He took the pen because it had my fingerprints on it. He was goofing on me, getting me to write down my phone number: he didn’t need my number; he had it already; my number was his and it was up. Well I’d show him. I knew what I would do, it was foolproof. I would wait for him. I would follow him, study him until I learned his patterns and habits, better than he knew them himself, I would educate myself. I would find the right moment and then I would act to quiet him, thereby reducing the total overall risk I faced. Life is full of risk, one can never be risk-free, but one can certainly mitigate the forces acting against one, and that was what I would do. I would act to protect myself. Somewhere in a small, dark room there were small, dark men laying small, dark plots against me, I would not be their plaything. There existed the possibility that they already had the pen in their possession, but that problem was not insurmountable, because fingerprints are made of skin and skin can be removed. I put my hands against the woolen blanket and began to sand away, I would do this one thin layer at a time. It didn’t seem to be working, though, and I searched the room on my hands and knees for something rough with which to exonerate myself. Underneath the bed near the baseboard I found a leftover piece of glass, a fragment painted in orange houndstooth, and with its longest edge I began systematically to shave the soft pad of my left thumb, one thin layer at a time. It wasn’t working, was it? I scrutinized. My thumb was red but the ridges and whorls were still very much intact, so I investigated the possibility of perhaps slicing off a layer parallel to my thumb. All it did was bleed, though. I felt nothing, the nerves wired for pain were all jammed with signals from my face, so I sat there grinning at my own blood, watching as it trickled down my wrist and into the crook of my elbow and pooled on the floor. I was thinking I had so much planning to do. I wanted to plan as far ahead as possible, but it was impossible to concentrate with her making noise like that. Listen to her. Honey. Please. What’s going on here? Please open up. I’m scared. You’re scaring me. Please. I love you. I know you love me. I don’t know what’s going. Let me know you’re okay. I’ll leave you alone if you say something. Don’t do this to me. Please. I want it to be better. You’re going to be okay. Everything is. I promise. I can help you. Let me help you. Please open up. Please don’t stay locked in there all night. And on and on and on and on and you only wish she would stop talking. Shut up. Shut up. You can’t stand it anymore, just shut up and let it be, shut up. Listen to how scared she sounds. It’s nothing compared to what you feel, though. You feel capable of anything. You need silence so you can think. Put down the glass and stand up and walk again in circles, covering your ears to wall her out. Shut up. The anger inside you has teeth; is it its own living thing, independent of you. You are merely a host to it. Shut up, please shut up. If she doesn’t shut up, you might have to do something about it. Please shut up. You might have to bash her brains in. You wouldn’t enjoy it, but it’s all you can think about right now. Once upon a time you loved her but now there is nothing but fear, fear and heat and pain and the pressure of a billion vises, and standing at the closet, you reach for your good old friend, cold and heavy, the coolness of it feels wonderful pressed against your molten skin, hug him close. Things don’t work out, do they. Shut up.
