by Blake Butler
What walls there actually are, far as she can tell as she shuffles out into the hall beyond her cell, are flat and blank, absent of doors that might have entered in to other cells alongside hers, a fact that corresponds with the fact that she’s seen no one else in here through all her time, far as she remembers. Which how long had that been now? How might she measure? A couple days at most, she thinks, though it’s still strange not to have encountered other inmates, heard their voices; instead, the withstanding span of silence of the prison’s space and her fading remembrance of years passed all runs together, disrupting her equilibrium in fact as she struggles to keep up with her ward already quite far ahead along the long drab hallway’s line of sight. It is enough, then, just to focus on one step and then the next, and so on forward through the extending space, more like an office building than a prison, both in texture and in spirit, manufactured to maintain calm.
No matter how well she maintains pace, regardless, the guard is always out of range, just disappearing around another corner as she passes the last one, never bothering to so much as look back. The hallway never seems able to go straight for very long before it comes to roundabouts or doorless junctures that bifurcate the path, always limiting her visibility to almost precisely where she is, each length alike in hue and texture, without markings. Either way, she stays the course, following suit without comment even under the great effort now required for such simple work, never mind the looping wills within her own head, her heavy limbs, somehow starving and flooded full at the same time. She doesn’t want to lose the guard’s lead, for some reason, more afraid of what might befall her were she to end up lost here than whatever other fate might await her otherwise, the threat of deeper confinement or even capital punishment at all times pressing in against her mind, even unable as she is for certain to say why or how it’d come to that, or what else might still be wanted of her.
Occasionally, too, at certain sudden checkpoints, Alice’s passage is interrupted by otherwise impassable security mechanisms, requiring her to present handprints, fingerprints, mouthprint, or nails and eyes as ID, which she performs without instruction from the guard—having passed their clearance some time before, perhaps, or otherwise finding their interface obvious, intrinsic. Certain devices take her pulse and test her blood, tap on her fillings, massage her pores, each dictating their intent on a tiny screen in block-lettered neon language, before she can be allowed through, onto the next, until, past one such juncture, just as she’s feeling so lightheaded she can’t lift her leg another step without a break, they emerge into a much larger space, one warehouse-sized and sturdy silver, lighted only by the distant glow of open sun allowed at last to shine in through the wide glass that spans the room’s far end, so far off she can’t imagine ever touching.
Her end of the room, as it remains, is bare of feature except for a small alcove installed into the wall behind her head, the glass that binds it small and frosted, behind one of which another person’s obscured form appears to pose. It is unclear if this person is the same one she’d followed in, she realizes, who otherwise seems to have disappeared into thin air. A sign above the window, in very small, almost illegible, oddly stylish neon white font reads PROCESSING; just beneath that, in tiny glaring digits, appears what Alice can only guess by its format must be the current date and time, each so unmoored from her way of being that she can make nothing of them but that they’re there.
The figure behind the glass seems to know already who Alice is, at least, why she appears. A mechanized voice in a speaker mounted in the glass between them repeats her assigned number, speaking quickly, and asks her to confirm it, which Alice does only by nodding, despite how she’s unsure if the pronounced digits actually match those on her uniform or not. She can only sort of see the figure’s stunted posture through the haze laid on the glass, the features blurred to plates and pockets, whorls where the eyes are, the open mouth. Then, suddenly, breaking her ogling, a steel drawer emerges from the gap right at her waist, like a bank teller in transaction, nearly hard and fast enough to knock her down had she been standing any closer. Inside the drawer she finds a silver stylus and a single piece of paper, blank except for a space upon which it appears she is meant to sign:
X _____________________________________
And though Alice’s own throat burns with lurching questions—what does this stand for, what am I agreeing to, how far have I come—the words won’t actually come; they buzz like insects around a flame, zapping out on contact with her tongue. Every word she might have ever chosen to speak holds hot and fumbling against the meat of her throat and larynx, on the inside, turning over and over as in nausea yet again; all syllable without an engine, nothing in her there where she would have expected her to be.
She is surprised, then, to see herself take up the stylus and calmly sign along the line in one quick stroke, even if what emerges looks nothing like her signature or anyone’s; instead, she finds in horror, standing watching her own hand, she signs the same way she remembers immediately as the same she’d seen installed directly onto the gallery wall, by the dead artist, whose name she no longer recalls, some time so long ago it seems forever. Her writing arm begins trembling immediately thereafter, soon shaking so hard she has trouble standing up, centering herself again only after somehow managing to place the pen and paper back together into the drawer and push it in, though she immediately regrets doing so without clear reason besides knowing there is no way to take it back, nor any understanding of what making such a mark might mean to confirm. She waits and watches helplessly then for what to do next from the figure behind the glass, finding no breath left to push out any question, any demands, fearing nothing more than simply being left alone to her devices.
