by Ryan Chapman
I visited the Westbrook library, though “library” isn’t the right word, it was an alcove with a door, too small to even turn around in. Squat bookcases heaved with mass-market paperbacks and Reader’s Digest omnibi. Good old Wilfred acted as our librarian, more in name than in function, often napping on a stool with his back to the decade-old PC resting on a card table. I was one of the only patrons, or anyway one of the only lenders, the others just wanted the computer time or one of the lawbooks for aspirational underlining. I must thank Wilfred for his generosity, he bent the rules regarding the number of loaned titles; a limit of twelve at a time, except for the Bible and the Koran—or rather I should say the Bible or the Koran—you could always append that to your call slip. (The Torah didn’t see much use.) The first time Wilfred slipped an extra atop the pile, an old Pocket Books edition of Ambrose Bierce stories I’d wait-listed via interlibrary loan—Westbrook, New Horizons, a handful of Bergen County facilities, Vassar—the first time he gave me the nod I felt an illicit charge in my veins. Of course, the screws counted during cell throws, but they chalked it up to special privileges. My collecting started in September, and within a month my cell was crowded with perilous towers circling the bed slab. And with those books—mostly library castoffs or rejected inheritances (hence all the Reader’s Digests)—the living histories of the objects themselves: tattooed with toilet-wine stains, Twombly-esque marginalia, and many, many pages stuck together. The towers got to be four feet, five feet tall. Screws would shake the bars without result, as if the stacks were possessed of an inner architecture outside of physics, outside of Westbrook law.
In my initial reconnaissance Wilfred said no other prison published a regular journal of arts and letters, as far as he knew. It was here that I began to understand the importance of the endeavor, if such a word can capture all that has since been unleashed and transformed and traduced. I admit now, hat in hand, I’d not originally planned anything more than the minimum required effort to satisfy Warden Gertjens—the minimum required effort being my personal preference for “going along to get along” inside. I’d seen time beat the enthusiasm out of even the sunniest inmate, it beats everything else out too. Incredible as it seems, I was asleep to my true self, asleep to the life of the artist. I’ve since drunk deeply from the cup of wisdom, replenished with TED Talks and Tropic of Cancer. You see, the artist stands alone. He stands alone from his people and at the same time among his people, not unlike the incarcerated man at once inside of and outside of society. You might argue because of this I have a doubled artistic temperament or at least a concentrated artistic temperament. I don’t expect my critics or my lawyer or those blue-hairs’ families to understand; they delineated small lives for themselves, they never sought the edge of the cliff.
Reader, you alone are my confessor and my ally; these words, my testament and my ablution.
In a way I have always sought the cliff’s edge, be it the figurative cliff of artistic ambition or the literal cliff back in Trincomalee’s north bay. Does it surprise the reader to learn I often hiked that mountain in my youth? I know how treacly it sounds, I wince as I type these words. If only those adolescent saunters were more original than simply gazing out at the refulgent waves. But there you have it. In my defense it was about the only thing to do in Trinco. Our lone soccer pitch had been annexed by a pack of mangy dogs, and bicycling was hazardous with the cordons of army trucks kicking up clouds of thick red-brown earth. When I wasn’t tending to my studies with Father Christopher, I scaled the mountain and gazed out at those endless refulgent waves. Twice I saw Tamil tigers’ skippers bearing south, their leaping bows hitting the water with shallow thunderclaps, their occupants standing defiant with to-do lists and purpose.
I remember one springtime weekday Father Christopher took me aside, wished me a blessed fourteenth birthday, and informed me play time was now considered idle time, and idleness was to be avoided at all costs. He needn’t have said anything more, and in fact he didn’t say anything more. I caught the conspiratorial look in his eye and knew I was being summoned to the hallowed local trade: catering to the whims of tourists. Today’s visitors can pick from luxury all-inclusives huddled on the coast cheek by jowl and financed by the Chinese and the UAE and the Ian Schrager Company, but back in those days there was only the Palm and the Ocean View, both owned by a Portuguese couple, the de Silvas, decent people with embarrassing accents.
