The Tower

Spade alone could reach through the bars that composed the ceilings of the cells. He did pull-ups on them until one day Jonsten Evers gleefully overturned his bed on top of Spade's hands, which peeked through his floor. Spade was stuck dangling five inches above the ground, swaying painfully back and forth. Jonsten had giggled hysterically during the thirty minutes the guards took to respond to Spade's roars. It was very hard to hear what went on in the Tower from certain areas of the roof (one of the flaws of its design), and this, in addition to the guards' general contempt for the prisoners, accounted for the slow response time when mishaps did occur.

After the tops of his fingers scabbed over, Spade stood on his bed for hours, his hand extended through Jonsten's floor bars. Jonsten, still under the sway of his heady delirium, played with Spade's hand at first. He taunted it with strokes, jerking back his hand as Spade's snapped shut like a Venus's-flytrap. He would spit on the hand, pinch the back of it-even try to step on it and pin it wriggling to the floor. Spade's hand responded so quickly, however, that it avoided much of the punishment from above.

"On the street, you'd be my little bitch," Spade growled at Jonsten through the bars. "I'd own you. These metal bars protect you from the beast. Just a couple feet between us. If I could touch you, I'd rip you apart with my hands and teeth. Rip you apart. Come on, just reach down. Reach on down and touch my hand."

Jonsten tittered nervously, his high-pitched laugh echoing through the elevator shaft.

"But we're not. We're not on the street. You can't touch me. I'm up here and you're down. You're down on Level Ten." He giggled as he writhed about the floor, singing ecstatically. His halting song came in tortuously rhymed couplets: "On the street a wild killer he made. But in the Tower, Spade finds himself caged."

As Spade persisted in his efforts, Jonsten's hyper-delirious mood was replaced with concern, then fear, then despair. He began to obsess about the hand's minuscule intrusion into his world. He stopped playing with it, then touching it at all, and soon he withdrew to his bed and refused to leave.

"Spade, I didn't mean it. With the bed. The bed. The bed that tipped over. I'm sorry."

But Spade said nothing, and day after day, he stood on the bed with his hand extended patiently through the bars.

Jonsten began screaming and moaning in anguish, but he was generally ignored. This was nothing new in the Tower. "The hand. Make it go away. Away, hand! Away, Spade's hand. I'll bite it. I'll bite it off."

He never really slept anymore, existing instead in that bitter dream world that lies between sleep and waking. He squirmed in his bed, his disheveled hair flipping from side to side. "The hand! Don't! It's reaching for me. It's coming for me."

A chorus of shouts answered him. "Shut the hell up, Jonsten. Or I'll come for you. And I'm worse than some fucking hand."

Jonsten peered anxiously over the edge of his bed to see if the tell-tale hand had sunk away, but it had not. For days it did not depart; it stayed and watched him, a shark's fin emerging from a metal sea.

When Jonsten had to go to the bathroom, he leapt from the bed and made his way to the toilet, his back mashed against the wall bars so he could watch the hand. He balanced over the toilet, his bulging eyes still fixed on the hand as he defecated sloppily into the steel bowl. Aside from such ventures, he remained sitting Indian-style on his bed.

All the while Spade waited calmly.

Jonsten got weaker and weaker. He was afraid to cross his cell to pick up his loaves; they accumulated just inside the slot in his door, collecting swirls of flies. After a few days, he became afraid even to make the brief journey to the toilet.

Eventually, his exhaustion caught up with him and he began to nod off. His head lolled forward and his weight started to shift him over the side of the narrow bed. He jerked awake in a panic, his wild eyes flashing, then orienting on the hand and setting themselves again with determination. He had glimpsed his final weakness, however, and now he knew, as Spade had all along, that it was just a matter of time.

Finally, one night he fell asleep completely and he slumped forward, his arm dangling above the floor. His eyes opened in terror as he realized where his lapse had landed him, and then the hand seized him around the wrist.

Spade leapt from his bed, maintaining his viselike grip on the wrist and bringing his two hundred and forty pounds to bear on it. Jonsten's body slammed flat against the floor, smashed by the force pulling his arm downward. His hand snapped back against his arm to accommodate the gap between the bars, and he squealed as his wrist broke in two.