God's Gym

by John Edgar Wideman

  Are prisoners permitted to cultivate beards. Would a beard, if allowed, cause the son to resemble the father more closely. How would I recognize a resemblance if I can't visualize the father's face, or rather see it all too clearly as the anonymous blur of an aging man, any man, all men. Instead of staring without fear and taking responsibility for the unmistakable, beaten-up person I've apparently become, I prefer to see nothing.

  Time at last for the visit. I'd written again and the son had responded again. A slightly longer reply with a visiting form tucked inside the flimsy prison envelope. Of course I couldn't help recalling the letter within a letter I'd received from the lawyer, Koppleman. The son instructed me to check the box for family and write father on the line following it. To cut red tape and speed up the process, I assumed, but for a second I hesitated, concerned some official would notice the names didn't match, then realized lots of inmates wouldn't bear (or know) their father's name, and some wouldn't claim it even though it's registered on their birth certificate, so I checked the family box, printed father in the space provided.

  Aside from a few sentences re the enclosed form, the second letter actually shorter than the first: Why not. My social calendar not full. A smiling leopard in a cage. Step closer if you dare.

  An official notice from the warden's office authorizing my visit took months to reach me. I began to regret lying on a form that had warned me, under penalty of law, not to perjure myself. Who reads the applications. How carefully did prison officials check facts applicants alleged. What punishments could be levied against a person who falsified information. The form a perfunctory measure, I guessed, so bureaucrats in charge of security could say they'd followed the rules. A form destined to gather dust in a file, properly executed and stamped, retrievable just in case an emergency exploded and some official needed to cover her or his ass. Justify his or her existence. The existence of the state. Of teeming prisons in the middle of the desert.

  During the waiting my misgivings soured into mild paranoia. Had I compromised myself, broken a law that might send me too packing off to jail. I finally calmed down after I figured out that short of a DNA test (a) no one could prove I wasn't the prisoner's father and (b) it wasn't a crime to believe I was. If what the son had written in his first letter was true, the prison would possess no record of his father. The late friend past proclaiming his paternity. And even if he rose from the dead to argue his case, why would his claim, sans DNA confirmation, be more valid in the eyes of the law than mine. So what if he had visited. So what if he'd married the prisoner's mother. So what if he sincerely believed his belief of paternity. Mama's baby, Daddy's maybe. Hadn't I heard folks shout that taunt all my life. Didn't my own mother recite the refrain many times. Nasty Kilroys scrawled everywhere on the crumbling walls of my old neighborhood hollered the same funny, mean threat. Careful, Jack. Don't turn your back. Kilroy's lurking. Kilroy's creeping. Keep your door locked, your ole lady pregnant in summer, barefoot in winter, my man. In more cases than people like to admit, paternity nothing but wishful thinking. Kilroy a thief in the night, leaves no fingerprints, no footprints. Mama's sweet baby, Daddy's, maybe.

  Psychologists say there's a stage when a child doubts the adults raising it are its real family. How can parents prove otherwise. And why would kids want to trade in the glamorous fairy tales they dream up about their origins for a pair of ordinary, bumbling adults who impose stupid rules, stifling routines. Who needs their hostile world full of horrors and hate.

  Some mornings when I awaken I look out my window and pretend to understand. I reside in a building in the bottom of somebody's pocket. Sunlight never touches its bricks. Any drawer or cabinet or closet shut tight for a day will exude a gust of moldy funk when you open it. The building's neither run-down nor cheap. Just dark, dank, and drab. Drab as grownups that children are browbeaten into accepting as their masters. The building, my seventh-floor apartment, languish in the shadow of something falling, leaning down, leaning over. Water, when you turn on a faucet first thing in the morning, gags on itself, spits, then gushes like a bloody jailbreak from the pipes. In a certain compartment of my heart where compassion's supposed to lodge, but there's never enough space in cramped urban dwellings so I store niggling self-pity there too, I try to find room also for all the millions of poor souls who have less than I have, who would howl for joy if they could occupy as their own one corner of my dreary little flat. I invite these unfortunates for a visit, pack the compartment till it's full far beyond capacity, and weep with them, share with them my scanty bit of prosperity, tell them I care, tell them be patient, tell them I'm on their side, tell them an old acquaintance of mine who happens to be a poet recently hit the lottery big-time, a cool million, and wish them similar luck, wish them clear sailing and swift, painless deaths, tell them it's good to be alive, whatever, tell them how much I appreciate living as long as I've managed and still eating every day, fucking now and then, finding a roof over my head in the morning after finding a bed to lie in at night, grateful to live on even though the pocket's deep and black and a hand may dig in any moment and crush me.

