I thought about it for several seconds and said, “Good shot!” Shit, a yellow slip, but instead, he told me the World Trade Center towers in New York had been destroyed by a kamikaze attack. The next morning at work, the Honcho called me to the fore to have a word. Then I heard him telling Jayanpati, then other prisoners, to look out their windows at the sky. I anticipated a yellow slip in the morning. He said something unintelligible but disagreeable in tone. “Sit! Damé! No look out!” Before taking my seat I pointed at the sky and said look. Gollum rapped on my door, crossed his bony index fingers in the sign of a cross, and hissed like a snake. I have never seen a sky like it before or since. I walked a metre and a half to the window. The entire sky was a most peculiar hue, suffused with an even, salmon-red glow, no indication of where the sun was setting. The walls were still pink, the whole room seemed to be pink, so I turned around and looked out the window. I blinked my eyes two or three times, thinking I’d been staring too long at my notebook. I was writing when I noticed the grey cell walls were pink, like the start of an acid trip. I had successfully avoided chobatsu, so far. It was after dinner on a typically hot, muggy, late summer evening, three years into my sentence. Every cell has a window, but officially, you are not supposed to look out of them. One evening in September he caught me standing in front of the window, staring at the sky. I imagined him jerking off a lot in the daytime over Manga comics. He had a pendulous lower lip and bad posture. He was thin and pale with dark rings surrounding deep-set, squinty eyes. Gollum was a low-ranker living in the barracks as a consequence, he frequently drew night-shift. He had a very limited English vocabulary. I called him (not to his face) Gollum-san. Whenever I saw him pass my cell I waited with a smarmy smile in place for his return. Ten seconds later it would be there again. He would walk down the hallway and his leer would appear for a second or two in the small observation window above the bed, then disappear. He was a stinker, a lurker, maybe some kind of pervert. One shifty corridor guard took pleasure tip-toeing through his shift, looking for the smallest infractions, rapping on doors, and hissing. “ Damé!” It was so quiet at night that even crepe-soled shoes were audible.
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