“Hello down there,” one voice says, though I can’t tell which direction it is coming from. The cinder blocks diffuse the location of the sound’s origin.
“Hello?” I say softly, barely moving my mouth. At first I am embarrassed by the thought of placing my lips near the cinder blocks and speaking. I am wary that the guards will pass by and take something from me as punishment for talking. I am wary that the guards will take my voice, that a guard will turn the key to my cell and then use the same key to open my throat and remove a small box from there, that only later I will discover was my voice.
“Oh, the new girl!” another voice says in the wall, surrounded by the sounds of many sighs and exhales and giggles. I pull my head quickly back from the wall. It’s alive, I think, and press my hand to it, expecting the surface of the cell wall to be fleshy or porous or at least electrically charged. It is none of these. It’s concrete. I reapply my ear. The wall still sighs and giggles and whispers. “Is she there?”
“What’s she in for?”
“Same as the rest of us,” one voice says. And then another particularly loud voice cries, “MAN! SLAUGHTER!” and the wall fills with laughing.
“Are you there?”
“Did she go?”
“New girl. New girl.”
I tap the wall. I put my mouth close to it. “I didn’t do it,” I say.
“Oh, she’s coy. I love that in a new girl.”
“I really didn’t,” I say. “Really. Really. Really. Really. Really.” I hit my head against the wall each time I say it. Really.
“All right. All right,” one voice says, though I hear others in the background mumbling, “Sure you didn’t,” or, “Liar,” or laughter.
“Hmpf,” I say to the wall.
“Don’t listen to them. They are just bitter. They didn’t do it either.”
I pull my head away. If I had a pen I’d write on my hand, “Didn’t do it,” so that I won’t forget. Next time I see a pen I will do this.
I put my ear to the wall again. Someone is saying, “New girl, tell us your story.”
“Yes please.”
“We’re tired of all the other stories here.”
“Yes heard them all and I mean HEARD! THEM! ALL!”
“Tell us yours.”
I rest my forehead on the wall. “Shh,” one voice says. “She’s thinking,” as though she could see me or as though the walls were not just a conduit of voices but a conduit of thought as well. I begin to wonder about all the voices. Were they all coming from inside the prison? Were they in my head? Or is the wall a repository? Maybe it holds onto the echo of old voices. Maybe some of these voices had already been released from prison or died and the wall is still reverberating with the sound of them. In that way the wall gave me no fear but rather comfort, because the wall felt like my house, old and haunted. I push my ear against the wall. The women are waiting for me to talk.
“One night,” I begin, and close my eyes, “my father, he was very handsome, he walked into the ocean. That was eleven years ago. He hasn’t come back yet and even though the police found the place on the beach where my father’s footprints disappeared into the water, they never found his body. So my mother and I have been waiting. We often sit and wait on the beach just at the spot where they say my father’s footsteps disappeared into the water. Sometimes I wait alone. We always thought he would return, and when I was young I would imagine the treasure he would bring back for me, starfishes or shark’s teeth or the navigational equipment from a sunken fishing boat. One day while I was waiting for my father alone, I saw a man. He was in the ocean. He was very handsome. However, he was not my father.
“I fell in love with this man even though I was only twelve years old and he was twenty-six. His name was Jude.”
“Jude,” says one voice.
“Jude,” says another, carrying the name further away through the wall.
“Jude.”
I continue with the story. “I fell and fell and fell until I was so deep in love that love resembled a well, steep sides with no way out. Everywhere I looked and everything I saw was Jude.
“Jude had been a soldier in the war and when he came home he was different. As if the war had drilled a small gulf in him that no one could touch, no one could fill. He tried though. He tried to fill the gulf with drinking. He drank a lot.”
I listen and there is no sound from the wall. I imagine the prisoners’ heads pressed up against the wall, listening to me, their eyes closed, their thoughts escaping for a few moments. I consider what parts of my story I will leave out. I will leave out a lot. I will leave out the personality test. I will leave out, “I save your life, you stay away from my daughter.” I will leave out how the ocean had me arrested.
I clear my throat, “A week ago I woke up at Jude’s. I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in bed. I looked in the bathroom and the kitchen. I looked in the living room. That’s where I found him, only he was really different.” I pause a moment, unsure how to tell them this part. It seems there’s only one way to say it. “Jude had become a puddle, a puddle of water. And so, I was very confused at the time, I drank him.”
For a moment the silence continues until the other voices realize I am done and slowly they begin to speak again. “That’s the most romantic story I’ve ever heard,” one voice says and I smile because I agree.
“Lovely.”
“Sad,” says another. I agree.
“You should talk to Undine,” one voice that sounds maternal says.
“Who?” I ask. “Why?”
For minutes there is no answer. I hear a tiny laugh far away and finally the maternal voice returns, coughing before she speaks. “Undine is a mermaid, too.”
I breathe quickly. I blink my eyes. Too? “How do you know I’m a mermaid?” I ask the wall but this time I really get no answer.
The maternal voice continues, “She’s not here anymore, though.”
