“What kind of cell is that?” he asks.
Not a cell, I say. The guards ran the prison from there.
“Go figure,” he says, but he doesn’t say whatever, and then there are other voices.
A light in the chapel upstairs.
The chapel is a big room with slender round columns and balconies. Once there were pews, then folding chairs, now bits of plaster littering the floor. The light comes from the other end, on the riser where the altar once stood. Four of them on a big air mattress. One on each corner. A tripod with a lamp hanging over the middle of the mattress, and over that a gauzy shroud like a mosquito net. But there are no insects up here, nothing lives but us, and the shroud is intended not to keep anything out, but whatever might show itself in.
“Are you a friend?” someone says.
“Did something bad happen to you?”
“Were you ever alive?”
“I don’t like this EMF I’m getting.”
We watch from the top of the stairs, all they’ve conjured so far. They are holding hands. I signal for us to leave and turn and the younger one belches at the top of his lungs—something he can do at will. A talent. Somebody screams. I set an example and head back downstairs. Someone comes after us.
“You don’t know what you’re fucking with,” he warns us from the top of the steps, but we aren’t the ones chanting around a shrouded light.
Back through the control room to the east cell block. Six tiers, six hundred cells. I start to tell him something about them and he stops me, says I already told him. Sometimes I think he just says that. We start up. A spiral ladder enclosed in a narrow barred cage a hundred feet high. Old paint and rust flaking off the handrail. The climb isn’t making me any younger and we stop to rest with the lights off, gloves on, near the top but not the end. Inter spem et metum.
“Need a jump-start, old man?” he says, but he sounds about as winded as me. “Aren’t there regular stairs?”
Everyone takes the regular stairs. You still have to climb them.
“Is this supposed to teach me something?” he says, but whatever I tell him will be something I already told him, so I use my breath to breathe and we start up again.
We get to the top without running into anyone else, head down the catwalk along the top range. The ceiling is close, peeling flaps of paint like ranks of sleeping bats. Our lights bend over them and so do the lights of the ghosthunters, some of them tinted red to show them what white light won’t. You can hear them before you see them, shouting to each other in their own language, about auras and apparitions, hot and cold readings, DVPs, EVPs, and RVPs. One of them passes us wearing a dust mask and night-vision goggles and the younger one snickers and gives way. Leans over the rail to our left, shines his light down the drop.
Don’t even think it, I say.
“Who’s thinking?” he says.
Get away from there, I say, let’s look at these cells.
Big enough for one, they held two. Damp, rot, rust, mold—they get inside us as much as we do them, in our noses and throats, and stay there. In some the frames of left-behind bunks, toilets and sinks stained beyond cleansing, dark shapes on the wall left by missing mirrors. They are occupied again: click of a Geiger counter, someone unrolling her sleeping bag, someone’s naked pale behind heaving in and out of the dark, and that too will get you permanently barred. I steer us past to the next one.
She tells me to try to be a friend. I tell him to be careful. These doors still lock, I say, and no one has the keys. Maybe I shouldn’t have told him.
Cell by cell, tier by tier, down. We pass a guy with a tiny camera strapped to his head, a drunken biker sobbing over something lost or found. The younger one wants his picture taken behind bars, and I make a bad pun about cell phones. Tell him he doesn’t have to smile. His face goes white in the flash but when we look at the shot only his hands are visible, gripping the bars out of the black.
Pictures don’t lie, I say, and this is a lie in itself.
“Maybe it depends who’s taking em,” he says, but doesn’t want to try it again.
At the bottom of the block, a narrow trench dug into the floor, opening through the wall: a tunnel. The younger one gets as excited as he’ll allow himself, so I don’t tell him it’s a fake, another kind of escape, dug by Hollywood for a Hollywood movie. It is meant to be a film about injustice and the unquenchable human spirit, but mostly it is a film about Hollywood. Some things you don’t have to see to believe.
I tell him stay out of there. We move on, climb the west block, then up another spiral to the west tower. This is not an official tour and the tower is closed, so we stand at the parapet, looking. The lights of the new facility away and below, and we look down into the present from the past. It’s cold. A young couple is out here already, smoking, ignoring us in favor of the moon. I light up one of my own.
“Gimme a puff,” he says, just to say it. He doesn’t approve. He asks about my father—knows my father was a guard. He asks me if my father ever used his gun.
Never said, I say; he doesn’t know everything, and doesn’t need to.
“Anyone ever break out?”
Not on his watch, I say, and I tell him all the stories but one. Then I light another.
“I thought you wanted air,” he says, yawns. “How long we staying anyway? This place even smells outside.”
Till we see what there is to see.
“There’s no such thing,” he says. “Just these losers looking for em.”
Happy birthday anyway, I say. I thought it’s the thought that counts.
“What if the thought sucks too?”
I admit that could be a problem.
I drop the butt and it disappears. One more stop, I tell him, and go to the stairs. Back down West Block, through the control room, the visitors room, down the long slanted wing where the barber shop was. Wood floor, now the color of stone. Discolored patches where the chairs once sat. I stand in front of one and play the light over it, then through the space above and on the back wall where things hung. The air is harder to breathe down there. Haven’t breathed it since I was a boy.
