by Joseph Glenn
“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Dr. Haze told her.
“There are also future income streams to consider,” Meredith added. “Someone like Sybil Germaine for instance. She’s made at least a dozen films, several television appearance—including running characters on a couple of series. Someone like her must have a five or six-figure income from all her old work. Along the same lines, there are authors, composers, scientists, really anyone with usable intellectual property. Clearly this money is going somewhere.”
“I suspect all of that money is nothing more than a drop in the bucket. The operating costs of the parks are well into the billions. Tax dollars cover most expenses and to a large degree—apart from the private donations we spoke of—they cover the costs of health care.”
“Do the residents, when parted with their money, have any say as to how the money is spent.”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Dr. Haze replied.
“I suppose it’s a mercy most were afforded the time necessary to liquidate assets and give their cash to friends and family before coming to Fallow Park,” Meredith said.
Austin shook his head vigorously. This last comment would certainly find itself on the cutting room floor. He was agreeable to the suggestion that they proceed to the conclusion of the interview. The camera-ready patients in the scene were displeased at this change of plans; had they been prepped for a scene in which the conversation occurs about them, but not with them? And did not the director want them to delve into greater detail about their infirmities? Austin assured them they had performed well and thanked them for their time. He did ask that they remain in their beds, quietly, while Meredith and Dr. Haze bade them, and each other, goodbye.
Chapter Thirteen
In a disproportionate number of prison movies Meredith had seen, the hardened criminal with key information could usually be reasoned with after a life-saving cigarette was produced. She fished through her bag, rejecting her lighter in favor of matches. So much more movie like, she thought. She struck one, which caught the attention of the man on the opposite side of the bars.
He was reading the Bible of all things.
Meredith passed the cigarette into the cell.
“No smoking in this building,” the guard beside her said with a great show of his masculine, baritone voice. This was in sharp contrast to the gentle, helpful manner he had displayed when he escorted her to the cell moments before.
Meredith gingerly handed the cigarette to the guard, using care not to burn him as she did so.
“That’s okay,” the man in the cell told her. “I quit smoking. What’s the point of being addicted to something you can only get once in a blue moon? They tell me I’ll live longer. If this can be considered living,” he added in a hopeless, far-away voice.
“You’ve got a visitor,” the guard pointlessly told the man. “This is Meredith St. Claire, the television star.” Meredith noted that the guard’s demeanor had returned to something closer to civility.
The man behind the bars perked up at this. “Oh, yes,” he said with considerable enthusiasm. “Please come in—if they’ll let you. I heard you were here. What a wonderful surprise that I’m one of the people who gets to meet you.”
The guard unlocked the door and directed Meredith to pass through. She took a seat in the room’s only chair, an overstuffed armchair of the same design as most of the chairs in the various residences she had visited. Beat up and in need of reupholstering, Meredith assumed a life behind bars was the fate of the worst of the park’s deteriorating furniture.
The man returned to his cot.
After locking them in, the guard retreated, presumably to discard the still-lit cigarette.
“What are you in for?” Meredith asked. She involuntarily cringed at the stilted line.
“I get confused,” he said in a carefully paced manner, as though he were weighing each syllable as he pronounced it. Then he drifted off.
“That’s a crime here?”
“No, I didn’t finish answering.” He lied back on his cot, as though doing so would help him think. He struck Meredith, in this position of repose, as a willing but exhausted therapy patient. His answers were forthcoming, but, as she quickly surmised, they would require a degree of contemplation. “I was going to say I’ve been in here so many times, I get confused about the details of each offense. This one. The last one. The one before that. They all blur together. I’m asking myself if this is the time I tripped an attendant. Am I here because I picked a fight with a neighbor, a person I probably revolted against because he seemed too content, too apathetic? Maybe this is the time I shouted some colorful language at Makepeace; there is no freedom of speech here, you know. Actually, if memory serves, it seems to me I’m here for accosting—verbally accosting—an attendant named June. June doesn’t get along with a lot of people. Neither do I. I criticized her appearance—her new uniform. It was childish, but I did redeem myself with a diatribe about her role as an agent of this government. Oh, I was in great form!” he reflected with just enough energy to justify an exclamation mark. “I swiftly moved to a discussion—one sided, of course; she had no idea what I was talking about and could only listen—about the atrocities of this current political regime and the blood on her hands as a willing participant. And I say ‘blood’ because for all its so-called efforts to trap us, imprison us—quite literally in my case!—in the name of saving lives, how many have died? Died from neglect, died from inadequate medical care, died from isolation? It kills the soul you know. And, of course, what about the suicides? Do you know, they don’t even keep statistics on those? Or if they do, they’re not shared with the public. Do you ever hear about that on the news? No.”
Meredith would have answered the question in the negative if he had given her time to respond. As he drew his breath, she jumped in with, “They arrested you for that?”
“She claimed that I physically threatened her—totally trumped up charges. I denied it all, of course. Guess which one of us they believed.”