“Where’d she go?”
Giggling. “She escaped.”
“She did?”
“Yes, she really did.”
“How?”
“Hmm. I don’t know. None of us know.”
“I know,” one high voice says.
“No you don’t,” another prisoner tells her and then adds, “dummy.” The high voice believes this is hilarious.
The mother voice speaks over the high laughing. “She had a similar story though. She had a husband, but after a few years the husband fell in love with Undine’s stepsister. So Undine, the way she told it, went back down under the water. Her husband never really knew how miserable she was. Her husband never knew she was a mermaid. Then, at least the way she told it, her uncle made her do it, made her come back from the ocean and get the husband. She got him. At least the way she told it, she just kissed him but that’s not what the pathology report said. It said he drowned.”
The wall is very quiet.
Until one mean, deep voice cracks, “Sounds like you, girlene. Freaking mermaids.”
I back away, suddenly scared that someone who shouldn’t have been listening was listening, like the guards or the policemen. I take my ear away from the wall and find my bed with my hands. I try to sleep but thoughts of the women in the wall keep me awake. “That was a dream. That was a dream,” I think, even though I know it wasn’t. My face can still feel the wall’s rough surface imprinted on my cheek. I know it wasn’t a dream because while I am trying to convince myself that it was a dream, I fall asleep.
THE WAIT
I don’t do anything in prison, and in fact I save and savor the few motions and things that I have to do during the day, holding out as long as I can, waiting, for instance, to brush my teeth, knowing that once I’ve done it, I’ll have even less to do that day.
My mother visits me every single day. Sometimes she brings my grandfather, but it disturbs him to the point of befuddlement, to the point where he says things that depress us even more. Things like, “We have to go, Marcella’s cooking a
roast tonight,” or, “What are we doing here?” or, “I left the word _____ at home,” and he won’t say the word because he left it at home. After a few visits, she leaves him at home.
My mother believes I am innocent, and not because the facts line up into a good defense but just because she believes me. For this I am extremely grateful. While she is here, I feel natural again. But her visits are limited to one hour, and so I have one hour of feeling natural, and twenty-three hours in which the only thing I have to do is brush my teeth twice and feel unnatural.
At night I speak to the wall, or at least I listen to it, and in the day I keep to myself and wait.
The sun rose earlier today than usual, I think. Not that I would know. I can’t see any windows from here.
Still waiting.
Today I thought about the word today.
Applying wait like a person might apply herself to a job.
Wait.
Wait.
Something is moving.
No. I was wrong.
The faucet in my cell has a drip, and today I counted 2,908 drips while I waited. That’s about one drop every fifteen seconds for twelve hours.
That’s a lot of water.
So much that it gives me an idea. I construct a temporary drain plug made of toilet paper, and the water begins to collect, very slowly, but that is good for my purpose. I spend the day by the side of the basin and with every new drop that falls I say, “Dad, I’m in prison. Come get me.” By seven o’clock at night the sink is full with, “Dad, I’m in prison. Come get me.” I pull the plug and send my message out to sea.
I get in bed early. I am exhausted from being so vigilant all day. My cheeks and jaw hurt from having spoken so much. I am exhausted because all the hope I felt while filling the sink seems to have disappeared with the water down the drain. So, though I’d like to hope that my message makes it to my father, there’s no hope left. I get into bed with anger. “Even if it gets to him he’ll probably be drunk.” I fall asleep.
Asleep I have a dream and in the dream I hear a bird chirp and warble. It is lovely. I pull a pad and pencil from my pocket. That is how I know I am dreaming—I am allowed a pencil and paper. On the pad, with my ear sharply tuned to the bird call, I begin to sketch a hirundine syrinx, that is, the vocal cords of a swallow. That is how I know I am a scientist, because I have never even heard of the word
hirundine–adj. of or like a swallow
before. When I have completed this sketch, in the dream, the syrinx I drew begins to chirp and sing and coo. That is how I know I am a real scientist. I collect my dream thoughts a moment. Then I collect a few choice science tools from a cabinet in my cell I had not noticed before. I choose a few pieces of equipment that I will need for my next experiment. I choose my Doppler profiler, my conductivity-temperature-depth recorder, a compass, and the salinity sonar. It is a heavy load but it is a dream and I have no trouble bearing the weight.
I stand at the door to my cell and, exhaling, I push the steel bars out of my way. Without fear, I walk through the hallway, turning left and right until I am standing before the prison gate. The gates bang with openness.
In the dream I carry my science equipment down to the sea. I will use it to pinpoint the exact location of Jude. I will take Doppler readings. I will make salinity profiles. I will graph the results until I arrive at an exact reading, the longitude, the latitude, and the depth of Jude in fathoms and feet. I will conduct an experiment to measure whether the ocean is good or bad, because I have a hypothesis that it is neither. I think I can prove that as a scientist. I take my Doppler profiler in hand. I imagine presenting my results to the world, and how in light of the startling results, the government will fund a study to prove the same thing about humans—that they aren’t necessarily good or bad—and if I could prove that I could pull Jude back up through the war and the water. I could make him mine.
