Back in the cell, my skin has become so goddamn itchy from the soap I washed with, I feel as if I’m going to lose my mind. I scratch my right shoulder, then my right cheek. I give my forehead a good rub with both palms, then the back of my ears, and the back of my right thigh. I dig my fingernails into my shins—good God, my shin—and scratch, scratch, scratch . . .
Outside in the corridor, I hear the jangling of keys, and as I’m giving my abdomen a vigorous going over, the door slides open. Bear tells me to put my uniform shirt on, to get ready to go.
“Where to?”
“The infirmary,” he answers.
I pull the gray short-sleeved, button-down shirt over my head, slip on the sandals and step out of the cell.
“Tuck your shirt in.”
The shorts issued to me yesterday are three inches too big around the waist. I have rolled them up to keep them from dropping down to my ankles. Tucking the shirt in just makes the whole get-up look all the more ridiculous.
From the far end of the cell block, a ragged-looking man in an orderly’s uniform slinks towards me like an ambivalent angel of death. Sickly pale and scrawny, the orderly is a paragon of ill health. Worse yet, his skin is so severely afflicted with dermatitis it makes me itch even more just looking at him. Brushed back, his scraggly gray hair barely hides a scalp covered with thick eczema.
The orderly asks if I speak Japanese. Not so much a question as a forlorn whimper. I tell him I do and his dry, scabby face cracks with constrained relief.
“Follow me, then.”