by Nick Mamatas
Schnell’s head is shaved now; the shaggy mop and sideburns behind which he hid his face after his arrest are gone. Around his neck and head he wore a steel halo of the sort sported by victims of traumatic spinal injuries. “To keep him from nodding or shaking his head,” we were told. “Only three words,” said the guard, warning us as much as him.
Schnell is thinner now as well. We asked him about the food; he answered, “Doesn’t agree with.” If he said “me,” it was cut off by the guard under the three-word rule.
What are his thoughts on America? “F__them all.”
Did he do it? “Call my lawyer.”
A countdown mentality could not help but take hold. There were no clocks on the wall, and we were relieved of our watches and cell phones—even the photographer’s digital camera and light meter were impounded immediately after one photo was snapped, and returned to us intact on the boat back to San Francisco—the ten minutes may well have been five minutes. It could have been thirteen.
Schnell misses the World Wide Web. He has had no visitors save us and is not allowed correspondence. To pass the time, he looks at Fisherman’s Wharf. He is reading the Bhagavad Gita. Schnell is irreligious but chose the Gita as the book he is allowed access to thanks to his First Amendment protections because “it is long.”
Robert Dahl, Schnell’s lead attorney, is as loquacious as Schnell is brief. Dahl moved his practice from New Jersey to San Francisco to have more regular access to his client. Dahl is not a happy man. “It’s torture,” he explains. “Keeping him there all by himself is just torture. We saw this with Padilla. The guy was brought out of the brig a broken human being due to isolation, sensory deprivation. The guards don’t communicate with my client. They’re actually trained in ASL so they can communicate with one another without Drew overhearing.”
Dahl has been holding his cards close to his vest as regards his legal strategy. Though rumors have been floated of an insanity defense, attempting to pin the transfers on cyber-terrorists and even the federal government itself, there is little in the way of a legal paper trail. “All in good time, all in good time,” Dahl explains. What of his client’s precarious mental condition? “I have a plan.”
The only legal papers Dahl has filed so far involve a unique legal strategy, to say the least. It’s a combination injunction/threat to begin a class action suit against the federal government for depriving Americans of their ability to visit Alcatraz Island as a national park. Dahl isn’t interested in damages per se, he literally wants the park reopened, with his client Drew Schnell as the primary tourist attraction.
“Human beings are social animals, it’s pure genetics,” Dahl told us. “Evolution demands it. The orangutans of Borneo are not social. They couple ever so briefly in the great green canopy of the jungles, and then separate forever. It’s a tragedy, those ape mothers and their few children, and the species is one the verge of extinction thanks to that. Lowland gorillas? Sure, I know what you’re thinking,”—he didn’t—“they’re social. Yes, but too hierarchal. A single silver-back, making all decisions, killing the infants of their rivals or predecessors. Who needs that? No wonder they’re endangered too. We’re the great naked ape, H. sapiens sapiens, we need to touch, to love, we all must hang together to avoid hanging separately.
“It’s a national park, great. Let it be a national park. Let Drew Schnell be the Nerd Man of Alcatraz. People pay their taxes to have this guy tortured, to have Iraqis blown up for ten years plus; shouldn’t they get to see it, shouldn’t they get a show? In the Constitution, every American is given a right to confront his accusers. Well, check the docket: it’s Schnell v. United States. How can he confront his accusers, every one of them? Isn’t that what freedom is all about?”
Dahl, when he isn’t talking, is a bit hard to look at. He’s a bland individual, white with a broad face and hair the kind of brown you forget about the second your eyes are off it. His accent is hard to place too; it’s strangely clipped though some of the vowels are rounded in the fashion of a Pennsylvania Main Line. He claims to be “from all over,” and to have traveled the world. “Yeah, I’m still doing that. New Jersey was a pit stop. San Francisco is destiny.” He often puts a palm over his ear when fielding questions, “to stop the buzzing.”
