by Ryan Chapman
* * *
Red, blue, and yellow lights are flashing brighter through the high windows, it must be the wagon circle of ambulances and fire trucks, blinking just a hair from syncopation. A strong part of me wishes it would fall into a comfortable pattern, though, yes, I know, that would defeat its purpose, but we all know we’ll be here for a while. Or at least they will. I hopped up just now to get a look at the cordon, there are indeed a half dozen fire trucks, long vehicular muscles ready for flexing. I wonder why they aren’t attending to the fires in A and B Blocks. Perhaps something to do with protocol, or maybe insurance? There is a kind of beauty to idling in an emergency, a rejection of what’s expected, I suppose, it’s a minor rebellion I can certainly endorse and would argue is not so dissimilar to the entire feeling of youth.
I admit to mixed feelings about Warden Gertjens’s survival. I know I should not wish ill on my patron and benefactor. And yet History demands blood. Shall I be the sole martyr today? Must my body be the only one laid atop the funeral pyre of postpenal literature? I suppose what bothers me most is the lack of contrition in Warden Gertjens’s voice. If he’s blind to his own role in this world-shaking moment, so be it. If he looks on the storming of the Bastille as mere property damage, so be it. The Holding Pen is worth a riot, worth a hundred riots. This work will outlive us all, it will outlive us all and gather momentum and be taught to schoolchildren and recited at the commencement of major sports events. Yes, certainly, it is worth my own life, on this random Tuesday, as I type with cramping fingers and a bouncing knee in the Will and Edith Rosenberg Media Center for Journalistic Excellence in the Penal Arts.
Do I exaggerate? I’ve studied the trends, I know the troubled passage all new art faces on its path to canonization. There’s a first blush of popularity, followed by a gauntlet of criticism most often directed at the fallibility of its creator. I will fare easier than most, my sins are well documented, my incarceration is itself a rubber-stamped takedown. What can the critics say about me that isn’t immediately obvious? I’m not in denial of the things I’ve done. When I returned to my post that night at the Bearnaise, I did so with complete sangfroid, manning my station with professionalism; I even took care to wipe the perspiration from my forehead and the back of my neck with a handkerchief spritzed with rosewater. And when Ms. Hwang’s son stopped by—his office at Barclays was about twenty blocks south—I greeted him with courtesy and with the subtlest genuflection. (The picture cracked, as it were, when he returned to the lobby and burst from the elevators screaming into his phone, “You better fucking be here when I hang up and you better fucking find out what happened to my meemaw!”)
* * *
The WXHY Action News interview with Warden Gertjens has cut away to footage from inside, it appears one of the Appeals’ smartphones made it in after all. The picture quality is quite poor, either from backlighting or the increasing amount of smoke in the flats. And quite shaky, too, the phone is being fought over with a chorus of offscreen requests: “Lemme send my girl a dick pic first, then you can have it”; “M13, aye aye aye!”; “Jamal, Jamal, turn that shit over here, get it on me.” The camera swings around to Frankie holding a bleeding white guy in a headlock, the two of them splayed out like Greco-Roman wrestlers. Frankie is beaming with hard-won pride, his sparring partner’s face is pocked and bruised to the hilt, as if sculpted from masticated cherry pits. Frankie is slapping the man’s forehead, repeating, “Say it. Say it and I’ll let go. Say it.” The camera zooms in to Frankie’s face, or rather it isn’t a zoom, something has sent the phone flying toward him, it hits Frankie square in the forehead, the picture goes dark. The phone must still function, however: next we hear O’Bastardface’s bellowing drawl, “I didn’t come here to make friends. I came here to win!” It’s unclear where in Westbrook this is taking place. I spotted the blue-and-white floor stripes demarcating the inmate and screw walk lanes, so they’re in the central corridors, likely between C and D Blocks and the row of solitary cells at the entrance to E Block. Close. It’s no relief to hear O’Bastardface in such high spirits. This is his New Year’s party: the clinking glass, collisions with strangers, old acquaintances not forgotten, a revived (and abusive) bonhomie. I would prefer to see anyone else break through my meager barricade. O’Bastardface has always put me at unease; McNairy once remarked, “That guy took a chain saw to his mental furniture long ago.” Perhaps O’Bastardface’s greatest flaw is an inability to simply rest, to be, something I learned during a routine keeplock a few months back—March, perhaps: a screw found a sharpened toothbrush, it was a day in the cell for everyone. The inspections ate up a.m. work detail, which begat boredom, which begat cursing out the screws because, well, everyone was bored. I decided to use the time productively and plot out feature ideas for the gaps in Volume I, Issue Ten (“Paradise”). Colleagues in the industry recognize the necessity for long lead times, which doesn’t really apply to The Holding Pen, but I instituted them anyway to maintain a sense of professionalism with Warden Gertjens and, truth be told, a sense of professionalism with myself. The policy also gave me a handy excuse with the more aggressive pitches: Sorry, would love to do a profile on your melamine-board sculpture from the woodshop, but the issue’s full.
