They Outlawed Love So We Do It In The Dark
Mikey
Gerard had woken up in a shared holding cell.
The moment he came to, he knew he was inside the Ministry of Love. He just knew. He had been propped up on one of the three concrete benches that lined and protruded from the walls, his back slumped and stiff. And there were others, still dressed in the clothes they had worn when they were caught. There were all kinds of criminals; there had been the odd political prisoner, like Gerard, but most of them were common criminals: smugglers, black-market merchants, petty thieves, beggars, drunks, prostitutes, and many more examples of depravity. Gerard had in particular flinched when he saw the prostitute taken away – immediately Frank and his lovely smile had flitted through his mind – but he remained stoic, for the most part.
Occasionally, one of the guards patrolling outside would unlock the barred door to collect a fellow captive (presumably to march him towards the tortures), and there would be a new person thrust into the cell. In between these instances, there were just long periods of waiting. It might have been days, weeks, or even months of waiting – there was really no way of telling the time, because the lights were always on. And in that period of time, only one occurrence stuck in Gerard’s mind. It was one of those younger, fanatical Inner Party members, and he had only been kept in the cell for three days – four at most, before he was taken out again. Gerard could tell the kid was in for committing thoughtcrime; how exactly did that orthodox automaton end up thinking unorthodox thoughts is beyond Gerard, but there was no doubt about it. Because the kid had kicked and cried when he’d first arrived, screaming at the top of his lungs about how he wasn’t the one they wanted to capture, how he could tell them all about his friends and their filthy, unorthodox conversations, if they would just let him go. Of course, a bark from the speakers mounted on the walls of the cell had quickly shut him up, but as soon as the guards came to collect him, oh, how he’d gone back to hollering the same things again. He’d latched onto the nearest object when they started to drag him out forcefully – and that object turned out to be edge of the bench Gerard was sat on, so Gerard saw it all play out before his eyes: the kid, reduced to a sobbing mess, had offered to tell them anything again. The kid had screamed as he pointed at Gerard, “That gentleman over there, I know what he’s really done, what he’s hiding!” And when they had given a particularly hard yank, the kid had just started blubbering without any incoherency. “He did it – I didn’t do it!” He was quite possibly still referring to Gerard, but the kid was already too far gone. He’d just started pointing randomly at the different captives within the cell. “You want him, or him – just, not me! Please, not me!” And Gerard had watched him mutely, face bearing no sympathy, as the kid was finally towed out of the cell. His screeches had rung and trailed into the cell from the hallway, turning into faint echoes as he was dragged away.
But the kid’s animalistic howls had continued to ring in Gerard’s head, and his wild, desperate eyes had haunted Gerard for the rest of his stay in the cell. He kept wondering if he would be reduced to the very same state in his last moments.
That question was very quickly answered when they finally took Gerard away. When they came for him – “77409, Way”, that’s his name now, just a bunch of numbers and his surname – he’d just stood up without a sound and followed them out. He’s resigned, through and through. He had been running away from the police for a long time, but they have finally caught up, and there is no way to escape. Everything is over.
“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
-- Part III, Chapter II, 1984
There was a shorter period of waiting, when he was first relocated to an isolated, single-person prison cell, before he was finally taken to a small room to be ‘re-educated and reintegrated’. There, he spends hours and days in the company of a gaunt, bespectacled man, who has gangly limbs, light brown hair parted to one side and slicked back nice and neat, and a face that never smiles. Déjà vu hit Gerard when he first entered the room and saw the man sat at the desk; there’s just something about his face that reminds Gerard of somebody he used to know, and it keeps plaguing him throughout his entire rehabilitation session with the man, but he can’t put a finger on who it is exactly.
In the first stage of the re-education, the man allows Gerard to ask questions. Gerard almost asks whether he’s known the man before, but he doesn’t. He asks about his capture instead, how they found about him. “Your journal. The antique shop proprietor is also a member of the Thought Police, just to clarify. And of course, there are the telescreens. The Party takes no risks. There are telescreens everywhere, you know that,” the man answers with a frighteningly calm expression. Then, as if sensing what Gerard’s thinking, he adds, “Yes, even in Frank’s flat. He just didn’t know it.”
