Now Jessica had left without giving Chris a thing. I sent him a note through another inmate. It said, “I tried, Chris. I’m really sorry.” I felt bad for having raised his hopes. I shouldn’t have been so optimistic, shouldn’t have said, “it’s in the mail.”
I couldn’t get Jessica’s letters out of my mind. That horrible letter of abandonment that she had placed into toddler Chris’s pocket at the church that day in 1987—and now this, the letter she did not put into his hands. The small thing that would have been the immeasurable difference between something and nothing. Still, I held out some hope that Jessica would send him something through the actual mail.
But then Martha the gossip approached me in the library. Jessica, she told me, had ripped up the portrait and a draft of her half-finished letter shortly before she was transferred. Martha saw the shreds in the garbage bin.
I thought about how isolated Jessica seemed that night when I saw her standing in line, as the prison commotion swelled around her, the laughing inmates, the shouting guards. Oblivious to her surroundings. She had just told me the story of abandoning her son. Her guilt and shame, her deep regret had sapped her senses. Just by looking at her that night, waiting for the officers to finish their count, waiting to march back to her prison cell, it was clear: Jessica was done. She hadn’t been tuning out the noise around her. She wasn’t ignoring the others. No, it was that she herself barely existed. Her presence then was papery and insubstantial. No wonder she’d ripped up the portrait. Ghosts cannot give gifts.
There had been one gift, though. Given to her cellmate, the Vietnamese woman who didn’t speak any English, whose inability to communicate with Jessica had formed the basis of their relationship. The woman was acutely anxious and would stroke a tiny piece of fabric compulsively, day and night. I witnessed this myself in the library. After a couple of weeks, she’d stroked her worry-totem down to a pile of furry threads. From the prison black market, Jessica had procured a tiny black ribbon, the kind used by mourners. The deal was done in the library—and she gave her cellmate the gift on the spot. The exchange happened near the bookshelves closest to the counter, where the Vietnamese woman had been flipping through books in a language she couldn’t read. The woman smiled at Jessica, and proceeded to stroke her new ribbon. Not a word was exchanged
A few months after she’d given this gift, after she’d ripped up Chris’s letter, Jessica was dead. The news came by way of Martha the gossip. She had arrived red-eyed one night in the library. Standing a few feet from where Jessica had sat for the portrait, Martha leaned on the counter and told me what she knew. Less than a month out of prison Jessica had overdosed.
“I heard she died in a boarded-up building,” Martha told me through her tears.
This apparently wasn’t quite true. A more reliable source later told me she’d overdosed and died at home. But I suspect this detail—that Jessica died alone in an abandoned building—had somehow made sense to Martha. When she’d delivered the news to me, there certainly had been an awful kind of plausibility to it.
The other inmates gave Martha space to cry at the library counter that night, though a few came over occasionally to put an arm around her.
“She was my friend,” was all Martha could say.
When she had calmed down a bit, she added, “Jessica thought of you as a friend, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “I considered her a friend too.”
In prison this was a complicated, impolitic thing to say. I was surprised how easily it had slipped out of my mouth. But at that moment, the shock of the news had forced out the uncomplicated truth.
Was it a suicide? With addicts it is sometimes unclear. Often unanswerable. So indeed was the related question of why she’d turned her portrait, and the letter to her son, into a pile of ripped paper in a prison garbage can. I could speculate but I’d never really know. Even if I did, I probably wouldn’t truly understand.
A ribbon to a stranger—this may have been the last gift she had in her. Perhaps it was as much as she had left to give. My mother once said that the one gift she’d received from her mother was her mother’s long life. Time. A gift given accidentally, but no less precious. It had been the single factor that allowed my mother to forgive my grandmother. Jessica was not able to give even this passive gift to her son. An early death was the final affirmation of her belief that forgiveness was not possible for her in this world. She’d given birth alone at Boston City Hospital. She’d abandoned Chris alone in a church. And in prison, when she was so physically near to him, she may have finally realized, or perhaps decided, if she hadn’t already, that she would remain alone. Perhaps it was precisely this proximity, the sight from that window in my class, and the unavoidable challenge it presented her, that finally brought this grim truth to her. That possibility weighed on me.
For days I kept imagining the fate of the world’s misplaced letters. I started noticing them everywhere. All the right letters sitting on desks and dressers, slipped into purses, abandoned in email Draft folders, forever sealed and unsent. Shredded. Forgotten, sometimes intentionally. And the wrong letters, placed in someone’s hands—which, once delivered, may never be taken back. Emailed and immediately regretted.
When I looked around the world, I couldn’t see these letters. But I became aware of their indirect presence. They contained life’s great subtexts, embedded between the lines of cell phone conversations of strangers on the bus, in the hazy motive of a coworker who told me she was taking a “mental health” day off after receiving a difficult email from her mother. These notes were virtual, folded up, hidden, like letters tucked into books of the prison library. A kite, barely visible in the sky, bound to a person by an almost invisible string. Even the unsent ones are very much present. Especially the unsent ones.