Things are what they are until they aren’t any longer. You have changed and changed again, you are a creature constantly evolving. Who can say when these transformations occur? Think about your brother. Was that fair? Think about the house and the money and the jewelry, was that fair? Sometimes the inequity lists in your favor; sometimes not. The universe moves and it moves you, the future pulling with inexorable gravity. You wonder if it is true, if you might actually harm her, and then you are small and curled and shaking, babbling to yourself as she pounds at the door, holding your friend by the neck, willing her to leave you be. You stay there until she gives up with an angry kick and you release him and he falls languidly to the floor and you fall, too, right there. Where you remain, and in some infinitely small time you dream dream of a horse being whipped to death waking to the moonlight streaming lucid through the open window and you are unclothed with a fist in your chest and your groin dripping and above all pain, obliterating the right half of the world, your brain a champagne bottle shook up ready to pop and as you move howling to the bathroom vertigo sends you crashing into the door. Your face is thick. Your cheek explodes every second. Get it off. It hurts. You must get it off. You cannot hear her, she is so far away, but she’s calling your name as you grope for the lightswitch. See your reflection through a one-dimensional haze. “Oh God.” In the doorway, her hands at her throat, looking at you. Nothing can conceal it, not anymore. Red and turgid, the inflamed rump of an animal in heat. Along your neck below your bulging jaw a bloody thumbprint where you earlier left evidence of yourself. “Oh God. Oh my God. I’m calling an ambulance. Where are you going. Joseph. You can’t go out like that. Wait. Wait.” Outside stroll naked through the snow. You expect it to be cold underfoot but it’s not so bad. In fact, it feels warm, with a pleasant beachy crunch. You dip your hands in the snow to see if it will remove the texture of your fingerprints, but to no avail, oh, well, keep on going, go on, walk. Some distance away your name is being called. Ignore it. Maybe the brick of the sidewalk will work? But no. Your hands are bleeding again. This isn’t going to work. You need professional help. They can do amazing things with surgery. Your name again, farther away. A siren whines. You’re almost there. The tall hospital winks a thousand white eyeblinks. They all blur together into one. A sliding door, a wet rubber mat, a room full of people, good evening ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please. The woman at the desk sees you and coming out of her chair breathlessly says the name of the Lord God.
“—FEVER UNDER CONTROL FIRST.” “Okay.” “Quite honestly it should never have been allowed to get to this stage.” “I had no idea—oh. Oh, no. Joseph.” Head up. “Relax.” “Sit back, honey. You have to sit back.” “Relax.” Relax. DAYS AND NIGHTS. Dreams. DAYLIGHT. TV NATTERING. The world looks funny. Flat. “Joseph.” Why’s that like that. “You’re okay. You’re fine, now.” Touch your face. “Don’t fiddle with it, please. They just changed the dressing.” Try again. “Please leave it alone. Please.” “Knock knock.” “Come on in. He’s up.” “Oh good. Joseph? Hi there.” A floating shape nearby. A voice familiar. “Take it easy, there ... There. Isn’t that more comfortable?” “He’s still pretty out of it.” “Mm.” “Thanks for coming by again.” “It’s not a problem. Don’t you worry, they’ll take good care of him. It’s good you came in when you did. It could have been much worse. You know, you look pretty tired yourself. Why don’t you go home for a bit.” “I don’t want to leave.” “Sometimes the best thing is to get out for a little while. Get a bite to eat. Take a shower. Don’t worry about him. He’s not going anywhere.” “... thank you, Dr. Cargill.” “You rest up now.” “Joseph? Did you hear that?” “You know what, let him rest.” “Take care. Thank you.” Later: “It’s nice of her to stop in. She’s not even your doctor. She just saw your name on the board.” Later: “Drew called. He’s in Atlantic City. He’ll be back tomorrow.” Later: “You could have died. Do you realize that? You’re such an asshole sometimes, you’re so fucking stubborn.” Later: “Please stop touching it. The nurse is getting mad. She said the next time she’s going to tie your wrists down.” Later: “Are you happy now?” Later: “I’m going to get some coffee. Do you want anything? Do you want me to change the channel? All right.” Alone, free yourself and stand looking through a lens smoky and partially occluded. A blue bulb flutters above the bathroom mirror. Lean in. The upper-right quadrant of your head mummified; with your hands (you still have fingerprints, it seems, you will have to file a complaint) find the joint and start to unwrap, unconcealing. It hurts. The gauze sticks to itself. Yellow crust. Red crust. The light ever more penetrating until: cold dry air on sutured skin, your face no longer yours, changed, the eye’s curtains drawn shut and sewn up tight and the space beneath vacant, y
ou can scream now, that’s fine, it’s all over now, go on, go ahead, scream.