Meredith told the man about the circumstances that had brought her to the park. She told him about the documentary, about her function as interviewer-slash-host. The camera crew, she explained to his quizzical look, was at one of the churches. She was here, she explained, for just a preliminary interview. She told him of her interest in the park’s criminal justice system. She told him she wanted to know what life was like for the convicted criminals—and made it clear the filmmakers did not share her interest. She wanted to know if the food provided to the incarcerated criminals was different from that served to the general population. She expressed great interest in the strategies he used to pass the time. She inquired after the books he had read recently. Because of his numerous incarcerations, she explained, he was an ideal interviewee. She rambled somewhat and wished she had thought out and rehearsed the bit. Time constraints, she reminded herself, had prevented appropriate preparation. While she attempted to hold the man’s attention and sound reasonably vested in her job, she stole repeated glance out of the cell bars. She spotted the shadow of the bulky man: the guard, returned from disposing of the cigarette, stood just out of sight, but well within earshot.
“But mostly,” her cellmate speculated, “you want to know about Jack Harbour.”
Meredith pulled another cigarette out of her purse. “Do you mind?” she asked. In a whisper she added: “I’ll take the heat if they catch me.”
He responded in a similarly hushed tone, for he, Meredith understood, had also seen the guard’s shadow. “Go right ahead,” he told her in a precise whisper. “You’ll have to do it over the sink, though; I don’t have anything else you could use as an ashtray.”
She stood at the small, steel basin and held the smoke of her first drag in her lungs for several seconds.
“I understand you knew him well,” she said presently.
“I still do,” the man said indignantly, but also with a tone Meredith recognized as “here we go again.” He was resolute, but seemed wea
ry from the telling and retelling of his tale. “It’s difficult to explain my relationship with Jack,” he continued. “People think I’ve idealized him beyond recognition. And more than one person has accused me of carrying a torch. That’s really offensive to me, particularly given how short our relationship was and how much time has passed since it ended.”
“How long ago was it?”
The man ignored the question; he was now too immersed in what Meredith took to be a well-rehearsed soliloquy. “The people who think I’m still in love with Jack don’t know me. The people who accuse me of romanticizing or exaggerating his best qualities don’t know Jack Harbour.” Meredith noticed he always referred to the mythic figure by his full name. “Why I meet such resistance from some people, such unwillingness to believe his virtues, I don’t know. I try my damndest not to blame their reactions on jealousy, but nevertheless, I return to that explanation again and again. Silly, of course, and so sadly misplaced. There is enough Jack Harbour to go around. All of us can love him.” He added, territorially, “It’s true no one will love him, or know him, the way I do.”
He stood and began to pace as he spoke. Less resolute or despondent in demeanor, he seemed to have gained energy. Physically he was not a strong, or particularly healthy looking man. His clothes, somewhat shabby from age, hung loosely, suggesting weight loss. But his face, pale due to the lifestyle imposed upon him, was distinctive with a proud nose and dark eyebrows. His hair, equally dark, at least in the dim light of his cell, was full and boyishly haphazard, as though he combed it with the palms of his hands. She concluded her mental assessment with, “Yes, I can see what someone like Jack Harbour would find appealing about him.”
“There’s a difference between loving someone and being in love with someone,” he said in a style suggesting he was at the beginning of a speech; these, she surmised, were his prefatory remarks. “I’m not a child. I know this difference. People who think I’ve never gotten over Jack,” and here for the first time he referenced him by just his first name, as though establishing his familiarity with the figure, “or believe that I entertain fantasies that we’ll be together again someday, are insulting to me. Those people are telling me they see me as emotionally immature.”
“What kind of a man is he?”
But the incarcerated man would not be refocused. “I say that I love Jack,” he continued with a frantic, urgent delivery, as though he could not get the words out of him fast enough. “Truthfully, everyone who has ever known him would say the same. And for me, even though, yes, the breakup was difficult, I’ve been luckier than most: I have been given a place of distinction in his life. I have a special connection with him because we were together for a period of time. I knew him like very few others ever get to. Once, Jack Harbour chose me. Try to understand, I can distinguish reality from fantasy; and I do think there’s a place for fantasy in real life. But I spend most of my time firmly planted in this concrete, real world, thank you very much!” Resentment crept into this last pronouncement. Meredith sensed a degree of defensiveness as well. It seemed as if he were addressing criticisms he knew or believed had been leveled at him.
“How long were you together?” Meredith did not expect that he would answer; it was as if he were compelled to continue the tirade he had begun.
The man caught her off guard with a direct answer: “Six months. Just six months. Hardly enough to qualify as a relationship, is it? But was it just six months?” Meredith took this to be a rhetorical question and was not surprised that he answered it himself, and so vehemently: “No! No it was not! It was my whole life,” he said. “It continues to be. Some people change your life. Jack changed mine so profoundly, so permanently; I could never go back to being the person I was before—apathetic, uninvolved. I can say I’m truly grateful that he came into my life, that I had that experience. I’m a better man, at last a whole man, because of him.”
