by Robert White
“And?”
“And usually it means set-up time. Somebody buys a contract. Word is, you should be in protective custody. Pronto.”
“Why?”
“Contract’s out on you. The administration isn’t moving on our recommendation, and that’s a first. Haven’t you noticed how vulnerable you are in here? Lifers, Aryans, Mexican Mafia, Latin Kings every kind of Crip and Blood going—shit, everybody who comes in here has to claim some affiliation so they know where to put him.”
“Booth told me Lindell’s keeping me safe from harm.”
“Not what Nathaniel says. This lockdown is just an excuse to put the big factions together so they can agree on the split. No matter who does you, they all share. It’s serious money.”
“So I’ll skip Thursday night’s film from now on.”
“Listen to me, motherfucker. You almost wrecked my investigation, so I don’t care what you do or don’t do in here. You broke the law just like these dirtbags. You didn’t follow advice—”
A caterwauling siren erupted.
“What the fuck is going on, Haftmann?”
“Sirens go off in here. It’s a fact of prison life.”
“All right, fuck you. I’ve tried. Why do you think you’re finishing your sentence up here instead of Ohio? The things run concurrently, don’t they? Boston don’t need you here.”
I don’t know what abyss it came out of, but I was weary of him. He wasn’t a good enough cop to put a patch on Jack’s ass—or mine, for that matter.
The wings of his nostrils whitened, and a tic along his jawline started to fidget.
“You shit-for-brains, private-eye moron,” he said. “Fuck if I know what to make of you. You must have a real death wish.”
“Thanks for the tip, Detective.”
“Yeah, right. Good luck in there and don’t drop the soap. I just called to tell you to watch your back. Slug a guard, get into SHU, but do something soon.”
My antennae—or Micah’s other way of describing my sudden hunches—were quivering. This wasn’t the old Cooney from Boston I knew. Something had changed. How I knew it, I don’t know, but I had clear image of him with his cell phone to his ear weaving back and forth across lanes like the prince of the city he thought he was. I imagined a big vein in his neck throbbing.
“Eat shit and die,” I said.
“Cultivate that attitude, Haftmann. It just might keep you alive.”
The laugh he sent back at me told me he didn’t believe that for a second.
Two days later the routine of prison was restored as mysteriously as it
was taken away. With it, I received my mail: one letter from Ingrid. I took it outside with me so that I could read it away from my cellmate, who fussed over me and tried to nurse me back to a better humor with little cakes purchased from the vending machines. Ingrid sent me two twenty dollar bills. The money wasn’t inside the envelope but a note from administration said that $40.00 had been deposited in my account. She also sent me a picture of herself, as I had requested. She said she might try to visit after Labor Day holidays. For the first time in a long time, I began to feel a contentment. I found a tray of dainties set on my bunk when I got back from the exercise yard. I tried to get him to stop, but the effort was more trouble than eating the snacks.
“You have been looking peaked, Thomas. I’m glad you went for some sunshine and air.”
“You shouldn’t be spending your money on me,” I said. He told me that Frank, his lover, sent him the proceeds from one of his black market operations; as a lifer, he had the shiv concession.
“Can Frank get me a blade?” I asked him.
“Of course, but it’ll cost you thirty-five dollars cash. Not scrip. Can you afford it, honey?”
“Tell me again who brings cash into the place.”
In his usual convoluted fashion, he told me how we could go about it, but it would cost me the equivalent of sixty dollars in scrip to get the thirty-five in cash I needed. One of the cons in C Block had an old lady who smuggled in cash in balloons inserted in her vagina on visiting days. I told Donald to get in touch with him.
“Thomas, I’m so glad. Do you know how strange you’ve been acting lately? Honestly, I’ve been afraid for my life. You know you actually sat up on your bunk the other day and wanted me to look at your watch because you said the hands were moving backwards! My God, I thought, he’s gone mad! I didn’t dare say a word for fear of my very life.”