  With Suh Jung's aid—why not use her, wasn't it always about finding uses for the people in your life, why would they be in your life if you had no use for them, or vice versa, and if you're using them, doesn't that lend purpose to their lives, you're actually doing them a trickle-down favor, aren't you, allowing them to use you to feel themselves useful and that's something, isn't it, better than nothing anyway, than being useless or used up—I gathered more information about the son in prison. Accumulated a file, biography, character sketch, rap sheet a.k.a. his criminal career.

  You're going to wear out the words, she joked as she glanced over at me sitting beside her in the bed that occupied the same room with a Pullman fridge and stove. Her jibe less a joke than a complaint: I'm sick and tired of your obsessive poring over a few dog-eared scraps of paper extracted from Arizona's bottomless pit of records, is what she was saying with a slight curl of one side of her thin mouth, a grimace that could have been constructed as the beginning of a smirk she decided was not worth carrying full term.

  I kept reading. Avoided the swift disappointment another glance at her tidy body would trigger. Its spareness had been exciting at first, but after the slow, slow, up-close-and-personal examination of her every square inch afforded by the bathing rituals she performed on me and I learned to reciprocate once my shyness abated, after we'd subjected each other's skin to washcloth, oil, the glide, pinch, stroke of fingertips and tongue, her body had become in a few months much less intriguing, less compensation for her tart remarks. Now I had no patience for her impatience with me, her taunts. The eroticism between us had dulled rather too quickly, it seemed. An older man's childish unreasonableness partly at fault. Why else would I be disappointed after a few weeks because her hips didn't round nor the negligible mounds beneath her nippies swell. Her boyish look not a stage, it was what I was going to get, period, even if the business between us survived longer than I had any reason to expect. No, things weren't going to get better, and I was wasting precious time. Given my age, how many more chances could I expect.

  Here's what the papers said: He's done lots of bad things, the worst kinds of things, and if we could, we'd kill him, but we can't, so we'll never, never let him go.

  Are you surprised, she'd asked.

  I didn't know what to expect, I had replied.

  Heavy-duty stuff. If only half the charges legit, he's a real bad actor.

  I'm not traveling out West to forgive him or bust him out or bring him back. Just visit. Just fill in for the dead father. Once. One time enough and it's finished.

  No matter how many times you read them, she says, the words won't change. Why read the same ugly facts over and over.

  (A) Because my willing, skilled accomplice gathered them for me. (B) Curiosity.

  His crimes would make a difference to me, I mean if I were you. This whole visiting business way over the top, you admit i
t yourself, so I don't pretend I can put myself in your shoes, but still. The awful crimes he's committed would affect anybody's decision to go or not.

  Is he guilty. How can you be certain based on a few sheets of paper.

  A lot's in the record. A bit too much for a case of mistaken identity. Huh-uh. Plus or minus a few felonies, the man's been busy.

  Are you casting the first stone.

  A whole building's been dumped on the poor guy. And he's thrown his share of bricks at other folks. I'd hate to bump into him in a dark alley.

  Maybe you already have, my friend. Maybe you have and maybe you've enjoyed it.

  You're more than a little weird about this, you know. What the hell are you talking about.

  Just that people wind up in situations there's no accounting for. Situations when innocence or guilt are extremely beside the point. Situations when nothing's for sure except some of us are on one side of the bars, some on the other side, but nobody knows which side is which.