In the dream I touch my toe to the ocean and the shock of the cold water is lovely. It feels like breathing. Unfortunately the shock of the cold water is really a shock and it wakes me up.
When I wake I am in prison. There is no cabinet of scientific equipment. It is dark and still and I am only momentarily confused. I remember the ocean and that it was a dream, but rather than feeling defeat what I feel is a residue of water that is so strong I imagine my toe feels wet and that thought makes me smile. I reach for my toe in the dark.
My toe is wet.
I bolt upright and the cot squeaks. “Shh!” I tell it. I get out of bed. At the end of the hallway of cells there is a red EXIT sign. It is required by law, though it has often been the source of amusement among prisoners, as there is not actually an EXIT open to us. The sign glows very brightly at night and casts a red glow down the hallway. I grab onto the bars of my cell and see that the red is reflecting off something in the alley between cells. The red light is caught in a trail of water that leads to the door of my cell. I can see where each of his feet fell because there is a print of water and the water reflects the red of the EXIT.
I pull my hair as a test. It hurts.
My ribcage grows tight, making it difficult to breathe. For one moment I look back at the bed, but only for a very quick moment. I try the bars. They glide soundlessly, and in my bare feet I follow my father’s wet prints.
BLUE
I run and run and run through the hallways of the prison. At first I think, “If I run fast enough I will catch up to my father.” But the faster I run, the harder it becomes to breathe. This stiffening in my lungs is a question that is pounding and growing and taking up space. The question is, “What do you mean catch up with your father? Catch up to being gone?” I stop running. People die so quickly already.
When I reach the gates of the prison the sun is coming up. The gates open to let me out and there on the other side of the prison gates is my mother, waiting beside our car with the engine idling. I run and quickly jump in. “Come on!” I holler. “Let’s go!” My father must have told her to come get me.
She turns slowly back to the car and gets in. She reaches across the gear shift to hug me. “Baby,” she says. “My poor baby.”
“Come on, Mom. We better hurry before they realize I’m missing.”
“Huh?”
“What happened? Did Dad come tell you?” I ask.
Her face wrinkles, like sadness and confusion were a blanket covering it all of the sudden. “It wasn’t your father. Oh.” She looks away from me but still does not put the car in gear. “The police called,” she says. “They said you were free to go. They said there was a note, a suicide note. They said you weren’t responsible. Oh.” She holds onto the wheel until her flesh whitens. “They said Jude killed himself.”
My mother and I both stare straight ahead, waiting.
The prison is surrounded by very tall pine trees. And after my mother says this, the trees and the prison continue to stand, sturdy and appropriately in the middle of a dark forest that keeps all the dark secrets of a forest. Birds, squirrels, fog, deer bones buried under pine needles, and lichen. Jude killed himself. The possibility that this might be the truth swoops near my head like a bat at dusk, a bat that soon flies off in the other direction uninterested in me.
Jude’s note. I smile. He really fooled them.
“Mom.” I say, “Listen,” and begin to tell her about the drip. I tell her about the drain and the dream and the noiseless way my cell door slid open. “There were wet footprints and I followed them. It was Dad,” I say and after thinking a bit, biting my lip, I add, “And that is the truth no matter what plain or boring or painful excuse you choose to believe instead.”
“I don’t know what to believe just now.” She exhales. The word just gives me hope that she might believe me. Just seems more like a moth just passing through and once its gone she’ll believe me that Jude and my father are alive. She’ll believe that I am a mermaid and her life won’t be so dreary. I keep talking. I tell her about the other prisoners and how we got fed and showered and exerc
ised like horses. I tell her about the mice and the poison the guards set out for them. I tell her details. Details make a story even as unbelievable as mine believable. My mother stares straight ahead at the prison, nervously fidgeting with the skin of her thumbs. I continue telling her about the police and the guards until she doesn’t want to hear anymore, until she is full.
“Ugh,” she says shaking her head no. “That’s not how it ends,” she says. “I’ve read enough books to know that’s not how it ends.”
“Tell me how it ends then.”
She squints her face up, thinking, trying to be very careful about the words she chooses. “It’s harder to say in words,” she says. “Words are so precise.”
“Why don’t you say it in sign language?”
“You don’t speak sign language.”
“I’ll understand,” I tell her.
And so she does. Her hand bobs up and down, like a fish swimming. Her fingers flare out slightly as she rises from each dip with words flying off them.
“Ah,” I say when she is done and for all I know it could mean, “Look out! Disaster!” But I don’t think so. I think it’s closer to Ocean. Continue. Forever. Smooth night with stars for navigation.
Words have more than one meaning all the time. Just like Jude’s note.
“Mom, listen to me for once without thinking no, no, no. OK?”
She nods and tears at her lip with her teeth.
“It was Dad,” I say. “He helped me escape.”
She doesn’t speak. She puts the car in gear and pulls away from the prison. She stays silent for awhile while we pass out of the pine trees.
The Seas Page 12