A woman shoveled snow in her driveway. So heavily dressed she had to pivot her whole body to get a look at him. Knock-kneed, his footprints a trail of dead roses. He felt nothing between his legs and the ground, as if he were floating, a pound and a half of cold metal in his hand.
“I need a car,” he said, and when he spoke he remembered he couldn’t drive, and how thirsty he was, that he was only at the beginning of his needs.
“The keys are in the house,” she said at last. “We may have to dig it out, though.”
“Water too,” he said, and realized the metal was stuck to his skin. “Who inside?”
“Nobody.” She looked at his feet. “I live alone.”
“Somebody put up them lights.”
“Somebody did,” but she didn’t explain. She looked old enough to have kids with lights of their own.
“All right then,” he said and waved the gun toward the house. Helped himself along the siding to the door. The warmth hit him with a pure feeling he did not recognize as gratitude. A short flight of stairs up to the kitchen; he practically had to go up on his knees. He kept the gun on her but hadn’t yet noticed he didn’t need it, only how heavy it had become.
“Anybody here?” he yelled. His voice had not far to travel: dining room, living room, hallway, bedroom. No basement, no upstairs he would have to take her word for. She waited patiently. Dark wood paneling, shag carpet he could barely feel. A fireplace with no fire, and the biggest picture on the mantel of a bride and groom.
“He put them lights up?”
“Some years ago,” the woman said. “He’s gone now. I haven’t taken them down since.”
“Ain’t that a bitch.”
“I guess that’s one way to put it.”
“I just lost my big brother.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You wouldn’t be if you knew.”
She looked at him. “The family in the field.”
“More like half brothers, we was.”
“Well it’s all or none, isn’t it?” She spoke rapidly, as if to forestall something.
“I need to sit down,” the little brother said and fairly collapsed onto the couch. Striped, wooden armrests. He gestured her into the other end of it, a gun-wielding host. She asked him if he wanted a pair of socks but now it felt like someone was nailing his feet to the floor and he couldn’t speak through it. She asked him if she could take off her coat and when he could he gasped “Go ahead” and she took it off without standing up.
“Did you see the wreath on the back of the house?” she asked. “He said you should always put some Christmas where no one knows it’s there. Someone will find it, he used to say.”
“I need to tie you up,” he blurted like a child confessing. He thought he could stand now.
She took it better than he expected. “I’ll have to see what I have.”
“I ain’t made no promises,” he said.
“It’s probably better that way,” she said, and something in her made something in him not pistol-whip her or shut her the fuck up. He just said, “All right.”
There was duct tape and twine in a drawer in the kitchen and he took her into the bathroom and crouched her in the tub while he lashed her hands and wrists to the faucet fixture. Something in her made his hands shake. He apologized without knowing it. He knew nothing about tying knots.
“For I can sleep,” he said, not normally given to explanation, and she told him where he could find something for his feet just before he taped her mouth shut. He told her to close her eyes and took a leak. His head was pounding so hard he couldn’t think and before he left he went into the medicine cabinet. There were no ideas in the mirror.
Out in the hall was a trapdoor in the ceiling he hadn’t noticed before. Attic or crawlspace; he thought about it but doubted he could climb a ladder. He found a closet where she said it would be. Plastic bags with what was probably someone’s name scrawled on them and he limped into the bedroom wearing a dead man’s woolen socks. He lay down. When the factory in his head quieted a little he half-slept, but instead of dreams there came to him a sense of forces outside the house, movement and rumbling, something audible in spite of itself like a giant trying to be stealthy. Then a phone rang and he sat up.
It stopped ringing. A furry pink slipper in the likeness of a rabbit next to the bed, its counterpart beneath it. He put them on and walked down the hall, something wrong with his left foot. He looked into the bathroom. The rope in the tub like a dead snake. He was neither angry nor surprised she was gone but the sound of pots and pans somewhere was not expected. He smelled coffee, breakfast. Went to the kitchen with his feet in furred pink slippers and the blood of ten on his hands, peered in the doorway gunfirst. Watercolor wallpaper. It smelled like a home.
“Hope you like French toast,” she said. Even from behind you could tell she enjoyed what she was doing. In her back and shoulders.
“I am so hungry,” he said like he’d just realized it. He listened. “Listen,” he said. “They out there.”
“They just called,” she said. “I told them not yet. I said you weren’t ready.” She looked at his feet.
They sat at the kitchen table, the gun next to his plate, silver like another utensil. French toast, sausage, coffee, orange juice. Woodgrain on the grips. She lowered her head with her hands in her lap and offered grace in the Lutheran fashion, asked that the family in the field be blessed as well, and that the little brother find forgiveness, amen.
“Amen,” he said, and the food tasted as food does when joy has gone into its making.
“I am tired,” he said, his plate clean.
“Go back and lie down. There’s all the time in the world.”
“I don’t think I can sleep,” he said. “I’ll get plenty a rest where I’m goin.”