  I know I haven't robbed or kidnapped or murdered anyone. Have you.

  Have I. Do you really want to know. Everyone has crimes to answer for, don't they. Even you. Suppose I said my crimes are more terrible than his. Would you believe me. Would my confession start your heart beating a little faster.

  (a) No. And (b) you're not scaring me. Put those damned papers away and turn off the light. Please. I have work tomorrow.

  You don't want to hear my confession. It might sound better in the dark.

  I'm tired. I need sleep, and you're acting stupid because you can't make up your mind to go to Arizona.

  My mind's made up. The prison said yes. I'm on my way.

  I'll be glad when it's over and done.

  And me back in the arms of my love. Will you be faithful while your sweet serial killer's away.

  She tries to snatch the papers but misses. I drop them over the side of the pull-out bed. Like the bed, she is small and light. Easy to fold up and subdue even for an older fellow. When I wrap myself around her, my body's so much larger than hers, she almost vanishes. When we fuck, or now, capturing her, punishing her, I see very little of her flesh. I'm aware of my size, my strength towering over her squirming, her thrashing, her gasps for breath. I am her father's stare, the steel gate dropping over the tiger pit in which she's naked, trapped, begging for food and water. Air. Light.

  I arrive on Sunday. Two days late, for reasons I can't explain to myself. I flew over mountains, then desert flatness that seemed to go on forever. It must have been Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, not actual desert but the nation's breadbasket, so they say, fruited plains, amber waves of grain, plowed, fertilized fields irrigated by giant machines day after day spreading water in the same pattern to create the circles, squares, rectangles below. Arable soil gradually giving way to sandy grit as the plane drones westward, through clouds, over another rugged seam of mountains, and then as I peer down at the undramatic nothingness beyond the far edge of wrinkled terrain, the surface of the earth flips over like a pancake. What's aboveground buried, what's belowground suddenly exposed. Upside-down mountains are hollow shells, deep, deep gouges in the stony waste, their invisible peaks underground, pointing to hell.

  A bit of confusion, bureaucratic stuttering and sputtering when confronted by the unanticipated fact of my tardy arrival, a private calling his sergeant, sergeant phoning officer in charge of visitation, each searching for verification, for duplication, for assurance certified in black and white that she or he is off the hook, not guilty of disrupting the checks and balances of prison routine. I present myself hat in hand, remorseful, apologetic, Please, please, give me another chance please kind sir, forgive me for missing day one and two of the scheduled three-day visit, for checking in the morning of day three instead of day one. Am I still eligible or will I be shooed away like starving beggars from the rich man's table.

  I overhear two guards discussing a coyote whose scavenging brought it down out of the slightly elevated wilderness of rock and brush beginning a few miles or so from the prison's steel-fenced perimeter. I learn how patiently guards on duty in the tower spied on the coyote's cautious trespass of their turf, a blip at first, up and back along the horizon, then a discernible shape—skinny legs, long, pointed ears, bushy tail—a scraggly critter drawn by easy prey or coyote curiosity closer and closer to the prison until it was within rifle range and the guards took turns profiling it through their sharpshooting sniper scopes, the sad-faced, cartoon coyote they christened whatever guards would christen a creature they probably will kill one day, a spook, a mirage, it seems so quick on its feet, bolder as it's allowed to approach nearer without being challenged, believing perhaps it can't be seen, flitting from shadow to shadow, camouflaged by hovering darkness, by mottled fur, a shadow itself, instantly freezing, sniffing the air, then trotting again back and forth along the skyline, skittish through coverless space, up and back, parry, thrust, and retreat, ears pricked to attention when the rare service vehicle enters or leaves the prison parking lot before dawn. Murky predawn the coyote's time, the darkness divulging it, a drop from a leaky pipe, a phantom prowling nearer and nearer as if the electrified steel fence is one boundary of its cage, an easy shot now the sharpshooters forbear taking, too easy, or perhaps it's more fun to observe their mascot play, watch it pounce on a mouse and pummel it in swift paws bat-bat-bat before its jaws snap the rodent's neck or maybe the name they named it a kind of protection for a while till somebody comes on duty one morning or premorning really when the first shift after the night shift has to haul itself out of bed, out of prefab homes lining the road to the prison entrance, shitty box houses, a few with bright patches of something growing in flowerboxes beside the front steps, boxes you can't see at that black hour from your pickup, eyes locked in the tunnel your headlights carve, a bad-head, bad-attitude morning, pissed off, thinking about quitting this stinking job, getting the fuck out before you're caught Kilroying or cuckolded in the town's one swinging joint, cussed out, serving pussy probation till further notice, cancer eating his mama, daddy long gone, kids sick or fighting or crazy on pot or dead or in prison so he draws a bead and pow, blood seeps into the sand, the coyote buzzard bait by the time I eavesdrop on two guards badmouthing their assassin colleague, laughing at him, at the coyote's surprise, the dead animal still serving time as a conversation piece, recycled in this desert sparseness, desert of extremes, of keepers and kept, silence and screams, cold and hot, thirst and drunkenness, too much time, no time, where all's lost but nothing's gone.

