by Paul Griffin
Solitary confinement is eight long by five wide. I thought that would’ve been plenty. Tiny toilet bowl, cold water sink the size of a tissue box, steel shelf for a bed. Nothing to do in here but sit and think about how stupid I am.
They have cameras. I was just taking off my T-shirt because it was hot, but they took it anyway. My socks and sneaker laces too. Put me in paper slippers. Thin plastic mattress has mesh weaved into it so you can’t rip the cover into strips.
If you do figure out a noose, you kneel on the bed, loop one end around your neck, the other around your feet.
Tighten the line against your spine and knot it. Tuck your fists into your waistband so you can’t pull them out in case you get scared and change your mind—and you will, I figure. All that’s left is you pitch yourself forward headfirst into that narrow slot of concrete between the bed and the wall.
“Lights-out,” one guard says to another. Dark so pure it’s either endless emptiness or filled with every wicked thing. Panting on the back of my neck? How many hours have passed? Or are we into days now?
In that darkness, a flicker:
She goes tiptoe to hit me with a surprise kiss. Her hands on my chest. She pulls back to look at me and smile. Her teeth aren’t perfect, and that just makes them more perfect. Crooked with a little space between the front two. Yeah.
(The next morning, Tuesday, August 4, the fifty-fourth day . . .)
The lights come on. They give me five minutes for my eyes to adjust.
The assistant warden sits outside the cell. Ex-military for sure. Straight back. He talks through the barred slot. “You’re going to kill somebody someday.”
“I already killed somebody.”
“Somebody else then,” he says.
“Maybe I will, then.”
“Big-time gangbanger, huh? Gonna get the T-drop tat, big man?”
You ink it on the outside corner of your eye, a teardrop, black Bic pen cooked with a smuggled lighter. Means you killed a man. I don’t want any black tears.
“What do I do with you?” the AW says. “Look at me. You’re special.”
“Hell you talking about?”
“Sergeant Washington told me you looked after that boy.”
“He that short guard with the thin mustache?”
“You see my problem here, right?” AW says. “I can’t keep you in the tent and I can’t keep you in isolation more than sixty days. After a sixty bid the outside monitors file for you to be remanded to the tent, and you have to go back once that happens. They think you need to socialize.”
“’Magine that.”
“Macario?”
“What, man?”
“I don’t know what to do with you.”
“You ain’t got to do nothing with me. Whatever happens, happens.”
The warden scratches his goatee. “You get yourself right, you could be something incredible. You could be useful. Hey, look at me when I talk to you.”
“Warden, maybe you ain’t heard, I’m about to bid two-five to life. I am done.”
“Son?” he says. “Think about what we can do with you. I need ideas. I hate waste.” He leaves, and I’m like, that dude is serious crazy.
They give me an hour break from solitary each day. The swelter won’t die, new records day and night. Sergeant Washington leads me toward the exercise field, baked dirt circling brown weeds, mowed scattershot. We halt in the tent shade. He gives me a piece of Juicy Fruit. A guard giving a prisoner gum or anything else is illegal. He’s got another thing coming if he thinks he’s getting anything back from me. He studies his fingernails, trimmed, clean. “I put you at fifteen. That about right?”
“Be sixteen soon.”
“Happens to fifteen-year-olds.”
“If they ain’t killed first.” The sweetness in this gum, man. I’m almost someplace else for a few seconds ...
Me and Céce sharing Bazooka.
No. Can’t think about her out here or anywhere. I have decided: She has no place on this island, not even in my mind.
Washington studies the guard tower. “I’m fifty-two. On the job here twenty-seven years.”
“All right?”
“You tell anybody I gave you gum, I’m done. I’m three years from pension and a timeshare on the water.”
“Then why you give me the gum?”
“Why you think?”
“You’re bored,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“You a lonely old man, got nobody else to talk to.”
“You have me all figured out, huh?”
