“Your turn,” noted his new cellmate. “What are you in for?”

“Don’t know. You?”

Frantisek really didn’t know what he was doing in prison, but his old cellmate had informed him that it was ‘languishing’. This same old cellmate had been taken away shortly afterward. A guard had overheard him saying to Frantisek that they could keep his body in prison but not his mind; the guards had led him off explaining that they were going to demonstrate several senses in which this was incorrect. Frantisek was in any case unsure of how true this assertion would turn out to be: he had lived much of the last year in a very small flat, and did not share his upstairs neighbour’s agoraphiliac loved of camping and travel, but the cell was beginning to feel uncomfortably confining.

Before they had taken him away, the guards had attached restraints to the upper body of Frantisek’s first cellmate, restricting head and arm movement and reducing vision to a tiny corridor directly in front, and reminding Frantisek of BDSM fetishwear he had seen on-line. “Don’t worry, we’re very professional,” one had said, seemingly to Frantisek more than to the man they were taking. “We always yell ‘clear’ before we turn on the electrodes.’” The smiles of these guards had suggested to Frantisek that they meant business; more than meaning business, they signified an entire mode of production centred on the industrialisation of suffering and death. They each grabbed an arm and half-directed, half-dragged his first cellmate down the corridor.

“I hate the smell of burning hair,” one said.

“Imagine how Hitler would have felt burning all those jews,” the other replied.

“He would have had to leave the room.”

Islam is the new black

The prison was arranged such that Frantisek never saw a guard take an order from anyone, which, along with the evident emotional investments of most guards in their antagonism to prisoners, or at least to him, may have increased the impression that their actions were their own. But something more than paranoia meant that he regarded any differences in the treatment he got from particular guards as evidence of a conspiracy in which different guards played different roles, directed according to purposes he could only guess, and turning the prison into a theatre of cruelty. Even the comment about electrodes made Frantisek suspicious now, as if what they did to his first cellmate might have been intended to intimidate him.

“Foreigner,” explained his new cellmate, who was young and off-white in colour and shape in those ways Frantisek had been taught, somewhat against his will, to identify as ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ - and so could have been from anywhere. This new cellmate had also invented a complicated game, a cross between a card and board game, with which they attempted to fill some of the potentially endless hours in this ever-lit cage. Frantisek rolled the dice they had manufactured out of paper, and got a six. “Frankly it’s a tribute to the tolerance and openness of this great nation that they let me live at all,” continued his new cellmate. “OK, you’ve landed on ‘resource struggle’ again. ‘Control of your privately-owned water resources is contested by a mass movement. Pick a card to see what happens.’”

Frantisek read the card out: “Your water resources are taken over: roll again to see whether you can limit the damage to a state-controlled takeover with full compensation or if your facilities are occupied by the masses and resources distributed according to need, with no compensation and a spreading revolt.”

“Bummer,” said his new cellmate. “Either way you lose the ongoing revenue, but maybe you can only have them nationalised and get compensated, then have the state buy off and forcibly disperse the movement and later engineer a neoliberalising regime which will give control of water back to you for next to nothing and call it ‘privatisation’. And anyway the compensation will allow you to finance your other operations for a while. It isn’t over yet, baby!”

This game, which his new cellmate had entitled ‘Prevention of Communism’, involved a variety of strategies for the players to attempt to retain elite status by screwing over the proletariat and global population as a whole, while forming a series of temporary alliances with each other to try to become dominant in competition with other elites i.e. other players. “I thought we had special prisons for foreigners. What are they going to do to you?” Frantisek asked.

“Uh oh! Aspiring elites leading what they call a national liberation struggle have diverted the masses of your neo-colony into capitalist state-building projects, but still impose new rental costs on you for continuing to exploit ‘their’ populations and take natural resources under their control… Indeed and of course you have such special prisons, but I am here to be questioned, I think, on suspicion of being connected to people involved with terrorists. I think it might be racial profiling exacerbated by my name. Unless they know something I don’t.”

Frantisek picked up the increasingly out-of-shape paper cube and tossed it lightly onto the stone floor. “And your name is?”

“Jihad.” And Jihad smiled. “I awoke very early one morning in one of your special prisons, on an island of which I had never heard, to the attentions of unpleasant men who brought me here, a rather long journey but only, they informed me, an ordinary rendition. They emphasised a number of times that no-one knows I’m here and hinted at the ease with which a permanent disappearance could be arranged, which I hope was merely encouragement to be forthcoming but fear may not be. Oh dear,” he said, looking at the board scratched into the floor. “Your imperial enforcer is overstretched and you will have to rely on the guile and brutality of local elites. Roll the dice to see if you can get away with retreating from production of commodities into currency speculation.”

Jihad had bad skin but good grammar, whereas Frantisek had bad posture but good manners: it seemed to Frantisek that they both had poor prospects but good intentions. The only reading they had been given was something called Underground by someone called McGahan, which they both agreed was one of the worst books they had ever read. “Are you scared?” Frantisek asked.

Jihad paused and smiled again. “Yes. A long time ago I was very scared, then I became outraged, then cynical, and now I’m back to scared again. And you?”

Now Frantisek paused. “For a while I was just bewildered. Now I’m scared.”

“This,” said Jihad, rolling the dice, “is progress, I think. Do you think inmates at secret political prisons are eligible for conjugal visits?”

Later, during what they had somewhat arbitrarily agreed to call the night, one of the guards sneered that Frantisek’s old cellmate was now “a broken man”. “I don’t mean mentally or spiritually,” he elaborated. “I mean physically. In two large pieces. Broken,” he concluded nastily, “”in half.”