by A M Homes
Slowly, steadily, he fell in love, never losing the fear that she would turn on him, direct her anger at the five inches of difference between them and once and for all take it from him—though there is no way he could have told me this, I can swear it is true, remembering it from my own experience, from my grandmother’s helper girl who once came at me with a paring knife. If you don’t believe me, I invite you to my room, where I am free to raise my shirt, lower my pants, and show the white scar it made, tracing down from just below the inverted stump of my umbilicus, through the matted down, and on into the nether regions stopping not a breath away from the veiny cord that is my manhood. Scarred forever.
Summer. Her boy went to camp—the recurrence of this theme being explanation for her worry about the new boy being lost to those woods. There was a long, slow good-bye in the trunk of his father’s Ford—the tire jack like an extra member nearly taking her up the ass—followed two weeks later by a strange late-afternoon phone call and her mother coming quietly into the den, whispering, “Lightning on a ballfield.” And the girl, being the closest companion, the best friend, was offered his toys, his collections—buffalo nickels and tumbled rocks—his cassettes and stereo as parting gifts.
THREE
Prison. Between the bells. I am lost in memory.
My yellow truck is not allowed on the table.
“It’s a dining room, not a parking lot,” my grandmother says. She squeezes orange juice. My grandmother squeezes the blood of an orange into a glass and sets it before me, thick with the meat of the fruit, with seeds. I am afraid to drink, to swallow, for fear an orange grove will grow inside me, reach its branches up from my stomach and into the back of my throat, tickling me.
“No seeds,” my mother always said. “Spit the seeds.”
“Swallow it,” my grandmother says. “No one wants to see you spitting at the table.”
A little girl from down the street presses her nose against the screen door. “Can he come out and play?” she asks my grandmother.
“Go on,” my grandmother says, “out from under my skirt.”
My mother is in the asylum. The little girl likes my yellow truck. I love my rubber tires.
No letter. For several days now, I have had no word. I imagine she has been pulled away from her correspondence by a high school chum who, in late-night session, bordering on exorcism, has brought low this girl’s senses, encouraged her to get a summer job, to take a college-level course and fulfill her foreign-language requirement, has, in her excitement at discovering her friend could be so bold, taken the sick thrill to heart. Aren’t you afraid to write him? Don’t you worry that he does something strange to the paper, implants it, impregnates it, fills it with some of whatever it is that makes him that way? I wouldn’t be able to touch it, I’d have to wear rubber dish gloves and open the envelope with a steak knife. And do they let him write to anyone he wants? Doesn’t the envelope say, “Caution, insanity enclosed”? Just his words, the things he says, could get inside your head and do something to you.
I fear she has been taken from me before I could win her, before I could make her believe that what is between us is ever so much closer to the core of things, to her true nature, and that a summer spent temping in the attorney’s office or learning German will, in the end, bring little to her life, but a summer swapping trickery with me would change her forever. As one day turns to two, panic takes over and I curse myself, damn, damn, and damn. I will never answer a letter again. I will not allow myself to be put in this position, this begging pose. They have no idea of how important they are to us, they do not feel the power we allow them, do not recognize that with so small a gesture they are in our lives. No one realizes how little there is.
Henry, hawking his wares in the hallway, breaks my concentration. Like a proper peddler he goes door-to-door, cell-to-cell, taking the pulse of the place, establishing himself as an ersatz psychopharmacologist, whipping up between-meal snacks, supplements, little things to lighten the mood. A man of the mouth, formerly the most oral of surgeons, Henry had the habit of giving his lady patients laughing gas, putting them out, then fiercely fucking them, while tugging on their wisdom teeth. His getting caught was a slip of the tongue, so to speak. While he was buried deep in a muff, some sharp thing slipped, and his prize patient, Mrs. Mavis Gilette, woke to find a harpoon hole through her cheek and her lost licker languishing on the floor. And not only that, but her blouse was buttoned all wrong. Upon incarceration, plagued by the need to assuage his guilt, Henry developed another kind of habit, and to better cater to his own needs became a kind of pharmacist, mixing his own elegant elixirs, etcetera, etcetera.
He is at my door. “What’ll it be?” he asks.
“Peace,” I say, eager to get on with my work, this awkward explanation, “and quiet.”
“May your dream be your reward.”
“What time is it?” I ask as he’s walking away.
“Past time,” he says, and moves on.
Memorial Day. A slackening of the custodial services is evident over the long weekend. Someone throws up in the hall, and for hours the puddle lies there, its stink ripening and seeming to slide down the hall, closer and closer.