“What are you looking for?” the younger one asks.
Nothing, I say. Anything.
I wait for him to have the last word, but he doesn’t take it. I ask him if he knows where he is.
“Do you know where I am?” his voice says, and the rest of him is somewhere else. I swing the light around. The barber shop is empty. I go to the doorway, look down the long hall of the diagonal. Other doorways, other rooms, lavatories, showers. He could be in any of them, or none of them. He could be in the sixth dimension.
Let’s not play games, I say.
“This is serious business,” he says and wails like what he might become.
I’ll leave you here, I say.
“Promises, promises,” he says.
I hear footsteps. A scream far away.
“It wasn’t me,” he says.
I’m going to count, I say. I pick a number. He picks a smaller one, gets there first.
I’m going to set an example he might not like.
“Boo,” he says. Then he sings happy birthday to himself.
The melting point of steel is twenty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
It had only been an hour, two at the most. I hadn’t seen much fire, just a lot of black smoke. A plane was surrounded at the airport. The Commander in Chief was in Florida, reading a story to second-graders. I knew steel beams were involved. But I didn’t think it possible for open flame to get that hot. Even jet-fueled…
Just like the burning pits.
“Who’d want to live there anyway?” she said.
Later the dog and I watched them go down—back then he still knew who I was. Back then I saw it just like everyone else, over and over, just sort of dissolving from top to bottom under that boiling gray cloud, kind of neatly in a way, and so fast. Just ten seconds, like a free fall.
She asked me to clip his nail
s. These days I wouldn’t even try.
These days I don’t see it like everyone else. I see the speed and precision of it, the pancaking, each floor giving way to the next with no resistance, no toppling, the little bursts of white smoke. I see something controlled, an implosion. Shock cord and thermite. A thumb on a button at a safe distance.
What I don’t see I believe needs looking into. There are other mysteries: explosions in the sub-basements just before the impacts. Blackouts, evacuations, inexplicable sounds of construction going on in the weeks before the planes. The new property owner took over just six weeks earlier, and promptly took out insurance against exactly what happened.
These days he moves in slow circles, favoring his hip. Sometimes when he gets up he leaves a stain.
Then there’s the matter of Building 7.
But the way they went in, sort of softly, neat, like coins into a slot, again and again. You almost expect it to come out the other side intact, no damage done, like something that can slip through solid matter. A ghost.
* * *
You could say we met on the way to Saturn.
Back then I was still in security, made rounds at a large private university. The libraries, the Law School, the frat houses, the School of Engineering, the School of Applied Social Sciences. The School of Engineering is across the street from the natural history museum, and a narrow tunnel connects the museum to the planetarium. To her. She sits on a stool at the entrance to the tunnel, tearing tickets in half. I went once a week. She counts heads, cleans and vacuums, tells you no food or beverages allowed inside, and if the astronomer isn’t there she can run the show herself. There are several; my favorite begins in silence and darkness. Then James Earl Jones says, “Can something come from nothing?” and you are engulfed in white light and sound and it is like lying under a freight train in a dentist’s chair. Now that they’ve figured out how the whole thing is going to end, I suppose they’ll make a show out of that too. (And whose voice will they find to tell that story? I say go with an Englishman.)
She told me to enjoy Destination Saturn. “Enjoy the trip,” she said. I said I would, though the accommodations were a little small for my taste. I meant no offense but she took some. Said it was the most advanced mid-size facility in North America. Told me the Skymaster ZKP3/S projector was the only one of its kind and could show you over five thousand stars.
I told her I could name every one of them: Acrux, Aldebaran…
She tore my ticket in half.
After Mars and Jupiter, the sixty-two moons and nine rings, after the winds that rage a thousand miles an hour, we went to Dunkin Donuts for coffee. She told me over decaf with an artificial sweetener about her work, her day, how many pounds she’d shed since joining Weight Watchers. I believed her. She said she’d never heard of me, then checked her baggage: her father was a drunk who took things out on her, and she’d married a man devoted to maintaining the tradition. She hadn’t seen him in years and I sometimes wonder if that will change. The past is not a canceled soap opera. He left her a son; somebody else left her the younger one. Her father left her the house we live in. Died in his sleep—probably the only useful thing he ever did for anybody and all he had to do was not wake up.
I suppose he had his side of it.
The house needs work, I do what I can.
It has a basement and a garage and half a second floor, stands on a street with other bungalows, mostly ranches, a few colonials. To the right what they used to call a starter home; these days that’s as far as you might get. A young couple live there with a baby, an SUV, a missing cat. He drives to General Motors in Lordstown every morning; she stays behind with the baby, waits for the cat to come home. Sometimes he waters his lawn in a softball uniform. They bowl and go to church, barbecue occasionally in the backyard with a small group of friends that never changes. We are not invited. But they are quiet and considerate, and in the winter he snowblows our driveway without asking anything in return. That is neighbor enough for me.
The husband handles the diplomatic chores. He asks what I do. I say I’m semi-retired and he doesn’t pursue it. Talks about squatters. Says he saw the younger one cutting through their yard—no big deal, just thought I should know.
