Riverine

by Angela Palm

  Love seemed a complicated emotional action for Burroughs, as well. In a documentary about his life, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, speculation and firsthand accounts of his romantic relationships cut into the story almost at random. He had a kind of sweet nesting relationship with a female friend, trading recipes with her for years. Patti Smith sang him lullabies. For a time, he slept with professional sex workers almost exclusively. Intellectual stimulation came from Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat poets. Despite being gay, a label he rejected on principle, he married Joan Vollmer and with her had two children. He seemed to have had a lifelong romance with guns, while heroin occupied the role of the abusive boyfriend that he kept going back to. I think that perhaps Burroughs’s entire life was a series of digressions. His chosen life path generated conflict in the white space surrounding each dip away from the central concern of living. I prefer my own relationships the same way, though with fewer negative consequences—with digressions, meanderings that connect us to other people and things or lead us to a more precise truth about ourselves. A life that has no map.

  As my life unmaps itself, Corey’s continues to stagnate. Indiana prisons have been privatized in recent years under the state’s overwhelmingly Republican legislature, and because of this, new opportunities were available for prisoners while others ceased to exist. The college classes that were once offered, which Corey had been enrolled in, were no longer offered unless inmates were training to become clergy. An unlikely fit for a science-oriented atheist/spiritualist such as Corey. Rehabilitation services had dwindled. Though he no longer needed substance abuse counseling, Corey did wish he had someone to talk to about his life, the unanswered questions he had about the course of his past actions, and resisting his present temptations—continuing a life of crime in prison, the path of least resistance. (Am I a monster? he wrote me once. Or was I, at least in part, a product of my childhood?) He said the counselors who were available couldn’t necessarily be trusted—talking to the wrong person could have negative consequences. It was safer to keep to yourself, protect your truths. If you cared about something, you were better off not letting anyone know so it couldn’t be used against you or taken away. Mostly, he said, navigating the social dynamics of prison was the hard part. The rest was easy—just follow the routine. One day after another, like having a job you hate. Play the game, pass the time, collect the paycheck. Only in his case it was play the game, pass the time, pay your moral debt.

  On the other hand, though, prison communication with the outside thrived under privatization. Third-party e-mail providers had contracted with Corey’s facility, one among the “lucky” in a handful of states across the United States as the privatization of prisons gained footing. It was still relatively new, but, he explained in a letter, I could set up an account and buy “stamps,” which would enable us to e-mail as much as we liked—or as much as we could afford. The rates of communication were as follows:

  $0.40 per e-mail

  $9.95 for a thirty-minute video visit (similar to Skype)

  $5.00 for a twenty-minute phone call

  $0.80 to send a digital photo

  $2.00 to send a thirty-second video

  Just after my first e-mail to him, Corey had sent me a video. I knew that he made only fifty dollars a month, minus taxes and a contribution to the state victims’ fund, earning twenty-five cents per hour in the kitchen, and that he used most of that money for food, clothes, stamps, paper, and personal needs. When I asked him about the costs, how he could afford it, he said not to worry about it. That it was worth it and he’d find a way. But I didn’t want him doing anything illegal for the privilege of almost real-time messages (the e-mails were monitored, of course) or for the simple act of him smiling at the “machine” as he sang me “Happy Birthday.” So I occasionally transferred stamps and a bit of money to him when I could. How did families manage this? I wondered. You could easily spend a few hundred dollars a month to try to maintain a normal relationship with an inmate. And what about the ones who had children? Incarcerated or not, the fathers were still fathers and many of them did what they could to be present in their children’s lives, even from inside. And if they couldn’t, wouldn’t that just set up the cycle of negative behaviors for the next generation? In many ways, these modern communication options afforded to select facilities would be a blessing to many people, allowing them to be better parents, a network of lives to be less disrupted by one person’s incarceration, one person’s past. It allowed the men and women inside to remain more human, less isolated, which led to less violent behavior amid the prison population, and, I believed, kept them connected to the world they would eventually return to once their sentences were served. It helped keep them sane, and that was important.

  But the third-party contractors had to be getting rich, charging for services that most of us on the outside generally used for free. From the get-go, I began spending per month more than what I spend on my Netflix subscription. Meanwhile, the Indiana legislature had passed an aggressive (compared with most other states) law that required violent offenders to serve 75 percent of their time rather than the typical 50 percent (with time off for good behavior), with more and more of those inmates housed in “private sector” facilities. It added up to millions upon millions of dollars if you did the math—the taxpayer cost of housing an inmate for a day multiplied over years and thousands of inmates.

  I remembered learning about privatization as an undergraduate, discussing with my classmates and professors the idea in theory, balking at its inherently wrong-goaled orientation: the more bodies in prison beds, the more profit the contractors make. How could such a business relationship between the state and the profiteers uphold any kind of commitment to rehabilitate inmates or, more important and certainly more effective, prevent incarceration in the first place? The arrangement, now a growing reality in the United States, shifted the focus from punishment to profit, circumventing crime prevention and rehabilitation almost entirely. The first thing you learn studying criminal justice is that deterrence—scaring people away from committing crimes through threat of punishment—is more or less a fallacy. If I called up Uncle Dave to ask him what qualities made a good cop, in his extensive experience in the field, he’d say people skills—not an imposing personality. Not muscle.

