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Hardly anyone comes to see me these days. Even my cell-mate, a convicted rapist, gets more people dropping by. In fairness, his brother lives in Marlborough, a short drive away; whereas I entail a plane ticket. Still. It gets lonely.
I do get letters. Four-fifths of them come from women, many of whom have read the true crime book about me or seen the half-hour basic cable show that aired last spring. An astonishingly large number of my correspondents believe that I am innocent. It’s hard to understand. I pled guilty. The videotape of my confession was excerpted for TV. And yet they write, these women, that they can see goodness in me, that I could never have done as I did unless driven by extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps I confessed falsely, compelled by fear. A man will say anything when he’s afraid. A generous mistake they make, these women: they fail to grasp what a relief it was to confess.
At first, nobody believed me, not Yasmina or the nurses. They thought I was still delirious, or stewed on morphine. They had me forcibly sedated, and several days passed before I was calm enough, and trusted sufficiently, to make a phone call. I asked for Zitelli, and when he was not in, for Connearney.
My first interview with him is the one that everyone saw. At the start, I am bent over, barely audible, the words dribbling out of me, and one can easily understand why people might believe me to have been coerced: I lose the thread, back up, contradict myself. My second, third, and fourth interviews—done to dispel the notion that I might be confabulating—were taped, as well, though never aired. Had they been, I think viewers would have gotten a much different impression of me. In them I’m sitting up straight, speaking soberly and with a practiced air. The judge who sentenced me called them chilling, and I’ll be the first to admit that he’s right. The lesson being that you should never, ever believe anything you see on television.
I spent the last third of my hospital stay in a private room, hand-cuffed to the bed, an officer stationed in the corner, lest I attempt to harm myself or escape. When the time came to change my dressing or empty the bedpan, he would stand up, poised to spring into action if I tried to do anything to the nurse. Other than that, our interaction was minimal. He wouldn’t say more than a few words at a time, and he avoided making eye contact with me, giving me the first taste of that blend of pity and revulsion now so familiar to me.
I am told that Yasmina’s assessment was correct: I could have died. Orbital cellulitis is no joke, and by failing to clean the wounds properly, and continually reapplying makeup, I had done a superb job of first culturing, then aggravating, the infection. It took my eye; it could have easily spread to my brain; and I wonder now if on some level I did not recognize this possibility. No doubt there are more efficient ways to commit suicide. I know better than most, though, that such decisions are rarely, if ever, discrete.
The case against me was straightforward enough. Even so, it did not go to trial for eight months. My attorney argued that I first needed to recuperate. Plus, they had to find the bodies. This took a while, as I could give them only the most general directions. Thanks to my exemplary willingness to cooperate, I was released on bond, confined to house arrest, and fitted with an ankle monitoring bracelet. I didn’t mind. I used my remaining time to finish my dissertation, e-mailing Linda Neiman a final draft at the end of April.
At that point there still hadn’t been any press coverage of the case. Her reply thus threw me for a loop. They wouldn’t graduate me, she said, not now or ever.
“We can’t condone plagiarism,” she said.
Apparently, my confession had renewed Detective Zitelli’s interest in the contents of Alma’s thesis. Fed up with his first translator, who found the paper’s arcane terminology a bit much to contend with, he contacted the Harvard Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. They referred him to the director of graduate studies, who referred him to Philosophy. Somewhere along the line my name must have come up, as in short order, the original landed on Linda’s desk. She took one look at its opening lines before phoning the detective to let him know that a full English text already existed.
THE REMAINING FIFTH of my mail comes from a motley bunch of folks. Christians pray for my soul. Screenwriters offer to collaborate. After women, the second largest demographic slice is teenage boys intoxicated by the notion that I intended to make with my actions some sort of broader philosophical point. Where they got this idea is beyond me. Certainly I didn’t say anything to that effect, either during the trial or since. Nevertheless, these boys write me long, intimate letters. They pour their blackness out onto the page, spinning violent fantasies—if such are the ones I receive, I can only guess at what the prison censor removes—and insisting that I’m being self-deprecating when I say mine was a simple case of greed gone awry.
Nor would the media accept this explanation. Looking for something fleshy to sink their teeth into, they made my resume their feast, so that when my name appears in print (it still happens, and when it does, one of my fans will usually mail me a clipping) the phrase “ex-Harvard professor and convicted murderer” is often appended to it. The first few times this happened, I wrote to the publication in question, asking that they run a correction. Nobody acknowledged receipt, and eventually I stopped trying. A Harvard professor I shall be, then. I can’t begin to imagine how severely this must irritate Linda.
We don’t have access to computers here, but a young man in Walla Walla took the time to print out thirty pages’ worth of material from his website, on which I feature prominently. Among its other subjects are Leopold and Loeb, the Preppy Killer, Theodore Kaczynski, and Robert McNamara, who I suppose might take a certain degree of umbrage at being inducted into our little fraternity.
Most puzzling are the proposals, of which I have had five. I am imprisoned for life, with no chance of release. I have expressed no interest in marriage. I am disfigured, not forbiddingly so but enough that I likely wouldn’t qualify for an all-prison beauty contest. Maybe these women think the eyepatch gives me a kind of piratical swagger. Who knows? I’ve given up trying to understand what makes people want one thing versus another.