“You’re an easy read.”
“That right?” he says.
“Regret that you give me the gum now, huh?”
“Not at all.” He nods toward the exercise field. “Let’s move.”
We sit the bleachers. They’re griddle hot. I look out to the bay. “Bet it’s cooler out on the water,” I say.
“It’s cooler anywhere else. You hang tough now, son.”
I study this guard. What’s he want from me?
Behind me: yipping. A German shepherd on the other side of the chain-link fence.
“Where’d that little fella come from?” I say.
“Seems more like a wolf, you ask me. K-9 training facility.”
“Seeing Eye dogs?”
“Police,” he says.
“Didn’t know they did that here. Who trains them?”
“Who do you think?”
“Yeah, huh? How you get that gig?”
“Behaving,” he says.
The dog barks at me, switches his tail.
“Mind I say hello?”
“He looks like he wants to eat you.”
I crouch to meet the dog at eye level. I put my fingers through the chain link to stroke the underside of the dog’s muzzle. The dog licks my fingers.
I try to find the sergeant’s eyes in his outline blocking out the sun. “Sir?”
“You can call me Wash.”
I nod and get back to petting the dog.
“What was it then, what you were going to say?”
“Forget.”
“When it comes back to you then,” he says.
The dog rolls over for a belly scratch, but I can’t squeeze my hand through the chain link. I remember what I wanted to say, but by now the time to say it has passed.
The radio blips. Wash draws it from his belt, nice and easy, clicks, “Go ahead.”
“Your friend there has a visitor.”
(Tuesday, August 4, dinner shift)
CÉCE:
I’m late for work. The bus from the visitor center got a flat, then I missed the city bus, had to hoof it to the train, which promptly stopped in the tunnel for forty-five minutes. I slip in semi-petrified dog crap just outside the Too, take off my sneaker, and hobble into the restaurant. I thought August was supposed to be slow. We’re slammed.
Marcy: “Why you wearing only one shoe?”
Me: “Did Cashew Man come today?”
Marcy: “Nope.”
Me: “Figured. Where’s my ten bucks?”
Marcy: “In my pocket.”
Me: “Can you take the money out of your pocket and put it in my hand?”
Ma: “Did he come down?”
Me: “Noper.”
Ma slams her tray to the bar counter. “That sonuvabitch.”
Me: “Easy Ma.”
Ma: “No. He can’t treat my baby that way.”
Marcy: “Right?”
Ma: “I’ve been biting my tongue, hoping he’d come around, but this isn’t right, what he’s doing to you.”
Marcy: “What he did to her too.”
Ma: “I mean, okay, the first time you visit it’s a surprise, he’s freaked out, you can sort of understand. The second time you go, though? Well, maybe he was really sick. But three times? Not even a word with you, half a stinking minute to thank you for going to that god-awful place to see him?”
Marcy: “Go, Mella.”
Ma: “Who the flip does he think he is?�
�
Marcy: “Punk-ass.”
Ma: “We all reached out to him.”
Marcy, eyeing me: “Some more than others.”
Ma: “And he can’t muster the decency to come down and at least say hello?”
Marcy: “Or good-bye?”
Ma: “You were a virgin, for Christ’s sake!”
Total. Silence. In the restaurant. Everybody is gawking at me.
I nod, hop into the bathroom, sit on the toilet with my shitty shoe and lament existence, not just mine but everybody’s. I don’t know one person I’d rather be, and I don’t want to be me anymore either. I’m beginning to think about it: death by cheesecake.
Ma comes into the stall, arms folded. She paces in the tiny two-foot space. She taps her foot. “Time to move on, babe.”
“I can’t. I’ll die if I don’t see him again.”
“You won’t die. He was the first guy you slept with. I know it feels like he was the love of your life, but it always feels that way, with every guy you’re with.”
“We told each other things,” I say, pointing my poop sneaker at her. “We shared our secrets. We trusted each other with the most important things in our lives.”
