“Do you see?” he asked. “Do you understand where you are now?”
I was so startled at having understood him, I could muster no reply.
He raised a hand, trailed his fingers across the bars of the gate, the sort of gesture a salesman might make to display the hang of a fabric. Assuming that he wanted me to inspect the bars, I stepped around him and bent to look at one. A bit less than halfway along its length the color and finish of the metal changed from rough and dark to a rich yellow. The join where the two colors met was seamless, and the yellow metal had an unmistakable soft luster and smoothness: gold. It was as if a luxuriant infection were spreading along the bar, along—I realized—all the bars of Czerny’s cell.
I am not sure why this unsettled me more profoundly than the rest of the bizarre occurrences I’d met with at Diamond Bar. Perhaps it resonated with some gloomy fairy tale that had frightened me as a child or inflamed some even deeper wound to my imagination, for I had a sudden appreciation of Czerny as a wizardly figure, a shabby derelict who had revealed himself of an instant to be a creature of pure principle and power. I backed out of the cell, fetched up against the railing, only peripherally mindful of Czerny’s attendants. The old man continued to smile, his gaze drifting here and there, centering briefly on my face, and in that broken muttering whose message I now comprehended as clearly as I might the orotund tones of a preacher ringing from a pulpit, he said, “You cannot retreat from the heart of the law, Penhaligon. You can let it illuminate you or you can fail it, but you cannot retreat. Bear this in mind.”
That night as I lay in my cell, immersed in the quiet of the cellblock like a live coal at the heart of a diamond, growing ever more anxious at the thought of Czerny in his cell of gold and marble, an old mad king whose madness could kill, for I believed now he was the genius of the place…that night I determined I would escape. Despite the caution implicit in Czerny’s final words, I knew I could never thrive there. I needed firm ground beneath my feet, not philosophy and magic or the illusion of magic. If I were to live bounded by walls and laws—as do we all—I wanted walls manned and topped with razor wire, written regulations, enemies I could see. Yet the apparent openness of the prison, its lack of visible security, did not fool me. Power did not exist without enforcement. I would have to ferret out the traps, learn their weaknesses, and in order to do that I needed to become part of the prison and pretend to embrace its ways.
My first step in this direction was to find an occupation, a meaningful activity that would convince whoever was watching that I had turned my mind onto acceptable avenues; since my only skill was at art, I began drawing once again. But making sketches, I realized, would not generate a bona fide of my submersion in the life of Diamond Bar; thus I undertook the creation of a mural, using for a canvas the walls and ceiling of an empty storeroom in one of the sub-basements. I chose as a theme the journey that had led me to the prison, incorporating images of the river crossing, of Frank Ristelli, the gray van, and so forth. The overall effect was more crazy quilt than a series of unified images, although I was pleased with certain elements of the design; but for all the attention it received, it might have rivaled Piero della Francesca. Men stopped by at every hour to watch me paint, and the members of the board, along with their entourages, were frequent visitors. Czerny took particular interest in my depiction of Ristelli; he would stand in front of the image for periods up to half an hour, addressing it with his customary vacant nods. When I asked one of his attendants the reason for his interest, I was told that Ristelli was revered for a great personal sacrifice made on behalf of us all and reflecting on the origins of our common home—he had been on the verge of being made a member of the board, but had forsworn the security and comfort of the prison and returned to the world in order to seek out men suitable for Diamond Bar.
Placing Ristelli’s zoned piety in context with the psychological climate of the prison, it was not difficult to understand why they perceived him to be their John the Baptist; but in the greater context of the rational, the idea was ludicrous. More than ludicrous. Insane. Recalling how laughable Ristelli’s preachments had seemed back in Vacaville reinforced my belief that the population of Diamond Bar was being transformed by person or persons unknown into a brain-dead congregation of delusionaries, and fearful of joining them, I intensified my focus on escape, exploring the sub-basements, the walls, the turrets, searching for potential threats. On one of these explorative journeys, as I passed through Czerny’s block, I noticed that the massive oak door leading to the new wing, heretofore always locked, was standing partway open and, curious, I stepped inside. The space in which I found myself was apparently an anteroom, one more appropriate to a modern cathedral than a jail: domed and columned, with scaffolding erected that permitted access to every inch of the roof and walls. The door on the far side of the room was locked, and there was little else to see, the walls and ceiling being white and unadorned. I was on the verge of leaving when I saw a sheet of paper taped to one of the columns. Written in pencil upon it was the following:
This place is yours to paint, Penhaligon, if you wish.