Two hours into keeplock I heard a primitive, ominous gurgle and turned to find my morning deposit rising up to greet me. As I leapt up onto my bunk I heard cries of disgust along the galley; at least I wasn’t alone in this plumbing bête noire, the puddle spread past my cell to meet its sibling coming out of O’Bastardface’s cell, his boisterous cackle identified his own toilet as our fecal estuary: he’d flushed his bedsheet. The insults shouted his way—“Motherfucker, I’m kill you for this,” “Last time I get shit on my felon flyers,” “I was napping, goddammit”—only fed his laughter more. The brackish film spilled across the flats and pooled around the shallow concavity at south gate. (I learned my cell rested at the bottom of a shallow decline.) Screws bounded out of the gates, undeterred by the splashing their footfall sent upward and out. From what I could hear O’Bastardface welcomed their blows with the equanimity of a conscientious objector—he knew fighting back would result in a longer bout of solitary.
As I said, O’Bastardface is the last person I would want interrupting my final and official accounting of events, as they happened. And yet I must pause for a moment to marvel at how long I’ve been allowed to commune with you, my friends and mass confidants. It’s been roughly six hours since the beginning of the riots—if we grant riots even have a “beginning,” I could argue we’ve “always” been rioting—and I’m feeling, knock on wood, something approaching hopeful. This could end at any moment, I know, and lest we forget the Buddha says we’re all already dead, but it hasn’t ended yet, and I have so much still to share with you, with the historical record, before the blunt-force trauma, before the end.
And yet this nape-hair anxiety is quite draining. I’m reminded of the evening after a second shift at the Bearnaise, it was midnight or one a.m., I was idling on the Uptown 3 platform. As the train approached, two hands grasped my shoulders from behind and pushed me forward—a white starburst filling my vision and mind—and just as quickly the hands pulled me back. I turned to see three black kids hooting and backslapping as they raced up the stairs. I laughed, too, a broken laugh like the sputter of a boat engine, drawing stares from my fellow subway riders, a broken laugh that dissolved into shaking and light pants wetting.
That was merely a second of anxious doom; this is a marathon. Exhaustion has set in. Perhaps even boredom. Okay, okay: I hear you, I hear you and I see your subtweets implying ingratitude. And though my own demise is assured, and will be understood by generations of scholars as a fitting coda to my editorial project—“He gave it his all”—my E Block neighbors would shake their heads. The arc of time does not bend toward justice. How could it? Justice is an abstraction. These carceral commons, if you’ll allow a subjective bias, is an animal place, with the thinnest veneer of civilization, a semitrans
parent veneer through which I’ve spied the truth, through which—to borrow a phrase from my psychotropic-drug-addled friends in C Block—I’ve “seen through the bullshit.” The arc of time bends toward nothing save for time itself.