“Oh.” It’s a dull sound. Gerard wonders if his spirit is already broken. “Where is Frank now?”
“Labour camp,” the man drawls in his monotone, and Gerard isn’t even the slightest bit shocked. He must have been more or less expecting this, although he’d rather they shoot them both. He thinks of all the rumoured hardships people are subject to in the camps, but the man interrupts his thoughts.
“You must be worrying about Frank.” Gerard nods, amazed. So far, that man has never failed to read his mind. “Frank is not your concern now. He is a fragment of your past. Right now what you need to focus on is the reintegration. The sooner we fix your head, the sooner you’ll be released back into the society.”
“But I’m not crazy,” Gerard says with a quiet voice.
“No, you’re not, but you might as well be, by the Party’s standards. You are severely disillusioned about the world. If you think you can change anything by yourself, you’re wrong. You are the last of the dying breed that still clings onto the ideals that once defined mankind.” There is nothing passionate about the man’s voice when he delivers the speech; his voice is sharp, precise, clinical, and in less surreal settings Gerard would’ve shivered.
“And now, you must learn to think the way you were taught to.” The man heads over to one side of the room to uncover a machine that had previously been concealed by shadows. What follows is a blur of electroshock and questioning. If Gerard got the answers wrong, he would get the highest voltage. If he chose the right answer but didn’t really understand why it was the right answer, he was still given the highest voltage. “The point is not to have you answer accordingly. You are a very intelligent man, Gerard. It isn’t that hard to learn to perform doublethink.” Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in one’s head at the same time; Gerard had indeed never understood how it worked. It seemed entirely impossible to him, yet, in the midst of the pounding headaches caused by the torture, he’s managed to grasp the beginnings of it. Gerard wonders if his spirit is really that easily broken. But that can’t be the case, he thinks to himself, because through it all, even when his vision starts to swim, and his body starts convulsing, he still loves Frank.
“We aren’t breaking your spirit yet; just reshaping the way you see the world. And you’ve done very well,” the man says; it’s not a praise, just a factual statement. But what he announces next shatters any lingering thought of rebellion
“The final stage of your re-education will be continued in Room 101.” That is where your spirit will be broken,the man doesn't say, but Gerard knows it.
The man escorts Gerard down a maze of corridors, before they turn into a seemingly endless, narrow hallway. It’s high-ceilinged, the cold, metallic blue walls stretching upwards forever into the dark. The lighting throws menacing shadows over the face of the nameless man walking beside Gerard. He looks away. To one side is a row of rooms, all their doors shut. Upon closer inspection, Gerard discovers they’re all numbered 101.
“They are all Room 101,” The man confirms, again reading Gerard’s mind. “They all cater to different fears. Yours is needles, right?”
Gerard nods, swallowing thickly. He is numb, but fear isn’t absent in his chest.
“Your room is over there.” They walk down the hallway in silence, until they arrive at a room guarded by two other officers, dressed in the same uniform as the man that’s been re-educating Gerard.
“Mikey Way,” the guards greet, nodding at the strangely familiar man beside Gerard, and the man – Mikey, nods curtly at the two guards in response. Gerard doesn’t catch the names of the two guards, because he is too busy making the connections in his head. He thinks, light brown bird-nest like hair, recalls large, lopsided glasses, and tiny feet trailing behind him and following him everywhere. Best friend, he thinks. Little brother, he thinks, and feels his stomach drop.
Just as Mikey is about to turn around and leave, Gerard darts out a hand to hold onto his arm. He needs to know for sure. “You’re my brother?” Gerard blurts out just as the guards looming behind him move to pull Gerard back, and Mikey signals for them to relax.
“Yes,” He answers, still as cool and calm. He doesn’t look apologetic at all.
Gerard’s silent for a moment, and he almost watches Mikey go, but he shouts out just as the guards open the door to the Room 101 behind him. “What happened to mom and dad?”
“I denounced them.” He says this simply, his face still the same infuriating display of neutrality, and turns on his heels to leave. He doesn’t even say goodbye. Gerard doesn’t really feel anything afterwards – not even when the guards escort him into the room, not even when the door swings shut.
