The Prisoner Escapes

It is as easy to speed time up as it is to slow it down. The accumulation of grief can slow time, but it is also possible to speed it up. This is the story of the prisoner.

In ancient days, long before any of this existed, there once was a man who was sent to prison. Time has erased the memory of his crime, but it is said it was a political crime, something that was more of an offence against the prince of the kingdom than it was any real harm to anyone. In any case, the man was given a lifetime sentence, the punishment for even minor transgressions being especially harsh in those times. Since he was, or had been, a person of some importance, he was imprisoned in the massive castle keep rather than in the dungeons and catacombs beneath the kingdom where human beings were sealed up and left to rot, forgotten.

The prisoner spent his first weeks in prison wracked with grief. More painful than anything else for him was the thought that he would probably never see his wife or children again. He lay for hours weaving together little tattered bits of hope. Perhaps the king would die and whichever of his sons took the throne would decide to release some of the prisoners to demonstrate his magnanimity. Perhaps there would be a war and the king would be overthrown. Perhaps his friends and neighbors, outraged by his imprisonment, were, even now, staging a popular uprising. The prisoner knew that all of these thoughts were fantasies invented out of desperation, and they always left him in even greater agony as the hopelessness of his situation became ever more real to him. He might just as well have crossed over into the kingdom of the dead.

But his tormenters had made a mistake. They had put him in a room with a window. The window was too small for him to escape through, and anyway there was a sheer drop: the prison was built at the edge of a cliff, and he would have been smashed on the stones far, far below. The window was too high up for him to see out of unless he chinned himself up on the ledge, a difficult thing to do since the window was barely wide enough to accommodate his two hands. And once he had made this effort, there was nothing to see but empty ocean. He really preferred lying on his bunk and watching clouds pass his tiny bit of sky, or watching his own bit of sunlight make its daily journey across the cell.

Months went by. After many days of sitting and thinking, wondering about his family, the wife and children he was never allowed to see, he became addled from his solitude. He filled the days as best he could with exercise periods, with singing songs and composing tales for an imaginary audience, and finally with ransacking his memory for every exciting and dull and painful and ecstatic moment of his life that he could savor. But in the end it was not enough,and for weeks he endlessly and mindlessly paced his cell, screaming and crying, talking to himself and banging his head on the floor, then he fell on his bunk and lay there for days, getting up only to use the slop pail, or to get the food that was pushed through the trap door. He thought about killing himself, and planned various ways. He might very well have done so if they had put him in one of the dark dungeon cells beneath the castle, but they had given him that one window and that bit of sunlight. Months earlier, before he had become completely lost in despair, he had spent an entire day making a sun dial. He had measured out the day by calculating his pulse rate, then counting out the number of beats to make an hour. He marked the hours by scratching the stone floor with bits of mortar. The sundial had continued to occupy part of each day for several weeks, as he tried to perfect his clock, until the floor was covered with white scratches.

Most of these had been erased by his earlier fit of frantic pacing, but that did not matter now. He still had that bit of sunlight, that square that oozed down the wall at the foot of his bunk, flowed across the floor and ascended the opposite wall, marking out each day. He watched it all day. If only, he thought, I could make it move faster. That thought was his salvation.

Couldn't he make it move faster? Originally, when he had begun measuring the sunbeam's progress, he had used his pulse to measure the time, estimating each heartbeat at about one second. But what about when his heart beat faster? Did time flow more rapidly? Of course not, but then again when he was a young man and held his future wife in his arms for the first time, his heart had beat more rapidly and the time had flowed with breathtaking speed. However, there was also the time he had spent being tortured until his confession was wrung from him and he had been sent to this place. Certainly his heart had been beating madly with fear in that situation, but time had flowed with agonizing slowness. Perhaps it was something he could control, and with practice, he could speed time up.

He tried to make the sun move faster. He imagined a quick flowing succession of days in which the square of sunlight dashed across his cell. First he would speed up an hour until it seemed like fifty minutes, then forty, then thirty. Finally each hour would seem a minute, and the days would fly by. Perhaps he could make even each day seem like a minute.

At first he had very little success. The sunbeam continued to creep at its own sedate pace. But he had learned patience, had learned to savor a problem that evaded an immediate and easy solution.