  Though these privatized facilities provide jobs in poorer parts of the state where prisons are often located, keep industrial food service businesses profitable, and relieve some of the financial burden local governments face due to high incarceration rates, their existence is still a type of public corruption. Privatization is not a solution to the problem of prison overcrowding and of crime in general, especially as funding for public education and various community and entitlement programs—measures that could contribute to crime prevention—face regular budget cuts.

  Corey knew many inmates who did a few years, got out, and were back in prison a few years later. He said it was easy to spot these guys who were “doing life on the installment plan.” The ones who did a little time and then went back out to cook meth or revert to whatever lifestyle they’d come from ended up back in prison. He saw it all too often. Whenever he had the opportunity he tried to counsel young offenders—the ones who could still turn their lives around, go to school or learn a trade, get out of trouble and stay out of it. “It’s hard to convince young people of anything,” he said. “I was probably the same way when I first came down.” But that was a lifetime ago. Another person ago.

  I already knew my life was somewhat unconventional. For years, I’d been caring for our kids while Mike lived in hotels nearly two hundred nights a year. When he came home, I’d go out and live my professional and social lives while he stayed home with our children. We were rarely seen together in public. Most of our communication occurred over Gmail chats at odd hours or in snapshots taken with our smartphones. I sent him a picture of our younger son’s first written word, another of our older son’s toothless smile. I used to keep
a list of the cities where he would be staying while he was gone and phone numbers for the hotels so I knew where he’d be on any given day and how to reach him via a secondary number, but that stopped years ago. More recently, I was only vaguely aware of whether he was in the Northeast or the Southwest or the Midwest.

  One night, he was in Toronto and all the smoke detectors went off. I couldn’t make them stop, so I called my dad for help and ended up smashing one with a hammer because the goddamn noise just wouldn’t stop even after I changed all the batteries. One day, Mike was somewhere in Louisiana and the living room ceiling was leaking. I put a bucket under it, sat on the couch, and stared. Another time, I was so sick that the kids ate an entire loaf of bread for lunch and there was nothing I could do but hope to get better fast. All the while I was consumed with guilt, worrying about the negative quantities of fruits and vegetables in their daily diet. I would miss deadlines and lose school papers and sometimes disappoint potential friends when I couldn’t follow through as planned. Sometimes I gave up sleep that I really needed to avoid these traps. I tried to make everything work. There were many days that I thought, What the hell am I doing here in Vermont? Why not just move back to Indiana, where at least I have some family and a few good friends? A support system of some kind and where I won’t have to worry about overt social pressure about eating meat. The idea I’d had that a new location would somehow simplify the logistics of my life was wrong. Certain jagged edges remained. And after bringing Corey back into my life, my mind was split, my heart was split. It became emotionally complicated, which was more than simply being unconventional.

  Though I moved away for a reason, I keep going back. Three, four, five times a year. I visit Mandi, who is like a sister to me and the only person besides my brother, other cousins, and Corey who knows the whole of me. We are unbreakable, bound by blood and the unspeakable bonds that form between children who are not altogether all right. I visit a few friends—Jen and Rachel, primarily. Two more squares of the expanding quilt. As women, we have grown together well, seen each other through childbirths, postpartum depression, regular depression, divorces, and absent partners. We have never lost our wildness; under the right circumstances, we will still strip our shirts off and dance under the moon. We travel together, sometimes. Now, place is not only an escape but also a way to reconnect to our old selves. Someday, we joke, we’ll buy a house somewhere that we’ll all share when our kids go off to college. We won’t need men at all, except for when we needed them. It isn’t necessarily a joke.

  I miss my old haunts, the familiar flat land, the people who know me well, even the endless corn. When I see pictures of Earth from space, the gap between memory and experience, right and wrong, past and present, closes. There is only now, only the daily choice to live the life I have the way I want to live it. I bet from space, the word political sounds silly. The word anger. Punishment, justice, loneliness. From that vantage point, why would you care about anything but happiness? Anything but peace? The farther away from the past, the clearer it becomes. Distance, they say, is everything. One planet closer to the sun and we’d all be dead.

  My parents recently moved to a subdivision at the golf course. They wanted to live closer to their friends. Finally, our wishes aligned, albeit two decades too late. My father called me on the day they closed on their old house, the one in the cornfield, the last place I had lived with them. I asked him if he went back one last time, after the movers had come, and whether he would miss it.

  “I was at work when they were there. There’s nothing I needed to see. It’s time to move on.”

