(Author's important notes: In the 'Yin Anecdotes', the author departs from the usual themes in order to conceptualize his brooding psyche in fiction. The stories in this series contain nudity, _s_e_x_, violence and profanity, but not always all at once. The characters and plot are merely a synthesis of actual people and events, and should not be construed as otherwise. The author would like to state categorically that he does not condone acts of violence and terrorism of any form against the weak and helpless, particularly children, women, homo_s_e_x_uals and all minority groups.)
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It was the morning of the eighth day, and the lights came on in Room 108.
"All right, Ari, it's time to get up," the muscular orderly said in a grisly voice, assumed to instill fear. The troubled young man who lay on the gurney turned groggily to look up at his attendants. Sickened from the lingering effects of too many sedative-induced nights, he groaned. Juan methodically released the wrist restraints and the two men took each of Ari's arms and pulled him upright.
"Here's your breakfast, and after that you'll have a BM and shower," Wing said, summarizing the day's itinerary, not that it meant anything to Ari for he heard nothing except the droning in his head. Always the droning; he heard it even in his dreams. How it hurt and placed his head just on the brink of exploding.
The men had been warned to take next to no chance with this one: he was mean and crazy, without a doubt, he was a danger to himself and others, and they ought not to believe his smiles or pleas or tears. Why, he had strangled to death his only parent, his mother. And then for a month he ate, slept and lived right there on the bed while the body started to decompose and stink and then the stench rose to the sky and neighbors were roused to the odd odour that overwhelmed them enough to call the police. When the police arrived, they had found him wiping the semen from his penis and the corpse's vagina. And when they arrested him, he had asked to kiss his decayed mother goodbye for the last time.
All the employees had also been told to take unlimited precaution to ensure that the boy did not go anywhere unsupervised, and that one of his wrists or feet should always be restrained.
Thus heeding the instructions, the orderlies put a straitjacket on Ari before they fed him his breakfast.
"This stuff tastes like chaff, sir, and smells like goat manure. I don't wish for anymore," Ari said, masticating boorishly on his first mouthful.
The boy's eyes were frightfully sanpaku for all the drugs and he seemed ready to attack at anytime.
"No can do, you will be a good boy and finish all of it or there'll be no books today," Wing replied, hesitantly extending another spoonful of the sticky goo to his charge's mouth.
"I said I don't want it anymore, f**k it!" the boy snarled.
"You have a filthy mouth and filthy manners," the tougher and nastier Juan warned, "you're going straight to Dr Iqbal." His hand instinctively went to the grotesque-looking blackjack in his belt harness.
The threat of a session with Dr Iqbal was always useful to produce a ready epidemic of denunciation of an intent by the inmates to stage a mutiny or rebellion. In the history of this institution since its foundation was laid during the British Occupation fifty years ago, no one who had spent a session with the doctor came out of the experience with his body, mind or soul unscathed. Dr Iqbal was advanced of age now and he wore his belly rotund and his pince-nez low on the bridge but he was a strapping old man who had lost none of his prowess to break the impervious defenses of even the most hard-core of his patients. Now, these were all young boys, and men, no more than nineteen, for the St. Ignatius Mental Care Facility had been founded specifically to rehabilitate male delinquents, too young for the State Penitentiary, and by reason of insanity had escaped time in the Boys' Reformatory. But they were nevertheless State property now.
And as State property, they were subjected to the dictates of Dr Iqbal's strict regime.
The door now closed on Ari. The odour of a mixture of medicine and antiseptic made him all the more nauseated. His giddiness returned. He hated being here as much as in his cell, so it did not matter one way or the other that he would carry on his uncivil behavior before the doctor.
Dr Iqbal regarded with a frown his career one hundred and thirty-sixth, and newest, patient, who was sitting on the plush leather single-seater opposite him. Ari's thighs were spread apart and appeared as defiant as the truculent way his eyebrows were knitted together. The boy's hostility notwithstanding, the doctor began to outline his professional opinion about what he thought was Ari's problem, hammering every word and sentence in by repetition. He also warned the boy of the punishment to follow if he chose to be difficult. The boy sat through the doctor's evaluation motionless, as if he were cast in lead. He listened with uncurious ears but seemed quite fascinated by the doctor's Adam's apple that was sliding up and down the throat.
