The police pulled Tom to the hillside, where the crowd had flattened the bushes and grasses. His feet slipped, and he fell on his face. He was covered in mud, he was filthy, and the police were filthy, too, and mad about it. Tom saw Rosalie. “Rosalie, Rosalie, I’m sorry.”
She kept moving with the girls and would not look back, she would not let him turn her into a pillar of salt. Little Alma looked back, and so did Perri. He would have raised a hand to let them draw comfort and hope from a confident gesture, but his arms were bound.
The police lifted Tom and handed him up the hill to more Jamaicans, the poor men who wanted only to work, and even this unpaid labor answered their needs for effort with purpose. Tom gave himself to the men who lifted him, and let his body help them by now holding a leg stiff, now tilting his head away so a hand could better wrap around the back of his neck.
Fog over everything. Too much pleasure in the obscurity of the day. This is what I asked for. This is what I came here to do. I have erased so much of my life that I am blind. There is only the rushing sound of the waterfalls, which could be just the sound of the blood in my ears. There is temperature, the afternoon heat, with a pledge of rain, with a thin slice of electricity in the taste of the air. There is gravity, because I am not floating away. But there is nothing to see.
The police pushed Tom into the backseat of a car.
“Open your eyes, please, sir,” said one of them.
Tom obliged. It made no difference. His eyes worked but to no purpose. All of his opinions, theories, and field notes, the murky half-toned ideas that float on the periphery of language, all of this rushed away from him, chased off the property by a barking horde of mistakes. He saw road and trees and the sea between the trees and past the road, and the romance and pity of the place meant nothing, either version of the island equally valid and equally pointless.
At the Ocho Rios police station, they gave him dry clothing, a blue prison shirt and blue pants. He was put into a cell, alone.
A new man came into his life, shining, dark, confident, with merry eyes, a man of patience and authority. “I am Captain Dekker of the police.”
“Tom Levy.”
“Well, well, well, Mr. Levy. So you have a fight in the falls, and the man dies. You pushed him, and we have this on videotape. What were you thinking, Mr. Levy?”
“I made a mistake.”
“Yes you did.”
“No. No, no, no, no, no. I should have killed the singer.”
...
Seven months later, Tom Levy was in prison in Kingston, sentenced for the rest of his life.
The trial was short, nine days. His parents sat behind him in the courtroom and paid his lawyer well, but Tom offered no defense.
His family came for a last visit when the trial was over, Rosalie with the girls and his mother and father and his sister. He was allowed to hug them. No one could say anything that made sense. His mother and father, who had once been so specific, spoke to him in generic bromides. “Why, Tom, why?” But what else could they say? As he stood there, answering, “I don’t know,” not wanting to explain himself anymore, he stared at them and forgot what they looked like.
His sister spoke to him privately. “You don’t know the damage that you’ve done. I couldn’t even tell you what I feel. The world has exhausted all analogies.”
“You could try.”
“No.”
“It might be a kindness. I need charity.”
“No. You need to say that you need charity. Charity, for you, Tom, is another bead in your chain of little strategies. I’ve been watching you since you were five. You, Tom, are an undercover agent.”
“And who runs me?”
“I did not call you a spy, because spies are powerless messengers, single-purpose demons or angels turned on and off as the need for them requires.”
“Undercover with what agency of what government?”
“The world of crime. You’re an ambassador from the world of crime.”
“Undercover agent or ambassador?”
“Did I say ambassador?”
“Yes.”
“Then, Tom, I’ll stay with both opinions, agent and ambassador together. The agent hides while the ambassador enters through the front door, and the agent leaves without turning his back. He can never reveal his true purpose. The ambassador presents his papers. You’re the assassin who got caught. You’re on trial for the murder of a man you didn’t know.”
“I knew him.”
“This murder was not your first evil deed. I saw you falling into crime when you were a little boy. It hurt you more not to steal than it hurt the other boys. You wanted to steal money from Mom’s purse, rubbers from Dad’s drawers.”
“How did you know?”
“Moses killed an Egyptian. It says in the Bible that he saw an Egyptian beating up a Hebrew, and when he looked this way and that and saw no one, then he killed the Egyptian. Sometime later he found two Hebrew slaves fighting, and he told them to stop, and they said, ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to kill us the way you killed the Egyptian?’ You didn’t know I was watching, but I was there. I know you.”
“Will you look after Rosalie and the girls?”
“Of course I will. I love them. I’m going to spend as much time with the girls as I can, and I’m going to do right by this side of the family. I’m going to help Rosalie make a new life, help her find a job, and find a good father for the girls.”
...
During the trial, remanded to the district’s small jail, protected, a little, by his American passport but knowing that prison was certain, Tom looked hopefully, even eagerly, ahead to an ecstatic boredom, a concentration of misery made enlightening as the resolving experience of his life. After three months in the Spanish Town Prison, around the bay from Kingston, to his surprise and disappointment, the day of his sentencing was not, he feared, and never would be, the division between before and after. Prison, in the beginning, was just the next place he went to after the place he had been before. Some days were good, some days were bad.
