Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.

  It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

  Out of all the indifferences, into one thing;

  “‘The intensest rendezvous’—the most charged and alive meeting—which most of us believe in, despite all the indifferences. Notice that plural—perfect!—there are so many ways to be indifferent! But the imagination, the imagination brings us together.”

  Within a single thing, a single shawl

  Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,

  A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

  “Suddenly he wraps us in a shawl: out of nowhere—a shawl, ordinary, the commonplace wrap, wound tightly around us as if we’re swaddled, like an infant in a mother’s arms, or like the beloved in a lover’s arms. This is what we needed, because we are poor, deprived of this attention.”

  I felt their minds following along, but I didn’t feel they were really attending. “Listen,” I said. “You know what? The other day I was teaching in the prison—out at Rikers Island? At the Women’s House? And here is a poem that one of the students wrote.”

  I read Darlene’s poem about shooting her husband.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  They were absolutely silent.

  “Well? Is this a poem or not?”

  I am the God of Three, put the gun unto his head

  And offer him to me. Then Darlene, he said, then the trigger.

  “It’s sensationalistic,” a student said. “It’s written just for the shock value, which cheapens the overall effect.”

  “Probably,” I said, “it was not written for the shock value. It was written down just as it happened, as the writer recalled it.”

  “What was her reason for writing it, then?”

  “To tell,” I said, “where she came from.”

  No one spoke.

  “I don’t know if it is a poem,” I said, “but I think it should be honored somehow.”

  A few nervous coughs.

  “You admire Wallace Stevens,” I said. “So do I. But I also admire what Darlene Denisky has done here. Stevens’s poetry, stylistically and structurally, is of the highest aesthetic order, but what he is writing about is empathy. What Darlene is asking for. That is the question I keep asking myself: How can we be poets without empathy? How can we perceive Beauty isolate, without feeling? Didn’t Freud say that beauty has no use, nor is there a cultural necessity for it—but that civilization could not do without it?”

  They nodded carefully, uncertainly. One of the very brightest, Randall Patter, looked upward at the ceiling as if Sigmund’s bibliography was printed up there, and murmured, “Civilization and Its Discontents, chapter two, the standard edition”—just to remind me that grad students read and know everything.

  “And look over here,” I said, pulling a second thin volume of poems from my bag. “Amiri Baraka has written a poem asking for, get ready, poems that murder, assassin poems. Poems shooting like guns.”

  A few of them laughed.

  “An ugly idea—not beautiful, not empathetic at all. And yet, in its ugliness, asking that the poem be a real object, like a gun. That words retain the power of things, of actions. This is what Darlene Denisky’s poem is also about. The poem is the gun. Just as Stevens’s poem is the shawl, the swaddling of regard, the ‘intensest rendezvous.’ The heightened perception of beauty or its opposite—and the response of the soul to either extremity: empathy.

  “There are so many ways to be indifferent—but if what we can imagine is a kind of god—then our darkness is lit by a candle held high.”

  Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

  We say God and the imagination are one…

  How high that highest candle lights the dark.

  “‘We make a dwelling in the evening air’—and our gathering together is enough, he says. This could be belief, religion even, by itself—except for the fact of that shawl. It brings all thinking down to the physical, the body—the holy body. This could be a hymn to the orgasm, to love, love itself.” Sam Glass flashed through my mind, then K.B., then nothing. Love itself.

  Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

  We make a dwelling in the evening air,

  In which being there together is enough.

  “But what if we don’t feel that togetherness? Baraka writes of poems as guns—but in writing about them, he concurs with Stevens. In Stevens’s imaginary rendezvous, we collect ourselves out of all indifference to become one thing. What we can imagine brings us together. Even imagining a gun, a gun held to a head.

  “And listen,” I said. “Here’s Baraka, on the subject of his ugly poems, asking us what goodness or kindness, what sort of riches might he give to the world? But what he finds he can offer us is ugliness and—shadows. He keeps saying that the imperfection of this world is a heavy weight. Then he looks up into the night sky.

  “I cannot link Baraka, or this prisoner’s poem, to Wallace Stevens,” a young woman named Rachel said, and sat back, crossing her arms emphatically.

  “But listen again: here is Baraka, answering Stevens, in a way—writing about how being black affects the aesthetics of empathy. Here is his mind, he says, ‘out among new stars…They have made this star unsafe.’”

  They have made this star unsafe.

  I thought about Polly Lyle—and Akilah. This star. Among the wilderness of stars. Among the wilderness of islands.

  I decided not to go any further with the Denisky/Baraka/Stevens constellation. If a poem could be an object to shock us out of our indifference (Kafka’s axe to shatter our frozen sea), then it could be a candle or a shawl or a gun. A cup of cold water. Someone asked about the Stevens poem being anti-Platonic, which it was—and we discussed this. It occurred to me that Kyrilikov would have objected to the poem’s symbolist appropriations. He felt that if Eliot and Stevens had read Hardy instead of Laforgue, we would all still be writing in meter and rhyme—for Kyrilikov a vastly superior, even morally superior, poetic stance. That aside, there was some excitement in the room I hadn’t felt before—some spark was in the air. They were not just trying to one-up each other intellectually. They were engaged with the poem—agreeing, disagreeing—living inside the poem, that intensest rendezvous.