He asks me if I’ve seen Tiger.
Only on the flyers, I say.
To the left lives a retired librarian, getting deafer by the day. All the quiet she can stand now—I drive her to the grocery store once a week. The man down the street has a flagpole in his front yard. A black dog is tied to the base of the pole and a black flag flies at the top. MIA. He lives alone. On certain national holidays he raises the Stars and Bars, but the neighborhood association believes in the sanctity of private property and minding their own business, so long as you cut your grass and don’t let trash pile up on the tree lawn.
I see to the grass. I mulch. I’ve put in a new water heater, a double sink, new counters; I’ve painted, insulated, rewired, regrouted, almost fell off the roof resealing the chimney flashing. A young man’s game, but I believe in pulling my weight. I work alone. I’ve tried to get the younger one to help me around but he is in need of repair himself. The older one used to. The older one is a straight arrow—tireless, uncomplaining, and a fair craftsman in his own right. Used to send emails and letters from whatever desert he was deployed to—he couldn’t always tell us—now we hardly ever hear. He’s due home later this year; her fingers are crossed and her breath held. We support the troops. She Watches her Weight. I reface the cabinets, walnut glaze.
She thinks of me as a former celebrity, but hasn’t seen the film. Says she doesn’t care for documentaries.
The younger one has blue eyes and light brown skin. I don’t ask. Sometimes his hair matches his eyes, and his clothes are so baggy he looks lost in them. Spends a lot of time in the room he shared with his brother; at the computer, in that world, one with an edge but no horizon. Wallows in videogame carnage designed by some kid from MIT, some genius making the rest of us dumber. Or he plays with the dog. Then he disappears to wherever his skateboard takes him, sometimes alone, sometimes not, and I’m not sure it makes a difference. He always comes back. Once with his hair a different color, a bolt through his nose, a tooth knocked out. Once in the back of a police car. Home or not, he disappears.
His friends are few, but quiet and well-mannered. This scares me.
Once he told me to go fuck myself. She said it was nothing personal.
“Just acting out,” she said, but I wanted to do some acting out of my own. Wanted to take hold of his hair whatever color it was. I sandblasted the drainpipes instead.
Did I say he’s good with the dog?
She tells me not to worry about it. She says I do plenty, and to show her gratitude let me convert the garage into a workshop. I have baseboard heating and high-security locks, weatherstripping, dehumidifiers, my washing machines. I try to keep busy. There is no longer room for the car but she doesn’t mind.
Once in a while we all have dinner at the seafood restaurant, in the strip mall across the street from City Hall. City Hall is a low, expansive building the mayor shares with the police station, court, recreation center, Board of Ed. We went there when they wouldn’t let us marry in the planetarium. I don’t know. They said there are regulations, but sometimes I have to wonder.
It is eight minutes long, give or take. Takes seven to read the statement, more or less. He sits on the floor in front of them wearing an orange scrubsuit. He is blindfolded. His hands are tied behind his back, and his ankles are bound. (You don’t see this at first.) Hair gray, receding, salt and pepper in his beard. He moves his head like a blind man searching his dark. His mouth opens and closes, he seems unsure what’s required of him. Maybe he isn’t.
There are five of them, all in black and wearing hoods. The one in the middle reads a kind of speech. He puts one sheet behind the other. The two on either side of him are posed with assault rifles on their hips. There is symmetry. You can see the language you hear on
the banner behind them. On the banner behind is a black sun. The one in the middle finishes matter-of-factly, like the closing of a monthly report. He hands off the speech to his right. With his left hand he pulls something from his sash, and he steps forward and they all move in with him as one dark thing.
The hem of a curtain sometimes swings in from the right. Must be a window there, a breeze. Light.
The man in the scrubsuit is taken to the floor by his hair. A zoom and the image disintegrates, then re-forms though you wish it wouldn’t. When you see him again he is trying to struggle. Someone is squeezing his jaw, keeping his head up. An arm, maybe someone else’s, moving back and forth. The blade is short. You can hear him through his gag like there isn’t one. It comes out in dark sheets. (You can’t see it on the black.) The arm is fast, working one side then the other. You can hear him longer than you would think. You hear him longer than you would think you would hear him. They are more than halfway through when he lets out one more gasp, almost resigned, then slackens, and everything relaxes in a way. It is just work now.
Now you hear the squealing of a pig.
Just work. (A powered handsaw would be ideal for purposes of scission post mortem, but may not be in keeping with the protocol of the ritual.) Jump cut to the final pass of the blade. When what’s required of him is lifted free you feel almost a kind of relief, though relief is not really the word and I do not know what the word is. It is placed on the body, on the back, and it starts to topple and someone has to step forward to right it. A delicate balance. One eye open and turned inward, like someone trying to look at his own nose. Trying to look inside himself.
Another jump cut. One of them holds it up in both hands. It belonged to an American contractor working for a foreign construction firm. He is still winking at us.
I ask the younger one where he got it from.
He shrugs. “Somebody sent me a link.”
“You shouldn’t be watching things like that.”
He shrugs again. “Somebody has to.”
“Somebody did. We’re taking away your computer privileges for a while.”
Layman's Report Page 27