25 H
ardly anyone comes to see me these days. Even my cell-mate, a convicted rapist, gets more people dropping by. In fairness, his brother lives in Marlborough, a short drive away; whereas I entail a plane ticket. Still. It gets lonely. I do get letters. Four-fifths of them come from women, many of whom have read the true crime book about me or seen the half-hour basic cable show that aired last spring. An astonishingly large number of my correspondents believe that I am innocent. It’s hard to understand. I pled guilty. The videotape of my confession was excerpted for TV. And yet they write, these women, that they can see goodness in me, that I could never have done as I did unless driven by extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps I confessed falsely, compelled by fear. A man will say anything when he’s afraid. A generous mistake they make, these women: they fail to grasp what a relief it was to confess. At first, nobody believed me, not Yasmina or the nurses. They thought I was still delirious, or stewed on morphine. They had me forcibly sedated, and several days passed before I was calm enough, and trusted sufficiently, to make a phone call. I asked for Zitelli, and when he was not in, for Connearney. My first interview with him is the one that everyone saw. At the start, I am bent over, barely audible, the words dribbling out of me, and one can easily understand why people might believe me to have been coerced: I lose the thread, back up, contradict myself. My second, third, and fourth interviews—done to dispel the notion that I might be confabulating—were taped, as well, though never aired. Had they been, I think viewers would have gotten a much different impression of me. In them I’m sitting up straight, speaking soberly and with a practiced air. The judge who sentenced me called them chilling, and I’ll be the first to admit that he’s right. The lesson being that you should never, ever believe anything you see on television. I spent the last third of my hospital stay in a private room, hand-cuffed to the bed, an officer stationed in the corner, lest I attempt to harm myself or escape. When the time came to change my dressing or empty the bedpan, he would stand up, poised to spring into action if I tried to do anything to the nurse. Other than that, our interaction was minimal. He wouldn’t say more than a few words at a time, and he avoided making eye contact with me, giving me the first taste of that blend of pity and revulsion now so familiar to me. I am told that Yasmina’s assessment was correct: I could have died. Orbital cellulitis is no joke, and by failing to clean the wounds properly, and continually reapplying makeup, I had done a superb job of first culturing, then aggravating, the infection. It took my eye; it could have easily spread to my brain; and I wonder now if on some level I did not recognize this possibility. No doubt there are more efficient ways to commit suicide. I know better than most, though, that such decisions are rarely, if ever, discrete. The case against me was straightforward enough. Even so, it did not go to trial for eight months. My attorney argued that I first needed to recuperate. Plus, they had to find the bodies. This took a while, as I could give them only the most general directions. Thanks to my exemplary willingness to cooperate, I was released on bond, confined to house arrest, and fitted with an ankle monitoring bracelet. I didn’t mind. I used my remaining time to finish my dissertation, e-mailing Linda Neiman a final draft at the end of April. At that point there still hadn’t been any press coverage of the case. Her reply thus threw me for a loop. They wouldn’t graduate me, she said, not now or ever. “We can’t condone plagiarism,” she said. Apparently, my confession had renewed Detective Zitelli’s interest in the contents of Alma’s thesis. Fed up with his first translator, who found the paper’s arcane terminology a bit much to contend with, he contacted the Harvard Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. They referred him to the director of graduate studies, who referred him to Philosophy. Somewhere along the line my name must have come up, as in short order, the original landed on Linda’s desk. She took one look at its opening lines before phoning the detective to let him know that a full English text already existed. THE REMAINING FIFTH of my mail comes from a motley bunch of folks. Christians pray for my soul. Screenwriters offer to collaborate. After women, the second largest demographic slice is teenage boys intoxicated by the notion that I intended to make with my actions some sort of broader philosophical point. Where they got this idea is beyond me. Certainly I didn’t say anything to that effect, either during the trial or since. Nevertheless, these boys write me long, intimate letters. They pour their blackness out onto the page, spinning violent fantasies—if such are the ones I receive, I can only guess at what the prison censor removes—and insisting that I’m being self-deprecating when I say mine was a simple case of