A key lay on the scaffolding beside the note—it fit the oak door. I locked the door, pocketed the key and went about my business, understanding this show of trust to signify the board’s recognition that I had accepted my lot and that by taking up their charge I might earn a further degree of trust and so learn something to my benefit. To succeed in this I would have to do something that would enlist their delusion, and I immediately set about working on a design that would illustrate the essence of the delusion, The Heart of the Law. Though I began with cynical intent, as the weeks went by and my cell walls were covered with sketches, I grew obsessed with the project. I wanted the mural to be beautiful and strong to satisfy the artistic portion of my nature, my ego, and not simply to satisfy the board—in truth, I presumed they would approve of anything I did that hewed to their evangel. The dome and walls of the anteroom, the graceful volume of space they described, inspired me to think analytically about painting, something I had not done before, and I challenged myself to transcend the limits of my vision, to conceive a design that was somehow larger than my soul. I came to dwell more and more on the motive theory of Diamond Bar, that the criminal was the fundamental citizen, the archetype in whose service the whole of society had been created, and in the process I came obliquely to embrace the idea, proving, I suppose, the thesis that high art is the creation of truth from the raw materials of a lie, and the artist who wishes to be adjudged “great” must ultimately, through the use of passion and its obsessive tools, believe the lie he is intent upon illuminating. To augment my analytic capacities, I read books that might shed light on the subject—works of philosophy for the most part—and was astonished to discover in the writings of Michel Foucault a theory mirroring the less articulate theory espoused by the prison population. I wondered if it might be true, if delusion were being employed in the interests of truth, and, this being the case, whether the secret masters of Diamond Bar were contemplating a general good and the experiment of which we were a part was one that sought to evolve a generation in harmony with the grand design underlying all human culture. The books were difficult for me, but I schooled myself to understand them and became adept at knotting logic into shapes that revealed new facets of possibility—new to me, at any rate. This caused me to lose myself in abstraction and consequently diminished the urgency of my intention to escape. Like everyone who lived at Diamond Bar, I seemed to have a talent in that regard.
The design I settled upon owed more to Diego Rivera and Soviet poster art than to the muralists of the Renaissance. The walls would be thronged with figures, all reacting toward the center of the design, which was to occupy the dome and which I had not yet been able to conceptualize—I felt the image would naturally occur as a byproduct of my labors. It took three months of twelve-hour days to lay out the sketch on the walls, and I estimated that, if done properly, the painting would take a year
to complete. Chances were I would be gone from Diamond Bar before then, and realizing this, when I began to paint, ensorcelled by my vision; driven by the idea of finishing in a shorter time, I worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. Dangling in harness from the scaffolding, crouched over, forced into unnatural positions, I gained an appreciation for the physical afflictions that Michelangelo endured while painting the Sistine Chapel. Each night after work I tried to shake off the aches and pains by walking through the sub-basements of the prison, and it was during one of these walks that I encountered the plumes.
In prison, sex is an all-consuming preoccupation, a topic endlessly discussed, and from my earliest days at Diamond Bar the plumes had been recommended as a palatable alternative to self-gratification. The new wing, it was said, would house both women and men, thus ending the single unnatural constraint of prison life, and many held that the plumes would eventually become those women, evolving—as were we all—into their ideal form. Even now, Causey said, the plumes were superior to the sex available in other prisons. “It’s not like fucking a guy,” he said. “It feels, y’know, okay.”
“Is it like fucking a woman?” I asked.
He hesitated and said, “Kinda.”
“‘Kinda’ doesn’t do it for me.”
“Only reason it’s different is because you’re thinking about it not being a woman.”
“Yeah, well. I’ll pass. I don’t want to think when I’m fucking.”
Causey continued urging me to give the plumes a try, because—I believed—he felt that if I surrendered to temptation, I would become a complicitor in perversion, and this would somehow lessen the guilt attaching to his sexual assault on me. That he felt guilty about what had transpired between us was not in question. As our relationship progressed, he came to speak openly about the event and sought to engage me in a dialogue concerning it. Therapy, I supposed. Part of his process of self-examination. At the time, I rejected his suggestions that I visit the plumes out of hand, but they may have had some effect on me, for in retrospect I see that my initial encounter with them, though it seemed accidental, was likely an accident I contrived. I was, you see, in a heightened state of sexuality. Immersed in my work, essentially in love with it, while painting I would often become aroused not by any particular stimulus—there were no visual or tactile cues—but by the concentrated effort, itself a form of desire maintained at peak intensity for hours on end. And so on the night I strayed into the section of the prison occupied by the plumes, I was, though tired, mentally and sexually alert. I was tempting myself, testing my limits, my standards, hoping they would fail me.
