The Graybar Hotel

by Curtis Dawkins

  Micky and I walked on either side of Ray as if he were physically injured and his knees might buckle any second.

  “There’s good news,” Micky said.

  “Yeah?” said Ray.

  “You’re TB free.”

  “Who says I want to be? I wish I had something terminal.” This seemed to lift Ray’s spirits because he chuckled slightly. I knew what he was experiencing—the first time when you realize you are not afraid to die, that in fact, you welcome it. It had dawned on me one night in County when I couldn’t sleep because my stomach hurt, but only on one side. I came to the conclusion that my liver was finally failing after twenty years of drinking. This thought wasn’t a minute old when it hit me as clearly as if someone in the room had spoken: I hope it’s shot to hell. Then I fell asleep calmly, imagining the peace that would come from not having to face the future I had ahead of me.

  “As a matter of fact,” Ray said, “I wish they had the death penalty in Michigan. Ha!”

  I watched Ray as this new realization settled on him. He had a crooked grin and a calm, satisfied look in his eyes. There was an aura of freedom about him, realizing that in his new life, death was now a fantasy.

  * * *

  There was no grass to speak of in the “yard” at 7 Block, yet that’s what the officer called it over the bullhorn at 8:00 a.m., when our doors broke open. Ah, yard, I thought: grass, the apple tree, walks on wood-chipped paths. My mind was not yet turned to the Prison Channel.

  About two hundred men were herded past the chow hall to a large, fenced-in basketball court catty-cornered from my secret jungle room. We were shaded by another cellblock and it was cold with the late August chill. I had the feeling we were in a dimly lit cooler. Ray, Micky, and I walked in a circle around the border of the basketball court. Ten men played ball, pausing to blow through their cold fingers every chance they got. “So this is yard,” Ray said.

  “Kind of pisses a guy off, don’t it?” said Micky. Groups of men sat at the picnic tables playing cards. Popcorn was weaving another man’s hair into cornrows. Micky put his gloves and bright orange hat on. “I had this dream last night,” he began.

  “Hey, Micky—guess what?” Ray said.

  “What?”

  “No one wants to hear about your fucking dreams. Who ever told you they did?”

  “But this is a good one, Ray.”

  “Unless you can tell the future with them and I’m out walking free, I don’t want to hear any more of that shit.”

  “Or what?” he said. “What are you going to do, Ray? You don’t have a gun and I ain’t your defenseless wife. You’re fucked, Ray. You’re fucked, so you might as well listen.”

  Micky waited for a moment, hopping up and down slightly to keep warm. When Ray didn’t say anything, Micky resumed with his dream. “We’re in a museum, or it might have been a school, but anyway, there are these paintings on the wall, but they’re not regular paintings, I mean, they look like it, but they are set up with mirrors and this naked girl shows me how you can stick your hand through them to, like, another dimension. Then we left and there are all these burned trees and houses around with bombs and mushroom clouds in the distance, but she’s just cartwheeling through it all. Cartwheeling and dancing, until I grab her around the neck and start choking her. Then I woke up. What do you think about that?”

  “I think some girl really did a number on you, Micky,” I said. “I think you hate women.”

  “Yup,” said Ray. “And that hurricane’s coming.”

  We looked up into the cold, blue sky for a coming apocalypse.

  “I don’t hate women,” Micky said. “And that hurricane won’t be a hurricane by the time it gets to Michigan. Besides, it’s got nothing to do with my dream.”

  “It may not be a hurricane when it gets here, but you never know what it’ll bring,” Ray said. “Once I was backpacking up the Cumberland Trail in Virginia, when a hurricane came up the coast and—”

  “This isn’t Virginia, dumb-ass,” said Micky.

  “No, it’s not. I’m just saying.”

  “You’re an idiot, Ray, with your hurricane speech.”

