead florescent light in the bloody liquid. Confident in victory, I kicked the body to assess the man’s status. The lifeless body did not respond. It was then that I passed out when they tasered me.

The prison is somewhere in rural Virginia. I pace my new cell back and forth along the wall opposite the steel cot and the thin gray plastic mattress. My round trip route is only 24 feet, and I do it thousands of times a day maybe achieving close to an unbearable, bounded five miles. The cell is solid steel and rock. There is no escape, but in the back of my mind I search for a way out, some potential vulnerability in the edges of the concrete walls or the steel door. My mind ebbs and flows between mental lucidity and a garbled mix of thoughts, emotions, and flashbacks from my previous life. I do not control my thoughts, nor do I try to. The fleeting memories come and go. It has been a long time since that afternoon in the darkened bar.

The cell is kept cool. I have whitish underwear and an orange jumpsuit that keeps me just warm enough, but when I sleep I shiver and often dream of warmer places. I hear sounds; my fingernails against the rough walls, my worn gray rubber sandals dragging across the pale blue painted floor. I hear muted voices through the steel door and down the hall, and a distant engine revving and fading away. I see colors in the cement walls; rhodonite reds, thionic yellows, azurite blues, and chrysolitic greens. These minerals and crystals had once formed deep within the Earth by geologic processes billions of years ago. Only recently have these rocks been crushed and ground into tiny stones and dust by massive machines designed by men who believe the Earth is to be altered to their purposes. Now this conglomeration of gravel, the remnants of once great mountains has been pasted together again to form my cage.

The concrete of the cell is not smooth. I discern shapes and patterns in the irregularities often morphing into visions of trees, cars, or my house in Alexandria. I smell the detergent on my clothes and the chlorine oxidizing in the steel toilet bowl. I hear a reverberating clank and pause in my incessant pacing. Somewhere more machines are at work. Another engine sparks to life. Tense pressured cylinders are pumped by exploding gases. There is no danger, and after a moment I continue to pace back and forth. My cell is grouped with other inmates in what they call a pod. This pod is reserved for special psychiatric cases. Some people think that I am insane. I am anything but. I am pure now.

Time does not progress for me in a linear fashion, one moment after another. I only have the current moment. I don’t know the exact date. Sometimes I am curious to know, but mostly I don’t think about it. The date is a human invention to track the Earth as it revolves around our sun. I can’t see the sun from my cell so the date is not important to me in here. In fact the word ‘important’ no longer holds any meaning for me at all. When I lived outside of these walls, when I was part of society, the date was important. I remember holding my checkbook asking, Do you know the date? or Is it the 21st or 22nd? In here I never have to ask what the date is. I am not even sure what day of the week it is. Monday, Tuesday, Sunday? I have no idea. Out there knowing the day of the week was often critical. That knowledge dictated what you should be doing. On most weekdays, you should go to work. If you were lucky weekends meant you were free to do leisure activities. Every couple of Sundays, you had to sit down and use that checkbook to pay the bills.

Tom, breakfast. The words are flat and lifeless. A small rectangular hole in the door opens and I get passed a tray of food. There is a banana, a cup of milk. One of the compartments in the tray holds dry Cheerios. Another compartment has a stale bagel, and a third has something that resembles butter or cream cheese. It’s hard to determine most days. I eat as a savage animal. The food spills on the floor.

My name used to be Thomas B. People called me Tom. I won’t reveal my last name because I still retain some minute level of a protective nature for my biological family. I am not sure why. They are all part of society. I used to be a part too, but I left that world long before I was put in this cell. My family is not like me. They hate and fear me although they never said it across courtroom barriers and Plexiglas windows. I suppose it is a blood thing, an instinctual desire to protect the clan by not revealing its identity. None of this matters; I will most likely never see any of them again.