Dahl wants to turn Alcatraz into a panopticon, the famed hypothetical prison designed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in which a single guard can observe all prisoners without the prisoners being able to see the guard; the prisoners never know if they are being watched, so act as though they are always under surveillance. Except we’d all take turns being the guard. “It’s in our brains. There’s science involved,” Dahl says as he digs through a folder for a few torn pages from a magazine. It’s an old study from 2007, in which the human lab rats were put in a functional MRI and given a computer game to watch. The computer played itself, badly, and this caused the posterior superior temporal cortex, the “empathy center” of the subjects’ brains to fire off.
“See? We cannot help ourselves. Way in the back of our brains, where we are still primitives, practically lemurs, we experience empathy, we seek to help. Drew is out on The Rock to keep him out of the public eye, to poison the well against him. He needs to be seen, by as many other people as possible.”
Schnell has scattered other allies. Some of the so-called (non-called) Sans Nom movement is backing him, albeit in ways that only members of that kooky group can. Several thousand false income tax returns were filed, perhaps a reference to famed Alcatraz inmate Al Capone, but the checks included with the returns had routing numbers that exploited a bug in IRS computers, leading to the nationwide rebate of fourteen cents per taxpayer. Rumors abound that Dahl is also being paid by the movement, which is represented most often by a wave of the hand, but Dahl dismissed those rumors … with a wave of his hand.
Then there is the ghost. Like virtually any big old building, Alcatraz is considered “haunted” by the sort of people who consider hauntings a possibility. Schnell is being held in 14D, the famous haunted “hole” in which a convict was supposedly attacked by a “creature” or the “spirit” of another convict. Television psychic Lulu Latif has expressed concern for Schnell’s safety and began an online petition to have Schnell moved … to another isolation cell in the prison. Schnell, for his part, said “not really ghost.” When we asked for clarification, even as the clock was ticking down, he only said “yellow spidery eyes.”
If there is a specter haunting Drew Schnell, it may just be the woman he claimed told him to embezzle the funds and remit them to Iraq. The police have found no trace of the woman, whom he says approached him on the ferry he took between his job in Manhattan’s financial district and his Jersey City home. Nor do any of the security cameras on the ship or either dock show Schnell talking to a woman, though most of the footage doesn’t show Schnell at all. He liked to sit on a bench by the stern that just happens to be in a “blind spot,” and on that bench is where his encounter with the mystery woman supposedly took place.
“Damn that bitch,” he said during the interview. What does Schnell want? “See her again.”
WE made a point of showing Julia this article one night when we were over, riding in our local man of indeterminate ethnicity. She didn’t recognize herself in the story, or Schnell, and indeed didn’t seem very interested in reading the whole piece. The cover, however, was unnerving. It was a photo of Keith Richards, as it so often is on Rolling Stone even after fifty years of publication. Julia spotted the magazine on her coffee table, where we had left it for her to nonchalantly discover, and with a start called out to us (we were in the restroom), “Who is this, the Crypt Keeper? Fangoria! Oh … never mind. Man, he does not look good.”
12
WE believed that Raymond often thought of Julia when he engaged in acts of physical love with Liz, despite Liz’s different somatotype. He cupped her breasts, which were larger and longer than Julia’s, as if they were Julia’s, using the same splayed five-finger grip. He thrust
his hips into the delta of Liz’s thighs with insufficient force to please her—Liz would have to correct him by lifting her legs and planting the bones of her ankles against Raymond’s buttocks to push him along. Also, one time he called her Julia and got a slap across the face for it.
Raymond balled up his fist, but let it go and turned away. Liz said she was sorry, casually. “Sorry then,” she said.
“I’m the sorry one. In both senses of the word,” said Raymond. He shifted to sit with his back against the wall, nearly crushing us.
“Perhaps,” Liz said. She slid her palm down her belly, to her pubic mound.
“I can’t continue, not right now,” Raymond said. “I’m just very bummed out.”
“Don’t mind me,” Liz said in a whisper, and she manipulated her clitoris until she orgasmed, taking several minutes, groaning deeply, her voice like a man’s. Raymond licked his lips, not from excitement but perhaps from thirst, but didn’t disrupt the proceedings by leaving the bed to fetch a drink. When she concluded, she rubbed her fingers together and then ran them across the roll of Raymond’s belly, leaving his skin slick and hair smeared and stuck to his flesh.