The moment he came to, he knew he was inside the Ministry of Love. He just knew. He had been propped up on one of the three concrete benches that lined and protruded from the walls, his back slumped and stiff. And there were others, still dressed in the clothes they had worn when they were caught. There were all kinds of criminals; there had been the odd political prisoner, like Gerard, but most of them were common criminals: smugglers, black-market merchants, petty thieves, beggars, drunks, prostitutes, and many more examples of depravity. Gerard had in particular flinched when he saw the prostitute taken away – immediately Frank and his lovely smile had flitted through his mind – but he remained stoic, for the most part.
Occasionally, one of the guards patrolling outside would unlock the barred door to collect a fellow captive (presumably to march him towards the tortures), and there would be a new person thrust into the cell. In between these instances, there were just long periods of waiting. It might have been days, weeks, or even months of waiting – there was really no way of telling the time, because the lights were always on. And in that period of time, only one occurrence stuck in Gerard’s mind. It was one of those younger, fanatical Inner Party members, and he had only been kept in the cell for three days – four at most, before he was taken out again. Gerard could tell the kid was in for committing thoughtcrime; how exactly did that orthodox automaton end up thinking unorthodox thoughts is beyond Gerard, but there was no doubt about it. Because the kid had kicked and cried when he’d first arrived, screaming at the top of his lungs about how he wasn’t the one they wanted to capture, how he could tell them all about his friends and their filthy, unorthodox conversations, if they would just let him go. Of course, a bark from the speakers mounted on the walls of the cell had quickly shut him up, but as soon as the guards came to collect him, oh, how he’d gone back to hollering the same things again. He’d latched onto the nearest object when they started to drag him out forcefully – and that object turned out to be edge of the bench Gerard was sat on, so Gerard saw it all play out before his eyes: the kid, reduced to a sobbing mess, had offered to tell them anything again. The kid had screamed as he pointed at Gerard, “That gentleman over there, I know what he’s really done, what he’s hiding!” And when they had given a particularly hard yank, the kid had just started blubbering without any incoherency. “He did it – I didn’t do it!” He was quite possibly still referring to Gerard, but the kid was already too far gone. He’d just started pointing randomly at the different captives within the cell. “You want him, or him – just, not me! Please, not me!” And Gerard had watched him mutely, face bearing no sympathy, as the kid was finally towed out of the cell. His screeches had rung and trailed into the cell from the hallway, turning into faint echoes as he was dragged away.
But the kid’s animalistic howls had continued to ring in Gerard’s head, and his wild, desperate eyes had haunted Gerard for the rest of his stay in the cell. He kept wondering if he would be reduced to the very same state in his last moments.
That question was very quickly answered when they finally took Gerard away. When they came for him – “77409, Way”, that’s his name now, just a bunch of numbers and his surname – he’d just stood up without a sound and followed them out. He’s resigned, through and through. He had been running away from the police for a long time, but they have finally caught up, and there is no way to escape. Everything is over.
“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
-- Part III, Chapter II, 1984
There was a shorter period of waiting, when he was first relocated to an isolated, single-person prison cell, before he was finally taken to a small room to be ‘re-educated and reintegrated’. There, he spends hours and days in the company of a gaunt, bespectacled man, who has gangly limbs, light brown hair parted to one side and slicked back nice and neat, and a face that never smiles. Déjà vu hit Gerard when he first entered the room and saw the man sat at the desk; there’s just something about his face that reminds Gerard of somebody he used to know, and it keeps plaguing him throughout his entire rehabilitation session with the man, but he can’t put a finger on who it is exactly.
In the first stage of the re-education, the man allows Gerard to ask questions. Gerard almost asks whether he’s known the man before, but he doesn’t. He asks about his capture instead, how they found about him. “Your journal. The antique shop proprietor is also a member of the Thought Police, just to clarify. And of course, there are the telescreens. The Party takes no risks. There are telescreens everywhere, you know that,” the man answers with a frighteningly calm expression. Then, as if sensing what Gerard’s thinking, he adds, “Yes, even in Frank’s flat. He just didn’t know it.”
“Oh.” It’s a dull sound. Gerard wonders if his spirit is already broken. “Where is Frank now?”
