From the Chrysalis: a novel

by Karen E. Black

  “He’s dead,” somebody was saying from the other side of the cell wall.

  Dace lay where he’d fallen, on a concrete slab four inches off the floor. It was covered by a sheet of plywood and a three inch thick foam pad.

  Dead. Ha, ha. Fat chance, he thought. He knew he was alive because some pig in the rifle tower shone a light into his cell twenty-four hours a day.

  “Who, Dace?”

  “No, one of the unwanted ones, you dumb cunt. His head was all busted up. Somebody pounded the shit out of him. He croaked in the army hospital today.”

  Maybe Steve’s name was mentioned too, maybe not. He felt like he was in a coma, aware of what was going on, but not really there.

  “Holy shit. I mean, who cares?”

  Max, the prison trusty, a joint man, a stoolie, a rat, pushed food through a five inch square window in Dace’s solid steel door. “Yeah, a second diddler died,” he muttered. Dace learned more from tiny notes rolled and buried under his cold toast. Like the reefers he used to get.

  “Rick’s all right,” Max added, then, “Watch the new Warden. He’s been reviewing your file and has it in for you.” The old Warden, so close to retirement, had left in a flood of post-riot criticism.

  “Jesus!” Dace exploded.

  “Ah, take it easy, man.”

  “Right. You got it right. I’m a man. Tell the Big Cheese that, too. You tell him everything else. At least I can live with myself when I wake up in the morning. Did he read the part where it says I never touched those fucking screws?”

  Max didn’t reply but shoved more items through the slot. He’d brought what Dace had requested based on the strength of Dace’s promises: I’ll protect you right or wrong when I’m in Gen Pop. Out in the regular population, a prison trusty needed all the help he could get. That’s how Dace scored an almost full blue fountain pen and some unlined paper, water damaged but still usable. And that’s how he got his books, mostly classics nobody else wanted to read, but also a coverless copy of The Godfather, a book he’d enjoyed several times before.

  I’m fine, Dace lied, practice-sitting on his concrete cot with his cracked ribs. His journal, in the form of letters, he addressed to both Liza and himself. He wrote her almost every day. If she got his letters, she’d understand. She always had, even his conviction for manslaughter. He didn’t like to think what that had cost her. He hated what he had put his family through, especially her. She was his future, his bright light, his … Aw, shit. He was getting emotional again. He had to get a grip.

  “Hey, guy,” Max whispered through the slot in his door. “What are you doing in there?”

  “Planning your demise. Yours and all the lying, cock-sucking …”

  “Duh-mize. Funny, man. Real funny. What’s duh-mize?”

  Although his parole was coming up, even taking into account the institutional charges and the “good time” he was likely to lose for this beef, he was considering serving all his time so he’d eventually be completely free and unsupervised when he did get out. He and Liza could go anywhere then. Anybody with half a brain could make a good living in this country. They’d find other people like themselves: people who liked to live and knew how to live good. “Good” as in really living, not necessarily as in living moral.

  My cousin, my self, he wrote in every salutation. Sure, it was a little more maudlin than he liked, but that’s what happened to a guy in the clinker, in the Hole. First you got cold, then your nerves went and the next thing you knew you were bawling like a girl. Her address—what the hell was her address? Oh, right, she was living in Maitland now, in the student rez. She’d visited him … wait. Was it just last week? No, it couldn’t be.

  I don’t want to leave you, her eyes had said when Savage led him away.

  I feel so close to you, he added, rereading the last page. Christ, what a goof. He crossed out a line and tried again. There, that was better. He wanted to tell her everything. Well, almost everything, he thought, sifting through key events and the role he had so reluctantly played. The last thing she needed was to get all her facts from the press. Somebody should know what had really gone down. And who better than her, his repository, his alter ego, the only person in the world capable of relating to his point of view?

  It was hard to explain about Rick, though. He’s my friend, he wrote in the end, never mind if his loyalty hadn’t helped him. He asked me to watch his back, that’s all. Then we took control of the guards. If we hadn’t … if anything had happened to the poor buggers we were all as good as dead.