“I just don’t understand it,” Raymond said. “It’s been a year and every day is still a hammer being slammed around the inside of my skill. So many associations, so much baggage. I can’t listen to the radio because I hear songs Julia liked, or lyrics that sound like something she said once, or might have said. Movies are impossible; the smell of the popcorn, the red velvet seats, they’re our early dates, ghosts hanging in the projector light.”
“And when your penis is in some woman’s vagina, it reminds you of her as well,” Liz said. “Yes, I understand.” Raymond said nothing, his lips stretched thin with potential retorts. Liz swung her legs off the bed and stood, her back to Raymond. “I’m quite annoyed with you, you know. The name was just half of it. Really, a gentleman would have at least lent a hand, even if he wasn’t up for it anymore, if you get my meaning.”
“You’re obsessed too,” Raymond said. “That’s why you’re here, with me. Wasn’t your last boyfriend an French-Canadian lifeguard whose only knowledge of English was his phonetic memory of Metallica lyrics?”
Liz slipped on her panties, and her blouse, but did not button it. Instead, she reached for her cigarettes and withdrew one from the pack with her lips, put the pack down to pick up the lighter, and lit up. Raymond scowled. “Those’ll kill you,” he said, “and will annoy me for three weeks.” He coughed meaningfully.
“Your rooms smell like Julia and anxious sweat,” Liz said. She exhaled smoke through her nostrils, two streams swirling into a great cloud before her. “Let this be a nice set of associations written into your autonomic nervous system. Smell smoke when walking past a bar, you think of fucking me now.” She raised her arms and shook her breasts at him.
“Instead of zeroing in on that sweet beery smell and thinking of me and Julia at the Holiday Lounge on St. Mark’s, with all the old guys muttering into their gins.”
“Good enough.” She sat back down on the bed, her butt half off, her legs straight and knees locked. Then she tilted backwards and peered up at Raymond. She made the glow of the cigarette pulse. Finally Raymond moved from the wall and lay down next to her, both figures across the short side of the bed.
“Do you think she’s sane again, wherever she is?” Raymond said. “In India.”
“If she’s in India, I certainly hope not.”
Raymond tsked. “That sounds borderline racist. There’s nothing wrong with India.”
“There’s nothing wrong with India?” Liz repeated.
“If Julia is sane, I’m sure she’s cosmopolitan enough to deal with the cultural chasms she may need to navigate. There’s certainly nothing wrong with many of the urban centers of India that she couldn’t be able to handle had her faculties returned to her.”
“You get many rewards from the notion that Julia was mad.”
“You get plenty from the idea that there is no such thing as madness, or for that matter notions,” said Raymond. “It’s easy to do whatever you want and treat people however you like if you consider them all, and yourself, behavior-making machines zipping around the countryside, eating stimuli and shitting responses.”
Liz sucked deeply on her cigarette. “Touché,” she said finally.
“A new insight to have the pigeon peck out of your brain this Wednesday.”
“I only hope he can get it all without giving me a migraine.” Liz said. Then they rested against one another, Raymond’s lungs grumbling as he held in a cough.
“Though, you know, there are plenty behavior-making machines out there,” Liz said. “Rats infected with toxoplasma will seek out rather than avoid the smell of cat urine. The protozoa within their wee brains drive them to present themselves to be eaten, for only in a cat can toxoplasma gondii sexually reproduce.”
“Protozoa sexually reproduce?”
“These do. But only in cats. Elsewise, they just produce pseudocysts in the intermediary hosts. Pregnant women so infected may give birth to schizophrenic offspring.”
“You believe in schizophrenia?”
“It’s easier than not believing in it, these days.”
“I wonder if Julia’s mother had a cat.”
Liz leaned up and extinguished her cigarette, then turned to the right and straddled Raymond. He stiffened under her, as did his member. He smiled and grabbed her hips, then lifted his head and torso to bite her left nipple.