“Would you like me to read to you?” she said. “That always worked for us.” He stared at her and she said he could bring it with him. She understood.
It was the first time. They went into the bedroom and he lay down again and she read to him from what she’d been reading to herself. She started over: a white bird, a seagull, more concerned with perfecting the art of flying than the gathering of food. He is mocked and ridiculed and soon becomes an outcast, a loner dedicated to flying higher, faster, farther. Eventually he reaches a height where like-minded creatures reside, communicating telepathically. He wonders if this is heaven, and one of the elders tells him there is no such thing, only a state of perfection that cannot be attained but must be striven for.
The little brother slept. Through the sound of the helicopter, the dogs, the amplified voice, she kept turning pages, and his dreams consumed the story and became indistinguishable from it.
The daughter of the family in the field testified from a wheelchair. Her legs and spine had been crushed, she’d lost an arm and her nose to frostbite; there were still bullet fragments in her brain and she had obvious difficulty speaking. She suffered from severe headaches, tinnitus, was assailed by strange colors and flashing lights, tastes on her tongue, uncontrolled spasms and inappropriate emotional responses. But she was able to recount that night in great detail and the little brother, in his oversized suit and tie and missing the toes of his left foot, listened as raptly as the jury and equally dumbfounded, as at the actions of someone else entirely, some stranger who had invaded her home and, with his accomplice, sexually assaulted not just her but every member of the household, male and female, exploiting every bodily ingress and position to the limits of imagination, and after this reconfiguring the family at gunpoint, coupling father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister and father and grandmother, and devising other permutations she recalled relentlessly and in spite of herself, including even the reek of this strange new chemistry mingled with the smell of evergreen and the pot roast they’d had for dinner.
The defendant, against all advice serving as his own counsel, was shrewd enough to object that a brain-damaged witness could hardly be considered
reliable: “She shot in the head, how she gonna know?” he entreated the judge, but her testimony was more than corroborated by the forensic evidence and continued on to profitless robbery: cash, jewelry, credit cards, both television sets, a Super 8 camera, the living room stereo, even the presents under the tree ferried out to the family van by the hostages themselves who, still unclothed, unshoed, shivering, sobbing, were crowded into the backseat with the exception of the witness, who rode up front between the intruders en route to the soccer field, where all were ordered out onto a tract of undisturbed white, harried, lined up, made to kneel in the headlights like novitiates to an ultimate order. Only the father, an algebra teacher and assistant football coach, had refused, and his end was no better nor worse than the others’; only the daughter, the last remaining, had asked for mercy, and so on her knees too but facing the little brother, the metal barrel pressed to her head, the small warmth of her mouth the most he’d ever felt of affection, but he had nothing left to spend and in place of his own release had pulled the trigger, and as she dropped back in the snow with her legs folded beneath her, the assailants returned to the vehicle, rolling over the bodies of their victims on their way back to the state highway, unaware she would somehow survive and drag herself over a hundred yards to the shoulder of the road…And at the conclusion of this portion of her statement, when the prosecutor asked if she felt her miraculous deliverance at the height of this holy season might not be evidence of higher purpose, she was racked by yet another convulsion, laughed painfully and said, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”
The little brother chose not to cross-examine. He called no witnesses and remained in his seat until the summations, during which he limped before a nervous jury box, evoking his debased childhood, mental and physical abuse at the hands of parents and foster parents, juvenile delinquency, the horrors of Viet Nam (where he had never served, having been dishonorably discharged during boot camp), drug and alcohol addictions, a series of petty crimes escalating into increasingly ruthless felonies, reducing himself to tears and such foul language the judge ordered him restrained and set about instructing the jury.
No one had ever read to him, he sobbed in his seat.
His mother sat in the back of the courtroom, behind sunglasses, befurred, bewigged, bejeweled. She had habitually sold her children to both men and women for money, drugs, and other favors, and when sentence was pronounced she cried out and fainted as if it had been passed upon her, which in a sense it had.
The judge asked her son if he had anything left to say. The little brother turned to the stricken shape in the wheelchair, looked at her as if he’d been her victim all along, and said, “If you sucked a proper dick I might remember just what it is they fixin to fry me for.”
The woman who’d read to him was his only visitor. She’d witnessed for the prosecution but taught him the alphabet as if to compensate. She taught him how to put two letters together to make other sounds and simple words…three letters, four. She gave him money for a radio that became a nest to the cockroaches that invaded his cell from the chow cart. When it shorted out he told her what had happened and she gave him a children’s Bible.
He did his laundry in the sink, hung it to dry on a line that ran from the vent in the back of his cell to the bars. Once he went two weeks without toilet paper. When it rained his cell would flood and mold infested the walls in black patches like a map of conquest. In winter he’d wear the wool socks she’d bought him to bed, two pairs, and one stretched over his head. Saw his own breath. Summers he’d lie naked on the concrete floor for hours on end, so still the mice sometimes crawled over him. He’d listen to the other inmates getting on the bars—Payday, Frosty, talking themselves hoarse; there were fifteen of them in the wing but they sounded like fifty. He spoke little but said too much. Learned to listen. He’d hear splashing in the toilet.