After ten minutes, Dr Iqbal took off his pince-nez and laid them on his desk.
"What do you say, Ari?" he asked the black-haired youth.
"The hell I care," Ari snarled, his voice low and tiny.
"So be it," the doctor pronounced, gesturing, with a swift click of his fingers, to the boy's orderlies who were still in attendant, guarding the exit not too far from them.
In quick work, they had pulled Ari up from the chair. The straitjacket was the first to come off, followed very quickly by the white cotton shirt and pants that were all the institution uniform of the prisoners. There was no need for underwear for it made it easier if immediate punishment in any form, spanking, caning or whipping, as ordered by the doctor, was warranted. Such as was happening to Ari. Naked and frightened, he revolted against the forceful manhandling, while his body twisted and turned, and he snarled like a tormented animal. But too small and frail for the orderlies, he found himself carried up by his legs and arms, lifted up above their shoulders and then swiftly put face-down over the horse, his buttocks raised up on the elevated saddle. He saw his wrists and felt his feet being strapped to the four legs of the horse. He remembered that he had been in this place three times previously. He knew that his smooth bottom wore the evidences of the last three times he was in this very same place, in this exact position. Spread-eagled and bound tight, he then heard a crack; the doctor was now testing the strap on the desk, and the sound made his heart pound. It always did.
"You've spoken," the doctor said. "You've chosen to remain recalcitrant and unwilling to change or respond to kinder treatment. I hope you will respond a lot more positively to this alternative."
The doctor had no sooner spoken than the strap was raised and the first blow inflicted on the restrained young criminal's lower buttock cheeks.
"Eeeyahh!" Ari heard his own scream, and then couldn't stop his body from quavering at the pain of the skillfully-placed first stroke.
The second stroke came immediately after, landing right on the meaty part of his bottom, that which met the thighs. He screamed out aloud again.
But this only spurred on the doctor who gave the boy his third whipping exactly where the second had been placed. A broad white imprint immediately formed and it turned a fiery pink in seconds.
For the next five minutes, the strap brutally lambasted Ari's buttocks. Though weaker now from age, the doctor was not ready to surrender to his straining arms. The boy was as hard as they came, he knew, and this was always a challenge he felt his discipline method was equal to, his reform tool successfully met. He was schooled in the old thought, that if you spared the rod, you spoiled the child. He now held with reverential scorn all that psychology and modern medicine, which he had learned at Harvard, had given up on them when, at twenty-six, he had been disillusioned by the suicide death of his third patient at the local mental hospital. He had known then that he was a failure.
Not this time around: he was not making the same mistake. No, he knew for a long time that this was what Ari and all his charges needed, what they had missed from those crucial growing up years - not more pop psychology and text-book theory - but a good spanking by an adult who put up with no nonsense. Whatever was amiss with their head could be corrected at the bottom.
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! On and on and on, the strap was raised and lowered and raised and lowered until all he could hear emanating from the boy's throat was a string of spasmodic hiccoughs and wheezes.
He stopped now. He bent a little to examine the buttocks that lay quivering under him. He could not find a spot that was clear or the color of skin. He laid down his strap, a satisfied smile etched on his face.
"Free the boy and take him for his shower," he told the orderlies. "He is fairly subdued, but continue to use the restraints on him. Tomorrow I want him back here before breakfast. I have a feeling the boy is about to break."
The fair-skinned and more slender of the orderlies, the one called Wing, picked up the boy's clothes.
"No," the doctor said, stopping him, "just the straitjacket for now."
The straitjacket back on, Ari was led out into the corridor to the common bath. Naked form the waist he trudged along on weary feet between the two orderlies. He was not even aware of the stares and chuckles from his fellow-inmates who would have found it impossible to resist touching his shaved crotch and spanked bottom had they the privilege of ownership of right and space of the world of reality.
The bath was commonly busy. Breakfast was over, and it was now time for the boys' bowel movement and bath. Ari watched while one by one the other towel-clad boys, aged upwards from sixteen, for younger ones bathed in another wing, disappeared into the enclosed stalls with at least an orderly always in tow.