“That your stink?” Frazier, my next-door neighbor, asks.
“No,” I say, thinking of how much Frazier annoys me, how the echo of his snoring keeps me up nights.
“If I find out who did it, I’m gonna make him eat it,” Frazier says.
“Ummm,” I say, responding only to keep relations neighborly.
Our keepers play with their families and come in late, hungover, faces baked from too many hours standing over the barbecue. And since they trust us not with fire and frankfurters, we are given cold sandwiches for lunch and dinner on Sunday and on Monday, a potentially poisonous picnic supper. The chilled chicken leg included is so thoroughly petrified one would wonder if it had not first been stored in formaldehyde, if it were not some fetal dinosaur never quite born or the quartered remains of an exhibit at the forensic institute down the Northway.
Two new guards talk in the hallway—it seems as though every week there are new guards, fresh recruits, no one lasts long. “Took my kid to the petting zoo,” one says.
“Shhh,” the other says, “don’t talk about it here, they jerk off to what we say.”
I stand on my bed and look out the single sealed pane of glass someone has nerve enough to call a window. If I raise up on the tips of my toes, I can see a little piece of the outside gate. Tourists are pressed to the gates, slipping the lenses of their Nikons between the wrought-iron bars that wrap this architecturally unsound palace. The prison was designed by a now famous gentleman who went on to build great museums and Long Island estates. But this, a monument from his youth, was suggested by a judge who clearly had the young draftsman’s future in mind, offering him a choice, time on the inside for yet another mishap under the influence, one in which a whole family of merchants was killed, William Morehood and Sons no more—or time out to design this convoluted construction. And so our ceilings sag, the walls bleed water on a schedule more regular than a woman’s monthly cycle, and in the summer the floors swell a good inch or two so that under the right circumstances one has the feeling of walking on air. And tourists come.
Prison. A bell rings. Lunch. Ham. Cheese. Green Jell-O.
I reread her first letter. One of my reasons for writing — and there are lots!—is to let you have a look at my life. I thought you might be curious to see what someone like me is really like. I’m crazy to learn more about your life and hope you’ll tell me all about prison. It sounds very exciting. Do you make license plates f
I respond. Today, I have a small headache of my own, an annoying frontal jab that indicates a piece of glass working its way to the surface. In that combining of fates and forces, in what’s most often referred to as an accident, my head once met a windshield, and in that split second, the two became sufficiently intimate that I took away with me great sections of fine
and fragile glass. And despite the careful dissection under magnified glass in a local hospital, pieces continually come to the fore, introducing themselves as sharp little stingers below the surface. I earned my initial rank here by removing a rather large sliver before an audience; it went off like the popping of a great pimple. I squeezed and out it came, coated in a pinkish, watery fluid that seemed precious being that it flowed so freely and close to the brain. The shard was then passed around the room and ultimately pronounced authentic by one who tested the extrusion upon himself, scraping his skin. The ease with which the splinter drew blood was taken by the witnesses to be evidence of its high quality. I can feel it now, another piece will soon be coming through. When I raise my brow, it scratches; when I rub my fingers across my forehead, the tips are pricked.
It will be a long day. There are many of those, moments between sunrise and sleep that stretch into centuries. I daydream, soothing myself with memories and imaginary games. I force myself to conjure. Clutching my pillow, I pretend the pillowcase is skin. I touch the sheet bunched at the bottom of the bed and think of the bones of Alice’s ankles. Beauty. I have loved. I think of the clean white sheets on my grandmother’s clothesline. I think of the little neighbor girl who liked my truck, I give myself history lessons.
Alice; naked by the lake is how she found me. She is there on the beach, standing between me and my clothing. I turn away, overcome with false modesty. She watches. She wears war paint and carries a bow and a quiver filled with white arrows ending in blue suction cups. She giggles. She points to my shriveled self hanging down below.
She finds me amusing.
Her amusement I find humiliating, arousing.
I instantly want to do something—to silence that stupid giggling.
Alice collapses, beside herself with glee.
Visitor. Two guards I’ve never seen before come to my door.
“Surprise, surprise,” they say, “long time no see.”
“Have we ever met?”
“You have a guest.”
I’ve not had a visitor in years, can’t imagine who it might be, but know better than to ask. The guards wait with leg irons and a belly chain. I take a moment and change into one of my two good shirts; it literally cracks as I unwrap it. I comb my hair, take a leak, and make sure everything is put away.
“Always important to make a good appearance, you never know who you’ll meet,” I say as the guards fit me into the various cuffs and chains.