Man Down
I was stuck. It was a Friday afternoon. After finishing up an early shift, I found myself detained longer than usual in the sallyport, together with a group of officers and assorted staff. The doors rolled shut, locking us in with the loud metal-to-metal crash that alarms visitors, and which staff members don’t even notice. It had been months since I’d passed into this second category. It was only after the second door—the one that would let us back out into freedom—had failed to open, that I realized we were locked in together. An emergency call went out. I heard it clearly from the radios strapped to the belts of the officers locked in the sallyport with me.
Man down in 3-3.
“Oh fuck,” said an officer next to me. “Here we go.”
“This could take awhile,” a nurse said to me, on the presumption I was a volunteer.
Until things were settled in 3-3, we were locked in this little limbo between freedom and prison. Everyone was coming off of a long shift, some were coming off double shifts. It smelled like overworked officers: a combination of worn rubber, leather, stale coffee, and sweat-soaked polyester. Not even a nurse’s overpowering perfume could mask it.
Through the dark, bulletproof glass that separated the sallyport from the central command center, I could see security cameras broadcasting the chaos in 3-3. I leaned in toward the thick glass to get a better view of the screen, which beamed a lurid light into the darkness of central control. I saw inmates in blue prison uniforms running in and out of the picture. Then an officer running. Then an inmate hop on a table and shout something. The wisdom of bolting prison tables to the floor suddenly dawned on me.
I was so absorbed in the scene broadcast live from the prison war zone that I almost missed the drama happening right there in the sallyport. As the group grumbled and sighed, and shifted uncomfortably inside our accidental prison cell, someone spoke. At least I thought he was speaking. A second later it was clear he wasn’t speaking, but singing.
Everyone went quiet and turned to the source. The singer was a large, loping labrador retriever of a man, top-heavy, a shaggy officer’s uniform, scraggly beard and stately belly, a big, nutty grin affixed to his face. He smiled as he sang.
“My story is much too sad to be told—but practically everything leaves me totally cold …”
An officer heckled him from the other side of the sallyport, “We’re not gonna give ya dolla bills, ya fat bastard.”
A few people, mostly officers, laughed. But he ignored the comment and pressed on. Though still barely audible, his singing gained in strength. It had a pleasant little swing to it. He was playing it up, cocking his fist like a microphone, and assuming various jazz singing poses, to the extent possible in a tight, locked space, packed with people.
“The only exception I know is the case—when I’m out on a quiet spree—fighting vainly the old ennui—and I suddenly turn and see …”
And with this, the big man made a surprisingly lithe full spin in his bulky officer’s boots and, mischievous smile widening to capacity, swung around until he was in a face-to-face serenade with a short, plump contractor.
“Your fa-bu-lous face …”
She blushed, and everyone laughed.
I suddenly remembered the chaos in 3-3 and I turned my attention back to the closed-circuit security TV.
By the time the officer launched into the refrain, “I get no kick from champagne—mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all,” every staff person locked in the sallyport, including me, was smiling. And not despite the violence up in 3-3 but because of it. You had to be open to humor in order to work in this place or you’d grow hopelessly bitter. Or simply numb.
Often the humor turned dark. During a recent staff holiday party I’d laughed with everyone else when, during a gift exchange, someone presented, as a gag gift, a “hooter kit”—the container of bathroom supplies, a tiny cheap toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap, given to inmates who were too poor to purchase these things from the prison canteen. The hooter kit is one of the bleaker, more poignant expressions of prison loneliness. The question I’d asked myself at the party, while twenty or so of us laughed as a coworker pulled the hooter kit out of a hat, was not whether the joke was witty (it was not) nor whether it was tasteless (it certainly was). The question was why was it funny anyway. Partly it was the surprise of seeing the kit appear out of place. But mostly it was because in prison you were often presented with the options of dark humor or no humor. And the former seemed like the better choice, the only way to feel that your strange place of employment was also just a human workplace, complete with awkward holiday parties and stupid gag gifts.
But my ability to cope through humor, my smile, was short-lived that day. I just wasn’t feeling up to it. At that moment, stuck in the sallyport, I felt stuck. Crammed inside of a machine, I was given to the sudden awareness that this wasn’t the mere sensation of feeling crammed, but the literal fact of it: I was crammed inside of a machine. A small system with two heavy doors rolling on tracks, controlled by a remote will, a situation not unlike that of a lab rat. It took only this small bit of pressure to puncture my equilibrium, letting in a torrent of emotions. Jessica’s death. I wasn’t doing well with it. It had shaken me personally.
I kept returning to what she’d said to me, her face and hair done up with such sincerity—it must have taken her hours to acquire all of the materials and to pull that off—she’d turned to me, smiled, and said, “This is a big deal, right?” What an understatement that had been. It was the first time in many years, maybe since she’d abandoned her son, that she was taking some major initiative, exerting her will. She was trying to push back against the immense machine of her fate, before it was too late. It had been a very big deal indeed.