The cat sat on the mat. The hen is in a pen. A previous occupant had set the cell on fire and the smell never went away.
Breakfast on the chow cart at six in the morning. Sometimes, after the tray had passed throught the foodslot, there would appear in the opening a full-lipped mouth, or an ass like a pair of tires on a rack, spreading to show him another way out. Or it was the little brother’s turn to kneel or turn the other way. He barely saw the trusty’s face and couldn’t remember his name, but he wondered if this was what it felt like.
“You’ll know it when it hurts,” Payday shouted on the bars. The oldest man on DR.
At night they would come and shine a light in your face on the hour. They’d wake you up and strip you and put you in a portable cage while they tossed your cell—random spot check or because they thought they had a reason. The little brother left his cell twice a week to take a shower and twice a week for yard, another hard rectangle—never again would he stand on soil or grass—basketball hoop, chin-up bar, two card tables, a sixty-by-forty sky. The yard was not a safe place for him; even among the condemned there is a hierarchy of honor and a self-confessed rapist-murderer is not in the top tier. Only once did he drop his guard: the ball had rolled near his feet and, instead of returning it to the players, he’d set himself and leaned back to take a shot from twelve feet out. Woke up in the infirmary with a line of stitches like a great dead centipede running from the middle of his chest to the top of his groin, and three-quarters of his blood a gift from strangers.
After he got back to D-Pod he didn’t see the trusty again, nor the woman who’d taught him to read. Never found out if she’d moved away, fallen ill, forgotten him. But apparently most of his self-pity had bled out as well, and after the stitches were pulled he began a daily regimen of calisthenics. (The only way to do fifty pushups is to do fifty-five.) He kept his cell clean. He practiced writing with a pencil stub and ten sheets of paper from the canteen. Practiced killing flies with his hands. He had no TV or radio but the book cart rolled by once a week. He’d finished his children’s Bible, got the one meant for adults, and when he could write well enough he joined the pen pal program. He read history books, Malcolm, the Koran, rejected Christianity and appended an X to his name. The cart rolled by. The title Man and Superman tilted on its end grabbed his eye and he grabbed the spine but it was not a comic, it said God was dead. He’d begun to suspect as much himself but he wasn’t sure why, and laboriously worked his way back to the beginning to find out. What wasn’t on the cart he could request from the library, or enjoin his correspondents to send: the Dialogues, the Poetics, the Republic, er cogito sum, the phenomenology of the spirit. A dictionary. It was slow going, like digging a tunnel with a spoon. He moved his lips but made no sound and the words slipped through his skull like ghosts through a wall. He crawled through the Realm of Objects, the Realm of Desire—where the trouble starts—the fear and trembling and the sickness unto death. He had no use for fiction. He read instead the critiques of judgment and of pure and practical reason, studied the categorical imperative, the transvaluation of all values, the Will to Power and the Eternal Return. He somehow avoided Marx but not the Upanishads, the Books of the Dead both Egyptian and Tibetan. He began to meditate and for a month he was a Buddhist. He stopped jerking off, stopped killing flies—just caught them in midair and let them go. Then, walking the perimeter of the yard for the first time since he’d been gutted there, on the very spot, he stopped and looked up at the blue rectangle of the universe, its faded gray bricks, and renounced all religion as superstition and all philosophy as gibberish, and never opened another book except for those from the legal section and those he would attempt to write.
He was his own lawyer, and his appeals churned in the imperceptible machinery of due process. Writs of habeas corpus, petitions, motions to vacate, to Recall the Mandate and Reconsider, issued to local courts of appeal, the circuit court, the Eastern District, to the State Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of the United States. Three hundred and fifty-six pages on twenty-seven grounds, pending.
Stays issued and lifted, one at a time, like
gifts given and revoked, unopened.
A committee re-evaluated his behavior every six months, and after seven years he was upgraded to Condemned A. They were still going to kill you but moved you to a cell that smelled better and you got your toilet paper on time. He’d taught himself chess and played with other inmates on the wing, shouting the King’s Indian Attack down the run to opponents he never saw. He competed in international tournaments by mail, fifty days to make ten moves. Stopped speaking for weeks at a time. He exchanged letters with a woman from Indiana. She sent him money, bought him a radio, sent pictures of herself in a pantsuit; a pale, grim-faced, middle-aged virgin who lived in Plainfield with her mother. Wore glasses. A mouth like a paper cut. In his fifth letter he proposed. She accepted and they were married by the chaplain in the Visitor’s Room, the warden as witness. The groom wore shackles and waist-chains and the state did not permit touching during the ceremony, nor during the visitations that followed. These came twice a month, and sometimes the allotted hour would pass painfully and awkwardly with hardly a word being exchanged; she was much more voluble on the page than in person, and who is to say this isn’t love?
Layman's Report Page 2