Ma rolls her eyes. “You gotta put him out of your mind, Céce.”
“Ma, what are you doing? I need your fake optimism right now. I need you to advocate his point of view. If you quit on him? You who catch cockroaches with yogurt containers and set them free in the garden? If you give up on Mack, then I’m done.”
“Then you’re done.”
“Mom, please, why won’t he see me?”
“I don’t know, okay? Men are weird, Céce. They would be so much easier to understand if they were like women.”
“Come with me next time. Get on the phone with him and make him come down.”
“I can’t make him do that,” she says.
“Please. It hurts so bad. Tell me what I need to do to make him see me.”
“I don’t know what you should do.” Total girl-spin scenario: My crying gets her crying, last thing I need. “Your brother too.”
“What’d he do now?”
“He can’t call me?” she says.
“He can’t if his sergeant won’t let him.”
“I need to hear him.”
“You’re hearing from him. He’s sending you postcards every other day.”
“That’s not the same thing. I need to hear him. I need to hear his voice.”
Marcy leans into the bathroom. “Um, Vaccuccia women, we have thirty hungry tables out there, I have twenty-nine brain cells. A little help?” She does a double take on her reflection and puts down her tray to fix her hair.
(The next day, Wednesday, August 5, morning of the fifty-fifth day . . .)
“You have your pencils?” Vic says. He’s cooking me breakfast.
I have no appetite. What I do have is a tension headache. Mack was supposed to be here to massage my shoulders, to chill me out. That was the plan.
“I have my pencils.”
“How many?”
“Sixty-two thousand.”
“They’re number two? They have to be number two.”
I show him. He nods. “Puissant,” he says.
“Potent,” I say.
Vic smiles and raises his eyebrows and taps his temple. “See?” he says. “See?”
I wink and nod and tap my temple. Have not a clue what he’s talking about.
I walk to the test. Mack was supposed to walk with me.
I whale on the multiple choice. I’m buying Vic a new Vic-mobile. Every single word he quizzed me on is on this thing. I finish fifteen minutes early.
They hand out the blue books. The proctor writes on the board: PLEASE TELL US ABOUT ONE OF YOUR GIFTS AND/OR TALENTS AND GOALS.
They list the essay subject on the website. They even tell you to prepare your answer. Why can’t we just bring it in?
My essay is supposed to be about being other-centric—my gift. Vic practically wrote it for me. I cried the first time I read it. I had no idea I was such a wonderful person. He made me look nicer and more pathetic than a missionary nun with late-stage cancer. I have it memorized. It’s supposed to be 500 words, max. I wrote it ten times for practice. The last three times it was 491 words. Basically Vic used waiting tables as a metaphor for life: service with a smile. Hard work. Making people happy, reaching out to your fellow human beings with warmth and all that crap. It’s the kind of essay that if you lie sincerely enough, it makes up for slightly better than good-but-not-great grades, and you get into a better school than you deserve. I start to write it, but something happens. I cross out what I wrote, and I write:
Mack is beautiful trouble. The time we went to Cindi Nappi’s party, we were waiting for the train. This junkie was totally out of it, stepping the edge of the platform like a tightrope walker. Everybody screamed when he walked right off the platform. He hit the track pit hard, but he must have been really spun out, because he got right back up and into his tightrope act, on the track rail this time, the one right next to the rail that will electrocute you.
This other guy hopped down into the tracks. I turned to Mack to say That dude’s psycho. But Mack wasn’t there. The psycho who hopped into the tracks was Mack.
He tapped the junkie’s shoulder. The man turned. He stared at Mack with strange eyes, somehow stunned and jaded at once. Mack was talking to him. The dude listened and nodded. Mack pointed to a spot between the rails. The dude stepped off the track rail to where Mack pointed. The weirdest thing? The dude was laughing quietly.