  “How about both of you just cool it,” I said. We stopped walking and stood by a row of telephones. Lines of men two and three deep stood waiting to talk. The three of us had turned in our phone lists, which had to be checked by the DOC and then sent to the phone company, a process that would take a month, at least. Men talked to their wives, girlfriends, and children. The ten guys played basketball. I don’t think they were keeping score, but they seemed to be having fun. The sun began to slip over the top of the cellblock and a line of light moved toward the row of phones—an imperceptible movement, unless you tracked its position against a rock or small hole in the ground. I stayed there and watched the line of sunlight as it swept the yard, turning the fragile frost it touched into a tiny wisp of steam.

  * * *

  We didn’t see the sun for a very long time after that cool August Saturday. The rain hurled up at us from Hurricane Katrina; we could hear it outside during church the next morning. A thin, old Baptist preacher reminded us that we were all God’s children. The fifty or so of us were excellent, angelic singers since the acoustics of 7 Block are similar to a bathroom or cathedral. Even the men who didn’t go to the services stood in the fronts of their cells, applauding after each song. That Sunday was so dark that many cells had their ceiling lights on, and as the men stood in their lit rooms listening, it could have passed for the world’s largest stained-glass installation, a vast, colorful window of humanity.

  * * *

  After church I ordered what I could from the commissary with the five dollars that had followed me from County—a pouch of Bugler tobacco, twelve generic instant coffee packages, and a twenty-two-ounce plastic cup. I mixed a cup of lukewarm coffee and began rolling cigarettes. The small piles of shredded tobacco were still damp and smelled like sweet, wet grass. Thunder from outside boomed and echoed throughout the block. I gave a couple freshly rolled cigarettes to the prison porters who were always passing with their brooms and cleaning supplies. I felt free that Sunday, rolling smokes and drinking coffee. For a while I was in a Manhattan bookstore on the corner of Prince and Mulberry, sunk in a seat by the window and looking up every once in a while to watch the pretty people pass. Then I was on the Oregon coast watching the tide slip out under high, white cliffs while someone’s dog fetched a stick through the salty foam. I raced through early morning Kalamazoo to the hospital, missing my son’s premature birth once again by two minutes. I ate deep-fried whole fish on Cozumel, then signed up for scuba lessons and swam among the coral and neon fish so bright they seemed fake. I thought about a tall, chubby kid in County who said he was going to wear his blanket as a cape into the courtroom and demand that the judge refer to him as King Arthur. I wondered if he ever did.

  I spent the first Sunday in quarantine in dreams of my own, the first freedom I’d known in nearly a year. Despite the caffeine, I fell asleep shortly after the lights went out at ten.

  I woke up early on Monday and found a yellow call-out sheet between the bars. “Psychological Testing, Zone 1.” By then we had all heard about the test: a five-hour marathon with over five hundred questions, one of which was going to be “Have you ever wanted to be a woman?” I had been toying with the idea of answering all of the questions with absolute honesty. Every man, at one time or another, has thought of what being female might feel like. I figured I could honestly answer “Yes.”

  After breakfast ten of us began the walk to Zone 1, Micky and Ray included. The weather was colder and thick with a fog that seemed to cling to the edges of things, softening and swallowing them at fifty feet or so. There were patches in the asphalt that had worn away to the previous brick surface and the red, clay-colored brick was slick with dew. A light breeze blew the fog around like sheer, white curtains.

  I looked for my jungle room, but couldn’t find it. Ray came up beside me. “What’s up with Micky?”
he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s quiet. He’s not talking at all. I feel kind of bad.”

  “I thought you wanted him to be quiet.” I was lagging, trying to figure out if I was looking up at the wrong building. Eventually I gave up. Ray and I walked quickly to catch up with Micky as we neared the gate.

  “What were you looking for back there?” Ray asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Hey, Micky, did you dream about the big test we have to take today?”

  “Nah.” He smiled. We came to that part of the path with the vast, open prison yard to our left and the open field to our right. I couldn’t see any building structures at all. Micky stopped, and the other men walked past, talking about questions on the test and all their smart-ass answers. Micky stepped off the path and into the thick, brown grass. He looked at me.

  “Did you have a dream last night, Micky?”

  “Yeah I did. But you’re right, Ray, I talk about my dreams too much.”