Is that whistling I hear? There’s a teakettle register somewhere down the hall, though it might not be human—a pinched heating duct, perhaps—and yet I shudder at the sound of an approaching malefactor. The sound is continuous, neither rising nor descending, and I wonder, perhaps foolishly, if it is an ally, or if not an ally then a nodding acquaintance, also squirreled away and riding this thing out. He wouldn’t have the writing of this official accounting of events, as they happened to bide his time, and may be at this moment finally reduced to the self-annihilating moth light of his plaintive whistle. In which case, my heart goes out to you, my friend or rather, my acquaintance, my heart goes out to you with sympathy and empathy, for I, too, would not wholly protest the day’s end, nor all that is implied by it. However, and this may carry a whiff of hypocrisy, if the whistling is coming from someone around the corner, biding his time, arms akimbo and playing what he thinks to be mind games—which, if true, I admit are more effective with each passing minute—then I do wholly protest the day’s end and all that is implied by it. I am not ready, I haven’t even gotten to the trial, nor the Holding Pen Amex card—0.5 percent of purchases donated to a legal defense fund for contributors—I am not ready at all, I need more time, and, yes, I acknowledge the sly wink from the universe: time is the one commodity I’ve had in abundance all these Westbrook months and years. And yet, if I were to be accorded another hour, another twenty minutes, such time would be invaluable for future scholars of postpenal lit. Not to mention present ratings for the local news.
I am not above requesting a distraction from my brothers-in-arms. The Appeals have shown blush-inducing solidarity; now is the time to, as they say, “kick things up a notch.” My brothers might engineer some kind of chaos near A Block and drive the crowds east and away from the Media Center . . . ?
The whistling’s subsided; it drew down steady and measured, perhaps a mechanical softening or a practiced human one. Either way: downright chilling.
As I said, I am not ready. With the end in sight The Holding Pen may not have its own end, which is to say by the very circumstance of its creation this final Editor’s Letter will be interrupted, not finished. As everyone knows, that which is unfinished is also without end, and that which is without end cannot be a work of literature. I now realize, with distress and a new valence of panic, this confession may very well upend my literary corpus, may upend it and destroy it, like a hiccup-filled eulogy. Was it better to depart in silence, to never have even started this official accounting of events, as they happened? I’m sweating from the distress and the panic, which have redoubled, and not from the broken A/C or the low-lying fear of death; it is the sweat of destiny, or a destiny thwarted, a stumble across the proverbial finish line and an end in personal and public ignominy. How did I not think of this before? I curse sophomore Alexis Somers and the auto-publish feature, all these words I cannot recall from the digital ether.
And yet: I continue. I seem to always do this—that is, to start something without a sense of the ending, a sense of where it will take me, if I may disassociate for a moment. Some people, as McNairy would say, are just poor planners.
Perhaps it is not so dire, now that I think on it. The inevitable blunt caesura of this final Editor’s Letter will perfectly mirror my own blunt end, a rather unique and unrepeatable rhetorical flourish—take that, Fritz!—not dissimilar from the hostage diary or the suicide note. I welcome the extreme pathos.
Ah, I see #rememberthepen is trending. It fills my heart to bursting to see your links to treasured stories and poems and topical cartoons. To be honest—to continue my honesty streak—I had forgotten about some of the earlier pieces. There’s fan favorite “Yr People” from Volume I, Issue Three (“Badlands”), which began Lewis Atwell’s stellar run from The Holding Pen to Harper’s to Kinfolk. One of our few science-fiction pieces—considered “light SF” by adherents and not “light sci-fi,” never anything “sci-fi,” it’s like saying “San Fran” to Haight-Ashbury habitués—Atwell’s story posits a post-diluvian Manhattan and a new southern border of 125th Street. A city councilwoman and proud Harlemite confers with the old heads about an immigration policy to contend with the Upper East Side crowds knocking at their door, proffering Birkin bags in exchange for potable water. Did I tear up at Anita’s extended dream sequence, where her nostalgia for our present commingles with lyrics from Bobby Womack’s immortal “Across 110th Street”? I may have, I may have.