  He mentioned, then, that a lot of things happened in that house. He didn’t name what, exactly, and he didn’t have to. We were both there. A new home hadn’t changed us as people. The problems we had as a family remained. To be sure, it distracted us for a little while—another kitchen to remodel, a new lawn to tame. That is all I can really say for a change of place. It’s refreshing. It can open doors, if you know where to look. But it isn’t everything. It isn’t a cure-all. We’re still left with our complicated selves, our mixed-up past. We have our individual perspectives to reconcile and our separate futures to manage.

  When Marcus was charged with battery—he’d punched a friend in the face—my mother was aghast. “I don’t understand how he could have done something like that,” she said. “You two didn’t grow up around violence.” I just laughed. There was no other response in me that remained. People see what they want to see, deny what they don’t.

  “When you make mistakes you can’t dwell on them,” said my father. “I always just move on to the next thing without thinking about it or looking back. Nobody tells you how to be a parent. You get one chance and there is no doing it over.”

  “I guess we all deal with things in different ways,” I replied. “We do the best we can.”

  In a snapshot of me, Corey, Marcus, and another neighborhood friend, we are all sitting on my parents’ front lawn holding kittens. Their eyes have just opened; they see the gigantic world for the first time. They cling to our shirts and our bodies. I hold mine as if it were an infant, cradling it, protecting it from falling. Corey’s sits on his head and looks terrified. We are all laughing and angled toward Corey, who palms a basketball in one hand and makes a silly face. He is the sun center of our youth. The one who keeps everyone smiling, even as his own life tears away from him beyond the photographic frame.

  A photograph is a living history. Like place, an old photograph is the future cutting into the present and the past ongoing. Outside the frame: Corey’s home, where this beautiful boy will soon be emotionally and physically neglected, locked out and abused by his own family; where he will be left to fend for himself and propelled to places he never should have been. Outside the frame: the bar and restaurant where I will learn of Corey’s crime; where I will call him even though I know he is long gone and hang up when his mother answers; where I will make money that I will save to help myself move on from this place. Outside the frame: the brown house where the people who will die when Corey is, at last, too far gone are still living their quiet lives. Outside the frame: the river that was moved a hundred years ago to make way for all of us. What happened to the Potawatomi in their new lives on their new land? What will happen to us in ours?

  Memory, it has been hypothesized, works like a compounding file system that constantly updates and pulls to the front of the file those memories that are being actively used or recalled in some way. Every memory is stored. As new experiences relate to old ones—such as hearing a new vocabulary word used in a movie, or meeting people over and over, learning more about them—the memory strengthens. Like payments made on an installment plan, new associations are added to the original memory, piling up to create a collected sense of what is remembered. On one hand, my memory of the river was romanticized. It was a place where, through countless interactions, I grew to love Corey so much that his worst actions couldn’t destroy the richness of my attachment to him. On the other hand, I associated the place with negative experiences and emotions such that it made it difficult for me to return.

  In Marina Abramović’s performance art exhibit The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art, she sat a table and silently looked into strangers’ eyes as they took turns sitting down in the chair across from hers. When her former lover and collaborator Ulay, whom she hadn’t seen since they broke up thirty years earlier, sat down at the other end of the table, she cried and reached across the table for his hands. In the video of the performance, you can see how much he still affects her. She looks like she is surrendering, body and mind, to the memory of him. When he walked away after his sixty seconds were up, she straightened her spine and returned to normal. In 1988, the couple had split dramatically. They walked toward one another from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, embraced, and then they went their separate ways. When I sat down with Corey, it was the same scene. I publicly surrendered myself to the memory of him—not as distant as I ha
d convinced myself. When I got up to leave, I took care to right myself within the present reality of our separate worlds.

  During the months after the prison visit, I squeezed my sons from time to time, worrying their futures like stones. The elder was intense and obsessive and had the capacity for extreme emotions. The younger one was calmer, tending to withdraw and ruminate if he was upset. They both sought love and praise. They both expected the world to be good and were shocked at anything that challenged that belief. Our worst flaws—my explosive reactions to perceived injustices, Mike’s stunted emotional capacity and compulsion to verify and perfect everything—flared up among their strengths. I cupped their tiny shoulders in my hands and reminded them to be kind. It was the simplest instruction or request that I could formulate. They nodded their soft skulls in agreement. I could nearly see the synapses firing behind their blue-white eyeballs. But we have no control over that kind of thing. What sticks and what doesn’t in the unseen expanse of the mind, what brief experiences get built up in memory and become the icons of a life lived. Even adults forget most of it soon enough, remembering the decades that pass only in gross summaries: the good years, the bad years, the big milestones, the few specific and vivid memories. We forget the small reasons we leave people and places, the little injustices. And we forget why, sometimes, we can’t go back. We just know we can’t. We know what happened but we never know why. Or we even remember it wrong, but that doesn’t matter: we have our truths. We realize that newness must take not only a new shape of behavior or thoughts, but sometimes even a new landscape. Place as reboot. Eventually, I think we forgive the land and the associations we have with it. We see it for what it is, what it always was: a complex terrain with a history and a future. A place where we were, for a time, becoming what we are now.