Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days (2 page)

Like me, George was kept hidden away in
solitary confinement in an ancient row of cells located in the
lower basement of the Old Main Pen. The Old Main was never to be
used for prisoners again. The combination of the bad economy and
subsequent civilian uprising of 2017 made prison space scarce and
profitable. They opened the Old Main and stuffed the prisoners
inside.

George should have been tucked away in the
NextGen Super Max facility, but the guards used him to quell
violence in the entire prison complex. When a new gang banger,
serial murderer, sex offender arrived? The guards would bring out
George to let them know what would happen if violence got out of
control. No one wanted the riots of February 1980 to return. George
made sure that kind of crazy rampage never happened again. Until
the wasps, of course.

I knew George because we were the only
prisoners in the lower basement of the Old Main Pen. For the
privilege of being in such a dilapidated facility, they gave us
“exercise” together. “Exercise” meant that rain, shine, snow, or
heat, we spent an hour outside. Most people in solitary confinement
spent that time alone.

I spent my exercise hour with George.

Most people were afraid of me. Even the
guards. George wasn’t afraid of anyone. So we “exercised” together.
He protected the guards from me, and I protected him from me. It
was a good arrangement that worked for everyone involved.

I should say that he exercised -- pushups,
weight lifting, running. Gleaming with sweat, he’d move his
massive, fat-free body through what seemed to me to be a random
routine. He still does these routines now. Habits are stored in the
more resilient muscle memory, I think. For the last year or so, we
have done these routines together.

In the old days, during exercise, I’d read.
Exercise was one hour a day I could count on decent light. In
exchange for a blessing, the guards would order books with their
own money and smuggle them in to me. Young guards always wanted
something -- a new girlfriend, a baby, more money, a better job,
whatever. My blessing brought them what they wanted, and they gave
me whatever books I wanted. I’d sit on the steps and read while
George worked out.

Three times a week, by George’s decree, we
spent our hour walking. He thought I needed the exercise. Looking
back on it, I think we both needed a friend. He spent the entire
hour talking about his life. When we were done, he’d ask for a
blessing, which I freely gave him.

Those blessings could easily be the reason
he’s still alive.

George was smart. Not book smart. I doubt he
could read then. He was too busy, too active, to ever sit down and
try. Even in solitary confinement!

No, George was life smart. He had a sense of
how everything worked. His intuition about people was always
correct. That’s probably why the guards liked him so much.

One of our last conversations was about
whether he was a homosexual. He was a predator, plain and simple.
If he saw something he wanted, he took it. Since he’d been in the
Pen, he took as many men as he wanted. That’s why he was in
solitary.

But George swore he wasn’t a homosexual. He
would wax poetic about the smell and softness of a woman’s touch.
Having grown up in a variety of hostile prison settings, it’s
likely that the only woman George ever touched was his mother. He’d
been taken from her only moments after he was born.

Because we both knew what he was here at the
Pen, the conversation changed to what he would do when he got out.
He was confident that, when he got out, he would get married and
have a bunch of kids. He was sure that he would finally get to live
happily ever after. I can still see his deep black face, bright
white teeth, and gleaming eyes laughing about the glorious future.
He was so certain, so sure.

He was wrong.

He told me once, before all this happened,
that I was his first and only friend. At the time, I couldn’t have
imagined what that would mean. Right now, even with all the work of
taking care of him, I’m glad he’s my friend.

Since this is the first entry, I should
introduce myself. As I wrote before, my name is Emil See Fwaha. I’m
of the Tewa people from the Tesuque pueblo. I’m a scrawny Ind’n,
maybe five feet seven inches tall. Last time I was weighed, I
topped 130 pounds. I’m heavier, more muscular now.

I got to the Pen by way of some crime. At
this point, I’m not sure if I even did the crime. I don’t remember
what the crime was that I supposedly did. My
great-great-grandmother told me I needed to be tucked away, so off
to prison I went. I landed in solitary confinement my second day
here and worked to stay there. Terrified of my power, the warden
stuck me in the oldest part of the Pen in a cell that could only be
opened with a crowbar and George’s extreme force. George and I
lived on this silent hallway, deep in the bowels of the Old Main
Pen. My sentence would have been over by now, but who knows? Prison
sentences had a way of never ending in the Pen.

Being the last person alive is another kind
of life sentence.

I should tell you about the prophecy. Around
1400 AD, a number of prophecies were made about strangers coming
from afar to destroy the pueblos. My great-great-whatever father
was a powerful shaman. In meditation one day, he saw the whole
thing unfold. The white man would attack the pueblo people and take
control of our land. He saw the white man, black man, tan man
feeding on everything in their path until one day these invaders
would turn into wasps themselves. A single shaman from his clan,
the Fwaha clan, would survive, must survive.

Why? I don’t remember. Maybe, someday, I’ll
read the prophecy and, like a cartoon light bulb overhead, it will
all make sense. I hope.

Nothing makes a lot of sense right now.

Every year, in November, the month the
prophecy was made, my great-great-grandmother would read the
prophecy out loud. All of the boys in my clan would gather to
listen to the story of doom and resurrection. For months after, the
boys in my clan would play “kill the wasp” as if to practice for
the day the invaders turned to wasps. Every boy hoped to be the
Fwaha shaman who saved the day.