I used to live with my wife in a house right outside of Washington, D.C., just south of the Potomac River. My wife was a paralegal who became a high school teacher. The last time I saw her was in our bedroom. Her image is silhouetted by the large windows behind her. My memory of her facial features has been fading, but I remember she was wearing only a white tank top and a dark navy blue cotton thong. She had a slender, athletic build and thin wispy brown hair which danced with whites, yellows and blonds in the bright light. The memory excites me and I feel arousal in my groin. My mind’s demarcation between memory and reality, the separation between past and present, is often blurred.

I was a software engineer for a large aerospace defense company. For the most part, I was an ordinary, professional, upper middle class married man living outside of a major city. I went to restaurants with my wife. We often rented movies to watch afterwards. We considered having a baby. I had a few friends, mostly just drinking buddies. Sometimes on Saturdays and Sundays we played golf or found a trail to use our mountain bikes. It was once very normal and predictable.

That was before what I can only describe as ‘the split’, before my consciousness ruptured along some deep unseen fault lines. With this fissure left behind by this cranial earthquake I became aware of my true nature: an animal living in the world and not some godlike master of it. I saw that I had been shrouded by society’s feeble constructs and misconceptions.

Like most people I used to be covered in a protective shell. You can’t see or touch the shell, but it is nonetheless strong and formidable. The shell dictated my behavior. It helped me act normal, appropriate. It guided my interactions with others, greeting people properly; shaking hands with other males or conducting the awkward half-hugs with females. The shell told me who my superiors were at work and how to introduce myself. It instructed me on how to eat and drink. At some point, when the split occurred, I became consciously aware of this encumbrance; an evolutionary aberration that had figuratively formed around our human psyches over the past couple of millennia. I realized that the shell was a limiting entity, a hindrance. When I was in this shell, I tried not to offend anyone or run into trouble with the law, the coded rules of society. But after I shed this turtle-like carapace, I started to live the way nature intended. There are many others like me. We don’t ignore the truths about ourselves. We don’t suppress our nature. The reality of the world is different for us. It is richer and more satisfying. That’s because we choose to see it, to let it in. My kind has no screen that filters out the realities of life. We listen to that little voice. That long suppressed notion of instinct, the voice drives you to have sex, to procreate and protect your family from harm. It also whispers more nefarious things like ‘steal’ and ‘kill’. Children hear this voice more clearly. If they want something and don’t have the money, they shoplift. It is simple and uncompromising: I want that so I am going to take it. It is only later that children learn the proper way to acquire the things they desire, when they develop their shells.

While these shells mute the little inside voice, they also dull the senses. Awareness of the outside world is clouded. Shapes and colors are less defined. Sounds are muffled. Scents are vague and diluted. Flavors are bland. But without the restrictive shell I am more in tune with my environment and those around me. I can acutely sense when people are angry or fearful even before the person themselves realizes their own emotions. I can tell when they are lying. It’s subtle, just little movements and postures, flickers of the facial muscles. I can sense if a person is sick or wounded even before they do, it’s in their color and temperature. If I am close enough, I can smell when a woman is ovulating. There is nothing special about me. I just choose to sense what is there; what is right in the open that people are trained to ignore.

People think that I am quicker and stronger than most humans. Within their shells, people delusion themselves. They think that behavior outside of the rules is somehow wrong and the perpetrator is aberrant and evil. A man who guns down a store clerk in a robbery is a monster. We tell our children that he must have been deranged, confused or on drugs. But we lie to them. And we lie to ourselves. There are no monsters. But there are people, regular society people: the man who steals from the cashier drawer, the woman who murders the husband for the insurance, the corporate accountant who diverts funds away from the pension account. The monsters are within all of us, and we like to tell stories and make movies about these things in us, while ignoring that it is really ourselves the camera is turning to. Turn off the TV, pause the show. Now we are safe. But look inside. There are ghosts and goblins haunting the edges our vision. There are werewolves and vampires that prowl the shadowed side streets of the mind. But these are only tamed down manifestations of real nastiness human beings are capable of. Watching these movies or television shows help to solidify the shells, the stories are meant to hide from the meek and fearful the much more terrifying darker side of our nature; to encase the truth of ourselves within some distinct, tangible myth or legendary tale.

