Undone

by John Colapinto

  2

  Jasper was not among the seven million Americans who watched Tovah’s show that afternoon. Like his fellow sex offender inmates, he was forbidden from viewing any photographs, books, movies, television shows or Web sites that featured teenaged girls, and he was expressly barred from looking at images of the daughter he had violated. Many others at the Beckford Correctional Center, however, did watch—a cohort of murderers, muggers, robbers, wife beaters, drug sellers and other criminals who had long known that Jasper Ulrickson, the notorious daughter-rapist, dwelled within their walls. Now, galvanized by the outrage and horror that Tovah was so good at evoking (several prisoners were reduced to sobs), they resolved, by whatever means necessary, to exact some jailhouse justice.

  The day after the show, Jasper was taking his daily exercise, plodding around the perimeter of the yard, the looming prison walls around him, the taunting rectangle of sky above with its one tender, lone cloud. He had completed two circuits when he heard a noise that anyone who had not performed this routine day after day for weeks would have failed to register, but which to Jasper was as unusual, as unexpected, as the sudden striking up of a brass band. The sound was the muted click of the computer-controlled safety lock on the door that let him into and out of the yard. This door was always kept locked during his exercise hour, to protect him from the rest of the prison population. The lock was on a timer that could be manually overridden only by, say, a crooked guard bribed by, for instance, one of the well-heeled inmate drug dealers.

  Jasper looked toward the door and saw two men—heavily muscled habitués of the weight room—approaching across the yard. They had eager grins on their faces and for a distorted moment he mistook their bright eyes and bared teeth for expressions of friendliness. He turned toward them. The first blow was to his chin, a roundhouse punch that made his teeth grind together and lifted him off his feet. He landed on his back on the ground. A stomping kick to his stomach knocked the breath from his lungs. A boot came down on the side of his head. Gasping, he curled into a fetal position, arms over his face. They beat and kicked and stomped—Jasper heard and felt things snapping and fracturing and splintering and tearing within him—until a guard not on the dealer’s payroll noticed the commotion on a security monitor and dispatched guards with cattle prods and Taser guns to halt the attack. The beating had lasted only thirty seconds, but it left Jasper with a fractured skull, two missing molars, a ruptured spleen, six broken ribs, a shattered pelvis and a broken scapula. His right eye had been kicked out of its socket and lay on his cheek.

  He spent three months in the prison infirmary, his head bandaged, his torso tightly bound in restrictive bandages, his right leg in traction. His eye proved unsalvageable and was surgically removed. His remaining eye, already dimming because of an unusual sensitivity to the flickering fluorescent lights that illumined the prison’s interior, had been further damaged in the attack. He could, if he squinted, make out objects at very close range—he could read print if he held it an inch from his face—but anything at arm’s length or greater disappeared into a fog, a blurriness that reduced the world to indistinguishable soft-formed blobs of weak, watered-down color.

  Discharged from the infirmary back to solitary, he was issued a pair of dark glasses to protect what remained of the sight in his left eye. For his trips to the exercise yard, he was given a retractable white cane with a ball-shaped tip for feeling his way around the yard’s perimeter. He moved in halting half steps owing to his legal blindness, and to a shortened leg that gave him a pronounced limp.

  Unable now to detect by sight the subtle changes in the light from the window of his cell, he ceased to be aware of the passage of day from morning through afternoon into evening. Gone, too, were those visual cues that told him of the progress of the seasons from brightening spring through effulgently sunny summer into dimming fall and dark winter. Apart from the chill that brought up goose bumps on his flesh in the months from November through March, or the slick of sweat that covered his body when summer arrived, he had no outward sensations, for the twenty-three hours a day he spent in his cell, of time passing. In this state of solipsistic inward-turning blindness, a single minute might stretch to hours or days or weeks; a month might vanish in a blink.

  Unlike his fellow prisoners, he did not secrete in his mattress a safety pin or paper clip with which to scratch out hash marks in the stone wall of his cell, to keep track of how many days he had spent in captivity—and how many more he would have to endure. He lived in the timeless moment. Tiredness came upon him, and he slept; signals sent to his brain by enzymes in his guts informed him that he must eat, and he duly masticated whatever matter was passed through to him on the tin plate from the small hatch on his cell door, chewing and swallowing, until the signal from his gut was appeased. And so he existed, without hopes, without goals, without desires, in the numb non-time of prison, in the dimmed, blurred world of his legal blindness.

  Then one day a guard arrived in his cell, filling its small space with the sour reek of his sweat and meaty breath, and in a deafening voice, told Jasper to follow. Limping, tapping with his cane, trying to penetrate with his remaining eye the enveloping grayness, Jasper followed the sound of the guard’s footsteps. He knew he was walking past his fellow inmates because of the sudden cacophony of shouted imprecations and threats, and the ringing clangor of tin drinking cups banged against barred cell doors. He heard a door crash shut behind him with a sound of ringing steel and an after-echo of tombal finality. They had entered a room that he judged to be cavernous because of the way it returned the sound, slightly delayed, of their footsteps.