Three levels down from the main walls were dozens of rooms—bedchambers, a communal kitchen, common rooms, and so forth—an area accessed by a double door painted white and bearing a carved emblem that appeared to represent a sheaf of plumes, this the source of the name given to those who dwelled within. Much of the space had the sterile decor of a franchise hotel: carpeted corridors with benches set into walls whose patterned discolorations brought to mind art nouveau flourishes. The common rooms were furnished with sofas and easy chairs and filled with soft music whose melodies were as unmemorable as an absent caress. No barred gates, just wooden doors. The lighting was dim, every fixture limned by a faint halation, giving the impression that the air was permeated by a fine mist. I felt giddy on entering the place, as if I had stood up too quickly. Nerves, I assumed, because I felt giddier yet when I caught sight of my first plume, a slim blonde attired in a short gray dress with spaghetti straps. She had none of the telltale signs of a transvestite or a transsexual. Her hands and feet were small, her nose and mouth delicately shaped, her figure not at all angular. After she vanished around a corner, I remembered she was a man, and that recognition bred abhorrence and self-loathing in me. I turned, intending to leave, and bumped into another plume who had been about to walk past me from behind. A willowy brunette with enormous dark eyes, dressed in the same fashion as the blonde, her mouth thinned in exasperation. Her expression softened as she stared at me. I suppose I gaped at her. The memory of how I behaved is impaired by the ardor with which I was studying her, stunned by the air of sweet intelligence generated when she smiled. Her face was almost unmarked by time—I imagined her to be in her late twenties—and reminded me of the faces of madonnas in Russian ikons: long and pale and solemn, wide at the cheekbones, with an exaggerated arch to the eyebrows and heavy-lidded eyes. Her hair fell straight and shining onto her back. There was nothing sluttish or coarse about her; on the contrary, she might have been a graduate student out for an evening on the town, a young wife preparing to meet her husband’s employer, an ordinary beauty in her prime. I tried to picture her as a man but did not succeed in this, claimed instead by the moment.
“Are you trying to find someone?” she asked. “You look lost.”
“No,” I said. “I’m just walking…looking around.”
“Would you like me to give you the tour?” She put out her right hand to be shaken. “I’m Bianca.”
The way she extended her arm straight out, assertive yet graceful, hand angled down and inward a bit: it was so inimitably a female gesture, devoid of the frilliness peculiar to the gestures of men who pretend to be women, it convinced me on some core level of her femininity, and my inhibitions fell away. As we strolled, she pointed out the features of the place. A bar where the ambience of a night club was created by red and purple spotlights that swept over couples dancing together; a grotto hollowed out from the rock with a pool in which several people were splashing one another; a room where groups of men and plumes were playing cards and shooting pool. During our walk, I told Bianca my life story in brief, but when I asked about hers, she said, “I didn’t exist before I came to Diamond Bar.” Then, perhaps because she noticed disaffection in my face, she added, “That sounds overly dramatic, I know. But it’s more or less true. I’m very different from how I used to be.”
“That’s true of everyone here. The thinking you do about the past, it can’t help but change you.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said.
At length she ushered me into a living room cozily furnished in the manner of a bachelorette apartment and insisted I take a seat on the sofa, then went through a door into the next room, reappearing seconds later carrying a tray on which were glasses and a bottle of red wine. She sat beside me, and as she poured the wine I watched her breasts straining against the gray bodice, the soft definition of her arms, the precise articulation of the muscles at the corners of her mouth. The wine, though a touch bitter, put me at ease, but my sense of a heated presence so near at hand sparked conflicting feelings, and I was unable to relax completely. I told myself that I did not want intimacy, yet that was patently untrue. I had been without a woman for three years, and even had I been surrounded by women during that time, Bianca would have made a powerful impression. The more we talked, the more she revealed of herself, not the details of her past, but the particularity of her present: her quiet laugh, a symptom—it seemed—of ladylike restraint; the grave consideration she gave to things I said; the serene grace of her movements. There was an aristocratic quality to her personal style, a practiced, almost ritual caution. Only after learning that I was the one painting a mural in the new wing did she betray the least excitement, and even her excitement was colored with restraint. She leaned toward me, hands clasped in her lap, and her smile broadened, as if my achievement, such as it was, made her proud.
“I wish I could do something creative,” she said wistfully at one point. “I don’t think I’ve got it in me.”
“Creativity’s like skin color. Everyone’s got some.”
She made a sad moue. “Not me.”
“I’ll teach you to draw if you want. Next time I’ll bring a sketch pad, some pencils.”
She traced the stem of her wine glass with a forefinger. “That would be nice…if you come back.”
“I will,” I told her.
“I don’t know.” She said this
distantly, then straightened, sitting primly on the edge of the sofa. “I can tell you don’t think it would be natural between us.”
I offered a reassurance, but she cut me off, saying, “It’s all right. I understand it’s strange for you. You can’t accept that I’m natural.” She let her eyes hold on my face for a second, then lowered her gaze to the wine glass. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to accept, but I am, you know.”
The Best of Lucius Shepard Page 54