Again, at once, without a word, the drawer slides out. Inside it this time, Alice finds a black-wrapped package, marked with the same number as her own. It stinks of smoke so much that it makes her choke, blinking to try to see straight, to do as seems suggested, left unasked. She takes the package out and holds it up to her chest awkwardly but definitively, like a stranger’s baby, then starts to unwrap it then and there, unsure what else she’s meant to do; as what better time for anything than now.
Inside the package, under several layers of slick wrapping, she finds the clothes she must have been arrested in, as she remembers only upon contact: cropped white riding pants and a matching blouse, both of which seem salvaged from decades prior, the smell of her old perfume beneath the smoke stench somehow even more heavily familiar, as if soaked into the fabric. There’s nothing in the pockets, no ID or credit card or anything with her name on it, besides a pair of twin black metal rings, which she does not remember ever owning or having wished to, though they seem to fit her just the same, slipping on with ease over her knuckle one after another, side by side, a perfect fit, and discovering only thereafter how she can’t get them back off, the metal snagged obstinately against the flesh over the bone, digging in as if there’d never been another way. It doesn’t hurt, though, Alice thinks, to have to wear it; it actually feels pleasant, even safe; something definitive for once, something mine; a long time coming.
All that’s left in the box then is a cell phone, from which, she finds, upon turning it back on, that the memory has been erased; no contacts saved, no photos or history of calls; only the time appears set on the screen’s default display of a flat white, neither it nor the current date beneath matching those above the processing window, in either second, minute, hour, day, month, or year. Even the design of the handset, too big and blotchy, heavy as granite, seems so outdated that she can’t imagine having lived during a time when someone would have gone around with such a thing, why they would want to.
The rest of what she is meant to do, it seems, to complete her transaction, given what she knows, is all there is at hand. She struggles with unzipping the inmate jumpsuit she’s been wearing for as long as she can remember, having to remember how to work it, suddenly lightheaded again, more so than last
time, seeing double, before she steps out of the sticky cloth into the air. Her naked body underneath is pressed with powder, a thick white coat that keeps it dry, and beneath that the tingling wrinkles of her flesh seem even softer, like a child’s. Through the lining she can see the networks of veins inside her mass, colored tendrils like lengths of wire whorled and interweaving, the sores and scars she has amassed as incalculable in their impression as any wind. She finds relief, at least, putting the old garments on over the body, covering herself over as in a costume, and how the hems still seem a perfect fit for every inch, despite her perceived weight loss, her heaving stomach; and yet in no way thereafter does she feel more familiar to herself, or more alive, and even less so, then, turning to face the far end of the room’s buttressing glow that only widens as she approaches, unsure where else there is to head in freedom but toward the undetermined.
Outside, the daylight holds no warmth. All shade of sky above as Alice emerges underneath is flat as anyone with eyes ever might remember if they still could—not blue or gray but both, reflective. Below, the massive lot surrounding the facility stands equally barren, marked only by wires laced overhead coming and going from nowhere to nowhere else; and far in the distance, a high metal partition, for definition or protection, showing the open light back at itself. Beyond its presence nothing else is clear about the land beyond: an open world, each coordinate connecting into so many possible directions that nowhere seems to have a true place.
Nearer, Alice sees now as her eyes go on adjusting to the glut: a long, white vehicle, with many windows, panels, wheels, idling along the curb; a limo, it appears, just like the one she’d driven herself around in some time that seems so long ago she can’t remember where she’d gone. She’s hardly even able to look at the thing directly in the high sunlight, its polished features tracing her vision with dizzy trailmarks, sticking at her eyes. She can’t stop blinking, the plot between shots of seeing reeling for composure, as if being shaken, each breath only puffing up inside her, finding nowhere else to go.
In flashes, then, she sees the driver’s door come open. A figure emerges from it, just far enough away to have no firm features, blurred but looming. And at once, blink by blink, he’s so much closer then, and closer still each time she looks, the world around them seeming smaller too, shrinking in as he approaches.
The man is well dressed, so it appears, wearing a tailored suit of some expense, as well as fine gloves and reflective glasses that hide his hands and eyes. Alice finds her eyes drawn to his scar, once he is close enough to make it out, the jagged ridge running from his Adam’s apple down beyond the neck of his starched shirt; the cut is rough, stitches still visible where he’d been sewn up. Again, he seems familiar, Alice thinks, if in a lost way, one she already knows she won’t have back.
“Ms. Novak,” the man says gallantly, once within arm’s reach. “It’s good to see you. You still look so much exactly like yourself.” He seems to really mean it, Alice feels, despite his drab tone, and how she doesn’t quite understand why he should know her. His eyes light, if for just a second, on the pair of black bands on her finger, together glinting oddly in the wide daylight; she even lets him take the hand then, slightly kneeling as if to examine the rings’ condition close up, before gently pressing the back of her hand to his lips—a wet, hot point of impact, making her shudder—then again standing back up as he should, suddenly somehow taller by several feet than he had last seemed. She peers up at his face, looking for someone there she might have understood once, finding nothing as their air surrounding seems to broil, some unexpected pressure in their piecemeal interaction.