He wittered and lisped for another half hour, but I had stopped listening. I was thinking of Ingrid and wondering if two people like us, already mangled by life, might not be able to find a reason to be together. I didn’t want to jinx it by thinking too seriously about it. Prison does have a way of concentrating the mind, however, and I found myself daydreaming thoughts about the two of us together in various domestic scenes.
Now and then, a sharp image of her naked flesh would sear my imagination, and it would catch me and put me into a cold sweat. I imagined what her breasts would look like outside that industrial sized bra and would see my hands kneading them, squeezing her nipples, and plunging my face between them. That, however, would entail a night’s lack of sleep or, more often, precipitate my hand’s releasing the tension. Donald was a light sleeper, and I did not want to give him another excuse for sliding his hand under the sheets and finding me there, swollen and ready to succumb. He once offered me his mouth, but I refused, half in fear of Frank, a confirmed psychopath who was given a wide berth by inmates and staff alike and partially because I did not want to give in to the pressure.
The days passed. My muscles grew slack from inactivity. I cultivated my slug-white prison pallor. No one who wasn’t a member of one of the gangs was allowed to use the weights. One of the lifers, a tattooed hulk with the story of his life in indigo ink on his biceps and back, informed me I was trespassing in the weight room the first time I walked in there. I bought my knife from Frank. A sharpened piece of stainless steel made in shop which I kept taped inside my thigh. I stood next to the toilet, homemade jack-off curtains obscuring me, and practiced pulling it out. I fell back into my routine of sleeping twelve hours a day. I told Donald not to call me for chow in the morning.
More days passed, Ingrid sent no more letters.
Chapter 11
White worms tented up from the corners of his mouth; suture scars, I could see now. He had two rows of even white teeth. Dentures, I figured.
“Don’t you find,” he said to me one day during the first week of June, “that prison—no, confinement, real confinement, I should say, more than anything causes one to experience what Kierkegaard calls ‘the despair of finitude?’”
Blue shirt, crisp collar points, ash grey silk tie with red splashes, black tasseled loafers. Impeccable. Small hands, folded neatly in front of him. He nodded his head as if confirming his own question. We were in the lawyer’s conference room, a privileged place. He wasn’t my lawyer, though.
I was looking into the brown eyes of Richard Galen Paracelsus Lindell.
“Please, Tom,” he said in the practiced manner of a man used to relaxing his social inferiors, “call me Rich or Richard, if you prefer.”
“You are fucking unbelievable,” I said.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I’m a man comfortable with himself and one who wants others to be comfortable around him.” He stuck his thumb behind his upper front teeth and popped out the bridge.
“Look,” he said, pleading with his brown eyes, “woulth a man who stanth on his thignithy do this? Show himselth to an enemy thuthly?” He winked.
Gooseflesh rippled up my back and shoulders.
“What do you want, Lindell?”
The bridge back in now, a little pop as it displaced air. “Just a chat. A talk between us to set the record straight. Nothing more nor less. I am not your enemy, Thomas Haftmann.” Another conspiratorial wink. I know you well,” he said.
I broke my stare. “This is crazy,” I said.
“Not at all, not at a
ll. You have to allow for a kind of reasonable insanity in a lifetime. You’re a gumshoe in that quaint jargon—forgive me—I should have said private eye. So you will have read Dashiell Hammett, if I’m not mistaken. Do you remember the pas
sage in Maltese Falcon—”
“Never got around to reading it,” I said.
“You’ve undoubtedly seen the film—”
“No, I haven’t. I don’t like movies and made-up shit. I like numbers.”
“Why?”
“Simple,” I said. “Because they’re real.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, but he looked at me hard. I looked back. Not a muscle in his face twitched; he betrayed nothing. Very cool demeanor, a man difficult to ruffle.