The Spanish Town Prison was hell, of course, a universe of pain and insult, six thousand men behind stone walls whose foundations were older than Boston. Someone was always screaming somewhere. Gang wars from outside continued inside, and the guards bet among themselves on fights that ended in death. Tom, hating himself, stifled his impulse to indignation, the voice of the American who might say, “I have my rights.” He wanted no rights beyond those he could earn.
But he did want something, he wanted the approval of the brutal men around him. They ignored him. Scarred, vicious men passed him without notice. He had killed a man to protect his daughter’s honor, everyone understood this. He wasn’t in prison because in a drunken coma he had run his car into three Jamaican children, or been caught transporting drugs. His crime was human.
As they avoided him, he decided that his intimidating aura of tragedy demanded from others a cautious and distant veneration.
Or so he thought at first.
After a time, he saw their opinion of him as nothing more than cold indifference.
And then he knew that he was wrong, they were offering friendship all the time, in their own way, and that they were all strangers to one another.
Now he embarrassed himself for wanting validation from such poor men. He knew he was confused, that he had wanted respect, yet he pushed these men away and created their disdain.
Looking back on his life, Tom saw a pattern, of first imagining that his worst feelings were the general opinion, the worst feelings about himself or others, and then sharing those opinions with people more generous to the world who pushed him away, not wanting to be stained.
Tom wanted to dig through the junk heap of his life until he found the layer where he had lost attachment to those scraps of his character that could summon worthy regard. He knew that if he could only pull the conflicts together, he would rescue himself from the whole flotilla of misjudgments that ended
with a dead fat man at the bottom of a waterfall. He wanted this, he wanted to fix himself, but to what end? He was here for the rest of his life. What good if this enlightened vision of himself finally arrived?
Slowly, Tom made friends. If someone needed help moving a bed, Tom was there to give a hand. If someone needed help reading a brief from his lawyer, Tom was there. The thanks he received made him grieve more deeply for the time he had wasted.
He understood this: If I could have recognized true friendship when offered, throughout my life, I would not be the person I am, and therefore I would not be here. Much earlier in life I would have joined in friendship with strong good people, men and women, not my gang of sleazy scammers, and we would have helped one another.
He imagined the contours of such help. It would have the energetic zest of his conspiracy without the cynicism, that suspicion of everyone else. He would make more money, but it might take longer, and his friends would always be there to point out new opportunities.
He lay on the floor of his cell, his arms crossed over his chest, their weight the two soft heads of his little girls stretched out on the floor beside him, in the living room of a condominium they rented at a ski resort in Vermont, watching the logs spark in the fireplace.
Skiing, yes, they would go skiing all winter long. His good friends and their families would rent condominiums in the same place, and they would all gather together at the end of the day and make dinner, big pots of spaghetti and huge salads made of nothing but iceberg lettuce. Rosalie never bought iceberg lettuce because it lacked the vitamin content of romaine, but children love iceberg’s noisy crunch, especially with sweet creamy dressing from a bottle. They eat large bags of potato chips, forbidden at home, but what the hell, right? It’s a vacation. Let’s relax. One of his friends is sure to know something about wine, and he brings a dozen different bottles, and all of them are good.
After dinner they play Scrabble together and let the children win, not that the children aren’t all bright and capable, and so intellectually elastic that they make wonderful words on their own.
They rent videos that everyone can watch. One of the fathers rents Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come, a film about a poor Jamaican singer who turns to crime and is shot to death in a mangrove swamp. With the first reggae song, the little girls are moved to stand in front of the television and dance, shaken by the music out of their bodies and their modesty, but they don’t want to dance, the music captures them, invisible strings reach out and jerk them like marionettes, and they cry out for help, and then Tom reaches for his machine gun and shoots the television, and then every television in the ski resort, and then he shoots everyone who threatens his children, all the children, and he goes on shooting.
...
His father died after Tom’s ninth month in prison, and his mother died soon after.
Rosalie visited without the children to bring him the news. She came with a white Jamaican lawyer. She wore a pretty yellow sundress and white sandals.
“Yesterday, after I left, your sister told the girls that you were dead. She told the girls that I had gone to Jamaica to identify your body. She told them that Jamaican law calls for your cremation. I know it’s horrible, but we want to make a hard boundary between the day you killed Barry Seckler and their future. I couldn’t tell them the story and look them in the eyes. When I come back, I’ll give them the comfort that I can.”
“What did I die of?”
“We said you had a heart attack. We didn’t want you to be murdered. A heart attack was easy. We’ll have a memorial service when I go home.”
“What will you say at the funeral?”
“We’ll talk about the man we remember, the man we loved. It will be wonderful for the girls and wonderful for me. We’ll laugh about you. We’ll remember your many kindnesses. The official story now is that you went crazy on your vacation and started to fight someone, and something terrible happened. Perhaps you had a fever. We all agree not to dwell on what you did or why. You were found guilty of murder in Jamaica, while in America you might have been convicted of manslaughter. The prison conditions were hard, you were delicate, and you died. Each of the girls has a therapist who is helping her to remember you with love. Sign here.”
Tom signed. “Have you had any contact with Debra Seckler?”