“Why would you call me by my mother’s maiden name?” she blurts, only thereafter realizing the question as pertinent, true—Ms. Ana Barbara Novak being the name her mother had gone by only in the time before Alice’s father’s disappearance, having refused ever to take Knott but auto-flipping unto Smith thereafter overnight—isn’t that right?—followed only by an ongoing denial it had ever been another way. Alice hadn’t thought of it in so long, maybe forever, though now, upon address, she can remember having had the name taken from her just the same, forced to abandon her prior person just like that as the unfather installed his way into their life, giving her no choice eventually to begin living as if she’d been someone else the whole time. Still, the recognition strikes her funny, as if invented, something she’s making up all on the spot, fixing premonitions to seem like revelations in the moment for better comfort. She can feel her face is at the same time beaming, calm, a far cry from how she feels inside—miles of screaming—as the two states refuse to correspond. She wants to raise her arms up in protest, to take this man by his lapels and shake him down, though her arms only hang limp, stuck at her sides.
“Of course you’re right,” the man says gently, raising his left hand to demonstrate abdication. He doesn’t seem at all taken aback; if anything, he absorbs the beat of how she’s feeling, purely professional. “I didn’t mean to say it like that. You prefer Ms. Knott, of course. My sincerest of apologies; please accept them. It’s just . . .” He pauses, scrolling inside himself after the correct words, “It was always so difficult to tell the two of you apart; and only more so as you grew older.”
Alice feels the man’s eyes moving back and forth across hers as he searches for her reaction, what else to say; meanwhile, the sky behind his head is shifting, suddenly muted, as if the sun has moved behind itself, eclipsing her desire to remain steadfast inside the moment, clinging to any kernel of larger certainty; like how the television felt some nights, the only exit any room might ever hold, wherein the longer she says nothing, the more the person nearest to her softens, settling back toward composure, in control.
“It’s quite all right you don’t quite recall me, you know,” he says at last. “I was so often, in your experience, just out of scene. More of an impossibility than a person, as your father so often liked to say, though I never really understood quite what he meant until most recently, after having worked so closely hand in hand with your brother—I believe you call him Richard?—who in turn has sent me here today to operate on your behalf. Or, that is, to negotiate your situation, as it stands, which of course is still continuously developing, please remember, even as we speak.”
He seems to study her thereafter, seeking reaction, some defining layer that might yet still come clear, the concurrent drift only widening by the second in their reserve, until suddenly he raises his right hand then, to remove his glasses, revealing pinpoint pupils surrounded by an intense, steely blue; blue as the sky had been once, Alice thinks, yes, so everpresent, and so disarming, if in a despondent manner, starkly contrasted by the sun-damaged color of his flesh. The impending clearer recognition drags her down, bunching together where she can’t quite underline it, but can at last at least imagine a terrain fading into place.
“Are you . . . Smith?” Alice manages, still uncertain what she’s saying as she says it. “Something Smith, I mean? Your name?” She finds she’s fidgeting, a nervous habit, standing on one leg, then the other, unable to suppress an unintended smirk despite the flatness in his eyes. The inquiry sounds strange, she knows, and yet once uttered it seems to find harbor in some larger connotation. “Didn’t you just come by at my house? Or was it that you lived there before us, for a while at least?”
Whoever he is, the man appears to consider her set of questions; he starts to form something back then, in response, before deciding against it at the last second, looking away. He puts his glasses back on, then, as if self-conscious, the dark curve of the lenses refracting malformed impressions of her façade bound up in the light’s glare.
“The last time I saw you,” he says, leaning forward, as if to share a secret, “you’d just awakened from your coma, on your thirtieth birthday. That must have been twenty years ago by now.” He’s almost hissing now, his eyes in slits. “My god, where has all that time gone?” He starts to reach to touch her again, then, she senses, to offer connection
, steady her shoulder; but again he stops himself, goes slack, letting his palms come to rest flat against his thighs. He stops and looks up at the sky directly, as if so that she might too, but therein only drawing further attention to his scar, the shoddy stitching, which she notices is more substantial even than she’d originally understood—his body seems to have been badly beaten, all under his clothing, she realizes, if so long ago that its damage seems incorporated into his person, healed away. She wishes she could just already understand him, absorb his purpose into her own path, as a parent should have long ago for her, out of instinct funded by some actual compassion, the kind that can’t be manufactured beyond mere pheromones and chemicals. It’s an oddly intimate feeling, she finds, particularly given her haziness of recognition, so little there to understand; and yet she feels it pulling at her, down around her, searching for handholds in her own mind; a mirror held up to a mirror, pressed together.