  “I’m not right, Micky. No, I’m not. No, I’m not.”

  Micky turned around to walk through the damp field, stepping high so he wouldn’t soak his feet, which made little sense given what he was doing. He was swallowed by the fog before he even got close to the off-limits sign. He reappeared just once, the blue of his uniform softer now in the distant white curtains. Soon, he was gone for good. I kept looking, knowing he was there, but I never saw him again.

  “They’re going to shoot him,” Ray said.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe they’ll—”

  And we heard it: the single crack and the faint echoes fading through the dense, wet air. Before the sound had finished, Ray and I instinctively dropped facefirst to the pavement. He began to cry and I didn’t care. The thought occurred to me to persuade Ray to follow Micky’s path—Ray was so goddamn annoying, I wanted to kill him myself at times, and he was needy and dumb enough to follow almost any suggestion. But I didn’t try.

  The deafening whine of the lockdown siren began, and I thought of the future.

  Do they shoot you in the head, or go for a wound?

  What would keep me from walking toward the wall someday?

  All people are stories and I wish I knew for sure about Micky. I wish the veil of fog had lifted and I could have seen his story end clearly. I wish the ending wasn’t only the beginning.

  573543

  * * *

  Goodbye to the river and to Jonnie Rae, whom I don’t remember. The river is real—as real as the cell I’m in now—with a name, the Kalamazoo. I rented an apartment near that river in a town of the same name. That much is real, I know for sure.

  I was working as a meat-casing salesman. Not the old-fashioned hog intestines or newer collagen casings for sausage—but high-tech, trilayered plastics that secreted different flavors and colors of smoke to the oblong slabs of turkey and ham that millions eat every day in delis across the country. I would fly out of Gerald R. Ford in Grand Rapids, work the Chicago area one week, then to Philadelphia the next.

  Most of my time was spent running tests in large processing plants—tagging our sample casings after they’d been stuffed full of sticky ham or turkey emulsion. When you think of a turkey sandwich, you’re really thinking of turkey emulsion—a nearly liquid, perfectly consistent batter made by running ground meat through what is basically a home blender times one thousand. I measured shrinkage after cooking and monitored the purge levels, or water loss. On the business end, lost water equals lost weight equals lost profit. My job was to find the perfect liquid smoke additive that could balance the pH, make the casing peel properly, and give the end product the perfect outer color and flavor. It was a white whale in a brown bottle, and there was a lot of failure, of course. But when it all came together, I’d find myself in a Fortune 500 test kitchen passing around warm hunks of lunch meat to a dozen executives, and success tasted just like a late-night raid on a leftover Christmas ham.

  It was a rewarding, well-paying job, but I was on my own a lot of the time, and strange things happen to an addict left alone too much. So much of the job involved sitting on planes, and eight years of sobriety slipped imperceptibly away with the muscle relaxers I took to relieve the strain on my back. I told myself the relaxers were okay—I wasn’t taking them to get high, after all. But little by little, like stars coming on at night, the distant fires returned. Soon, I would find myself looking up at the cold night sky without realizing the dark had come.

  It was a few months of doctor-prescribed Soma, Flexeril, and Skelaxin before I discovered easier ways of getting drugs on the Internet—websites and forums set up by chronic pain sufferers sharing information and resources. Drugshare.com is where I first heard of ketamine, a painkilling pet anesthetic.

  To a normal person, a pet anesthetic injected intravenously might sound scary. For me, the appeal was not only analgesic; ketamine was said to produce visions as well. The user basically entered a fifteen-minute coma without any variation in pulse or breath rate. It is used every day in vet offices worldwide and was historically used in wartime for short, painless procedures where opiates are too sedating. It was quick, effective, and just shy of illicit, enough that I could tell myself I wasn’t using again.

  I found a seller—Joseph from Cebu City, Philippines. Joseph sold a variety of Schedule III drugs: sleeping pills, buprenorphine, muscle relaxers, aspirin with codeine, all manner of benzodiazepines, and a drug called Pharmased—50 mg per ml of pharmaceutical ketamine. Twenty dollars for a 10 ml vial, five vial minimum.

