The Orion Plan

by Mark Alpert

  She tried to do it, spreading her lips and lifting her tongue. She looked like she was on the verge of success, but then she closed her mouth and turned away. She raised her right hand and pointed at one of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. At first Joe thought she wanted him to turn it off, but then he realized she was asking a question.

  “That’s a light,” Joe answered. “Try to say it, Annabelle. Light.”

  But instead of trying to speak, she pointed at the floor. Then at her pillow and the bedsheets. Then at all the pieces of medical equipment surrounding her bed. She wanted Joe to name every object in the room. She needed him to say the words so she could relearn them.

  So Joe did it. Slowly and patiently, while he drifted in and out of consciousness, he taught her all the words she’d forgotten.

  * * *

  When he finally awoke he found himself lying on a different kind of bed, a narrow cot with a thin mattress and a discolored pillow. On his left was a cinder-block wall, painted dull yellow. The opposite wall was just a few feet to his right, and jutting from it were a small sink and a stainless-steel toilet without a lid. On the floor was a crosshatched rectangle of sunlight, slanting down from a high window with a metal grille over it. Then Joe saw the bars of his jail cell’s door, which stood wide open, and he remembered where he was: on cellblock D of the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island.

  He had a headache, a bad one. He raised a hand to his forehead and touched the bandage wrapped around it. The cops on Dyckman Street had given him a concussion when they’d tackled him last night. He’d regained consciousness in the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital, where he lay handcuffed to a gurney for five hours before the doctors there said he was okay. Then he spent the next eight hours at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where the prosecutors charged him with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. He couldn’t make bail, of course, so the next stop was Rikers.

  Joe twisted on the cot, trying to find a more comfortable position. The guards had taken away his old clothes and given him a pair of gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. His new clothes smelled better than the old ones, but he still didn’t feel clean. The jail had its own stench, a mix of sweat and mildew.

  He guessed it was evening now, maybe seven o’clock. He’d been lying on the cot for the past three hours. His withdrawal symptoms had kicked in again—he hadn’t had a drink since one thirty in the morning—and the tremors and nausea would soon get much worse. There was no malt liquor for sale on cellblock D, and even if he could somehow get his hands on a smuggled bottle of booze, he doubted he’d be able to drink it. The poison from the satellite was still in his bloodstream. He knew it was inside him because his vision was still phenomenally sharp, and because thinking about alcohol still made him want to puke.

  This was the biggest of his problems, even worse than the fact that he was locked up in Rikers. The poison was changing him. It’s what made him grab the nightstick from Officer Patton and jab him in the stomach. He’d lost control of himself for only a moment, but it had scared the shit out of him. He should be in the hospital right now, in the toxicology department at St. Luke’s, working with the specialists there to get the poison out of his blood. But he couldn’t get help, couldn’t even ask for it. If he told the guards about his problem, they’d send him straight to the jail’s psychiatric ward, and Joe had a feeling that place would be even scarier than cellblock D.

  He rolled onto his side. He needed to piss but was afraid to get out of his cot. Some of the other inmates paced up and down the corridor outside his cell. When he’d arrived at the jail earlier that afternoon the guards had informed him that the cells would stay open until dinner and in the meantime he could visit the exercise yard or the TV room. But he’d noticed that most of the inmates remained in their cells, either napping or reading or zoning out, so he’d concluded that this was the safest option. There seemed to be a shortage of correction officers in the cellblock, and they mostly stayed behind the protective glass of the guard station.

  As he lay on the cot he kept one eye open and watched the inmates in the corridor. Some stared straight ahead as they passed by, avoiding eye contact with everyone. Others—the biggest, most intimidating prisoners—took a moment to peer into each cell. Most of the inmates were either black or Latino, and very few were over the age of forty. Joe, as a middle-aged white man, was a novelty at Rikers, and the other inmates were curious about him. Every couple of minutes someone would stop outside his cell and linger in the corridor. Whenever this happened Joe closed his eyes tight, pretending to be asleep and praying that the inmate would go away.

