“Take a look, rodent,” one of the guards said. That was when doom welcomed Horus at the end of the eight-foot box, as his senses washed in like a tide and crashed against the walls. He looked about and witnessed the enormity of his end, drawn and atrocious. “The Cask of Amontillado,” a story he read so many times in his school years, one that began to speak to him, materialized in his head with every inhalation of the foamy air. He was Poe’s Fortunato now. He could smell and feel the mold and damp. Horus was ordered to move forward. The two guards put him facedown on the stiff bed, unshackled him, and left him there.
And from the beginning of his time in the mausoleum, when Horus Thompson was not made to submit to hoods, strip searches, cell raids, penis measurements, or water torture, he was plagued by two great tormentors: Light and Dark. In the darkness, he tried to keep track of the passage of months by counting the occasions he was allowed to see the sky. One-hour sessions in a special roofless cubicle, which seemed to be about every sixty days. Or was it every ninety? And when darkness completed its course, the inverse (Light) circled around to take its place with the scowl of twenty-four-hour fluorescent lights. The bright white drilled through his crusted eyelids, unremitting beams of judgment that pierced his pores and shrank his pupils to specks of dust. The light rained down, drenching Horus in thousands of watts, until he was convinced that the Dark had been a thing that dwelled only in his imagination. At the height of his confused senses, he awoke in the pan of a polar desert, shivering under a white winter sun. His head banged on as his ears rang, as he swooned. He felt as if he were falling from some great height, falling through the earth.
Then all the pivotal moments before the instant of arrival in the sepulchre broke away and fell into the substance that was enveloping him. The moments flashed like the disintegrating frames of a silent black-and-white movie: his mother’s smile, his father’s bloody chest, Manden’s blank stare, the police lights running along the walls of his house. There was the image of the contents of the bathroom trash: crumpled tissue, a spent razor, and the inky dot of a pregnancy test.
Worst of all were the flashing images of Brenda the Beautiful lying naked on the bed. The sight of the worried, ruined landscape her face had become. Horus felt he needed to begin erasing those images as soon as he sat on the bed that night and waited for the police, as soon as the sirens approached, as soon as the gavel fell. He needed to forget the long licorice locks that framed her magnificent watery eyes and the coconut oil that dressed her supple legs. He needed to forget her dark berry lips, round and firm, her slender frame and inviting hips.
Brenda the Beautiful. The erection that once overtook Horus when he thought of her vanished in the undertow of grief. Formaldehyde filled the blood vessels of his member now. The miracle once manufactured in his loins by the millions ceased, the turbines and pistons shut down, rusted and inert like an abandoned steel mill. Brenda the Beautiful. He wished to God that he never met her, that he never saw the test in the trash can, the mark of a new life that caught aflame and would grow without him. By doing what he had done, he killed his own past and future and buried his chance at a family. Thinking this, he turned to Brenda slowly as the cops approached that night, as if moving through primordial water. He discovered in those seconds that not speaking was easier than what remained in ether.
He was unable to manage more than a glance at her tearful face that day in the courtroom, those same pained eyes that would look back at him through Plexiglas for the next twenty-five years, for the rest of his life, asking him silently, Why? It was a question he would never be able to answer in a way that Brenda could understand, and the look of her eyes through the glass would have meant a different kind of death that he could not stand. “I am dead to you,” he’d said. And he said it out of love, a mercy killing of everything he knew she would cling to, of all he would never find the words to say. The divorce he would later ask of her would erase the rest.
Horus did not want to think of such things, and yet they rose before him in his mind every day like the sun. And his first vow to himself after the prison doors slammed shut, when everything went black and cold, was that he would will it all not to be there. And after the dementia and the mania and the death wishes that the vow would bring, there would only be the sounds that lingered in his mind, echoes left as if in an empty house: the wheels of the car on the highway that night he drove to Upstate New York, the rhythm of the windshield wipers, the driving rain, the gunshot. There would only be the echo of policemen knocking, the verdict, and the gavel. The structure of why it all happened had yet to come into full being. When it was ready to form, he would know and understand it himself.