  In the Chicago area, I stayed at the Comfort Inn off the 294 Tollway in Harvey, Illinois. At a nearby Mailboxes Etc., I leased six months on a mailbox under the name of Carl Gauss, a nineteenth-century astronomer I’d heard about while tuning my radio. I sent an international money order to Joseph and waited. And waited and waited. E-mails from Joseph told me to be patient, but after two months I was beginning to think I had been taken. All the Drugshare message boards were pro-Joseph, but who knew, all those people may well have been Joseph.

  Then, in early September, it came—a discreetly packaged college-level engineering book, Forms and Functions of the Transitory Square, Bubble-Wrapped, hollowed-out, filled with cotton and a plastic holder containing five vials of Pharmased. I sat in the strip mall parking lot and held one of the vials in my hand. It seemed magical—cool and light and clear—a potion of possibilities.

  I drove down the road a block to the large supermarket. I waited in the car a few minutes wondering if just anyone was allowed to purchase syringes. I had thought about the question before, but never believed I’d get this far: actually walking through the balloon displays at the flower department, past the baby formula, diapers, boxes of cold remedies, antacids, cough medicines, and then to the pharmacy desk with its small, semiprivate window. I stood a courteous three feet behind a man sporting a ridiculously fitted toupee. Viagra, I thought. Now, when I remember him, I think cancer and cringe at the asshole I once was.

  The man stepped away, and the pharmacy tech asked how she could help me. “I need some syringes, please.” She pulled a clipboard from under the counter and asked what size.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “So they aren’t for you?”

  “I have a friend,” I said. “I want to make sure he doesn’t use dirty needles.”

  She smiled at me sympathetically. “I’ll give you thirty-gauge,” she said, handing me the clipboard. “It’s so the company can account for the needles.” I signed the name Carl Gauss and paid for the syringes, as well as cotton balls and a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

  Back at the Comfort Inn I fired up my laptop and got on the Internet, wanting to clean the slate before going on the ride. I answered e-mails concerning future appointments in Philly. I filled out two test reports and e-mailed them to our technical expert. I turned off the computer and cell phone, drew the curtains, and dead-bolted the door. I had read that ketamine users, above any other precaution, should avoid outside
disturbances of light or sound. Just enough light glowed around the drawn shades and through the center line of the curtains, and in the dim light I removed the plastic band from the top of the vial, stuck the needle through the small cork opening, and filled the syringe with 0.5 ml. I tapped the air out of the needle and slapped my forearm, just like in the movies. I rested the needle’s tip in the center of my arm, but started to shake and pulled it away. I took some deep breaths and tried again, this time anchoring the needle slightly below the skin. I felt the needle tremble in my arm as I pushed it halfway in, and before I thought too much about what I was doing, I sunk the plunger. I pulled it out, swabbed the area with alcohol, and capped the needle. I put the syringe and cotton ball on the nightstand, then lay back on the bed and closed my eyes.

  I suppose I should have been preparing myself by focusing on breathing and clearing my mind. But I waited and thought about work—an ongoing project eight hundred miles away at a pork plant north of Philly. It involved a supposedly groundbreaking paper-silicone film developed for whole-muscle hams. It would replace the expensive collagen wrap we currently used, but so far, we had been unable to get it to slide properly through the forming cars of the Tipper Tie assembler. It was basically a paper jam on a massive and incredibly technical scale.

  I imagined each step, troubleshooting the process and letting my mind drift, until I became conscious of a slow and steady buzz, like my entire body was humming a song in bass monotone. The hum faded and I felt my body melt away—I was now only a shapeless being of energy, a glow contained in some sort of mechanized casket, sliding through stainless-steel streets between tall, black buildings. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew it was good; I had no needs, no sense of lack. I slid down sharp hills like an amusement park ride and my stomach tingled with the loss of gravity. Near the end, I slowed and entered a cave of complete darkness. A pinprick of light in the distance grew to consume me as the casket dropped away like a shell. I was high up in the light and below me were millions of my fellow beings waiting for me to descend into them.