Naturally the millennial set is rallying behind Jin-ho Yoo’s story “AAAAAH OH,” which many discovered through the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology, guest edited by Kristen Wiig (thanks Kristen!). At the risk of offending our young readers I confess I did not initially understand the story. I consulted with Warden Gertjens, who thought the many references to Urban Outfitters might flatter the company into carrying The Holding Pen—this was perhaps three issues before they picked us up—and when I expressed my doubts he pulled rank and demanded its publication. Well, I’m not too proud to admit when I’m wrong, and Warden Gertjens’s insight brought us a vital, underrepresented voice. Hundreds wrote to say they identified with the story’s disaffected young protagonist: they, too, have pawned their roommates’ jewelry for ketamine; they, too, have wandered the NYU campus for whole days; they, too, have seen the faux-vintage T-shirt in UO with the phrase “Funk Seoul Brother” and realized they never replied to their mother’s voice mails about their recently departed father. They, too, have then taken more ketamine and posted ten-thousand-word L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry on Facebook.
Were I to pick a favorite, an essentially impossible task, the first that comes to mind would be “The Poet” by Cesar Rojas, a middleman among the Latin Kings, an absolute prizefighter among prose stylists. Who could forget his rhetorical riddles and evasions? A poet in Cartagena is to give a reading at the local university, he decides to recite his friend’s verses instead, perhaps as a joke, perhaps as a test of the critics; his friend even attends the reading and never realizes the theft, as it were, even compliments him afterward over steak and red wine. The poet goes farther, he sleeps with his friend’s wife, does so in such a bald-faced manner, nobody is surprised when they are caught in flagrante delicto—except, presumably, the friend’s wife—and most remarkably the friend does nothing, he does nothing and says nothing. This enrages the poet, who follows him and yells, “Why aren’t you upset? Do something!” The friend just smiles. Meanwhile, the critics are saying the poet has turned a corner, entered a new frontier in Colombian letters. The poet is at the height of his career and in the nadir of his life, he develops insomnia and high blood pressure, his friend’s maddening equipoise is killing him, and while complaining to his nephew the two hatch a plan to mug his friend, to catch him unawares and savor the look of fear on his face. Naturally they’re both arrested midrobbery, the poet ends up in jail, and his friend visits him every week.
* * *
I see the upper window in the Media Center is stippled with rain, and visibility has dropped to a hundred feet or so. On the southern lawn news crews have brought out their mobile klieg lights, forming a high corona of pale white above the dots of yellow from the Appeals’ flashlights and the GSSR’s battery-powered fluorescents—or perhaps it is the Appeals’ battery-powered fluorescents and the GSSR’s flashlights: my view is streaked by the rain and an uptick in activity. Instagram shows a few portraits in close detail: Bronwen Taylor and the Cornell PhD candidate in matching bandanas, facing the camera with tongues out and left hands curled in the universal “Hang loose” sign; a kimchi taco from one of the food trucks, tagged #bestever and #foodporn; the smoke rising from B Block, reflected upside-down inside a large puddle; a bikini-clad woman on a beach exhorting the viewer to trade likes for followers. There’s a whiff of petrichor in
the air near the window, a welcome change from the sulfurous and dried-urine scent I’ve grown accustomed to; I would not have guessed until this very moment how much I valued and do value last smells. The necrotic perfume of the riot has been filling the hall, I can almost see it, though that may be fatigue setting in; still, you encounter all sorts of new odors inside, I remember Cornrow from D Block, a quiet old-timer and hall-of-fame molester, he would shuffle the flats with an old cigar box clutched to his chest at all times. I saw him bite White Gerry’s pinky finger clean off during a jovial attempt to pry it away; nobody bothered Cornrow after that. When he finally gave up the ghost, Dr. Edwards discovered the cigar box contained tightly rolled Ziploc bags of feces. Presumably Cornrow’s, though really who knows.