Inside the office of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), there is a fortress. There is also a dungeon.

The fortress is made of desks and towers of shelves and stacks of disorganized papers, periodicals and books. It is the workplace of 10 aides.

They are slim, which is a good thing, for there is little room to move. There is also little floor visible. The desks are lined up facing one another. On top are dark-chocolate-colored bookshelves that block the view of anyone sitting opposite. And staffers on one side of the fortress can hear those on the other side only if they shout.

But this isn’t the dungeon. No, no — the dungeon is even less luxurious.

The dungeon, also known as The Room, is reserved for Isreal Mallard. Apart from Mallard, its occupants are a broken fax machine and a printer. There are no windows and no door (the latter has been taken off its hinges).

It is bleak, dark and lonely and looks like what it is — a once and future kitchen closet. Its location means that Mallard gets to talk to people only when they come to the kitchen to get coffee or food.

He has been in solitary confinement in The Room for three weeks.

“Everything else was full, so I had to take what was available,” he says.

He does not despair at his circumstances but is glad to be working on Capitol Hill. He has pinned a large American flag on the wall to remind himself what he’s doing there and to make it “patriotic as well as homey.” He insists on getting out of the office as much as he can.

“I’m never just stuck in this space,” he says.

In the confines of most Capitol Hill offices — and they are confining — aides must carve out privacy for themselves in any way they can because it does not occur naturally. Mallard is unusual because he craves company — privacy he already has in abundance.

For most aides, however, privacy is a luxury and getting it requires creativity.

One Democratic aide finds peace with ear buds plugged into his computer to wipe out the noise of a work colleague who talks too loudly on his cell phone.

“Others do their best to block it out, but it usually sends a flurry of IMs around the office so instead of letting it get to me, I tune out via the ear buds,” the aide says.

For at least one House Appropriations Committee staffer, finding privacy means cleaning her desk and leaving when the committee holds a hearing; her desk and computer are in the committee hearing room.

An aide in one Republican office says buds are likewise used on the GOP side of the aisle to overcome the drawbacks of confined workspace.

“A lot of us in our office like to use our iPods to tune out and stay focused,” he says.

The drawbacks of cramped conditions vary from one office to another. During the Atkins diet fad, one GOP aide had to endure the smell of a colleague’s pork chops first thing in the morning. His desk was surrounded by the kitchen and office supplies. The co-worker would heat up pork chops at 9 a.m. just inches from his head.

“I once leaned back on my chair knocked the coffee pot off the refrigerator, onto the heater,” he says.

Seven people worked in a 20-by-20-foot space, he says, adding, “The quarters were so cramped, they had to take the door off between the office and the reception area in order to fit the last person in.”

Since then the office has acquired a new chief of staff whose first priority was to reconfigure the space with modular furniture to “cubicle-ize the office,” make things more comfortable and minimize the smell of reheated meat.

Lanier Avant, chief of staff to Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), uses a “virtual door” to create his own space. The door is an unspoken rule that anyone who approaches to talk to him must first knock on the side of his desk.

“Everyone follows the rule, except the congressman,” Avant says. “He’s exempt.”

Avant says that cramped quarters can be difficult but that he and his colleagues have gotten used to certain realities.

“If somebody’s wife or girlfriend is not acting right everybody knows it, and we can tell from the unmistakable sign of a phone slamming because we never slam the phone on constituents,” he says. “We try to respect each other’s privacy as much as we can.”

One of the most notorious small spaces on Cannon’s fifth floor belongs to the office of Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.). It’s called The Cage, and for good reason. It’s across the hall from the official suite, and a small crew of interns is usually hard at work inside. The Cage has visible pipes and cables, and on one side there are what appear to be strips of metal, enhancing the sense of imprisonment.

The Cage has no windows. It has heat, music and cooking smells (lasagna on the day I visited). A clever sign on the wall reads, “Welcome to the Pent House Suite.”

“It gets kind of depressing if you’re back here by yourself,” says Andrew Menaquabe, an intern who spent his first few weeks working here alone.

Daniel Goetzl, another intern here, says daylight comes as a shock after being caged. “When you go outside the sun hits you so hard,” he says, explaining, “You don’t see the light of day.”

But there are advantages.

“I really like being back here,” says Rachel Levine, another intern. “The office seems so formal sometimes. [This] puts me at ease.”

Gesturing to the main office, Menaquabe agrees, saying, “It gets pretty hectic in there. Sometimes people get kind of moody.”

Goetzl nods his head and says, “Yeah, you don’t have to deal with the drama.”

In the legislative back room of Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), life is confined but not unmanageable for the six aides working cheek by jowl. Caroline Nugent, the scheduler, remembers walking in and thinking, “This is it?” followed by, “I hope I like who’s sitting next to me.”

Mercifully, it was Joelle Marquardt, a legislative correspondent with whom she gets along well. They say the many TVs in the room offer a sensation of white noise and privacy.

Ryan Loskarn, Blackburn’s press secretary, says he has trouble throwing things out, hence the clutter of his workspace across the room. But it doesn’t bother him.

“It’s just when you see them 10 hours a day for five days straight,” he says of co-workers. “Then it gets a little old.”

In one Democratic office in the Rayburn Building, six aides and two interns occupy their small legislative room. It is well-organized and clean, but space is scarce.

“Nothing is said that someone else can’t overhear,” says the communications director, “so you learn to become very good friends very quickly and you can easily tell who has been drinking the night before.”

The upside of such a confined space, the aide says, is that you can have a six-person conversation without much difficulty.

Despite the close friendships, aides in this office place file folders on top of their desks to avoid major eye contact with neighbors opposite.

“It’s kind of a poor man’s cubicle,” the communications director explains.

Back in Jackson Lee’s office, Gregory Berry, the congresswoman’s legislative director for the past three months, enjoys a prime piece of real estate. It’s the corner desk next to the window, which offers him breathing space and sunlight, but access comes only via a narrow strip of carpet along one side of the fortress (and plenty of “excuse mes” to aides along the way). One such aide is Michael McQuerry, the press secretary, who sits next to Berry.

He says he finds peace in such a small space by keeping his desk tidy. He brightens his mood by keeping a cubbyhole for tchotchkes he has collected at congressional receptions — small stuffed animals, glasses and such.

Tracelyn Hairston, a summer intern from Howard University, looks happy enough now, but for the first week after she arrived she found herself overapologizing because she felt as though she was always in someone’s way.

Her desk is a table she shares with another intern. It’s stuffed between the fortress and the copier, which leaves a sliver of space when other aides are walking by or making copies.

Now she takes her space issues in stride, and even smiles at the awkwardness of moving.

“I try to keep as close to the desk as possible rather the walkway,” she says. “It’s hard, but I do my best.”