He clasped his hands on the oak table again. “Let me put it this way,” adopting a professorial manner. “There’s an ordinary man walking to his office one day in downtown Seattle when a falling steel beam crashes next to him, an accident, but it scares him. He considers his life. He leaves his family, wife and kids, goes to Tacoma where he takes another job and marries a new woman and raises a second family. What’s the moral, do you suppose?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“He was nearly killed, you see. He had to adjust to a world where steel beams fell out of the sky and nearly obliterate him. Then he had to adjust to a world where steel beams don’t fall out of the sky.” He smiled.
“I don’t get it.”
“Reasonable insanity. You must adjust to life’s beams falling out of the sky, but you must not judge. That’s the secret.”
“What about a world of women and girls—girls, you fuck—what kind of world do you adjust to?”
“A reasonable world. A very reasonable world, to be sure. I must ask you not to raise your voice, however. Don’t worry. I’ve ensured us total privacy, but we ought not abuse the privilege, don’t you agree? I’ll answer all your questions. That’s why I’m here.”
Then he laughed as if hugely pleased with himself.
“Good Lord, what kind of cheer is this that I tediously set forth as if I had made discoveries? Every talk show host and politician has been belaboring this point for years. It is only that I am deeply moved by events as I seek, in my New England-derived Puritan way through my own failing civic duty to find solutions—”
Here, he paused and looked at me. “Do you know Herostratus, Thomas?”
“Fuck you.”
“Herostratus set flame to that wonder of the world, the temple and statue of Artemis of Ephesus so that, as he bragged after the deed, he would be remembered forever for the destruction he wrought, destroying the world’s most beautiful thing.”
“Her name, fucker, was Annaliese Marie O’Reilly. She was only twenty years old.”
“Since you know something of my career, I feel hurt. Odd how one responds to calumny, the blow to narcissism perhaps but rationalized as the child’s plea for justice, or the prophet’s for vengeance.”
“You don’t hear well, do you? You kill children.”
He shook his head vigorously in denial. “No,” he said, “you’re altogether wrong. You do not know what destruction is. Hope you are never in a position to be taught by me what destruction is.”
The look he gave me was something he had pulled out of the abyss. I had never seen a look so malevolent on a human face. I remember the shrinks at Basic Sciences said that certain types, devoids, who were incapable of experiencing the normal range of emotion simulated them at an early age to blend into society. Sometimes their facial expressions were mockeries of the emotions they were intended to express. I was lost in thought when his mesmerizing voice brought me round: “. . . if you take our polity and its civilized riches as beauty, we see a myriad of killers, keen junk bond dealers, unscrupulous politicians—all memorializing their small and satisfied selves as agents of the destruction of this beauty which has been our land.”
“I saw photos of the bodies.”
“So you saw photos. It is the usual thing. Ah me, when my hangnail hurts, my brother’s broken leg seems distant. Let me try to explain myself another way. I had this notion while growing up that I lived under a lucky star—a notion which should have faded by age six months—”
“Your mother should have strangled you then.”
“—but somehow, as lunacy does, probably stuck with me through adolescence and then, because things did go quite well for many years, probably took on the status of doctrine.”
“I don’t want to know why you became what you are, Lindell. I don’t suppose anyone will be able to look inside your mind.”
He smiled at that: an ant trying to contemplate an angel, no good.
“I remember,” he said, ignoring my comment, “a study a few years ago which said only depressed people had an accurate view of how others evaluated them. You see, the depressed knew others thought badly of them, whereas those ‘normal’ were consistent in thinking those who knew them well thought better of them than those people did, as measured by ratings or some such. In this world depression is realism, so is being paranoid.”
Like Micah when she was pissed off. Indirect, oblique, answering a question with a question. Never met anything head-on. Even my friend Reg did this: lawyers.
“Why do you do it?”
“Not a simple answer, Thomas. There is no more paradox in this than in believing in God even if there is none. Delusions sustain us. Television merchandisers are not selling imagery, as the media parlance has it. They are selling the very stuff of necessary unreality.”
