The Think Tank
Ryan Schiff

I signed up for a seven month hermitage. I’ve been in here a long time.

I remember the light. There was one room in the old jail with beautiful red windows. The light turned your skin pink and blue if you sat near them at the right time of day. Sometimes the light would do this thing… When it would hit the right kind of glass, it would break into ribbons of light and shimmer and dance. Think of it, light breaking apart, shattered by glass!

I remember how words looked. I wonder if they still look the same. I used to write them, at the old jail, squiggles and lines on the pages, my “journal”. That’s why I’m here, because of what I wrote. They’re testing me.

By signing up, I didn’t really mean I signed up, more or less. I was signed up, put here, placed here, given the chance to be here, because of what I wrote.

I miss pages. They’re great, magical things. I loved feeling them after I’d written on them because the letters on them had sunk in because I only got one pen each month and they always ran out of ink.

I’ve been in the tank for a long, long time. They took four years off my prison sentence so that they could try this thing. It’s dark in here. I used to think the color black was dark. This is darker. The walls are smooth as the no-light, an oblong dome, slightly flat at the floor, a perfect dome that never lets anything in or out. Not light, not by a long shot. Not even sound. I almost thought it was a good deal at first.

I loved sound. Pens made great sounds, clicking away at the paper. Great sound. In here I hate sound because it’s oblong and swollen like the dome. It echoes but it isn’t an echo, just a muffled sound. It sounds like what a person typing with their face would write. That’s why I stopped talking a while ago, because the echoes were too much.

I wanted to compose my thesis on my hermitage.

I think it was a while ago. I’ve slept a lot since then. With no light and no sound, there is no time in here. I might have stopped talking about two months ago. At first I was counting sleeps, twelve sleeps, twenty sleeps, forty-two sleeps seemed like a big deal. I did the math before I got here, I’ve got at least one hundred and forty sleeps. I did almost half of them before I forgot. When I stopped talking, I started counting sleeps again. I made it to a number in the lower teens before I forgot to do that too. Now all I do in here is think.

From what I know, this is how things go inside the think tank. I might be out soon. I might be out very soon. I might be out very, very soon.