  The only thing he didn’t tell her was how sorry he’d felt for the guards.

  His decisions had made sense at the time, but they didn’t now. If he’d had any brains, he would have crawled up into the ceiling and stayed there. Plenty of others had, men who valued their own skin.

  Stabbing his pen into the tablet of writing paper, he crossed out another whole section and started again. After six weeks in solitary, he’d revealed more than he’d planned, his anger spilling out in a rush of words that were sure to worry Liza sick when the letter finally arrived.

  What kind of man do you think survives this human pressure cooker for five or six years? That’s easy. A strong, violent man. Some say that’s me. A former Warden (a man I admire) used to call me a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but I haven’t seen Hyde for a while.

  Okay. So let’s say a man understands this. He even realizes he’ll have a difficult time surviving in society with the temperament he has. What then? What can he do to readjust himself so he fits the outside environment?

  Nothing! Because to fit those surroundings would be to disgrace himself. Besides, a man isn’t a robot, Liza. He doesn’t change with a bolt here or a spring there. If he could change so easily, he wouldn’t have survived all that time in prison, either mentally or physically. Also, he would find it totally impossible to understand why society would force him to be of such a violent disposition for such a long time, then abruptly force him into another entirely different personality.

  Jesus, if he’d killed the guards, he wouldn’t be in this mess. Okay, he’d be dead, but at least he wouldn’t be listening to morons hassle the ex-biker next door, a big side beef of a man, with a tendency to mouth off just after 11:00 p.m.

  Six ‘officers’ just came and tear-gassed everybody. I have to lie down and cover my eyes for a while. They’ve been using it on cons for no reason. Just for something to do. Hard to believe, but it’s true. I swear I’ll spend money gallor [sic] to expose these people, individually, when I get out.

  Usually the guards sprayed until their target fell and everybody else got coughing, too. Most men threw up. As an added bonus, the effects lasted longer than the usual fifteen minutes because there was so little fresh air intake in Segregation. On these occasions, no matter what he said—or didn’t say—the guards kicked his door, grunting as they passed. “You wanna fight, punk?” But when he replied, “Okay, when?” they didn’t follow through. “Whatsamatter? You just like rattling my cage?” he called, watching them saunter back to their own quarters with the man he always called that fat fuck Savage in the lead.

  Just as well. Sure, Savage was a fat fuck, but Dace was in lousy shape now. He wouldn’t want to meet any bad guys on the street. His busted ribs had slowed him down so much he hadn’t started exercising again, even in his cell. Once he could have lifted three hundred pounds over his head with one clean jerk motion, but he’d be lucky if he could do two twenty now. Even though he’d always thought a workout was as good as a high, now he spent his days sleeping and his nights writing letters or rereading the paperbacks he extorted from the little delivery man. One of the books was From Here to Eternity, but it was so draggy-assed in places that he had trouble finishing it.

  Time helped. And cursing. Dace recited the same steady stream of expletives his father had once employed in the absence of his God-loving, Catholic wife. Mother fucker was the only phrase Liza might have recognized.

  He also had trouble finishing h
is thoughts these days. He tried to sort them all out by writing to Liza, but it didn’t always help. Days and nights ran into each; events bled and blurred. When had he taken custody of the pigs? Why? Was it really just to help Rick—and to help them—or had he just needed a starring role?

  “He’s a hero,” people were starting to say about Rick. What did that mean? Still, he hoped Rick was out in the regular Population somewhere, anywhere but here. So far he hadn’t run into him during his infrequent visits to the Yard. No doubt they—the Authorities—had planned it that way.

  If Liza couldn’t keep track of all his ravings, his written record would be lost. For some reason he was getting most of her letters, but she wasn’t getting his. He knew this from what she said. The new contact probably just needed a boot up the ass.

  Tell me you’re all right, she pleaded. She would go crazy if she didn’t hear from him soon. Over and over she wrote, her bright light competing with the spotlight from the rifle tower.