“You want polemics, write on the bathroom wall. I’m not interested.”
“But you should be! We’re not much alike, of course. I don’t find you interesting.”
I looked around to signal a guard.
“I’d like to leave now, you sick fuck.”
“Oh, I’m boring you.”
“Fuck you.”
“You overuse that expression. Your crude upbringing, I suppose, having been raised by a semi-literate woman from the old country. Do you know, I’ve decided to do a monograph on nausea and vomiting. The anatomists call it a reflex, but it turns out to be a ubiquitous human response which seems entirely maladaptive. It quite turns Darwin on his head.”
I rose to go.
“How are you finding it in here?”
“Entertaining in a Hollywood, media-saturated sort of way,” I said, standing.
He maintained composure, ignoring me, speaking on in that monotonous voice just at the edge of hearing, as if I were still sitting in the chair.
“There is not theory that entirely satisfies with reference to etiology. My reading includes neuroendocrinology and cognitive psychology. I have an advantage, you see. No complicated university permission to do human testing. I’ve seen them vomit with the most . . . abject of fears. Fascinating. Your little Annaliese, for instance, spewed forth projectile vomit as soon as I removed the tape—”
“Shut up,” I said, “I’ll kill you if you say another word.”
Not daring to turn around to see if he were looking at me or the chair. My neck hairs jumped with electricity. I felt a pang of profound anguish, hopelessness, even fear.
“My own situation,” he continued, “is one of reasonable steadiness. Has Donald performed fellatio on you? Odious creature—”
I was banging at the door now, my flesh crawling in waves.
He regarded me as if I were a specimen of some interest. He said to my back: “Not to worry. Just the bathos of a little honest prudery is all.”
The door opened, the guard almost had to tackle me to stop me, but I heard his small, articulate voice echoing in the room: “ . . . just an interim state where neither great adventure nor commitment is possible. Let desire and witches burn . . .”
I was gone, unable to hear another word, running down a corridor that looked strange to my eyes, although its walls were the same lime green and floors the same battleship grey I had mopped in another prison in a different state in another
time.
After that visit, I had dreams of him. I left instructions with the guards that his name was to be removed from my visitor’s list immediately. The captain of my cellblock wrote down my request disinterestedly and said he would forward my request to administration.
I went from sleeping all the time to insomnia. I couldn’t buy sleep. The noise of clanging metal reverberated on all sides of me, and I was aware of each shocking intrusion. Donald wrung his hands in dismay and looked at me with a solemn pout that I grew to hate. Time nailed me to my cross and every screech of metal drove another spike in deeper. The cruelest of ironies was that, in my freedom, I thought of suicide; in the confinement of prison and wrapped in my own suffering, I couldn’t bear the thought of ending my life.
The lack of sleep stunted that part of me that should have been alert. I grew reckless and indifferent to my safety. I failed to pay attention at times to my location inside the cellblock. Trespassing gets you killed in the joint. I watched a couple gangbangers flashing signs from the top tier one day while Frank came up behind me. “Baboons,” he said. “Can’t fucking spell their real names, but they can spell all this gang lingo at each other with their fingers.”
He showed me a couple curled fists and smiled at his own humor. “You hear what those fuckin’ coons did to the new fish? Got him over there inside one of their cribs on top and beat the shit out him. He had to suck off all those niggers before they let him go. He’ll be wearing a dress before long.”
I had heard that was more or less how Donald was turned and acquired via the prison bartering system. Frank probably never missed a night’s sleep, but he fell upon some poor family on a picnic at a state park and killed them all. He talked about a heavyweight fight tomorrow night at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Frank meant in the lifer’s only rec room. “This guy’s from Russia like that seven-foot giant. No heavyweight’s worth a tinker’s damn since Tyson.”
When he left, he winked at me over his shoulder: “Anything happens to Donnie, I’m holding you responsible.” Down the block, someone was playing rap.