A R C H I P E L A G O

Dea Anne Martin

You are a creation of your will. A king builds his palace on the broken backs of peasants. Each man mixes his clay with the tears of the angels. All heed nothing but the voice of the snake that coils inside of the heart.

Thomas the Gob - London
August 18, 1553

It's just like layin' brick, ya know baby? Just put one of 'em right on top of the other.

Charles Starkweather - Lincoln, Nebraska
January 21, 1958

The cells are damp cinder block. There is no heat. Several prisoners have contracted pneumonia and have died. There is nothing inside each cell but a metal bench and a hole in the floor. The ceilings are lined with fluorescent tubes and these are never t urned off. Prisoners are fed every other day, if that often. The diet is white rice with a few vegetables stirred in. Two pints of water are allotted to each prisoner everyday. Murderers are jailed with vagrants. Prostitutes are housed with rapists. This abuse perpetuates itself.

Susan Chadwick/Amnesty International - New York
April 19, 1998

Husk - Holding cell 5/sector 8

"Nomads live in tents," she says. "They carry their houses with them." She leans back pressing her cheek against the damp cinder blocks and opens her burning skin to the cold. Her tongue snakes out of the corner of her mouth and licks the wall. She pull s her tongue back in and turns to face the metal screen that runs from ceiling to floor and divides her section of the cell from the others.

"I am a nomad"! she cries. Some of her cell mates turn and look at her through the series of screens that keep them separated. Some of them pay no attention at all. "Shut up," someone croaks from a distant corner. Shouting is wasted effort. Days of bored om spent inside this cold. bright box have taught them all that any sound - even a whisper - soaks the air like oil on brown paper. Their ears are saturated with sound and none of them talks much anymore. She is a nomad. She has traveled through strange p laces that float like ghosts in front of her eyes. Her eyes are as clouded as old windows but she knows that she sees through a clear lens. She lives inside of a sphere the circumference of the circle she can make when she extends her clenched fist at the end of a stiffened arm and spins around. This shell is transparent. Her walk is slow shuffle - the march of a body in pain and constant danger- but the hesitant steps are her way of propelling the bubble. She never wants to stop movin g. She sits down when she's tired but it's hard to stay awake when her body is still. She forgets to stay awake. She opens her eyes and her body jerks up like a fish on a hook but she never remembers dreaming. She wants to keep moving and she marches alon g the perimeter of her section like an army on patrol. She knows that if she doesn't keep moving, the music living inside her sphere will swell up and crack the rigid shell into tiny pieces that will decorate the floor like huge glittering tears. She can feel cells drift off the surface of her skin and patch into the sphere, keeping it hard and strong. The clothes that she wears are filthy and the weight of the dirt has altered the fibers. Sometimes, she gets new clothes - given to her by hands and faces that appear out of nowhere and then disappear again. She waits through days stacked like bricks until the welcome veneer of dirt settles onto the recent garments. The dirt that covers her clothes and skin muffles the music - its beauty becomes exactly bal anced, calibrated to the exact amount of air that she takes in and pushes out through her nose. Her breath, her cells and her dirt are what keep the sphere in place around her and without this she wouldn't have a home.

Hyena - Holding cell 5/sector 4

My last name is Lammergeier. According to the dictionary, this is the name of a large Eurasian vulture. My mother was born near the Mekong delta and grew up in Saigon. My father was a farm boy from Hinesville Georgia who became a Ranger and learned how t o tear the throat out of any warm-blooded animal with his teeth. I can't remember anymore how much of this is true but I'm 6'2" without my heels and thinking about a mother, a tiny frail-boned mother...a small mother whose genes worked desperately to pass on their code to me - well, that helps, ya' know? I'm travelling male to female. Yes, it's a journey...at least that's what a therapist told me when I went to see one. (One visit is mandatory. They suggest more, but one is all that the state will pay for ). I agreed at the time, I was so young back then! Here lately, it seems to me as though I'm building myself. Designing myself too. Do you know that they take your penis and empty it out like a gourd? It's like a piece of glove losing its resident finger . Do you know that they take skin from your penis and graft it into the hole that they make? They do, and I know that it's surgeons who do all this but I feel as though it's me - that I'm creating it because I want it. Five years ago, I wanted breasts and now I have them. You can have anything that you want. I really believe this. What I want is not just a silhouette but a real structure. Oh, what's the word? An armature! Yes, that causes my whole skin to fall into place the way that I want it to. None of my molecules would dare to rebel! I was standing there all dressed up, talking to a guy and next thing I know they've hauled me in here. What am I supposed to do? Even the state has surgeons now performing the operation but it still isn't free, you know? The wire screens keep the others away from me, and that's fine, but they keep it really bright in here - and cold. It's like the inside of a refrigerator. Makes it hard to masturbate which is the only way I can relax in a place like this. The hormones limp me out a little but I can still manage it. I don't know. Maybe I'd miss it ... all that gravity, but not much I think. After the operation, I'm going to stand in front of the mirror and take a pair of scissors and cut through the big red ribbon that I'm going to tie a round my hips.

Mantis - Holding cell 5/sector 6

He was building himself a new skin. It was going to take time but he was a patient man. No one could understand that it took time. He held them in his arms and prayed through their bodies. He absorbed their skins into his and the armour around his body thickened. He felt his cells grow stronger each time he put his hands around a neck or used his knife to draw the color red. These skins. They were so versatile! He was amazed each time at the resilience that met his fingertips. The yielding essence awed him to silence as it ran up his arms from the gasping pleading sack that he held beneath him. He had heard about the pyramids in Egypt and how laborers had died while building them. What he wished was that there was a monument to Jesus, a church that could hold that much blood inside its walls. That, to him, was a fitting tribute to a God so great. He had been in the cell nine days already. He had invent ed three new hymns during the time and he'd also realized what it was that he'd been doing all this years. He was building a true church to Jesus with his own hands. The bodies of others were necessary offerings. His own body was the temple. He slept well each night in the bright noisy cell...dreaming of what breathed around him through the other screens...outside the walls - so much material.