CHAPTER 22
Day and night were meaningless distinctions in solitary confinement. Simon forgot how long it had been since he last saw another human being. At the Secret Seminary, Mr. Stern had prepared a crisis training program to equip the students for interrogations and torture. It hardly touched on the horror of total isolation.
And the silence. It made his ears physically hurt. At times, Simon was convinced he heard voices talking. Some hissed to one another in the darkness, teasing Simon’s sleep away. Others were kinder, softer, but vanished as soon as he responded to them. At the Secret Seminary, he had been one of the quickest to memorize Bible passages, but here, with his body kept a few crumbs away from starvation, his mind tortured by the darkness and timelessness of his cell, it