Mr. and Mrs. de Silva reminisced often about the golden age, by which I took to mean the 1950s; I see now my golden age was just beginning. My teen years coincided with the drawdown of the conflict, plus I had the additional good fortune to be born Dutch Burgher: part of the local clerisy and, when it came to the separatists, neither here nor there. As any ethnographer of the subcontinent will tell you, I was bred to sniff out opportunities where others detect moral compromise. The tigers stapled people to the roads, President Rajapaksa volleyed grenades into the camps, and I sought my fortune. Before you judge me, wasn’t it your Thomas Jefferson who said a country needs destroyers and rebuilders? Well, the destroyers performed admirably; now it was my turn.
The tapestry of progress is threaded with capitalism, or so the Hilton Hotels advance man said, and I was his servant at the loom. A charming Brit with patrician manners, he installed himself in the Palm’s honeymoon villa and perched on the same barstool every evening with a sheaf of paperwork, sipping birdbath negronis and half watching the European children play with a life-size set of checkers on the beach. I wish I could tell you what it was about me that first drew his attention. Perhaps he could sense my industriousness and moral flexibility in the way I swept the fallen palm fronds from the hotel’s walkways. Or maybe Father Christopher’s Francophilia had instilled a Continental bearing in my demeanor, setting me apart from the other groundskeepers. Whatever the reason, it brought the hand of fate to rest on my shoulder, ask if I had a moment. I remember it now: the hand of fate was quite pale, with blond hair on the knuckles and a pinky ring from a magical land named “Eton.”
The Hilton Hotels advance man possessed the ease and bluntness of the born salesman, and in short order he’d prized my biography out of me, my biography and my half-formed aspirations, though in truth half is being generous. By then I’d already put in three years with the de Silvas, and he was the first person to ask me what I thought about anything of consequence, the first person to see me as capable of great things. I was wholly receptive to his need for the swiftest paths through Trinco’s jungle of bureaucracy in securing commercial zoning permits on beachfront property which may or may not have been assigned to tsunami-relief housing. In this case the housing did exist and was in use, but its inhabitants—tigers’ widows and/or magistrates’ mistresses—were an easily displaced lot, nothing a few official-looking mailers and borrowed army uniforms couldn’t solve.
Additionally, the Hilton Hotels advance man needed to know the respectful amounts of the many remunerative incentives for said magistrates, explaining that onetime bribes do little to cement the blood-oath trust required for large-scale development projects: “We’re in this for the long haul, my boy.” I brought on my friends Rajit and Georgy to assist in the delivery of these remunerations, the schedule of which was entirely my purview and, I must say, a source of pride. I’d entered management.
Speaking of trust, I knew I’d have to assure the Hilton Hotels advance man of his decision to work with a go-between such as myself. I introduced him to the Colombo municipal official who, during tea service at the Galle Face and arrack at the Captain, verified the magistrate was indeed cutting through the red tape as promised. (As a fillip to the proceedings I had the Colombo municipal official lament the absence of scrambled-egg breakfasts and American beer at the Palm and the Ocean View, amenities the Hilton Hotels advance man’s Hilton Hotel would bring to Trinco.)
The Hilton Hotels advance man also stressed the importance of a “work-life balance,” a strange term that caught on my tongue. He all but demanded three-day sojou
rns to Colombo, providing a list of recommended nightclubs and brothels. (Grand Opening had and might still have the best lunch buffet.) Rajit and I would freeze in the overnight train’s first-class cabin under an industrial A/C unit, watching it drip onto the mounted color TV and taking bets when it would short out.