  A spiffy, spit-and-polish platinum blond guard whose nametag I read and promptly forget, Lieutenant, another guard addresses her, Lieutenant, each breast under her white blouse as large as Suh Jung's head, smiles up at me from the counter where she's installed, hands me the document she's stamped, slides me a tray for unloading everything in my pockets, stores it when I'm finished. Now that wasn't so bad, was it, sir. Gives me a receipt and a green ticket with matching numbers. Points me toward a metal detector standing stark and foursquare as a guillotine whose eye I must pass through before I'm allowed to enter the prison.

  Beyond the detector one more locked door I must be buzzed through and I'm outside again, in an open-air, tunnel-like enclosure of Cyclone fencing bristling on sides and top with razor wire, a corridor or chute or funnel or maze I must negotiate while someone somewhere at a machine measures and records my every step, false move, hesitation, scream, counts drops of sweat, of blood when my hands tear at the razor wire, someone calibrating the before and after of my heart rate, my lungs.

  I pass all the way through the tunnel to a last checkpoint, a small cinder-block hut squatting beside the final sliding gate guarding the visiting yard. Thirty yards away, across the yard, at a gated entranceway facing this one, guards are mustering inmates dressed in orange jumpsuits.

  In a slot at the bottom of the hut's window you must surrender your numbered green ticket to receive a red one. Two groups of women and children ahead of me in line require a few m
inutes each for this procedure. Then I hold up the works. Feel on my back the helplessness and irritation of visits stalled. Five, ten minutes in the wire bullpen beside the hut, long enough to register a miraculous change in temperature. Less than an hour ago, crossing the parking lot from rental car to waiting room, I'd wondered if I'd dressed warmly enough for the visit. Now Arizona sun bakes my neck. I'm wishing for shade, for the sunglasses not permitted inside. My throat's parched. Will I be able to speak if spoken to. Through the hut's thick glass, bulletproof I'm guessing, I watch two officers chattering. One steps away to a wall phone. The other plops down at a shelflike minidesk, shuffles papers, punches buttons on a console. A dumb show since I couldn't hear a thing through the slab of greenish glass.

  Did I stand in the cage five minutes or ten or twenty. What I recall is mounting heat, sweat rolling inside my clothes, blinking, losing track of time, not caring about time, shakiness, numbness, mumbling to myself, stiffening rage, morphing combinations of all the above, yet overriding each sensation, the urge to flee, to be elsewhere, anywhere other than stalled at that gate, waiting to be snatched inside or driven away or, worse, pinned there forever. Would I be knocked down to my knees, forced to recite my sins, the son's sins, the sins of the world. If I tried to escape, would my body—splat—be splashed and pulped on the razor wire or could I glide magically through the knives glinting like mirrors, not stopping till I reach a spot far, far away where I can bury my throbbing head in the coolness miles deep below the sand, so deep you can hear the subterranean chortle of rivers on the opposite face of the planet.