rest of the inmates are called out into the hallway for a count. The guards make them chant, Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Because of what he did, my shit bucket won’t be emptied tonight. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Because of what he did . . .
A new prisoner, 416—8612’s replacement—organizes a hunger strike. He gets a couple prisoners to join him, but others slam him for stirring shit. When there’s trouble, everybody suffers. Five seventy-one refuses to choose sides. He’s not a joiner, but he’s no Kapo, either. Everything’s falling apart. The prisoners are turning on each other. He can’t afford to get involved. He tells everyone he’s nonaligned. But there is no nonaligned.
John Wayne threatens 416. “Eat the damn sausage, boy, or you are going to regret it.” Four-sixteen throws the sausage on the floor, where it rolls around in the filth. Before anyone knows what’s happening, he’s shoved into the hole, the dirty sausage in his hand. “And you’ll stay there until it’s eaten.”
There’s a general announcement: If any prisoner wants to give up his blanket for tonight, 416 will be released. If no one does, 416 will spend the night in solitary confinement. Five seventy-one lies in bed, under his blanket, thinking: This isn’t life. It’s just a fucking simulation. Maybe he should fight back against the experimenters, screw with their expectations, turn into a holy Superman. But damn it: no one else does. Everyone’s waiting for him to sleep cold tonight. He hates to disappoint them all, but he’s not the one who told 416 to pull his dumbfuck stunt. They could all have bored each other to death for two weeks and everything would’ve been fine.
He lies there warm all night, but he doesn’t sleep. He can’t turn off the thoughts. He wonders: And if this were all real? If he were put away for two years, or ten, or two hundred? Locked up for eighteen years for manslaughter, like the drunken junior high teacher back in Townsend who smashed into his parents’ Gremlin while they were coming back from line dancing? Put away behind bars, like the invisible millions across this country who he’s never thought twice about? He’d be nothing. He wouldn’t even be 571. The real authorities could turn him into anything at all.
Next morning brings a hasty meeting. The warden and superintendent are summoned by the higher powers. Some big-brained scientist in a position of authority at last wakes up and realizes people can’t do this. The whole experiment is fucking criminal. All the prisoners are to go free, pardoned early, sprung from a nightmare that has lasted only six days. Six days. It doesn’t seem possible. Five seventy-one barely remembers what he was, a week ago.
The experimenters debrief everyone before turning them out into the world. But the victims are way too keyed up for reflection. The guards defend themselves while the prisoners go apeshit with anger. Douggie, too—Douglas Pavlicek—jabs his finger in the air. “The people who ran this—the so-called psychologists—should all be locked up for ethics violations.” But he didn’t give up his blanket. He will now, forever, be the guy who wouldn’t take sides and didn’t surrender his blanket, even in a tame little two-week playact experiment.
He comes up out of the dungeon into the brilliant, beautiful Central Peninsula air. A sweet little breeze smelling of jasmine and Italian stone pine goes down his shirt and ruffles his hair. He knows where he is now: the Psych Building, on the robber baron’s campus. Stanford. Land of knowledge, cash, and power, with its endless tunnel of palms and the intimidating stone arcades. That fat-cat monastery where he has always been afraid to walk, or even run an errand, for fear that somebody will arrest him as an imposter.
They give him his check for ninety bucks and drive him back to his efficiency in East Palo Alto. He holes up in his private bunker, eating Fritos stewed in Pabst and watching television on a tiny black-and-white with crumpled tinfoil horns for antennae. It’s there, three weeks later, that he sees a broadcast about the hundred-some U.S. helicopters lost in a bungled operation in Laos. He didn’t even know the U.S. was in Laos. He sets his can of beer on the spool table and has the distinct impression that he’s leaving a water-ring stain on someone’s pine coffin.
He stands up light-headed, feeling like he did the night 416 spent in the hole. He runs his