We had no illusions, we knew everyone saw us as slow-gaited upcountry folk, but any embarrassment on our part was subsumed by the general jubilation of the weekender on payday, as well as the specific jubilation of the weekender spending his payday on prostitutes. Which is not to say I was a total spendthrift: for that I must credit Father Christopher’s financial acumen. While Rajit blew his earnings, I socked 60 percent in an HSBC online savings account recommended by the Hilton Hotels advance man. My needs were modest (and still are, really). I slept in one of the nondescript guard huts lining the Nilaveli Beach—tourists confused them for lifeguard stations, a joke that never failed to get a laugh with the women at Grand Opening—and entertained myself with the English-language books discarded by tourists: Nora Roberts, Patrick O’Brian, Jack Welch. After slogging through the classics at school this was something of a revelation. Though if I’m to be precise, my reading of the classics was done aloud, in fulfillment of my duties as Father Christopher’s aide-de-camp, and not entirely for myself, as it were. The man’s failing eyesight and the alcoholic handicap of the local optometrist meant daily recitations of favorite novels and philosophical tracts, the two of us sitting in teak rocking chairs and facing the bustling town square, now and then pausing to wave off the same three beggars. While I don’t regret my time with Father Christopher, I do wish we’d ended our sessions before five p.m., when the nursing school on the east side discharged its comely students. My hometown abstinence in those days was most certainly buttressed by the emasculating display of reading Proust to the town’s living symbol of fervent rectitude. A word on the books themselves: I figured Father Christopher’s taste had less to do with the sonorousness of the French language or the existentialism of its literature—which, I later appreciated, swaddled the frazzled intellects of the war-torn country in a blanket of individualist redress—no, I assumed Father Christopher loved the French because they were one of the few European countries to never bother colonizing us.
One day, after yet another slog through Temps perdu, Father Christopher asked how the work was going. He said it just like that, or in an approximate Sinhalese idiom. I was impressed as much by his attempt at modern colloquy as I was at his interest in my perspective on my own life. I relayed all of the horizon-broadening tasks I was doing for the Hilton Hotels advance man, plus a bowdlerized version of my Colombo visits. His response, thinking about it now, may have been the most instrumental reply of those formative years: “To what end?” After which he stood and entered his house to go to bed.
To what end, indeed. I’d seen the Hilton Hotels marketing literature: as impressive as the concierges looked, their jobs and their lives would still be inexorably tied to Trinco’s provincialism. If I may borrow a phrase by the irritating members of Westbrook’s NA community, I’d seen the light.
As for the work itself, it was Father Christopher who instilled the strong Jesuit values necessary to arrive at my present station. Sure, there were others jockeying for position within the growing black markets and gray markets circling the hotel developments. I was twice as industrious, twice as charming, and twice as willing to do what was needed. My reputation spread and brought continual work—or rather I should say constant work, paid out handsomely in US dollars. And so it was that in my eighteenth year on this planet, after a year of self-cultivation and increasing net worth, I discovered the truth in what the Hilton Hotels advance man had once slurred after his ninth finger of scotch: in times of national upheaval, a young man can go far.
I realize I’ve been over-salting the meal, as it were, with all these rose-colored memories. If only McNairy could see me now, waxing nostalgic about the motherland! In these final moments my mind races toward the earliest moments, toward a psychological safety net, when in fact I must contend with my present situation head-on, as it were. Readers demand an official accounting of events. I hope you’ll forgive these venial digressions, I know I must earn that forgiveness with candor and a laying out of the facts. Perhaps I should begin with the synapse-exploding, bowel-shaking artistic revelations I felt assembling that triumphant first issue.
Crucial to these revelations were the dusty books Wilfred pulled out of a rat-shit-freckled pile in the library, in addition to the handful of (ultimately fruitless) National Geographic back issues: The Trial by Franz Kafka, a Norton critical edition of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, the prison diaries of Nelson Mandela, and, just for fun, a pinup mag from the 1960s in what collectors would call “poor” condition. These texts changed my life, I read them and reread them and then forgot who said what in which book and read them again. Kafka, MLK, Mandela—the faces on my Mount Rushmore and the names printed in invisible ink above The Holding Pen’s masthead.
I didn’t read The Trial in the traditional sense, I remember I found the narrator quite boring. No, I read it spiritually. Josef is my penal spirit animal, my incarcerated brother-from-another-warden. And, yes, I’m sure everyone inside claims he “gets” Kafka, but not like I do. Even now, as I type these words from the dubiously fortified Media Center, I feel the Czech’s deep-set stare traveling over the astral expanse and drilling through my frontal cortex into the recesses of my lizard brain. Fear, anger, hunger, lust, Franz. My copy of The Trial is a cheap paperback from 1974, the inside front cover graffitied by three rows of simple declaratives in lead and ink—“Donald read this,” “Juice read this,” “Mehki read this,” and so on—which perhaps augmented its talismanic quality. Despite these names the book felt thrillingly sacred and thrillingly mine.