greed gone awry. Nor would the media accept this explanation. Looking for something fleshy to sink their teeth into, they made my resume their feast, so that when my name appears in print (it still happens, and when it does, one of my fans will usually mail me a clipping) the phrase “ex-Harvard professor and convicted murderer” is often appended to it. The first few times this happened, I wrote to the publication in question, asking that they run a correction. Nobody acknowledged receipt, and eventually I stopped trying. A Harvard professor I shall be, then. I can’t begin to imagine how severely this must irritate Linda. We don’t have access to computers here, but a young man in Walla Walla took the time to print out thirty pages’ worth of material from his website, on which I feature prominently. Among its other subjects are Leopold and Loeb, the Preppy Killer, Theodore Kaczynski, and Robert McNamara, who I suppose might take a certain degree of umbrage at being inducted into our little fraternity. Most puzzling are the proposals, of which I have had five. I am imprisoned for life, with no chance of release. I have expressed no interest in marriage. I am disfigured, not forbiddingly so but enough that I likely wouldn’t qualify for an all-prison beauty contest. Maybe these women think the eyepatch gives me a kind of piratical swagger. Who knows? I’ve given up trying to understand what makes people want one thing versus another. One would think that such letters would be written exclusively by lunatics. Not so. Of all my prospective brides, three sounded frightfully sane. One even included a photo of herself in a mortar-board and gown. Sinead from Colorado: you seem very nice, and I wish you the best of luck. I never reply to anyone. It doesn’t matter. People keep on writing. The truth is they’re lonely, too, and I make the perfect receptacle for their own fears and frustrations, no different from a fictional character, a figure out of myth. MY CELLMATE’S name is William. Six years ago, he raped an eighty-two-year-old woman, who died as a result of her injuries. When I first met him, he was withdrawn, basically mute. Months went by before we had any conversation lasting more than two or three exchanges. His skittishness awakened me to the idea that my scarred face and imposing height made for a kind of insurance policy. William himself is about five-foot-five. At some point he decided that I posed no danger, and the words started coming, first cautiously, then torrentially, a disjointed autobiography that I have managed to reassemble after hearing it four or five times. His parents were both alcoholics, at whose hands he suffered constant sexual and physical abuse; he has been in and out of the prison system regularly since the age of twelve, when he stole a car. In recounting his crimes he sounds less remorseful than inconvenienced, to the extent that I wonder if he has any real grasp on why he’s here. He once told me that we’re all bad, deep down. My instinct was to reply that that was nonsense, there had to be good people out there. I stopped myself. Whatever gives him solace—even if it’s believing he’s a regular joe who happened to get caught—what right do I have to deny him that? AMONG WILLIAM’S many impairments is a crippling dyslexia. Most everyone in prison reads a great deal, in one form or another. In my first six months alone, I went through more than a hundred books, whereas in all that time, I never saw him with so much as the funnies. Sometimes he’d pick up whatever I had just finished, glaring at the cover in an intimidated way. On one such occasion—the book in question was The Trial,
which I hadn’t read since high
school—he asked me in an offhand way what the story was about. I related it to him, in brief, and as I did his face took on an enraptured glaze. He interrupted me, prodded me for details, asked questions about the lives of the characters that I could not answer. His curiosity made me smile and, without thinking, I suggested that he read it himself, if he was so interested. The words were not out of my mouth before I regretted them, and I sat back, ready for a violent reaction. Instead, he asked me for help. Have you ever taught someone to read? If so, it was almost certainly a child, whose mind was plastic, voracious. We tend to take for granted our ability to extract meaning from a page of writing, but it is in fact nothing short of miraculous, and if we did not learn to employ it at an age when we still believed in magic, few would. William was forty-seven years old when I began teaching him to read. We didn’t have to start at the very beginning. He could sign his name, and he knew the alphabet. He could not, however, assemble those letters into words. I put a lot of thought into how to approach the problem, but every technique I tried failed, no matter how cutting-edge the pedagogy behind it. In the end we had to resort to brute force: I spent long hours drilling him with flashcards, helping him commit to memory the shapes of individual words, such that bird
Jesse Kellerman Page 25