“Let’s make some behavior,” he said. His penis did not retract, nor did it cause him to panic.
Several hours later, after Liz left for the evening, Raymond had a craving for a sort of doughnut he didn’t often buy. He went to the Food Emporium, which was a twenty-four hour supermarket, and there he saw Julia. He went home and paced his small apartment for hours, gnawing on his fingers till they bled.
13
RAYMOND saw Julia several times and, indeed, also saw one of us again. We were at St. Mark’s Bookstore on a sultry summer night, poking around the zine section, on our knees peering at merchandise near the bottom of the shelving unit. Zines, especially in these days of the Internet, are the near-exclusive precinct of the extremely observant and/or psychotic. Raymond was neither, and nearly tripped over our broad back.
“Oh, hmm, sorry,” he said. His arms were full of books from the bargain tables. Deviant sciences—the dream machine, orgone boxes—in luridly scholarly trade paperback. We stood and smiled at him. We liked him. Still do, indeed.
“No need to apologize,” we said. “You have to expect that kind of thing when on the floor.”
“Expect?”
“Kicked. When you’re down.”
Raymond’s expression grew dark. “I don’t think I’d say kicked.“
We smiled at him. “Then there is a need to apologize, my own. Sorry. For everything.” Then we sunk back down to look back at the zines.
“Excuse me,” Raymond said. “This may seem like a strange question …” he trailed off and we looked up at him. “Where are you from?”
“Oh, all over. Heinz 57, you know.” We decided not to act offended, though in St. Mark’s Bookshop a thundering condemnation of the political implications and ingrained privileges of such a question would have certainly been acceptable.
“No. I mean, do you live in the Village?”
“Oh no,” we said, and we took the opportunity presented by another patron squeezing between ourselves and Raymond to stand up and back away from him. It was an unnerving experience, feeling Raymond’s eyes upon on as we walked past him into the center of the store to pretend to peruse the coffee table books—perhaps that itch is what you all feel when you see a spider walking down a white bedroom wall. We rode our man of indeterminate ethnicity out of the store and let others keep an eye on Raymond.
Raymond came home with his books and set them on his worktable. He put on his work glasses, turned on his work lamp and got out his purple and gre
en stickies and yellow highlighting pen. Two minutes later, after attempting to read the first few pages of each of the books, then resorting to skimming to study the diagrams for the construction of a dream machine and an orgone box, he gave up. He turned on his laptop, found an ambient iTunes radio station he liked, and drank three fingers of vodka from a dirty glass in his sink. He texted Liz—R U THR? and then checked his phone every few minutes, setting the ringer volume all the way up, all the way down, and then all the way up again to make sure it was working. He poured himself another vodka and then fell asleep, face-down, on his couch. His ankles hung off the side.
It was nearly 3 a.m. when Raymond awoke. The Green Hornet was playing, louder than usual. He’d turned up the volume. Raymond lurched off the couch and grabbed the cell phone, not bothering to check the display before he answered. “Yes, hello!” he said, nervous.
“Who is this?” the voice on the other end demanded.
“You called me.”
“My name is Lamberson.”
Raymond squinted in the dark to find the time. The cable box had it. “It’s three in the morning. Look, if this is one of those dumb movement things, include me out.”
“I hired a private eye to find you, and this number. Julia Hernandez’s husband.” The word husband hit Raymond like a rock. He nearly spasmed. “And yeah, I agree, include me out. Your wife ruined my fucking life. Cops, IRS audit, constant questioning, my neighbors and poor mother too. Those damn kids and their stupid spectacles. Cameras on my lawn constantly, and spiders everywhere. I’ve been up for three days, working up the courage to call you.”
“Oh, that Lamberson. Well, you got me, what do you want?”
“Bubble Yum has spider eggs in it,” Lamberson said. Then Raymond heard what sounded just like a gun being fired. He laughed. It sounded almost too real, as if the cell phone hadn’t warped the blast as it must warp all sounds, as if the peaks and dips of the frequency-bundle weren’t sliced free by the digital speaker. “Fucking idiot,” he said. He hung up and waited for a call back.