She jumped at the dramatic pause he seemed to think his words required. “Better, despite all the illegal conduct?”
“Damn straight, sister! It’s because of Jack that I do the things I do. My so-called criminal activity here at Fallow Park is so much about Jack. Why do I do these things? I wish I could tell you how many times I’ve been asked that question.”
Meredith held her cigarette smoke in her lungs. This appeared to satisfy the young man’s expectation that she hold her breath waiting for his answer.
“Because what would Jack think of me if I didn’t? It may be as pointless as tilting at windmills, but it’s action. If you’re going to go down anyway, make sure to go down fighting. That sounds like something Jack would say. It isn’t. I just made that up right now. And that just shows you how much I’ve learned! That’s what Jack Harbour gave me—this vision, this understanding, this…” he grasped for the words; it was the first time he was speechless. “I think like Jack Harbour,” he finally concluded. “That’s what it is. And I know now that I can never be complacent. Anything, any act of opposition, any statement I can make that says I know this is wrong, any way I can show that I know I deserve more, is better than being complacent. Jack is never complacent. You can’t just let life happen to you. That’s something Jack did say. If I had a nickel for every time Jack said that to me: ‘You can’t just let life happen to you.’”
Meredith stamped out her cigarette in the sink. At a loss as to what to do with her hands—or the rest of herself—she lit another one.
“And Jack and I remained friends,” the prisoner said. “After the breakup, I mean. Even now we are close. I know he’s found the partner he was looking for, and that he probably has no more that infrequent occasion to think of me. I understand that. I’m happy for him—and that’s the most truthful statement I’ve ever made. I always speak the truth. I’m happy for both of them.” He said this in a calmer, more controlled style. He was transitioning to a more reflective, pensive aspect of his monologue. This, too, struck her as well thought out and deliberate in its pacing and language. It was, she could tell, well-traveled territory for him. He sat on the cot and clasped his hands together. “Likewise, I know Jack only wants good things for me. You see, we will always be connected because of our history, but also because we’ve reached that certain level of communication and understanding that humans so rarely achieve. I’m not able to contact him now, unfortunately, and that’s very, very difficult. However, I carry our friendship with me; it’s part of my make-up, my essence. The memories, the feelings are things I can tap into whenever I need to. And when I do, I attain a degree of closeness to him. So you see, I still know Jack.”
He flashed her an angry look, one he apparently waited to make until she looked up from the sink. “Ours is a current relationship. It always will be. And even though it seems as if I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing, in a way I do. That’s how well I know him—just as he so assuredly knows me. Do you want to know where he is? A lot of people do. They’re always at me to tell them. I don’t. But I know, because I can feel him. That’s the kind of connection we have. He’s living outside of Paris. I see him in a small but comfortable home. Right now he’s sitting down to dinner with his partner. As he silently says a prayer, he’s thinking about me—and people like me. He’s resting, regenerating, in preparation for his next coup. You see, he doesn’t rest long.”
He looked at her across the darkened cell. “I know what you’re thinking. I can see it on your face.”
Meredith was without a thought, save a sense of pity for this heartbroken creature who had sacrificed himself for a lost love; and in any event the cell was too dark for him to read her face. But, then, what followed continued to sound rehearsed. In his isolation it seemed he had ruminated endlessly on this topic, likely to the exclusion of all else; hence the polished delivery. The man did not lack sincerity, though; indeed, the conviction, the certainty that he was sharing a deep, palpable truth was unmistakable.
“You think I’m drawing an analogy to God. You think I think Jack is God, or that h
e has godlike qualities.”
Nothing could have been further from her thoughts, but she did not contradict him.
“You’re wrong!” he shouted. “Jack is a man. That’s the whole point. That’s why he is great—No!” He paused in search of a better adjective, though, again, Meredith had a sense he had already decided what he was going to say. Even this pause seemed part of the speech. “Important. That’s it! He is a mere mortal who accomplishes work as important as God’s. But his work, what we will someday come to call his legacy, is all the more meaningful because he is a man.”
He was silent. Meredith savored the respite. It was difficult to listen to the man without feeling embarrassed for him and his utter lack of shame as he expressed every emotion, every thought, in such a precise and planned manner. She was a stranger to him, and for all he knew she would share his confessions with her television crew. She would not, of course, but there was no way the man could know this. It was difficult to feel close to someone who shared of himself so carelessly, so indiscriminately.
“What is he like?” she asked once again. “What drives him to be the kind of man he is?”
The prisoner looked at her with suspicion. “What kind of a man do you think he is? Are you persuaded by the slanted portrayal in the American press? Do you know he’s considered heroic in Europe?”
“Yes, I do,” Meredith said without hesitation. “It’s an opinion I share.”
At this, the man softened measurably. He leaned against the concrete-block wall.
“Jack Harbour is different things to different people. To those who know him, he is the best friend they’ve ever had. His loyalty is boundless, as boundless as, as…”
Meredith silently prayed he would not say “his love.”