  “Right here,” the guard said, grasping his upper arm.

  He could make out a wavery figure standing behind a low table. It pushed toward him a box. Jasper opened it. He brought his face close and could see that there were objects inside.

  “Personal effects,” the figure behind the table said.

  He lifted each object from darkness into the weak light that issued from a buzzing overhead fluorescent tube. They were the items that had been in his pockets at the time of his arrest. He handled each like a precious talisman from a vanished civilization: four twenty-dollar bills; a limp brown leather wallet; a tube of ChapStick; three quarters; and a small tin of mints. Some clothes lay folded at the bottom of the box: the jeans and T-shirt he had hastily pulled on that morning after waking to discover his crime. They might as well have been impregnated with Chloe’s dried blood, so repellent were they to him; yet he was told to remove his orange prison jumpsuit and put the clothes on. He did so. They hung loose on his emaciated frame. Only by cinching the belt to its last hole was he able to prevent the pants from sliding off his bony pelvis. He pulled on the Adidas that he found at the bottom of the box.

  The guard growled at him to follow. They proceeded through a corridor where unfamiliar smells—aromas and scents that he had not experienced in five years, a particular deodorant, a female’s perfume, the complex aroma of inexpressibly delicious-smelling nachos, all cheese and vinegary jalapeños, tart tomato salsa and garlic-infused ground beef—filled his quivering, awakened nostrils.

  They passed through another vague doorway into a large indoor space, and a burst of bright light hit Jasper, causing him to wince. A shadow man materialized beside him and handed over something that, when Jasper raised it to his face, he saw was a yellow and black plastic card. He told Jasper how to find the bus stop. He also handed Jasper a piece of paper upon which (Jasper saw when he brought it so close to his face that it brushed the tip of his nose) was written the address of the place where he would be living for the next six months, until he earned his complete freedom.

  Some time ago—a month? two days? two hours?—he had been taken from his cell and brought before a murky tableau of four people, two men and two women (judging from their voices). They had spoken to him about the day of his release, about the residential rehabilitation center, about his reintegration into society. But he had promptly dis
missed all thoughts of his discharge—of his freedom. Because, for him, there was no chance, ever, of freedom, no respite from the knowledge that he had destroyed his family and each and every member of it. His prison was not a physical state.

  Nevertheless, he passed through one door and suddenly he was standing in a bewildering blind swirl of sensations. He felt, through the soles of his unfamiliar shoes, the yielding texture of grass (he had accidentally stepped off the cement path that led to the prison’s exit). He felt wind and the long-forgotten touch of sunlight on his face. The bright September sun, not yet drained of all its summer strength, jabbed painfully at his remaining retina. He closed his eyelids. Cautiously tapping, he moved off the grass verge and onto the invisible sidewalk. Eventually, his probing cane hit something and he opened his eyes. He was standing at the base of a gigantic stone archway, the outside gate of the prison. He stepped across onto the sidewalk, and into his dubious freedom.

  As instructed, he turned left and squinted in search of the bus stop. He could make out, vaguely, some twenty or so yards up the street, a blurry but familiar pattern of blue and white that the city used for its public transit signs. He moved toward it.

  A flurry of shapes lunged from the darkness around him and raucous voices, at close range, shouted his name, yelled at him—”This way, Jasper!” “Over here!” “Look at me!”—and for a moment he was reminded of the attack, four years ago, in the exercise yard. He lifted his cane, holding it out in front of him. Someone batted it away, and he heard laughter. He braced to feel a blow to his head or a kick to his groin. He held a hand over his crotch. Someone yelled, “That’s good! That’s good!” He heard a chattering sound of rapid-fire clicking. He squinted, looked around, realized that a crowd of men had encircled him, jostling for a clear view, elbowing one another out of the way. “Please,” he said, trying to push through the scrum, which moved like a single elastic organism, surrounding him on all sides, continuing to snap away. “Please,” he repeated.

  He had taken only a few stumbling paces toward the bus stop when he heard, through the tumult, a female voice calling out from behind him: “Here! Over here!” He turned. The voice repeated, “Over here!” He tried to look for the owner of that voice—that familiar voice!—but could see only the insect-eye lenses and hunched shoulders of the people surrounding him. The gunning mechanical chatter continued on all sides. Overwhelmed, he crouched and put his arms over his head.

  The female voice was close by, shouting, “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” He heard shoes scraping on the pavement and rustling clothing.

  “Who the fuck is that?” someone shouted.

  “Fuck knows—but I’m getting a shot.”

  “Away!” the voice screamed. “Go away!”