Stuck in the sallyport and feeling stuck, my defenses breached, I was suddenly overcome by a wave of emotion. For Jessica: who, with the complicated staff-inmate relationship behind us, I could now call a friend—one who died broken and alone. And for her son, a kid with a rough future. And for me: a fool for using the library as anything else but a place for inmates to get silly thrillers. I felt deeply ashamed for telling Chris that his long-awaited letter was “in the mail.” Books are not mailboxes, said Amato’s sign. I hated that sign. To me, the library was at its best when creating the space for Jessica’s letter to pass through, to be delivered. But perhaps the sign was right. My optimism amounted to a cruel joke played on a troubled eighteen-year-old orphan. I was overcome by a shrinking feeling. Oh shit, I thought, I’m actually going to cry like a little girl in the sallyport.
I stared at the one-ton steel door and willed it to open, so that I could spare myself this. I stared and willed it open, but the door remained locked. It wasn’t working. I tried to divert my mind with something else.
I shifted my gaze to the dark figures moving around in the control room itself. Set against little flashing red and green lights, switches and levers, and various monitors beaming images from the violence in 3-3 and from all over the prison—and a monitor, set low and out of view, that beamed in daytime TV—these dark forms stood, sat, leaned, held paper cups of coffee to their shadow-darkened faces. From where I was standing in the sallyport, it was hard to make out anything in there. But I noticed two long, fine feminine hands, like a pianist’s, working over a switchboard. I hadn’t noticed it before: such brutal doors operated by such a pair of refined hands. While their owner remained shrouded in darkness, those elegant fingers, illuminated under a small lamp, tapped buttons, pulled switches. After a few more painful moments, they hit a master stroke. The heavy steel door rumbled open and we were set free until the next day.
The Automat
The next evening I spotted the prison shrink in the staff cafeteria. I made a beeline for her. She was a tall, thin woman with big clunky jewelry and poofy hair that hovered over her like a fair-weather cumulus cloud. There was something comforting about her professorial disarray. She pursed her lips, furrowed her brow, and paused for long moments before answering serious questions. I had one for her that day.
Before saying hello, before giving the woman an honest chance to dig into the tofu salad she’d brought from home, I put my tray down next to her and said, “So what’s so bad about countertransference anyway?” She paused, and pursed her lips.
Countertransference was a concept I’d heard her mention once before. The idea, as she had used it, was basically that people who work with populations like psych patients or prison inmates might identify a particular individual with someone important in their own lives. And, as a result, regard this patient or inmate in a similar mode as they would this person. For example, treating an inmate with a strange, seemingly unwarranted blend of sympathy and jealousy because he reminds you of your brother.
“Well,” said the therapist, “a lot, potentially. Especially if you aren’t, for whatever reason, paying attention to it.”
The practical dangers, she said, included inappropriate unprofessional behaviors of all sorts, from bending rules to throwing all propriety out the window. The feelings themselves are natural and inevitable. It’s important to be aware of what is happening, to keep the situation in check by setting boundaries, and, in some cases—especially for a therapist—to ask yourself if the patient is eliciting these feelings in you because of her behavior toward you: that you see her like a daughter, for instance, because she views you as a mother. A therapist may have to carefully explore this patient-doctor relationship in the context of the session itself.
“Sounds like a headache,” I said.
“It is,” she laughed. “But I’m in the headache busines, and so are you, by the way.”
She added, “Let me know if you ever want to talk about it.”
I didn’t. The talking cure doesn’t do much for me. I tend more toward the brooding cure. In my brooding, I had decided that I was experiencing a reverse transference: not seeing an inmate as though she were a loved one, but rather seeing a loved one as though she were an inmate. I saw some of Jessica—her tortured solitude, the abyss of silence—in my mysterious grandmother. I had always judged my grandmother by her malicious words and actions, and never tried to understand her predicament. Never really a
ppreciated that she was an intensely lonely person. A prisoner.
In my writing class I found myself distracted by the empty chair in which Jessica used to sit looking down at her son through a prison window. I had asked the women to write about Edward Hopper’s 1927 painting Automat, to personify in words the lonely woman in the painting. The assignment was inspired by Jessica. But when I started to think about the woman in the painting, I found myself thinking of a certain portrait of my grandmother.
Once, in order to shake my grandmother out of despondency, my aunt had forced her to buy a new dress, get a makeover, and sit for a photo portrait at a local mall. I knew this photo well. It was the one of my pale grandmother in a hideous blue suit, hair set like a trench helmet, wearing too much lipstick and looking as dour as ever. This was the photo I had long associated with the sneering portrait of Mussolini in my eighth-grade history textbook. The moment I’d turned to that page in the World War II chapter I’d thought, Whoa, that looks exactly like grandma’s picture! I hadn’t shaken that feeling since then.
But now I saw things more clearly. Like Jessica preparing for her portrait, my grandmother had been dressing up her vulnerability—one accessory, one stroke of makeup at a time—in order to sit defiantly in the presence of her loneliness. It was an act of self-preservation and quiet courage.
A small detail about Jessica returned to me. The day of her portrait, she had arrived with the bottom of her uniform pants cuffed, following a prison style popularized by the cool crowd of women inmates. She’d never cuffed her pants before. At the time, it seemed unremarkable.
Running the Books Page 18