Most people want these cocoons. They are afraid of what they hear in that voice and what they imagine others must be hearing too. My speed and strength is increased by not having to bear the weight of the protective shell. Imagine quickly pulling your hand away after touching a hot stove before you feel the burn or when jumping away when a garden hose plays a snake in the path ahead. I just don’t think like people do when interacting with the world around me. I don’t weigh consequences or consider options in the cerebral cortex. My thinking dwells in the lower, baser parts of the brain. I listen to what my instinct tells me to do. I use whatever resource I have to survive. There is no middle ground. There is no morality. There is no fair play. There are only the victims and the victorious, the survivors and the dead.

When I was a young participating member of society, I accepted the notion that people had to follow certain paths and do certain things. A child has to learn his society’s language and educate himself in its rules and customs. He has to learn a trade or participate in some way to earn food, shelter and sex. Societies all over the world vary, but it basically comes down to those three things; all of which are manifested to varying degrees based on social status. At one end of the spectrum there is filet mignon at a New York City Steakhouse, and at the other end there is dumpster diving for scraps outside of a Baltimore soup kitchen. There is sex with a lingerie model on a beach in St. Bart’s and there are toothless, meth-addict blowjobs behind roadside bars outside of Toledo, OH. There are beach houses in Malibu and public housing in Detroit. Society was designed so that if your father was a rich Wall Street broker you will have food, housing and sex from one side of this spectrum. If your father was an immigrant day laborer you will have those things from other side. Deviations from this structure are rare. There may be a few steps from side-to-side in the spectrum from one generation to another, but they are usually miniscule. Accepting all this, I was taught certain rules. Don’t hurt anybody. Don’t steal from anybody. Do unto others…

My current cell is a twelve by eight foot square concrete box. There is a tall skinny window where I can see a small slice of open sky. I think it faces north because I never see the sun. The two inch thick steel door has small holes through which I can see the gray hallway wall opposite my cell. There is a shuffling outside and then voices.

Tom, rec time! I turn and study the cell door.

I got a new guy with me today, Tom. A rattling of keys.

Talk to me, Man. But I can only manage a guttural throaty reply.

No problems today, right? The rectangular door opens, my trained routine takes over and I stick my hands through the opening. Once a day, if I haven’t broken their rules, not challenged the established order, my wrists are cuffed and two guards lead me a few steps down the hall to a small outdoor enclosure with twenty foot high ceilings. It is sort of like being at the bottom of a colorless empty swimming pool. The guards hate and fear me. I can sense it in their furtive eyes and jerky movements. They have good reason for their apprehension. I would kill every one of them given the chance. In time I have come to view prison guards as the lowest form of societal human. Not only do they follow society’s arbitrary rules, but they choose to enforce them on others as well. That takes a special and particularly low kind of life form. The idea of just doing your job has led to more than one horrific achievement by mankind in recent history.

I bit one of them once. At first there was no reason other than the fact that I wanted to cause my captor pain, to let them know that I wasn’t dead, that I wasn’t subdued, and that I wasn’t following the rules even in this lifeless prison. Once my teeth penetrated the soft tissue in the guard’s neck my consciousness was overwhelmed. I was transformed into a state of frenzy. I could not satisfy my lust for the sweet blood as my jaw clamped down harder and harder, griping muscle and tendons. The taste was that of the flesh and blood of another animal, not the processed material in shrink wrap that people accept as food. As my teeth sunk into the side of his neck, I celebrated what it was like to be alive, consuming the flesh of other animals to survive. I remember the smell, the screams of pain and terror. My heart raced as I maniacally tried to bite again deeper as the guard struggled to free himself. I blacked out when the familiar taser ripped thousands of volts of electricity through my body. My muscles contracted and I crumpled to the floor no longer in control of my thoughts or movements.

Other than these lively engagements with the guards, I don’t see many other people. Occasionally, some police come to ask me about a girl named Jenna. Not regular police but the kind that don’t wear uniforms just neatly tailored suits with badges attached to their belts instead of their shirt pockets.