  Although he hadn’t showered in two weeks or shaved in three—a true torture for anybody remotely fastidious—he no longer cared. A couple more weeks in solitary and he was so lonely he even understood why some of his fellow inmates had tamed rats. In the end the only thing that saved him was knowing how much he meant to Liza.

  Dear Dace, she wrote, even in the apparent absence of a response from him. Is this love?

  What are your feelings for me? he wrote back. Open up and tell me more.

  You’re so beautiful. I have a craving for the exciting and unusual. She continued on as if she’d heard him, her words thrilling him to the core. But I’ve been jinxed and I have hurt the people I loved. I don’t want to hurt you too. Oh God, I’m afraid to tell you what I’ve done.

  My God, what could a good little girl like her have done? He did what he could to reassure her.

  There’s nothing you could tell me that would scare me. You said you have a craving for the exciting and the unusual. I have, too. I always will, but now I understand it. Sweetheart, you can’t crave or want to try anything I haven’t already done, or thought of, or am waiting to do.

  Put aside your fears. You can’t hurt me because I see you in me and I see myself so clearly in you. There’s nothing wrong with the way you think or feel. How the hell can you think there is? Stop being afraid.

  You think you’re a jinx because a past lover or a friend has failed you. They failed to accept you and your needs. They didn’t understand you. Are we supposed to conform to “everybody’s” way of life? Like hell. I’m satisfied to know that you find me beautiful. And I’ll prove to you that you are, too. Others will envy us because of what they failed to be. What they can’t be. You’ll see.

  Sometimes he wanted to shake her. Everybody would envy them when he got the fuck out of here! Why couldn’t she see that? He’d carry her through live minefields if he had to. God, she shone. And even if she were just trying to lure him back to safety by pretending to fall in love with him, it didn’t matter. Little Liza had always been a great pretender. Somebody had to dream. Besides, she was his cousin, no matter what. Family stuck together, or his did anyway. The Devereux were like the Corleones that way. Dad and Rosie had always hung tough for him, and Liza would too. All she needed was a sign that he was alive and well. God help her if the Maitland Spectator was all she had.

  Ah, the Maitland Spectator. It was—what was one of Liza’s favourite words? Omni … omniscient. His supper trays were lined with newsprint, as if he were a dumb animal. Somebody must have wanted him to see how positively ghoulish the Spectator’s riot coverage had become. To get his goat. Sick bastards.

  Where the hell did the Spectator get its news, anyway? Who was their source? Front page stories hinted at sexual sadism, torture and vampirism, although editorial pages attempted a more scholarly analysis of the facts, blaming everybody from society and the Solicitor-General to the overcrowded, nineteenth century jail and the warped inmates themselves.

  The news about another little sit-down at the Joint was just a sidebar, but it made him crazy to read that most of the so-called ringleaders, his friends, were doing dead time, too. The day he found that out, he pounded the wall so hard with his right hand that he ended up writing the next two letters with his left. When he wrote Liza about the new Warden’s decisions, secretly pleased to have a fresh target for his fury, she replied:

  I still haven’t got a letter, but Joe says you’re in the Hole now. Why do you think he knows so much? And what does being “in the Hole” mean?

  It means I’m in a cage twenty-three plus hours a day, little Liza, he almost snapped back.

  Why was she talking to that dumb dick anyway? Not that he said that. No point in telling a smart little girl like that what to do.

  He also didn’t mention the absence of a toilet and the presence of a six inch drainage pipe at the head of his bed. Actually, the room was clean enough. No wonder. It was flushed every forty-eight hours by a large hose inserted through the slot in the door, the force of the water plastering him against the back wall, which he shared with an indoor ball court. If he waited long enough, the players on the other side tapped hello. He liked that. It was his way of keeping in touch with the world.

  It was also part of his punishment. For being so full of himself, so full of shit. Just like Rick. For imagining he could redeem himself and make things right. A girl like Liza probably would have figured out something else to do and landed on her feet … although she goddamn well wouldn’t have been in the Joint in the first place.