He paced circles in the cell and tallied the pulses of his heart. He once tried to stop it by sheer will, but the thing marched stubbornly on. In the torturous silence, when his bug-eyed stares at the walls of the cell stretched taut, he was plunged into obsessions of the natural world, the realm that seemed to function without the sun. He marveled over the female menstruation cycle and the magic of bears hibernating. Under the weight of time, Horus pondered such things, until he could no longer remember his own face. Shadows, those illusionists that subsisted on panic and fear, dislodged themselves from the edges of spaces, accosting him. He curled in a fetal position on the stiff bed that first night, watching them float down to him and recede, loom and ebb.
Horus wondered if it would have been better to be on death row. In the execution line, there was a semblance, at least, of some appointed time to end it all. There were others he imagined, like himself, housed somewhere in the hallways within hallways, rooms within rooms. And these condemned souls knew a specific date was set when they would surely die. He wondered if the lethal injection that awaited them was a nervine, a relief, even, against the hours that led to more hours, days that led to other days.
Somewhere in the cavernous corridors, Horus could hear the cackle of the beast he called the Bean Hole Man, the prison guard Jimmy Eckert. Sometimes Horus thought that he and the Secured Housing guard were the only inhabitants left in the world, that since the earth plates shifted and all of the dinosaurs died, it had been just the two of them. When Eckert wanted to taunt Horus, to remind him that torment would prevail for all his living days, he spoke of old man Edward and his decades in the penal system. “The Mummy,” he called him. “Old Edward tried to escape another federal facility years ago,” Jimmy Eckert said, sneering through the envelope-sized slot of the steel door. That was how old Edward was transferred to Black Plains to die.
The guard enjoyed telling Horus that he was bound for Edward’s fate, that the old man who had already been inside Black Plains for decades had been institutionalized in other places totaling forty-seven years, the longest of anyone. The walls claimed his mind. “The Mummy’s only joy is the Great Room,” the Bean Hole Man said, chuckling. He spoke of the horrors of the Great Room, a crucible of machines and hisses, where men lost fingers and limbs in the faulty equipment, where buzzers announced the shifting from one rote activity to another, the movement of every inmate timed. “Only the lucky ones are allowed to slave there,” the Bean Hole Man whispered to Horus through the slot of the cell door, peering in with his dilated, Ouija-board eyes, “to be flogged by the minutes and the hours.”
Horus wanted to ask the Mummy what it was that he had done, if the Act was ever committed by anyone at Black Plains. Written in the invisible scripture of the prison, the Act was the cardinal sin of speaking aloud about that which had been responsible for one’s imprisonment, the highest offense. For nothing that happened outside of Black Plains mattered. It was no longer real. To speak of the Act that led to imprisonment meant that something of meaning outside of Black Plains had actually happened and therefore existed.
One day, as Horus stared at the wall from his bed, he saw from the corner of his eye a cockroach making its way. The fat roach crawled across the ashen wall near his face, brazen and without fear. It stopped as if to look at him. Horus stared back. He cou
ldn’t remember when he had started eating roaches in the times when Light reigned, when his brain turned that corner where such an idea was not repugnant. He had learned in the thick solution of time that the mind was free to bend itself into new shapes of being. He couldn’t remember how he developed the quick-twitch skill of catching a roach, looping his forearm up and around as it ran frantically across the back of his veined hand, so that it leaped from the cliffs of his fingers and dropped into his mouth.
The roach had been busy on its way, crossing what for it must have been like kilometers over the span of the wall. Horus assumed it was headed for a meal at the toilet, where there was always a generous lining of microbial slime and water. It seemed to stop and look at him with curiosity, and Horus could see its antennae rotating in their sockets. Perhaps the insect thought that the threat that existed with other humans did not exist with this one, and it stopped to take a look. Horus thought of swiping at the bug to startle it away or snatching it up and chewing its insides between his teeth, but the roach scurried on and disappeared into a crack.