“Yes. When you were sentenced.”
“Will you tell her I’m dead?”
“Yes.”
“I could write to the girls. I could send them mail. I can tell them I’m alive.”
“You won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you don’t want to hurt them any more than you have.”
“I may get out someday.”
“No. You’re here forever, which won’t be long. You’ll get old in here fast, and you’ll get sick in here, and you will die in here. I’m sorry, I hope you believe that I’m sorry.”
They shook hands. Then she kissed him on the cheek. “We were having such a lovely day. They were lovely people.”
Four
One morning, Tom looked in the mirror and saw a man with a white beard that fell to his chest, and white hair below his shoulders. The man had eyes set deep in hollow sockets. The beard was thick, but what he could see of the man’s cheeks was furrowed. The white-haired man’s nose had a high bridge that twisted to the right and then flattened.
Tom touched the nose.
This is me, he thought.
He knew this, years had gone by. The last thing I remember was a visit from my wife. I have been in a fight, or I have fallen, or been pushed. My memory dissolved, but I’m back into myself, and I remember who I was before I grew this beard. I am Tom Levy, and I killed a man.
There were four iron cots in the cell. A black man, perhaps thirty, smoked a cigarette and looked up at him with little curiosity. Tom, careful not to make eye contact in the mirror, wanted to stay suspended in the peace of his recovered self without announcing his return to consciousness. He needed time to make sense of things.
What if I’ve been a zombie for twenty years? What if this man and others feed me, dress me, wash me? Have I been silent for twenty years? Do I talk, but without consciousness of my speech? And if I speak, what do I speak? Have I learned the Jamaican patois?
What if I have been a savage man, fighting and stabbing? What if I am cruel and a leader? What if this man protects me? What if this man is my prison lover?
Tom lifted his shirt. He was well muscled, and his chest was covered in old scars. And were these hands his, so burned and calloused? How did this happen?
Tom cleared his throat. The man on the cot said nothing. Well, a man clears his throat, no matter who he is or what.
The smells of the prison rushed at Tom like a sound, like music. The heavy tropical air carried the rich brew of a harbor, and the close relish of cooking oil, wood smoke, and a sewer, like a bass, supporting all the vibrations of stink, and as each scent tickled Tom’s attention, it came with an emotion: the smoke was distant lust, the aroma of cooking was disgust, the feeling from the sewer was a paradox of repulsion and love.
He studied the mirror. I would not know this was me except that I know my name.
Those dark steady eyes are my eyes, which used to be even and dull, practiced in their steady focus. My face records the triumph of repentance over still visible and unmistakable traces of the depravity of that dullness. I am beautiful! My panic is gone!
He touched his nose. Someone hit me.
I was in a fight. I will not assume that the punch that might have knocked me into years of insensibility is proof of defeat. I may have won. And I have been, for years, so completely within the routines of my penance that time dissolved and, with time, my crime.
How many years?
Something in me stands corrected. I look like a saint.
Beneath the mirror was a washbasin. Tom ran the water and splashed it on his face. This must be why I was standing here. I was here to wash my face.
Behind him, in the mirror, Tom watched the smoker on the bed. It was time to learn more.
“Where do I get a shave?” Tom asked.
The man on the cot smiled at him, like a father in love with a baby. “What?”
“Where do I get a shave around here?”
“I’ll be right back.” The man ran from the room, shouting down the corridor, “He spoke! He spoke! He wants a shave! Levy wants a shave! Levy wants a shave! He spoke!”
A hundred prisoners gathered outside the cell. Tom watched them, remembering some of their faces from his first year in the prison. There were two white men among them.
“Can someone tell me my story?” Tom asked, keeping his eyes averted from the white men, who Tom supposed were drug dealers, so the blacks would not feel divided from his respect. “Can someone tell me how I broke my nose and why my hair is white?” Tom’s voice was as unfamiliar to him as his face, lower, softer, not so aggressively placed in the middle register, not so tight. He liked this new voice. “Can someone tell me how long I have been here? Have I been well? Have I been a burden or of service? Please, how long have I been here?”
The first man to answer was the man from his cell. “Seven years.”
“And my hair turned white in seven years?”
“Yes.”
“And how did I break my nose?”
An old man in the crowd started to answer, excitedly, but he spoke an impossibly difficult argot, and Tom could understand none of it. One of the white men, an American, saw Tom’s distress. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I know what he’s saying.” So the old man explained, and the American translated.
“When you came into the jail, you knew nobody. For the first year, everyone asked about you, what you had done. You were the man who killed a tourist who had offended your daughter. Everyone knew the story. No one blamed you.”
“But I shouldn’t have done it.”
“No one blamed you. Still, this is prison, and men challenged your honor. A thief from Negril asked you to fight. You had no choice. He hit you, and you hit him. He hit you in the face, with a rock he kept hidden, and you fell. You were taken to the infirmary. There was a condemned man in the bed next to yours who took you for an angel. He had been tortured for days by the guards. His hanging was due in a week, and the warden wanted the man presentable because the execution would be observed by the press.
Under Radar Page 6