One would think that such letters would be written exclusively by lunatics. Not so. Of all my prospective brides, three sounded frightfully sane. One even included a photo of herself in a mortar-board and gown.
Sinead from Colorado: you seem very nice, and I wish you the best of luck.
I never reply to anyone. It doesn’t matter. People keep on writing. The truth is they’re lonely, too, and I make the perfect receptacle for their own fears and frustrations, no different from a fictional character, a figure out of myth.
MY CELLMATE’S name is William. Six years ago, he raped an eighty-two-year-old woman, who died as a result of her injuries. When I first met him, he was withdrawn, basically mute. Months went by before we had any conversation lasting more than two or three exchanges. His skittishness awakened me to the idea that my scarred face and imposing height made for a kind of insurance policy. William himself is about five-foot-five.
At some point he decided that I posed no danger, and the words started coming, first cautiously, then torrentially, a disjointed autobiography that I have managed to reassemble after hearing it four or five times. His parents were both alcoholics, at whose hands he suffered constant sexual and physical abuse; he has been in and out of the prison system regularly since the age of twelve, when he stole a car. In recounting his crimes he sounds less remorseful than inconvenienced, to the extent that I wonder if he has any real grasp on why he’s here.
He once told me that we’re all bad, deep down. My instinct was to reply that that was nonsense, there had to be good people out there. I stopped myself. Whatever gives him solace—even if it’s believing he’s a regular joe who happened to get caught—what right do I have to deny him that?
AMONG WILLIAM’S many impairments is a crippling dyslexia. Most everyone in prison reads a great deal, in one form or another. In my first six months alone, I went through more tha
n a hundred books, whereas in all that time, I never saw him with so much as the funnies. Sometimes he’d pick up whatever I had just finished, glaring at the cover in an intimidated way.
On one such occasion—the book in question was The Trial, which I hadn’t read since high school—he asked me in an offhand way what the story was about. I related it to him, in brief, and as I did his face took on an enraptured glaze. He interrupted me, prodded me for details, asked questions about the lives of the characters that I could not answer. His curiosity made me smile and, without thinking, I suggested that he read it himself, if he was so interested.
The words were not out of my mouth before I regretted them, and I sat back, ready for a violent reaction.
Instead, he asked me for help.
Have you ever taught someone to read? If so, it was almost certainly a child, whose mind was plastic, voracious. We tend to take for granted our ability to extract meaning from a page of writing, but it is in fact nothing short of miraculous, and if we did not learn to employ it at an age when we still believed in magic, few would.
William was forty-seven years old when I began teaching him to read. We didn’t have to start at the very beginning. He could sign his name, and he knew the alphabet. He could not, however, assemble those letters into words. I put a lot of thought into how to approach the problem, but every technique I tried failed, no matter how cutting-edge the pedagogy behind it. In the end we had to resort to brute force: I spent long hours drilling him with flashcards, helping him commit to memory the shapes of individual words, such that bird became a single unit, apple another, and so forth. In effect, we made English into a pictographic language, akin to Chinese. It’s notoriously difficult for Westerners to learn such systems, because we’re trained to think of words as divisible. In a sense, then, William’s knowing the alphabet was more a hindrance than a help.
We worked together for close to two years, and on my thirty-fourth birthday, he made to me a gift of a letter he had written, without my help or knowledge. It described our cell. Though its style was repetitive, and its subject matter a little too close for comfort (shades of Nabokov’s ape), it did possess a kind of crude poetry, and more to the point, it was spelled perfectly. I hung it near the window. It’s the first thing I look at when I wake up in the morning.
MY CHIEF OCCUPATION is running the prison library. Officially, there’s a state employee in charge, but it’s not a job with a good retention rate, and thus far I have had to train three new initiates, the latest of whom is a newly minted Harvard graduate. His name is Adam, and he holds a bachelor’s degree in Yiddish literature. Like me, he hails from flyover country, and despite my best efforts to the contrary—one swiftly learns to eschew sentimentality—we have developed a rapport. He has never hidden his true motivation for working here: he’s collecting material for a book. Recently he asked me to take a look at his letter to literary agents. It was well written, if a bit cerebral. He cited Foucault and referred to “the interiority of prison as a social space.” I told him that that was all well and good, but in my opinion, he’d be better off taking a more narrative tack. Sell yourself, I said. He told me he’d think about it.
It was he who first suggested that I teach a class, although it took him a good while to convince me. Aside from my (quite reasonable) skepticism—why would a bunch of felons want to talk about philosophy?—I had a much more elementary cause for concern. At that point I still hadn’t made any friends. I knew I was thought of as aloof. From there it’s a short trip to becoming an object of ridicule, and thence an even shorter trip to becoming a target.
But boredom is a potent catalyst. If it can get us to do things like bungee-jump and shoot heroin, it’s surely enough to get me in front of a classroom. I decided to begin with a general introduction: what is philosophy, and why is it important? I typed up a sheet with sources, Adam put up a sign in the library, and together we hoped for the best.