However Ari himself was to use the open bath - always the open bath - for he could not be trusted to use the ones with curtains that gave some privacy. The open bath was a large space at the end of the aisle and on its tiled wall were five showerheads that hung in symmetry along the eighteen-foot breadth. Beneath the showerheads were also five ordinary-looking latrines, but the most significant feature of the bath was the leather restraints nailed into the walls above each showerhead. It was this that made the difference in ensuring dangerous prisoners like Ari could cause no one harm even if they were left unattended for a long time, which sometimes happened when all the orderlies were called to defuse a fight.
Ari knew he was being watched with keenness as he was ushered, in full, unhampered view of the rest, to one of the unoccupied showerheads. In fact all were presently found unoccupied.
Hands were pressed down on his shoulders, forcing him onto one of the disinfected latrines. His toes curled in while he sat down to excrete, a task which he was struggling to achieve. His face wore the grimace of exertion.
"You know what to do, and you know what happens if you take longer than five minutes," he heard the order given.
Five minutes was a short time if you were constipated, and you were always constipated because the diet here was so different from your previous nourishment. Suddenly he was pulled up. The orderlies shook their head while they checked the bowl.
"All right, looks like he's going to need this," Wing said, unwrapping the foil to remove the glycerine suppository.
They turned Ari over the toilet and pulled apart his legs. The suppository glided easily up his anus and for the next fifteen minutes, they kept the squirming adolescent pressed down on the seat. Afterwards, the bowl was found filling somewhat and the boy was heard sighing with relief.
Now came the bath. The straitjacket came off once more. Hands raised and crossed over the pipe, wrists bound with leather, Ari stood under the showerhead waiting, while one of the orderlies dipped a mop into a bucket of soapy water. Then as he stood about two feet from Ari, which was the safety regulation position, Juan held up the mop at ninety degrees. In downward and upward sweeping movements, he covered the boy's body with the watered-down soap, scrubbing him skill-handedly. This part of the bath was quick, but now came the trouble spots where the grime and dirt collected most.
The two orderlies briefly consulted with each other, and it fell on Wing to scrub the spots with a sponge in his hands. He put a cuff around Ari's ankles first, and the scrubbing began. The crack was always the diciest; there was always the fear of touching something that one could catch, but it was necessary that cleaning the anus be thorough to remove all the remaining excrement. Finally the bath was finished with a scrub to Ari's hairless armpits and crotch. And then Juan pulled out the plug and the water quickly curled around Ari's toes and rushed evenly through the hole on the tiled floor.
All the boys, spotless and smelling fresh, were now ready to be called up for their daily evaluation with their doctors, but since Ari had had his already, it was certain that he would be omitted from another. He was delivered to his cell instead.
There, laid out on the edge of his bunk, was the usual clean change of uniform he must now wear.
"No, let him be," Wing told his partner, who was unbuckling the straitjacket to dress the boy. "But turn him on his stomach. He's not ready to be clothed yet."
Juan scowled at his friend's penis released from his open fly. The latter was stroking himself to a frenzy.
Eager and desperately impatient, Wing mounted the subdued Ari from behind and his massive tool was immediately put to pistoning the trapped youth's enlarged anus for half an hour. Ari had learned on his first day that being used for their orderlies' _s_e_x_ual gratification was nothing unusual for either himself or the other boys within these plastered walls, and none of them told. They were either too fearful or crazy to tell, and many were silenced by the knowledge that they needed to get along with their caretakers who were their ticket to a fag or fix, and to favors such as easier chores or leniency when a rule was broken.
Wing muffled his ecstasy while he shot his load into the boy's anus. And then the men exchanged places, Wing standing guard, with legs straddled, at the door and Juan, bare-bottomed, behind the naked Ari.
Juan took more time to climax but he climaxed twice, unloading his juices right into the indifferent boy.
At last clothed and warm under the blanket, Ari lay on his bunk, eyes closed. Alone finally, he counted the footsteps retreating from the corridor. He had three hours to think during the time that the psychological evaluation, taking its course on the floor below him, must be carried out for every one of the thirty-seven boys on this wing. He remembered today was the first day of the week, and this meant that there would be an assembly later. He also remembered that there would be public beatings to watch at an assembly. Then his muscles started to relax and he fell asleep ....