I should note this informal ledger wasn’t limited to old Franz; every book was marked as such. And to answer the question on your tongue: Yes, nine or ten names tracked very closely with my own path through the library holdings; my treasures had been their treasures. I came to think of these men as fellow travelers through the same autodidact wilds; but, no, I do not care to identify them here. When I mentioned my phantom book club to Wilfred, he confirmed what you may already suspect. They were, to a man, all pedos.
* * *
I see my pile of Aeron chairs has settled a bit. A moment ago one dislodged and tumbled over, producing a rather effective jump-scare. I know I shouldn’t worry about the strength of the barricade: I’ve done all I can with what was at hand. I’ve wedged the fallen chair into a bald spot between a footlocker and the doorframe. Looking at it afresh, I must tell you it is incredible that this loose collection of furniture is all that stands between life and death. I bow my head to these inanimate allies and hope they will exhibit solidarity and resolve when the time comes.
Returning to the books: future historians and hard-core fans might be interested to learn of my own reading habit, wherein I pluck an eyebrow or two and drop it between pages, deep in the spine. I did this constantly, McNairy found it unsettling and once asked, “What about the next guy who read the book?” In truth I had these readers in mind all along. I hoped for some geneticist several generations from now, paging through, discovering this skeleton key to my DNA, and reverse-engineering a second existence like in the Spielberg entertainment. Which is what I told McNairy: this eyelash habit was symptomatic of a fear of death. He shook his head and asked if I’d ever considered the pages’ likely contamination by the eyelashes, hair, and corporeal debris of a hundred others, producing a worrisome hybrid of aught-years felons who ultimately destroys his makers and wreaks havoc on my imagined future utopia? I had not considered this.
One lesson I’ve taken from old Franz, based on my limited exposure to his work: Stay away from the ladies. To be more precise, the ladies that come to you. A true gentleman does all the work, and even then he isn’t likely to persevere, and that’s al
l right: wanting occupies the febrile mind. I learned too late with that Janus-faced Betsy Pankhurst.
I remember our first meeting well. After a few flirtatiously terse letters introducing herself and the occasion for her writing—an assignment from the MFA course “Queer ‘I’ for the Straight Guy deBord: New Journalism, New Perspectives”—she drove up in her roommate’s car on a cloudy Thursday in January. Though The Holding Pen was gaining popularity, my only visitor had been my appeals lawyer, a frighteningly obese man with the optimism of a climate scientist. Other prisons have modernized visitor’s centers with half partitions and, it’s rumored, board games (!), but Westbrook is still resolutely traditional, and the E Block visitor’s center sports double-pane Perspex with telephones mounted on the right side. (An awkward setup for southpaws like myself.) The guards cleaned the receivers with Windex wipes between guests; even now the smell of clean windows triggers a tumescent sense memory. When Betsy sat down, I took her in as quickly as possible with only a brief glimpse toward her breasts: I am a gentleman, I was aware of this and also aware Betsy did not yet know this; she might have been at that very moment expecting a most lecherous stare. I rose to the challenge, as they say, a gentleman above all: the table helpfully disguised the sudden rush of blood. She was smartly dressed in a glowing white wool sweater with a Weimar bob accentuating her ears. Those ears! Their constellations of red dots, swollen from removing the earrings at check-in. I was filled with a mad wish to run my fingers over their fleshy hillocks; I could have done it for hours. She wasn’t petite but appeared so with an affected scoliotic posture I recognized as the “Otto Dix look” promoted by child soldiers-cum-models in the season’s glossy magazines. (I report this with authority, inside we obsessed over every donated Purple Fashion, The Gentlewoman, and W, experts in the style of the day: how to evince “no-makeup makeup,” the “secrets to landing that internship,” whether the ass was “in” . . . We laughed at that one.) I didn’t register it at the time, but I would treasure her tight, pallid skin, an almost deathly look, and therefore a constant reminder of death itself—paradoxically, a total turn-on.