  This strategy worked well for the first fifteen minutes. Then a hulking white inmate walked right into his cell to get a better look at him. Joe closed his eyes a little too late. The guy stepped further into the cell and poked Joe in the shoulder.

  “Stop faking it.” His voice was slow and deep. “I know you’re awake.”

  Joe opened his eyes a fraction, just to see how much trouble he was in. The inmate was well over six feet tall and weighed at least three hundred pounds. His T-shirt was too short to cover his belly, which hung over the cot like a hot-air balloon. His head was bald and bullet-shaped and slick with sweat, and there was a crude tattoo of a skull over his right ear. He bent over Joe and grinned. “Hey there, Doc. My name’s Daryl. Welcome to Rikers.” Then, without waiting for a reply, Daryl looked over his shoulder at another inmate standing outside the cell.

  “Check it out, Curtis!” he shouted. “The doc woke up from his nap.”

  Giving up, Joe opened his eyes all the way and saw a second white guy come into his cell. Curtis was also bald and even taller than Daryl but didn’t have an ounce of fat on him. His chest muscles bulged under his T-shirt and his forearms rippled under shirtsleeve tattoos. He leaned over and slapped the foot of Joe’s mattress, making it jump. “You’re a noisy motherfucker when you’re napping, Doc. You were saying all kinds of crazy shit.”

  Joe had no idea how to respond. He wanted to tell them to get the hell out of his cell, but he was too sick to even raise his voice. Shivering, he lifted his head off his pillow and stared at the two men. “Why … are you calling me ‘Doc’?”

  Daryl shrugged. “We heard you’re a doctor. That’s the word going round.”

  “Yeah, a drunk doctor who hit a cop.” Curtis laughed. “How the hell did a stupid fucker like you get into medical school?”

  Again, Joe didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t tell how serious his visitors were. He studied their faces, trying to figure it out. Were they kidding around or getting ready to hurt him? The uncertainty was making him squirm. He didn’t know anything about the inmates here, so he was afraid of everything.

  “I’m not a doctor anymore,” he finally said. “I’m just a drunk now.”

  “Hey, I like your honesty.” Curtis nodded in approval. “You’re an honest white guy, which definitely puts you in the minority in this place.” He jerked his thumb at the corridor outside the cell. “If you haven’t noticed already, most of the assholes here are lying, dick-eating niggers and spics.”

  Joe winced. It was an involuntary reaction, like gagging. He’d been raised by a family of ignorant racists. That was one of the reasons why he’d left home and broken off all contact with them.

  Daryl noticed his reaction. He opened his mouth in mock surprise and looked at Curtis. “Uh-oh. I don’t think Doc liked that.”

  “Really?” Curtis narrowed his eyes and trained them on Joe. “You didn’t like what I said? About the niggers and spics here?”

  Joe tried to sit up, his head swimming. He raised his hands, palms out, as if to stop the men from coming closer. “Look, I don’t want any trouble.”

  Curtis stepped toward the head of the cot, nudging Daryl aside. “Come on, Doc, be honest with me again. You’ve never called one of them a nigger? Never in your life?”

  This was one of the few things, maybe the only thing, on which Joe still held a s
trong opinion. He’d hated his family for their prejudice, and these men were acting just like his uncles and cousins. He shook his head. “No, never in my life.”

  “Whoa, we got a saint here!” Daryl pointed at him. “Saint Doc the drunk.”

  Curtis wasn’t amused, though. He furrowed his brow and looked down at Joe, examining him carefully. Then he turned to his friend. “Step outside, Daryl. I need to have a talk with this asshole.”

  Daryl nodded and stepped away from the cot, but he didn’t go far. He took up position just outside the cell, with his back turned toward them, his body blocking the view of anyone trying to look into the cell from the corridor. Joe’s stomach clenched as he stared at the back of Daryl’s T-shirt. Well, at least there’s no more uncertainty, he thought. Now I know something bad is coming.