As expected, the initial response was tepid: three people, two of whom had the idea that I might pass out dirty pictures, and who left when I did not. Something must have taken root, though, because I tripled attendance over the course of the next lecture, a two-parter covering the early Greeks. Heraclitus’s statement that “character is destiny” triggered some mild debate, but what really got the conversation going were Zeno’s paradoxes, which made intuitive sense to a bunch of men staring down infinity. By the time I got to Aristotle, I was pulling in seven regulars, and the lecture on Descartes brought us to ten, at which point the warden capped enrollment, citing safety concerns. We’ve established a waiting list.
In retrospect it seems obvious that the class should have succeeded. People in prison have nothing to do but think, and their confinement tangibly demonstrates the power of abstractions: love, hate, desire, vengeance, justice, punishment, freedom, hope. They might not have all the jargon down, but they have more than enough energy and fervor to fill an hour every other week. They are, I believe, the perfect students.
With Adam’s help, too, I have begun a correspondence course. It took a fair bit of digging to find an accredited Ph.D. program. I wrote to Linda to see if she’d arrange to send a transcript, enabling me to skip some of the prerequisites. She never replied. It’s just as well. I’m starting from scratch, however you look at it.
I HEAR FROM DREW that Yasmina’s wedding was an affair to remember. She and Pedram live in Los Angeles, where he works for her father. She’s due next spring.
THERE HAS BEEN considerable legal wrangling over Alma’s estate. Citing health problems, Palatine recused himself as executor, throwing a major kink into the process. Taxes needed paying; my lawyers (I now have several) needed paying. Andrei has brought a civil suit. And so forth, everyone grabbing for their piece of the pie.
Leaping into the fray is a certain nonprofit organization that pursues compensation for victims of the Holocaust. Eric knew whereof he spoke when he said that Alma’s family had worked for the Third Reich. It’s unclear whether the estate will be forced to pay, less clear how much, still less which creditor takes precedence. What about the money held in trust? What about interest? I don’t keep close tabs on the various motions and maneuverings. It’s a mess for other people to sort out. Even if anything is left for me, I’ll never get to use it. Which is fine by me.
In this way, prison becomes me. I have a roof over my head. I have three meals a day. I have books, and students, and time. Nobody is looking over my shoulder. Here, my opinions carry weight. I am respected. Once I believed that I stood above the judgment of the world, and while that continues to feel less true every day, I do take some small satisfaction in knowing that I’ve found a home. Alma once suggested to me that freedom obtains when we think of it. If this is true, then I ought to be the freest man on earth. And who’s to say I’m not? When I am outside, walking the yard, I look up at the great gray walls, at rows of tiny portals and curls of barbed wire and cameras and floodlights and towers presided over by shadows—I look at these instruments of control, and I know that none of them can penetrate my mind. I picture the teeming mass held in by those walls; I consider my place among that mass; and I think: my ivory tower.
The one thing I miss is the bookend. The police took it away as evidence, and anyway, I’d never be allowed to keep such a sharp, heavy object in my cell. I don’t know where it is. In a storage locker, perhaps, in a box. My friend. I wish him well.
Dear Joseph—
I apologize that it has taken me so long to reply to you. I’ve struggled to find the right words, repeatedly discarding earlier drafts. Language seems wholly inadequate to the task. My emotions change, even as I set them down on paper, and they will have changed again by the time Iput this in the mailbox.
California has been lovely. The students are a good bunch, the faculty, a genuine boon. And I would be remiss not to mention the weather. It is no small thing to wake up every day to perfection. Whether such abundant pleasantness is good for the soul I leave up to you to decide.
<
br /> This isn’t to say that it feels like home. I had always thought that I would finish out my days near the place of my birth, and to have been called away at my age still amazes me. Perhaps some are meant to live in exile. I suppose that’s true regardless of where one lives, however long one lives there. All earthly homes are temporary. One does not need to be a believer to appreciate the truth of this.
To answer your question: I have been in contact with your parents. I will ask them again to visit you. I can’t say whether they’ll listen to me, of course. These terrible events have been hard on all of us but, understandably, hardest on them. No matter whatyou say, they will continue to fault themselves, and they resent being made to feel guilty. They are angry at you, very angry. As am I. I wish I could say otherwise. My office demands otherwise. But you and I don’t have that kind of relationship, do we?
You didn’t ask to be forgiven, which leads me to believe you’re not seeking an easy out. Good. There are none. You’ve done a grievous wrong. I am sorry if it sounds cruel ofme to say so. Having always regardedyou as a seeker of truth, I expect that you will not flinch to face it.
Peace unto you.
Father Fred
As for remorse: yes, I feel it. Of course I do. I took two lives, wrecked at least one family, brought shame and grief to myself and those I love. Of course I wish things had turned out differently. Sometimes, when I am in the mood, I imagine other possible worlds, worlds in which I am not this person but another. I think about Alma. I think about my brother. I weave together past and present, meditating on the foregone. It’s a silly game, giving reasons, pointing fingers, and I ought to know better by now. But I can’t help myself. It’s in my nature to wonder. It’s who I am.
The Executor Page 28