  A hand closed around his arm. He was being dragged back down the street. The crowd followed, clacking, snapping, shouting. Jasper was pushed hard. He fell, but instead of hitting asphalt, he landed on a soft surface that he recognized, by its smell of leather, to be a car seat. He drew in his feet and heard a door slam. There was muffled shouting and more clicking, then another door slammed. An engine roared to life and a deep vibration ran through his body. His head jerked back.

  3

  Those horrible people!” Deepti said, glancing into her rearview mirror as she accelerated away from the curb. The paparazzi were not giving chase. They were standing in a calm group, looking down into their camera viewfinders, checking their shots, laughing and chatting as if at a cocktail party. She eased up on the gas and looked at Mr. Jasper.

  He sat mute, his eyes obscured behind dark glasses, his head shaved almost to baldness. His face was impassive, as if the ambush had not happened, or as if he had already forgotten about it. She was stunned by the changes in him. He was unrecognizable—hence her failure to intercept him when he first emerged from the prison gates. She had been expecting a slightly older version of her tall, robust former boss. Instead, she had seen a wizened old man, stooped, shuffling, limping along in dark glasses. Until those horrible photographers began to attack him, she had had no idea that it was Mr. Jasper. And it was difficult to believe even now.

  “Thank you for your help, Deepti,” he said in a low growl.

  “You are welcome, Mr. Jasper,” she said.

  His demeanor (head slumped forward, chin almost on his chest, mouth tightly closed) told her that he did not wish to speak. So she drove in silence. She had already apprised him, in her regular letters to the prison, of Pauline’s and Maddy’s progress, so there seemed little, in any case, to talk about. She had no intention of asking him about the scandal that had landed him in prison. Deepti had been as shocked as anyone by Mr. Jasper’s acts—he had always seemed such a decent, good man. But she believed every person worthy of forgiveness, and capable of redemption, and that is why she was there for him, that is why she had phoned the prison, learned about his release date and come to pick him up.

  She followed the GPS instructions that carried them to an address on Dunmore Road, in the city’s gritty west end. Number 16 was a nondescript two-story house, vaguely institutional, with beige siding and white window trim behind a ten-foot-high chain-link fence, a coil of razor wire on top. She parked at the cracked curb in front, then helped him out of the car. He leaned heavily on her arm, tapping with his cane, as they went up the cement walk, past a leashed pit bull that growled but made no move to attack. There were two security cameras mounted on either side of the door and a sign reading: All Visitors Must Buzz. Deepti pushed the intercom button, and after a moment a voice came through the crackly speaker. “Yup?”

  “Mr. Jasper Ulrickson,” she said.

  A buzzer sounded and they pushed in through the door, into a bright, large room. Deepti saw, behind a reception counter, a tall man with a military-looking brushcut. He wore a starched, short-sleeved button-front shirt and a shoulder holster. Behind him were office machines—computers, printers, photocopiers—and a bank of small black-and-white screens, which showed ever-shifting views of the house’s exterior and interior. In an area to the right of the desk were some tweedy brown chairs and sofas upon which a couple of men were seated. They looked up sharply at her, then just as quickly dismissed her as of no interest to them.

  “This is Mr. Ulrickson,” she said to the desk sergeant.

  He looked at his computer screen, then at Jasper. “Okay,” he said, “we’ll get you processed.”

  Deepti handed Jasper a slip of paper. “You can call me anytime,” she said. “And I will be back to visit.” She also gave her name and number to the man behind the desk. “In case he needs me,” she said. She silently squeezed Jasper’s arm, then disappeared into the dim fog that surrounded him. He heard a buzz, and the door clanged shut behind her.

  The man placed on the counter in front of Jasper a register book, and told him to sign in, giving Jasper the dislocated feeling that he was checking into a hotel. Then the desk sergeant—who identified himself as Officer Dunwoody—told Jasper to stand with his arms extended at his sides. He patted Jasper down. He then explained the rules and regulations of life in the Turning Points Residential Rehabilitation Center. “And this is a rehabilitation center,” he added. “We don’t call them halfway houses anymore. And you will be rehabilitated, as long as you follow our rules.”

  The rules stated that Jasper would spend his first three weeks confined to the center. After which—and depending on whether he followed the rules—he would be permitted to come and go unsupervised, although his whereabouts would be monitored. “That is, upon leaving, you will give phone numbers and addresses for your destination, state the time of your return, and be subject to strict curfew. Any failure to abide by the curfew, or any deviation from the scheduled time and place of your trip, will result in sanctions up to and including reincarceration, depending on the severity of the infraction. You are required to meet, in person, with your parole officer daily. You are forbidden to use computers or the Internet. Regular drug tests will be administered. Unscheduled
room searches will be in effect. All items brought into the center are subject to inspection. As a sex offender with a conviction for statutory rape and incest, you will not be permitted to see any material containing photographs of school-aged children or either of your daughters. After six months, if you have followed all the Turning Points rules and are deemed by our psychosocial team to have been rehabilitated, you will be released, fully free, into society. Do you understand?” Jasper said yes.