One day, after hours of contemplating his little square of light, he dozed a little. When he awoke, he saw it was gone: several hours had passed and nightfall had arrived. What happens he thought, when we sleep? Our mind slows, dwelling on a few thoughts, stretching them out and perhaps making a dream out of them. It seemed to the prisoner that in the deepest, dreamless stages of sleep there was actually no thought at all, and the sense of passing time completely vanished.

He began to try to slow his thoughts, trying to feel each one oozing through his mind like flowing molasses. He told himself a story. It was a simple story told to children, so he was very familiar with it.

"Once . . . he said, and thought about all that word entailed, how it sounded to his ears in his ragged prisoner's voice, tried to feel its meaning registering in his brain. He continued: "upon . . . a time . . ." By the middle of the story, he felt his pulse slow to a crawl. By the end, he thought he could see the sun beam moving more rapidly, creeping across the floor. This success excited him so much that his heart beat sped back up and time began to flow once more at its normal snail's pace. But he knew that he had found something and that with practice it would become better.

It took many days of trying, but at last he began to become adept at slowing his thoughts and speeding up time. Sometimes he sat for a whole day, watching impassively as the sun dashed across the floor, his thoughts slowed to nearly a standstill.

In this way he was soon able to make a day seem like an hour, then like a handful of minutes. A year passed and he was called before the prelate to see if he had been broken by his ordeal. They were surprised to see the prisoner looking so serene and healthy.

"Whose been feeding you, hmm?" the prelate asked. "You have a friend on the outside, don't you?"

The prisoner said nothing The prelate's words passed through and beyond him so rapidly that they did not seem worth answering. In fact the prisoner was so healthy because he had slowed his mind and body to the point that he needed very little food and the handful of bread and the bowl of gruel that was shoved through the small trapdoor on one side of his cell was too much. Indeed, it seemed like food was forever appearing out of nowhere and he threw half of it out his cell window or dumped it in his slop pail.

"Put him to the torture. Bring him back when he is feeling more talkative."

But after several days of branding and near drowning and electric shocks and several broken fingers, and twenty yanked out finger- and toe-nails, the prisoner still said nothing. He had become so adept at slowing his thoughts to nothing that he could convince himself that a day was nothing, less than an eyeblink of existence. It is easy to say this, to understand this, but to truly believe and perceive it is something few of us ever manage to do. To the prisoner, the pain was easily tolerated: a short jab, a brief suffocation, a little shock, next to nothing.

Finally they put him in the deepest, darkest dungeon. It was several seconds or days before he noticed there was no sunlight there.

He shrugged his shoulders, and the shrug took two days: a day up and a day down. It was better now without the sun. He could concentrate on the flow of time better without continuously clocking it. Now there was only the steady ticking of his slop pails being taken away and his daily bread ration being shoved through the trapdoor. Eating and elimination became a terrible nuisance. Even though he waited until there was several days worth of food on the floor before he rose to eat and drink and use the slop pail, it still seemed as though he had to get up every few minutes. He finally ceased to bother. If he didn't eat, he wouldn't have to relieve himself, and if he slowed his thoughts down to nothing, he wouldn't have to eat or drink. And thinking that, he ceased to think at all, and time flitted away from him and became nothing.

* * *

They gave him up for dead. After he had not eaten in weeks, the jailer entered with a flashlight and studied the prisoner's gray face.

"This one's gone. I'm surprised there ain't no stink yet," the jailer said. He left then. He was a lazy man and often left the dead prisoners to rot and become piles of bones and rubbish in the cells after they died, rather than going through the trouble of carrying them to the charnel house. But the prisoner was not dead. Curled in his bunk, softly sighing every few days or so, his heart beating less than once a day, he felt time flowing through him and away from him, leaving him untouched.

Many years passed. A new prince came to power and freed all the prisoners. The jailer, when he opened the prisoner's cell, mistook him for a bundle of refuse and left him lying on his pile of rags and straw. The door of his cell was now open, but the prisoner did not notice.

Finally they cleaned the cell and took the scraps and pieces that remained of the prisoner, and burned them. The prisoner was far beyond noticing the flames. The wind carried his ashes over the city, but he was still alive, floating on currents of air, preoccupied with his own thoughtless existence. He's still alive now, for all I know. The dead are all alive. They are the true masters of escaping the flow of time.

Copyright 2003 by John Clinbrohf. Permission is granted to print single copies of this story to read or share with others. The story may not be altered in any way, and must include this copyright notice.

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