  Meanwhile, Curtis stepped closer. He bent over the cot and grimaced, flaring his nostrils. The man’s eyes were bloodshot and he had a scar that ran diagonally across his forehead. “Let’s get something straight, all right? In this place it doesn’t matter who you were outside or what you did for a living. Not one fucking bit. We’re all the same here.” He curled his lip, baring a row of crooked teeth. “You hear me?”

  Joe nodded, but it looked like Curtis was going to hit him anyway. Bracing himself, Joe raised his arms to protect his head. But then Curtis turned away from him and looked down at the floor. He reached under the cot and picked up a plastic bin that Joe hadn’t even known was there. “We have a rule here in D block: share and share alike. So I’m gonna take a look at your stuff now.”

  He opened the bin, which was about the size of a hatbox. The only contents were the personal hygiene items issued to every inmate: a plastic cup, a stubby rubber toothbrush, and a small tube of toothpaste. Curtis stared into the bin for several seconds, then turned back to Joe. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “The rest of what?”

  Curtis flung the bin against the wall. Joe’s personal hygiene items scattered across the floor. “Don’t play games with me, motherfucker! You’re gonna tell me you don’t have a watch? A rich fucking doctor like you?”

  Joe belatedly figured it out. The bin was supposed to hold any possessions that the inmates were allowed to bring into the jail—books, watches, that kind of thing. And because Joe had no possessions whatsoever, his container was almost empty. But explaining all this to Curtis was going to be difficult. The guy didn’t seem to be in a receptive mood.

  Taking a deep breath, Joe looked him in the eye. “I told you, I’m not a doctor anymore. I don’t own a watch. I don’t own anything. I was living in the park before they—”

  “You lying shit!” Curtis grabbed the front of Joe’s T-shirt and bunched it in his fist. “I know you have a watch and it’s probably a goddamn Rolex! Now where the fuck did you hide it?”

  He shoved Joe backward, pinning him to the cinder-block wall. Curtis’s fist pushed against his chest, the knuckles digging into his breastbone. Joe could feel its pressure on his heart. He stared in terror at the man’s bloodshot eyes and saliva-flecked lips, and in that moment he realized that Curtis wasn’t simply angry. The man was mentally disturbed. He was liable to do anything.

  Joe considered yelling for help but then thought better of it. The guards wouldn’t even hear him, much less come to his rescue. His only hope was to talk his way out of this, and that wasn’t much hope at all.

  Curtis leaned in closer, his face just a couple of inches away. His breath smelled like vomit. “You’re fucked, Doc. You know that, right?”

  “Listen, I—”

  “I can do anything I want to you, and no one’s gonna stop me.” He pressed harder against Joe’s chest. “You got no friends in this place and a whole lot of enemies.”

  Joe shook his head. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe. He thought of the poison in his blood, the neurotoxin that made him attack Officer Patton, but he couldn’t feel it inside him now. There was nothing but static in his head, and he was so dizzy he couldn’t see straight.

  Then a loud, high-pitched buzzer sounded. The noise came from the corridor and echoed against the walls of every cell. It lasted for four or five seconds before abruptly cutting off. Then a chorus of other sounds arose from D block: men laughing and cursing and shuffling out of their cells. Above it all, Joe heard a guard’s voice: “Line up! Chow time! Everybody get in line!”

  Curtis waited a moment, his brow creased. Then he let go of Joe’s shirt.

  Joe slumped to the mattress, breathing fast, his head still full of static. He raised his arms again, expecting a parting blow from Curtis, but the man just looked down at him.

  “Don’t get too comfortable, Doc. We’ll do this later, after chow. You can count on it.”

  Then he stepped out of the cell and joined Daryl in the corridor.

  * * *

  The food was horrible, just as Joe had expected. Two cold gray hamburger patties lay on the left side of his tray, each on a slice of stale white bread doused with ketchup. On the right side was a mound of limp string beans in a gelatinous fluid. The best part of the meal was the fruit drink in the plastic cup. It was so watered down it had no taste at all.

