It was Hell. Robert spent most of his twelve to thirteen hour shifts sitting in a metal chair, reading The Crusade of Davenport under a shady lamp with the aid of an old dictionary to keep him educated on language. He stood from his chair once every two hours, or at least shifted, to prevent himself from developing ulcers on his backside. And he was perpetually alone, too. Regardless of the amount of inmates he had, or the five minute guard exchange with Jay, he considered himself trapped in solitary confinement indefinitely.
Pessimistic and as sad as an undertaker, life was meaningless to Robert, but death was much more remarkable. Death meant action, change, and purpose. Closure.
It was early morning on the night of Iggy's operation and like clockwork, Robert put down his ragged book and stood from his chair. He had a limp in his left leg that slanted his whole posture, causing him to stand at about five foot six, which was three inches shorter than he was prior to the injury. He opened the main door and a soldier from upstairs pushed the gurney through from the other side. He let go once it crossed the threshold. "Contact Doctor Branching when this one wakes up," he ordered before retreating. There was no medical folder, no name check, and no verification of any kind.
Robert brought the gurney in by the top rail without looking down at who was lying on top. He opened the door to an empty cell with his key, and tossed Iggy inside onto the floor. Once the gurney was empty, he returned it to the Base Prison door and pushed it out of the hallway back to the other side where it could be transported back up to the labs. Then, he returned to his seat and reopened his book. The rest of his shift carried out with no excitement. Jay took over and Robert retired for a twelve hour rest in the closet sized bedroom in the back of the prison. But then, before he knew it, he found himself in the same chair again finishing the same book that he had started the night before.
In the creaky silence, Iggy made a long mournful groan. Work was calling. Robert only had the one inmate, so he stood up and approached the cell to see what was happening, even though it was not a necessary responsibility in his job title. He unhinged the radio from his belt and held it close to his mouth. His voice was very harsh and raspy, he hardly recognized it. "Base to labs-"
A staticy voice responded, "labs to base-"
"Subject 17 is conscious. Should I bring him back up?"
Iggy lifted his heavy head off of the cold cement floor. Dark dirty walls surrounded him and a grungy barred wall separated the room from the gloomy hallway on the other side. It was dark there, but for some reason the shadows held no presence over him. He pushed himself up. His arms shook under his shoulders inadequately, like toothpicks that were ready to snap, but still he wobbled up to standing, dizzy and confused, hunching forward.
An incredible yet terrible tightness gripped his chest. He peered down through the neck hole of his bloodied white shirt and saw a freshly cut wound running in a lateral line from his sternal notch down to his xiphoid process. His sternum was rigid and broken and it was wet and stitched shut. Regardless of the extra stitches, the bones in his chest were hardly able to contain the monstrosity inside. The left side of his chest moved up and down with the beating heart, but it was not right. It was too tight. Besides the swelling, the organ was too large for the natural cavity of his chest. With each heartbeat, a hyperactive itch erupted behind his esophagus and begged for a scratching, but was impossible to appease.
He reached up his shirt with a shaking hand, and traced his skin until he felt the first few stitches with his fingertip, then he stopped. His blood pressure dropped. A cold flush in his cheeks, his heart pumped harder to catch up, and nausea made him hunch further over. He wrapped his fingers around the bars on the wall to hold himself up, unknowing that he was over estimating the strength that he had in his hands.
When his vision stopped shaking, he looked up from the floor, tracing Robert's oil stained boots and dirty dark gray jumpsuit upwards. The ragged man standing before him appeared older than sixty, although he was fifty seven. His hair was grayer than brown, wiry and long enough to cover the tops of his ears in spirals. It smoothed out into his beard. His nose was lumpy and crooked to the right, with a deep dip under his septum that disappeared behind the beard. The hard wrinkles etched into his face gave him a miserable look that never went away.
Iggy pushed into the lingering light leaking in from the hallway. His eyes were gleaming, but he didn't reach through the bars, and he wasn't salivating from his mouth, either. Instead, he was standing still, rather self-restrained and that struck Robert as odd.
"No, no. There's no need," the radio responded. "Just let me know when he dies."
The hair stood up on the back of Robert's neck and his eyebrows furrowed near the top of his nose. He held the speaker closer to his ear and paced away from the cell. "Can you repeat that?"
Through the radio, the responder sighed and it sounded like a blast of static. "He's a dumper. The transplant was botched. A failure. No matter what, the left pulmonary artery wouldn't seal. I tried just about everything. When I asked for the original heart back, Dr. James Kern already had it cut up."
Avoiding the usual doctor drama of who did what, Robert responded back quickly. "I see. A dumper. How long should it be?"
"It's hard to say. I kind of liked this subject, so I gave him a steady intake of anti-inflammatory medicine on his left lower hip that will prevent the heart from rejecting out of his body right away." Iggy lifted the bottom edge of his shirt and looked down at his hip. He found the small medicine box taped to his skin sending chemical concoctions into him. The chills rattled him from his core outwards now that he knew that they were talking about him. "I'd say it will sustain him for about two weeks. If you get impatient, you can take it off yourself. That will speed the process up. That or you could just kill him in your own way."
Robert leaned along the opposite wall in the hallway with his ankles crossed, and peered down at Iggy's lower hip from a distance, but didn't quite understand. "What's the point?" he asked. "He'll starve by two weeks, anyways."
"I'm not sentencing him to starvation," the radio responded. "If you have any prisoners coming in, by all means, send them to their demise. I sent him down with a full stomach to encourage healing of the heart transplant, but it was obviously useless."
"Alright. I understand. I'll let you know." Robert flipped the radio on silent and stepped forward. "So, that's why."
Iggy pulled away from the bars. He gravitated to the furthest cement wall and kept himself from collapsing, then he laid one hand flat over the wound and the other over the medicine patch on his hip. "Please, don't take it off."
Robert came to the front of the cage and made a wide stance. "I won't do that," he said. He dragged the radio antenna along his own sternum to push it shut. "But, I won't stop you from doing it, either." Robert backed away around the corner of the cell and sank back down into his old metal chair.
The itching and grinding in Iggy's chest was so irritating that he could feel it in his throat, mouth, and under his skin. He was exhausted, too. He gazed up at the criss crossing of two steel bars and his eyes filled with heavy tears. "Why would they steal my heart?" he dared to ask.