And it was during these cycles of rule by his two great tormentors (Light and Dark), in the seventh year of condemnation to the solitary confinement wing of Black Plains Correctional Institute, that Horus came to understand the great drain into which he was being emptied day by day. Like an equation, he was being reduced.
That was when Horus found the Catacombs.
Catacombs
Unbeknownst to the Rockies and long before Black Plains had been built, generations of locusts had been growing underground . . .
The Catacombs, that place of the damned and the blessed, of chilled limestone and granite and gypsum, of ancient growth crawling out of ancient things, lay in wait for Horus. It was the place where memories of the past rose like corpses and the extinct lived. Where the hieroglyphs of meaning and consequence were scrolled on the walls, invisible until the soul was awakened, until the world vanished into the dream it had been. The endless tunnels were hundreds of feet below, deep beneath the layers of Horus’s mind, long, dark mazes that went on forever. The entrance to the Catacombs appeared to him one day of its own volition, an archway framing something blacker than his cell in the time of Dark rule, the death grip of the time of the eclipse. The entrance held a silken calm, and Horus felt as if he were looking into deep space. Its open mouth was an invitation to its wonder.
Horus entered the dank chill that led to the tunnels of a million paces, infinite strata and gradations. The dark rolled out before him like an open road in the night, and he could no longer feel even the presence of the shadows of his cell that stood panting near him always like fiendish familiars. At the archway, the scope of the place lay mysterious.
He took the first step forward. His bare feet were unsure on the dusty path beneath them. Was it dust? Or ash? He looked down and saw nothing. His eyes were of no use to him, and he came to understand that he would not need them where he was going. He would not need them to see. He reached out and touched the sides of the narrow passageway and felt the slime that coated the stone walls. What realm had he entered? In other floor-pacing nights of foamed mouth and crossed eyes in his cell, he was convinced that he had fallen to the lowest depth, a dimension burrowed in the deepest pit. And yet here was another doorway to another place. He thought of turning back to the familiarity of that hell behind him, the known Amenta that had held him these past seven years. But the stagnant, primal air of the Catacombs cloaked him, beckoning him further.
He took more steps forward, stumbling over what felt like jagged bones and cracked skulls scattered on the ground. Were they bones? Or his own twig legs and scaled feet? It smelled of myrrh and roses and death, of the dust of lives once lived, of final breaths. And somewhere he thought he heard the roll and crest and break of the ocean.
More than the substance that filled his cell, the walls and spaces of the Catacombs amplified the smallest decibel in his ears. Sighs and whispers leached through the pores of the granite. Spaces and walls, upper and lower realms, made their presence known by the green velveteen quiet that caked them. There were things awaiting the breath of life that remembrance would give. They waited for Horus to resuscitate them. And Horus could feel their infinite patience, ground as sharp and aged as flint, a waiting presence that needed the permission of a living being to live again.
Horus looked into the darkness. The sound of the ocean rolling and cresting and breaking came up from somewhere in the cauldron of time. The smell of seaweed and foam rose from the black. Dare he think of the Caribbean Sea crashing against the shores of Jamaica, where he took Brenda the Beautiful? It was she who revealed to him the enchantment of getting away from the grind of life, the tedium of doors and keys. It was she who reminded him that there could still be splendor out of the thorny past he did not discuss and the forested way ahead. Brenda the Beautiful. Her dark skin shimmered in the sapphire light. Her intricate coils of braided hair were coiffed into sculpture, her dark shapeliness was exquisite crystal. Her sweet smell blended with the salt breath of the ocean. They had made love under a midnight sky, diamond-encrusted with stars. They moved with the tide. He flowed into her like a hungry delta. They receded together and turned their backs onto the wet sand. They glimpsed the icy blue point of light that was Venus, close enough to touch. Horus could have pulled it down from the heavens and set it in Brenda’s earring. Was that when she conceived the child?