  And she would have handled the press, who were flooding him with written requests for interviews. As if he had anything to say. Goddamn bottom feeders.

  Although if you asked him, some of the movers and mooches inside the Joint were even worse. Jailhouse snitches liked to talk, something he figured out when he’d been bodybuilding.

  “Christ, he’s one tough mother fucker,” they used to marvel. “I saw him lift half a ton.”

  “I heard he captured fourteen guards single-handedly,” they recalled.

  “Yeah, I heard he wanted to cut off their fingers and their toes!”

  “No,” somebody else said. “Taking the guards hostage was just a snow job. You know Dace. He’s wanted those mother fucking diddlers dead for years. Remember the sneer on his face when …”

  They’d even started calling him the Master of Ceremonies, though not to his face. No fucking balls, the dirty stoolies. If he ever got a hold of the man who had coined that phrase, “Master of Ceremonies”, he’d kill him. Of course the stoolies and joint men always dummied up when he was on the move, which wasn’t too often. He was in Segregation, for Christ’s sake. The bulls hauled him to the showers or the exercise yard once or twice a week, if they remembered to check the chart posted just outside his door.

  To think that taking care of the guards had turned out to be the least of his problems. Stuck in solitary, all he could do now was listen to lies from sneaks and sleazes who had either hidden under their beds during the riot or—if they were feeling really cocky—moled through the heating ducts in search of contraband, as if the whole goddamn riot had been a super-sized frat party. They didn’t have a clue about what had gone down, he wanted to write Liza, but man, they loved a good story about a sweet kid who was raped in his cell or the begging words uttered by some dying diddler.

  She wouldn’t know what he was talking about, though. She wasn’t there. It made him sick telling her the whole story. A sweet little girl shouldn’t know all about it. It didn’t seem right. But he had to tell somebody the way he saw it, or at least the parts he’d seen, because he hadn’t been everywhere. The letter took him several days.

  Well, Sweetheart, I’ll try to be less secretive.

  I know I told you about my violent streak. What I didn’t tell you was that I overcame it. During the riot, of all places.

  My guard post was on the fourth range, in clear view of the whole dome, which is a round area with stairs winding from the main floor to
the fourth. So I could see if anyone tried to sneak up on my men or the hostages. People on three sides of the dome could see me too. Well, now people are saying I was directing the beatings of the diddlers downstairs. Sharp bunch of jerks, eh? They’re saying a lot of things about a lot of people that are lies. And most of these so-called witnesses are going up for parole soon.

  But like everybody else who had ever kept a journal, he also left stuff out. The human mind could only take so much. Although he’d seen men go insane, cut their throats, swallow razor blades and jump off fifty feet towers, he didn’t like dead bodies. So he couldn’t tell anyone, not even Liza, that he was haunted by what he had seen. In the end it didn’t even matter if they were baby killers. Not even that one of them was guilty of having sexual intercourse with a girl not yet three.

  “Close his eyes,” he’d said to the convicts who’d wanted their handiwork admired. Although he didn’t know how, the Maitland Spectator was spot on about this: the men had been hidden under a sodden mattress in a utility room, two victims, one dead and one dying. When Dace had entered the utility room, his friend Steve was just leaving.

  Too late. There was nothing anybody could do, so he’d waited with his so-called co-conspirators for his name and number to be called and the chance to run a gauntlet. The rioters were stripped naked. The prison guards and army men waited outside on the lawn, a double row of cowboys and Indians with billy clubs instead of guns and arrows. Most of the prisoners could barely crawl when they got to the finish line, but Dace had footballed through the human corridor with just a couple of blows to his back. Looking back, he had no idea where he’d found the stamina, except he had run on adrenalin for so long.

  At least the gauntlet wasn’t personal. It was just mass punishment for the fright and loss of control the guards had experienced, and for the implicit criticism they would face when their jobs and routines were reviewed. How did Sandy McAllister get hostages? In their place, Dace might have done worse. Then they got a little too personal when they came to his cell.