“Big day on main street,” Kleinman says, watching them lead me away. “Good to see you getting out of the house, and wearing something decent. I wasn’t going to say anything, but you were starting to look frumpy.”
My chains rattle, the guards’ keys jingle. The great steel gates roll open.
I am taken to the visitors’ center—led through the maze on a route that is new to me. Even if my visitor is some door-to-door salesman, a fucking Fuller Brush man, I am grateful for the outing.
“I’m lost,” I tell the guards. “Didn’t the visiting room used to be off to the right?”
“It’s been reconfigured,” the guard says.
“Two years ago,” the second one adds.
“I don’t get out much,” I say.
They have no response. The men of West are not the most popular in this facility; scariest of the scary, our crimes the most criminal of them all—we are kept in a special section for the sexuals. Car thieves, petty larcenists, and common murderers will have nothing to do with us, and so, to keep the calm, the cool, we are kept entirely apart and are therefore all too easily forgotten. The visitors’ center is the crossroads; East meets West, North meets South, and you can tell who’s who by the jewelry they wear. North and South are minimalists, unadorned, low security, petty criminals really. Easterners are kept handcuffed, and all Westerners are bound at both wrist and foot. People stare.
A small room in a series of small rooms, a glass door, high glass walls, and a narrow counter—like a phone booth without a phone. Cut into the glass is a small pattern of holes, a place to speak. The lighting is harsh, fluorescent. I squint. Suddenly self-conscious, I look down at myself. My shirt is yellow, stained although I remember it being clean, new. I stare at the stains. I try to rest my hands on the counter. There is no natural position.
An old man steps into the booth.
“How are you, Chappy?” he says loudly, using my childhood nickname, a reference to a perhaps extreme affection for the product Chap Stick.
Frightened by his familiarity, I am suddenly sure that despite the glass that’s supposed to protect him from me, at any moment he’ll do something that will finish me—I imagine being shot, the bullet shattering the glass. I slump in anticipation of the impact.
“It’s me, Burt, you ass. My God, you’re awful. It didn’t occur to me that you’d be this far gone. Sit up,” he says, dusting the chair on his side of the booth with a handkerchief and then sitting down. “Jefferson Warburturn Marx.” He gives the name of my grandmother’s sister’s son, who as far as I know has been dead for years. “The third,” he adds.
My cousin, my second cousin. “You used to be younger,” I say.
“So did you. Perhaps I should have called ahead. It didn’t occur to me. I didn’t think you’d be going anywhere.”
“When did I last see you?”
“Uncle Richard’s wedding. You were in junior high, I was a freshman at Dartmouth. I got you drunk and made you eat a lot of wedding cake. I thought it would absorb the alcohol.”
“I was sick for days.”
“And how are you now?”
“Better.”
“Good,” he says. “I was worried.”
In the booth to my left a couple is kissing through the glass, tongues and all, steaming up the booth. The guard makes them stop.
Burt continues, “We got to talking about you. It still comes up, you know, and there was some wondering how you’re getting along. I was elected to investigate.”
“Curiosity killed the cat?”
“Something like that. So,” he says, clapping his hands together. “How are you getting along in here, are you adjusting?”
“It’s been twenty-three years,” I say, intending it to sound more like a reminder than a reprimand.
“Well, yes, I know. I’m sorry to have been so out of touch, it’s just that, well, the whole thing was very upsetting, scared a lot of people. Frankly, I was never frightened, just hesitant to get involved. Actually, it was more my wife…. Anyway, I’ve been awful busy, just retired last year. ”
“What time is it?”
“Haven’t you got a watch?” he asks, looking at his own, taking it off, motioning as if to hand it to me, as if I could reach through the glass and take it from him.
“Sir,” the guard says, interrupting him. “You’ll have to put that back on.”
“But I’d like to give it as a gift.”
The guard shakes his head.
“Is there a clock?” I ask. “Out front, above the entrance, a clock with one hand?”
“I didn’t notice,” Burt says, strapping the watch back on. “Do me a favor. When you leave, look up and see if there’s a clock, let me know if it’s working.”
Burt changes the subject. “Do they offer you any treatment, any hope?”
I suppress the urge to tell Burt the truth, that their idea of treatment was encouraging me to jerk off while watching porno movies with something called a plethysmograph strapped to my penis measuring my hard-on—and with them watching me through a one-way mirror, no doubt doing a little handiwork of their own. I have the urge to tell him that quite clearly my treatment was for their entertainment, but I don’t think he’d take it well.