He walked on.
There were other memories waiting, serene and petulant. They were smaller and required less breath, less flesh. They called to Horus from the corners and crevices of stone, from the particles floating around him. Like the smell of coconut oil and cinnamon. Like the deep blue of blueberries and the royal purple of plums. Like fireworks over water. But there were beasts that needed more, those memories that needed lungs filled with what air there was to breathe. They glowered through the stone, waiting for Horus, waiting for him to think of one beautiful day, of white picket fences and coffee, of the straight white lines of the interstate, and of storm clouds.
Horus felt faint and struggled to right himself in the passageway. The silence was steeped in itself and waited for him to continue, but he could not. He looked into the endless maze. The labyrinth looked back at him from oblivion. “If I think of it . . .” Horus said to the darkness, his voice echoing through the chambers. He knew that thinking about things, remembering, was dangerous. It was pain beyond pain. In the clutches of torment in his cell, he had learned that the beginnings and endings were the least of worry. There was always a beginning to something, and there was always an ending. But he had learned that the most troublesome was the middle of things, that which happened after a beginning, that which forced the end of something else. The middle was unsafe. It was what blotted out who he was before the middle, what he became after it. He was at risk of that box of teeth-chattering cold, of mind-numbing heat, of slowly dying as he inhaled something designed to poison him. It would put him in danger of not surviving another hour, another minute, another second in that place back at Black Plains. But he had found this place, this secret wonder, hadn’t he? To think of any of it might mean something else this time. A way out, perhaps.
Horus looked into the darkness and felt something inside him quicken, and the thought surfaced before he had a chance to push it away: the child would be seven years old by now. The only remaining proof that there may have been something that was not ruined by what came before the middle, evidence that there may yet be something left of the man he meant to be. And the child had been there all the time, growing through the years without him. The bricked-up child was there, behind the limestone and granite and gypsum of his thoughts. Hidden since Horus looked at the pregnancy test and listened to the sirens and the knock knock knock. But he would not try to imagine the child’s face (was it a boy or a girl?), for fear that he would not have the strength to go on. He would be forced to retreat, to walk the miles back through the Catacombs to Amenta.
; The thought of going back to that place of endings, that realm away from this realm he’d found, drove him forward. He felt his way down a sloping path of the Catacombs, until the passageway turned and dipped into a deeper labyrinth. He looked into the dark. And slowly, a thin gleam appeared as if from miles and miles away, a tear in the sheet of black where a prehistoric torch of light stabbed through. He moved toward it, tracing his way along the gypsum walls. What had spilled inside coursed through him, and he could feel the memories that lay waiting behind the great boulders of stone, how they lived still, even after he tried to put them to death, how they ached to live out loud again.
Horus looked ahead to the cavernous depths. The light was still there, a seduction, a warning. Before his mind could stop his heart from resurrecting it, out of the black, he saw the sunny sky again. He saw his mother’s smile again. He heard his father’s voice again and remembered July 21, 1966.
Empire and Sky
The basketball court in New York on July 21, 1966, was alive with color and pride, blanketed by hands waving flags of red, black, and green. The crowd was a vivid, glorious patchwork quilt of colorful dashikis, head wraps, and sunbursts of African cloth, and it moved like the sands of a kaleidoscope. The air was thick with anticipation, and everywhere was a heat like the fiery blast of an explosion. It was electrified by voter drives and the Vietnam War, by riots and slums and sit-ins, by white crosses and the Klan, by Night Riders and the police, by rent strikes and cotton-picking minds. Malcolm X was already dead. He had been murdered the winter before, with his wife and four children looking on, with twin fetuses swimming in their mother’s fluid, listening to the gunshots. Some traveled to Southern churches to hear Martin Luther King speak of having been to the highest peaks. The truth was revealed to him, he said. Had he really been to the highest peaks? The people weren’t sure. They needed proof in 1966.
Time of the Locust Page 11