People helped Mack pull the junkie out. When Mack hopped back up to the platform, everybody clapped. Mack dropped his head to hide from them. He seemed mad. He grabbed my hand, and we hurried up the steps. I said, “What about the train?” He said, “Let’s take the bus.” I started to tell him he was a hero, but he cut me off. “Don’t tell anybody about this, okay?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
And then Mack said, “Talking about stuff like that ruins it.”
We sat in the back of the bus and kissed so hard I got dizzy because I kept forgetting to breathe. I couldn’t stand it when his lips weren’t touching mine. All I could think was that someday one of us would die first, and I hoped it was me, because how do you keep going without a man like that in your life? Ma wants me to move on? To what?
I know he still loves me. I know he’s a good person.
I’m going there again. I’ll keep going until he comes down to see me. I’ll call him first. I’ll keep calling until he comes to the phone. I can wait for him. By the time I’m thirty, maybe he’ll be out. Or if it’s a twenty-five-year sentence, I’ll be Ma’s age. I’ll work hard and save money and buy us that nice little house he wanted. Everything will be ready for us by the time he gets out. Everybody tells me I can’t think this way. Marcy gives me another month before I’m with some other guy. She says once you have sex, you have to keep getting it. But I can’t imagine being with anybody else. Ever. I’m supposed to be with Mack. I feel it, and I have ESP.
I count the words: 477. Nice. I rip the essay in half and toss it out the window into the hot wind with the rest of the test I spent the last year studying for, and I am so out of here.
Ma will be not at all surprised but extremely thrilled to hear Anthony is number one in his platoon. She will be very pissed that his special privileges limit him to twenty minutes of Skype time at 8:00 p.m., smack in the middle of Carmella Vaccuccia’s Wednesday night shift.
“You don’t need it anyway,” Anthony says.
“You’re right, Ant. C-team status in Ultimate Frisbee Club and a year and a half of Brownies in a hand-me-down uniform—I’m sure to get into Princeton.”
“Two pieces of advice: Take it again in the fall. Don’t throw it out the window. Done. How’s Mack?”
I rehearsed the lie in the mirror until I actually believed it: He’s just great, I’m just great, everything is just great. “Well, Ant, Mack is ju
st . . .”
“What happened? Cheech, we have seventeen minutes.”
I tell him.
He’s motionless, eyes downcast, stays like this for maybe a full minute. He clears his throat and nods. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“It’s not.”
“First things first: He loves you.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I’m a guy. He’s trying to make it easier for you.”
“And this is so easy.”
“All he wants is for you to be happy. If he sees you, it just prolongs the inevitable.”
“That we can’t be together.”
“Yes.”
“No. I reject that.”
“How do you think he feels, Cheech? He knows how long it takes you to get there, what you have to go through to get inside. To be inside, seeing him struggling. I wouldn’t want you or Ma to go through that for me.”
“But you would at least come down to tell us that.”
“I hope I would, but I’m not looking at being locked up for the next two decades.”
“Ma’s gonna flip when she finds out you’re taking his side.”
“No sides here. I’m dying for the both of you. Seriously, it sucks. Look, I’m not telling you to stop going. I don’t think he’ll sit with you, but you have to do what you’re doing until the sting fades, you know?”
“Ant, I know that down deep you’re probably furious at him—”
“In no way.”
“Well, I just want you to know he never hurt me.”
“Of course he didn’t.”
“I don’t want you to feel bad about setting us up.”
“I don’t.”
“You could feel a little bad, asshole!”
“I think this’ll be a defining moment for you. You just have to go through it, kid. When you’re ready to stop hurting, you’ll move on. But that won’t change the fact that you’ll always have a part of him with you. He made a terrible mistake, but he is an exceptional human being. He’s a good person. I know you know that. You were lucky to spend time with him. And he was lucky to know you. That doesn’t go away. It’s okay to keep loving him. Hey, Céce, it’s never easy, but it’s always great.”