I didn’t hope to save anything. I wanted to
be left to my books, my streams, and my forest. I spent most my
youth hiking the mountains outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico. If I
wasn’t in school or working the hard New Mexican soil, I could be
found out in the middle of nowhere, hunting, hiking, rock climbing,
backpacking, or listening to the earth. (That’s what my
great-great-grandmother called my mind-wandering dreams.) I read
about explorers, travelers, and survival. By the time I was
eighteen years old, I could survive in the wilderness for a month,
without supplies, regardless of the season.

When I was thirteen years old, I witnessed
my mother’s death in a dream. She died a week later at the end of a
stranger’s gun. I loved my mother more than I have pages to write
here. Her death, and the fact that I saw it so vividly but was
helpless against its inevitability, still brings me to tears.

When summer came, my
great-great-grandmother made arrangements for me to work with a
Dine medicine man. I spent every summer, from then on, with a
native healer
--
Dine singers and sand painters, Hopi medicine men, Apache
healers, and shamans from every Indian nation. I spent every
afternoon with the Tewa and Tiwa shamans in our area. When I
finished with the white man’s school, my great-great grandmother
sent me to Mexico to live among the Wixaritari shamans in the
Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range of Western
Mexico.

I returned to the pueblo when I was
twenty-five. My great-great-grandmother was on her deathbed. Her
dying wish was that I would spend my life in the Pen.

And here I am.

I can walk through walls, speak with the
dead, control people, walk among my ancestors, heal injury, read
minds, increase fertility, chat with familiar spirit guides, and a
host of other things, and I’ve spent more than half of my life in
this prison.

In thirty days, George and I are
leaving.

11/02/2056

I wrote about George and I wrote about me. I
should write about what happened. But first, I should say how I
know.

I’m a shaman. As a child, I learned to talk
to spirits, spirit guides, and the most ancient creatures of the
earth. To me, dead people are not very different than living
people. Living or dead, a human soul is a human soul.

The Pen was a storage house for trapped
souls until I arrived. The souls of human beings killed in the riot
of 1980 or by the guards or by disease or whatever were unable or
unwilling to move on. I spent my first couple years at the Pen
sending human souls to the afterworld. It was a lot of work, but I
was in solitary confinement. What else did I have to do?

Twenty or so human souls remain in the Pen.
They are as annoying as gnats to a light. They refuse to move on,
to change, or to do much of anything. No wonder someone killed
them. I’d have kill them myself if I had the chance.

Sorry, I got sidetracked. In the end, I hope
this will make some kind of sense. All I can say is that I’m doing
my best.

In March 2009, two children in San Diego,
California, came down with a new kind of flu. They originally
called it the Swine Flu and traced its origin to a pig farm in
Mexico. I was seventeen and a year into my “experience” at the
United World College, Armand Hammer’s crazy experiment in world
peace.

At that time, I read
the
Albuquerque Journal
out loud to my great-great-grandmother every
morning. I read about the flu in April or maybe May of that year.
I’ll never forget the look on my great-great-grandmother’s face.
She nodded to me and said very simply, “It’s started.” My
great-great-grandmother sent me to the Wixaritari within the week.
I never realized until this moment that I was sent to study from
the Wixaritari because of the swine flu.

By the end of 2009, the pharmaceutical
companies had developed two vaccines against the swine flu, which
they started calling H1N1. One was a dead virus that they injected
into people, and the other was a mist of a low dose of live virus.
The shot wasn’t readily available, so people chose the mist.

Once a person took the mist “vaccine,” they
promptly infected their friends and loved ones for the next
twenty-one days. The mist became more of a transmission source than
the vaccine against disease.

As usual, man’s best intentions are always
the ones that get him in trouble.

Under the pressure of numerous lawsuits, the
pharmaceutical companies began working on a foolproof method to
provide inoculation for any virus. Three years later, they launched
a program designed to create vaccines based on an individual’s
unique genetics. An individual would submit his DNA for testing,
and the vaccine would be doctored to match his or her specific
genetics. The program was a great success. Even people who were
resistant to vaccinating their children began vaccinating again. By
the end of that year, the manufacturer launched a side program
which harvested an infant’s unique DNA during pregnancy. The
vaccines were available for the child upon birth.

Five years into this program and millions of
human DNA samples later, the pharmaceutical companies launched a
clinical trial to test if people could receive immunity equal to
the individual-DNA-based vaccines if they included a single set of
one hundred and forty-six nucleobases, the building blocks of DNA,
in every vaccine. A year later, the pharmaceutical companies
announced that they had achieved results comparable to the
individual vaccines with the inclusion of this strand of DNA, which
they were now calling “The 146.” Within six months, all vaccines
included The 146.

The discovery and use of The 146 led
antibiotic manufacturers to create human-DNA-individualized
antibiotics. These new antibiotics were miraculous. Resistant
bacterial strains were eliminated completely. At the beginning of
the following year, the antibiotic manufacturers launched the “Be
specific, not non-specific” marketing campaign. It had a catchy
jingle and a lot of promotion. Within two years, older, general,
wide-spectrum antibiotics such as penicillin, were no longer
manufactured.

While pharmaceutical companies were working
on DNA-based vaccines and antibiotics, plant geneticists joined the
pesticide manufacturers in their efforts to reinvent plants. They
started by genetically modifying corn and soybeans. Impressed by
the results of human vaccination campaigns, these companies used
the same technology to modify food crops. Modified corn and soy
were fed to livestock with great results. Soon grains such as
wheat, rice, and oats were modified. By the time the National
Institute of Health declared the war on disease to be over, every
link in the food chain had been modified.