“Labour camp,” the man drawls in his monotone, and Gerard isn’t even the slightest bit shocked. He must have been more or less expecting this, although he’d rather they shoot them both. He thinks of all the rumoured hardships people are subject to in the camps, but the man interrupts his thoughts.
“You must be worrying about Frank.” Gerard nods, amazed. So far, that man has never failed to read his mind. “Frank is not your concern now. He is a fragment of your past. Right now what you need to focus on is the reintegration. The sooner we fix your head, the sooner you’ll be released back into the society.”
“But I’m not crazy,” Gerard says with a quiet voice.
“No, you’re not, but you might as well be, by the Party’s standards. You are severely disillusioned about the world. If you think you can change anything by yourself, you’re wrong. You are the last of the dying breed that still clings onto the ideals that once defined mankind.” There is nothing passionate about the man’s voice when he delivers the speech; his voice is sharp, precise, clinical, and in less surreal settings Gerard would’ve shivered.
“And now, you must learn to think the way you were taught to.” The man heads over to one side of the room to uncover a machine that had previously been concealed by shadows. What follows is a blur of electroshock and questioning. If Gerard got the answers wrong, he would get the highest voltage. If he chose the right answer but didn’t really understand why it was the right answer, he was still given the highest voltage. “The point is not to have you answer accordingly. You are a very intelligent man, Gerard. It isn’t that hard to learn to perform doublethink.” Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in one’s head at the same time; Gerard had indeed never understood how it worked. It seemed entirely impossible to him, yet, in the midst of the pounding headaches caused by the torture, he’s managed to grasp the beginnings of it. Gerard wonders if his spirit is really that easily broken. But that can’t be the case, he thinks to himself, because through it all, even when his vision starts to swim, and his body starts convulsing, he still loves Frank.
“We aren’t breaking your spirit yet; just reshaping the way you see the world. And you’ve done very well,” the man says; it’s not a praise, just a factual statement. But what he announces next shatters any lingering thought of rebellion
“The final stage of your re-education will be continued in Room 101.” That is where your spirit will be broken,the man doesn't say, but Gerard knows it.
The man escorts Gerard down a maze of corridors, before they turn into a seemingly endless, narrow hallway. It’s high-ceilinged, the cold, metallic blue walls stretching upwards forever into the dark. The lighting throws menacing shadows over the face of the nameless man walking beside Gerard. He looks away. To one side is a row of rooms, all their doors shut. Upon closer inspection, Gerard discovers they’re all numbered 101.
“They are all Room 101,” The man confirms, again reading Gerard’s mind. “They all cater to different fears. Yours is needles, right?”
Gerard nods, swallowing thickly. He is numb, but fear isn’t absent in his chest.
“Your room is over there.” They walk down the hallway in silence, until they arrive at a room guarded by two other officers, dressed in the same uniform as the man that’s been re-educating Gerard.
“Mikey Way,” the guards greet, nodding at the strangely familiar man beside Gerard, and the man – Mikey, nods curtly at the two guards in response. Gerard doesn’t catch the names of the two guards, because he is too busy making the connections in his head. He thinks, light brown bird-nest like hair, recalls large, lopsided glasses, and tiny feet trailing behind him and following him everywhere. Best friend, he thinks. Little brother, he thinks, and feels his stomach drop.
Just as Mikey is about to turn around and leave, Gerard darts out a hand to hold onto his arm. He needs to know for sure. “You’re my brother?” Gerard blurts out just as the guards looming behind him move to pull Gerard back, and Mikey signals for them to relax.
“Yes,” He answers, still as cool and calm. He doesn’t look apologetic at all.
Gerard’s silent for a moment, and he almost watches Mikey go, but he shouts out just as the guards open the door to the Room 101 behind him. “What happened to mom and dad?”
“I denounced them.” He says this simply, his face still the same infuriating display of neutrality, and turns on his heels to leave. He doesn’t even say goodbye. Gerard doesn’t really feel anything afterwards – not even when the guards escort him into the room, not even when the door swings shut.
@fiftyshadesofmrway
thanks for reading and leaving feedback ^_^ much appreciated :)
4/13/14