  We talked excitedly for a good while. I found myself telling them about the prison workshop and the poems that had been written by the women. There might be a future there, I thought. One or two of them might want to come out to the Island to teach the inmates. They had responded at last. As if the poem were a shawl wrapped around them—and a gun held to their heads.

  That night I went to stay with Benny for a while, to think my broken thoughts about my marriage and my life—the night after I slept with Sam Glass. That was The Night—the night that the impossible happened. Against all logic, all probability, Inmate Akilah Malik, a.k.a. LeeAnn Kohler, managed to escape from Rikers Island and she rocked the foundations of that island jail as if she’d set off an atomic bomb. I wrote it down in my notebook on my way out to the prison: Akilah Malik has escaped from Rikers Island!! I wrote it twice, then a third time—then added exclamation points (several), then scribbled below the repeated lines, in large capital letters: HOW??? How had an inmate so controversial, so distrusted, so continuously observed, lifted up and off the Island with the ease of a bird?

  Aliganth sat me down and told me how in detail when I arrived on the Island that Friday. I’d read the newspapers, but the reports were vague, plus I was distracted, shocked at what was happening in my own life—and I’d hardly been able to read the newsprint. The truth was, I’d been crying and I couldn’t see words or even screaming headlines through my tears. What was the story? A missing person, a dazzling jailbreak, a lost cause?

  The Island was alive with the news: Akilah Malik had disappeared! It had happened on Thursday night. When I arrived on Friday, it took me an hour to go through the checkpoints. There were no pimps out in front of the R
eception Center, they’d been temporarily barred from the Island. There were armed guards at the entrance to the bridge and at the other end. Powerful new searchlights, installed in a day, raked the water, but rayed low, out of the way of the airport lights. The escape had created a shock wave—Akilah Malik’s breakout was being interpreted as a personal insult to the security capability of Rikers Island, which indeed it was.

  When I finally made it inside the Women’s House, I was frisked for the first time, just inside the electronic gate. I didn’t recognize either of the female C.O.s searching me, but when I looked around, shaken, as they handed my bag and jacket back, I saw Aliganth coming out of the Dep’s office. She nodded to me, then pointed with her chin toward the classroom.

  When we were inside, she shut the door and told me to sit down.

  “Listen to this,” she said, leaning across the metal table toward me and speaking in a low urgent un-Aliganth voice—as if she thought the room was bugged. “When it happened was when she was being taken in a Corrections transport vehicle to New Jersey. She’d been acquitted of the Freedom Front bank robbery charge in Manhattan court, so this was the extradition to Newark—you know, where she set to face trial for the murder of the state trooper? All been planned carefully and went off smooth and quick.”

  She described how they took her out at night in the armored vehicle under heavy guard—on the assumption that the swiftness and secrecy of the transfer would prevent possible interference. They were wrong. Not far past the bridge, past the main gates of Rikers Island, the vehicle was commandeered, the tires shot out. It was boarded and Akilah Malik was spirited away. The guards were overcome and forced to lie down flat in the transport van, then they were thrown out—roughed up but uninjured.

  “Don’t repeat what I say, because I’m givin’ you a heads-up here! We got it back that figures dressed in black, all masked up, with guns and silencers, shot out the tires, shot open the locks, overcame our C.O.s, before an exchange of fire could get going.” (In other words, I thought, they were significantly outnumbered. Later I also heard a rumor that a guard who’d come aboard from the Manhattan court was an infiltrator and had held a gun on the C.O.s in the van till the others boarded.)

  Aliganth was still talking low. “The vehicle was found a few blocks away, they drove it right off the road, tires flat—left it sittin’ near the water.”

  Aliganth said it was thought at first that the fugitives had jumped into another, waiting vehicle, but no evidence had been found of such a vehicle at the scene. It looked as if Akilah Malik and her liberators had simply vanished into the river.

  “This kind of thing not supposed to happen,” said Aliganth. “She run amok a few yards from the Island! They going to track down anybody Inside who had anything to deal with her.”

  I tried to think, to make some sense of what she was saying.

  “Do you suppose they’ll question me—or the class?”

  “What you think I’m tryin’ to tell you? Listen close: if you remember anything or you overhear anything—if you even got a mild suspicion in your mind—you need to tell me now! ’Cause they gonna be lookin’ to ask you a whole lot of why’s and what for’s. Do you follow me now?”

  Of course I thought about Polly Lyle and the navigation poem with the map on it, and what I’d said to C.O. Janson. Akilah had done the impossible—unless they caught her soon, she was out of the net. She had escaped from Rikers Island—and on the river! I still couldn’t seem to take in what she had managed to do. The whole world seemed unreal to me now—as if I myself were vanishing slowly. I felt as if, having left K.B., if only temporarily, I’d left myself behind, a ghost, in the apartment we’d shared. The night before, I’d sat on Benny’s couch in her cluttered living room and watched her eating a snack.