  Joe sat by himself at one of the long tables in the prison cafeteria. The room was noisy and crowded with hundreds of inmates, but they all kept their distance from Joe, as if he had something contagious. When one of the prisoners headed for his table, the others shouted at him until the guy went elsewhere. At one point Joe looked up from his tray and scanned the room, looking for Curtis and Daryl, but he couldn’t find them. There were too many tables and too many people standing in the way. After a while he gave up and returned to staring at his dinner. He had no intention of eating it, but at least it gave him something to look at.

  He felt another wave of nausea. He’d now gone more than eighteen hours without a drink and his withdrawal symptoms were escalating. He had to grip the edge of the table to stop his hands from shaking. His headache was so bad it felt like cluster bombs were exploding behind his eyes, and every few seconds he felt a sickening surge of vertigo. He tightened his grip on the table as the world came unglued and the room spun around him.

  But the worst symptom of all was the self-pity. Joe couldn’t understand how things had gone so wrong. When he saw the satellite for the first time, just the night before last, he’d thought it was a godsend, an honest-to-goodness gift from heaven. But instead it had made his life infinitely worse. It was so unfair he actually started to cry. This was a very stupid thing to do in a prison cafeteria, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  He shook his head. Jesus, don’t be an idiot! They’re all looking at you! But the tears kept coming. He was thinking of his Yankees jacket, which the cops had stripped off him shortly after his arrest. Although the police were supposed to keep track of his belongings, at some point during the journey from Dyckman Street to Rikers they’d left his jacket behind. It was an old, filthy thing that stank to high heaven, and now it probably lay in a trash can somewhere. But it had been precious to Joe.

  His wife had given him that jacket on their first anniversary. At the time Joe had been in medical school in Alabama, but he and Karen had already decided to move north, and the Yankees jacket was a symbol of their new life, their future. Joe had applied for residencies at several hospitals in New York, and Karen had started looking for nursing positions in the city. It would’ve been easier to get jobs in Alabama, but that wasn’t an option for Joe. He was determined to put as much distance as possible between himself and his family.

  The Grahams of Bullock County were white trash, pure and simple. Joe’s father was a drunk, and so were all of his uncles and cousins. His mother had run off with an Amway salesman when Joe was just five, then drank herself to death when he was seven. Joe himself had started drinking in high school and by the age of eighteen he was as bad as the rest of them. But just before graduation he nearly died in a car wreck, and while he lay in the hospital he resolved to clean up his act. He realized he did
n’t have to be a stupid drunk all his life; instead, he could be like one of the doctors who’d just saved him. So he enrolled at the University of Alabama and set off on the long, hard road to medical school. His father thought it was a crazy idea and refused to pay for anything, but that was all right with Joe. As soon as he finished school and had that M.D. in hand he was going to get the hell out of Alabama and never look back.

  Although Karen had enjoyed a happier childhood and a less dysfunctional family—her parents were decent, hardworking folks—she supported her husband. If the decision had been up to her, she might’ve preferred to stay in Birmingham or Tuscaloosa, but she was willing to make the sacrifice. That was the message behind the Yankees jacket: I know how important this is to you. I’ll do anything to make you happy. It was a beautiful gift, a wonderfully loving gesture. Thinking about it still brought tears to Joe’s eyes, despite all the not-so-beautiful things that happened later.

  He was still crying and clutching the edge of the table when someone threw a hamburger patty at him. He felt the thing bounce off the back of his neck and saw it land on the floor. Ketchup splattered over his T-shirt and the gauze bandage on his head. A roar of laughter erupted from the tables behind him, but he didn’t turn around. He just sat very still and tried to stop crying.

  There was only one sure way to do it. Joe closed his eyes and recalled the last two years of his marriage. He tried to harden his heart by remembering their arguments, how he and Karen had fought over money and sex and where Annabelle should go to school. He pictured the screaming matches in their living room, in the car, in front of their daughter. He remembered their silences too, the days and weeks when they’d avoided each other by working long hours and rearranging their schedules, making sure they were never home at the same time. And, last, he remembered how Karen had betrayed him, how she’d slept with his boss, the chief of surgery at St. Luke’s. He pictured her on the night when she admitted the affair, speaking slowly and calmly, with that cold, unrepentant look on her face.