  “You might try some tea with a buttermilk scone or two,” said Benny, chewing grimly on a twist of red licorice, “and maybe some clotted cream. The ritual of tea, you see, gets your mind off yourself.”

  I had laughed a little, I wasn’t sure why. Nothing seemed really that funny anymore, not even Benny’s clotted cream and scones, which could be thought of as mildly hilarious.

  Still, I must have chuckled to myself at that point, because Aliganth jumped all over me.

  “You think this is joke time, Miss Teacher—you better think again! This going to change a whole lot of what around here.”

  I found Akilah’s poem in my files about a half hour after the prison workshop ended that same Friday night. I’d gone up to the Social Services office—I’d heard there had been a prisonwide raid the night she’d broken out. They’d turned the residence and social service and medical floors and each cell inside out, searching for any clue as to how she planned and managed her breakout. They’d ransacked the four or five folders of writings (no more contraband!) in my AfterCare office. There were papers half pulled out of files and crumpled pages and folders on the floor. But in searching for clues to Akilah Malik’s disappearance, in searching out manifestos or revolutionary tracts, cryptic notes or code words—they’d overlooked the alternative language of revelation. The language she’d chosen for her goodbye poem was not the armored rhetoric of revolution. The poem, in her hand, unsigned, had been placed randomly inside one of the folders. Had she hidden it there herself? Had an accomplice Inside left it there? I looked at the sure steady handwriting; I recognized it from the workshop. Bold, simple. Disguised by its lack of disguise. I saw that the poem was not about Killing the Pig or Bringing Down the Oppressor, there was no Black Power or antiwar rhetoric leaping out from the page—so they hadn’t picked the writing out as hers. Poem Without a Hero. It must have looked to them like a typically irrelevant little effusion. They hadn’t read all the way to the end. It was a poem that I too wanted to read—again, carefully—but I also didn’t want to be caught with it in my hand, so I slipped it into my underpants. I’d seen the inmates do it and it seemed to work like a charm—though it was undeniably a tad uncomfortable.

  I looked at the cabinet that held copies of the intake files. The intake files were sketchy—they contained very little information beyond date of birth, place of birth, vital statistics, and history of medication. Occasionally employment history. I’d looked for Akilah’s file before, but of course it was not kept in Social Services. I imagined that there was a special file box just for her in the Dep’s office. I opened the drawer idly now—and my eye fell on Polly Lyle Clement’s file. I’d looked at it before, several times—there wasn’t much. Polly had provided nothing in terms of vital stats. Her medication history since arriving at the Women’s House was pretty alarming. There were numerous entries at the Infirmary and from the med cart. They’d really been trying to keep her sedated, but I pictured her “tonguing” the pills and spitting them out later. Corrections always checked the inmates’ open mouths after medication, but Polly was ahead of them.

  “I got a wise and thinking tongue,” she’d told me.

  They had worked their damage on her, the so-called health and social service professionals. Some of the medical doctors and psychiatrists spoke little English; they could not understand the inmates. Many had had trouble finding jobs elsewhere. One or two had even had their licenses revoked. Reading Polly’s medication and treatment history, it appeared that the goal, if there was one, centered on wiping out her consciousness little by little. She had been allergic to Thorazine, so they’d given her something that looked like secobarbital sodium. Plus Dilantin and phenobarbital for seizures. Substantial amounts.

  I heard something and looked up. Aliganth was at the door, beckoning, her expression thoughtful. We stared at each other for a second. There were extra officers everywhere in the wake of Akilah’s disappearance—so I was relieved it was Aliganth herself who came for me.

  “Ross want to see you, Mattox. Right away.”

  She was waiting for me, her face grim and set. I hoped that I wasn’t walking funny—I had, after all, a poem in my underpants. Then I stopped thinking about the p
oem—I felt a flash of sympathy for Warden Ross. How bad was she looking these days? I wondered. To the upper administration, to the City, to the newspapers? How many of the guards riding in Akilah’s transport vehicle had been from the Women’s House? This time there were no shadowed implications, no bemused instructions—she went right to the point.

  “Miss Mattox,” she said. “Both Akilah Malik and Polly Lyle Clement were, or are, students in your poetry workshop, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Miss Mattox, did you ever notice any exchanges of information between Polly Clement and Akilah Malik?”

  “Do you mean conversations?”

  “Conversations—yes.”

  “If you mean conversations—they, like all the members of the workshop, talked to each other.”

  “Miss Mattox. I am particularly interested in any exchanges, or conversations, between Miss Clement and Miss Malik that seemed out of the ordinary to you.”

  “I have to remind you that I teach poetry. Almost any conversation in a poetry workshop would seem out of the ordinary to a random listener.”

  Ross inhaled slowly, deeply. She looked at me in a mild and courteous way that was somehow deeply intimidating.

  “Miss Mattox. You were the instructor. You noticed things about your students, am I right?”

  “You are.”

  The warden sat back in her chair, smiled, and shook her head at me.

  “In keeping with this routine observation, I’d like to ask you to relate particulars about how Akilah Malik and Polly Clement interacted.”

  “They talked to each other—they weren’t friends, exactly, but they did talk.”

  “Their topic of conversation?”