Sophisticated Devices/Make No Mistake

by Jesse Michaels

  Sam McPheeters thanks Paul Maliszewski and Jesse Pearson for their help.

  This is a Genuine Barnacle Book

  A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Jesse Michaels and Sam McPheeters

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Set in Minion

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-14-5

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Michaels, Jesse, 1969-

  Sophisticated devices : make no mistake / by Jesse Michaels and Sam McPheeters.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-942600-04-6

  1. Child molesters—Fiction. 2. Sex offenders—Fiction. 3. Probation—Fiction. 4. Shopping malls—Fiction. 5. Cults—Fiction. 6. Psychotherapy—Fiction. I. McPheeters, Sam. II. Title.

  PS3613.I34436 S67 2015

  813.6 —dc23

  Barnacle Split Editions

  Barnacle and Rare Bird are proud to introduce to you the first in a very special series of books that adapts the idea of split release records to books. Ladies and gentlemen, Barnacle Split Editions…

  Contents

  Sophisticated Devices

  Make No Mistake

  Sophisticated Devices

  At noon, two guards evicted Chang from his cell. He followed them across the gentle curve of the U ward mezzanine, down the south stairs to a smoothed rainbow mural, a leftover from the days when the wing had been a day-care annex for prison employees. A guard entered magic codes into a keypad, one final event of regulation life. As the rainbow folded inward on its own huge hinges, Chang realized some of the mural had faded during his own time in prison, and he finally saw this eviction for what it really was: an escape. He had outlasted his opponent, carefully minding his days and years until someone in an office somewhere had said uncle. It was a victory of attrition.

  The rainbow opened onto a corridor, and the corridor opened onto a fenced-off patch of parking lot, an outdoor walkway connecting building units. “Pick one,” a guard said without conviction, nudging a chin at two dirty plastic lawn chairs. Chang perched on the cigarette-scarred seat holding less rainwater. He signed a line on the clipboard and the guards were gone, closing the door behind them with several inorganic clunks, as if they didn’t trust him not to creep back in. This was the holding pen of legal limbo. He looked out across the expanse of parking lot before him, taking in the heat shimmering from parked cars, the fence in the foreground. He hadn’t seen as quaint a barrier as chain-link since the blazing, cicada-filled morning in 2010 when he’d first entered the penal system. The slightest of breezes now reached him, and he pictured himself on that afternoon, having been led through fences, drawn toward the core of horror, wild-eyed with possibilities.

  Attrition. He’d written letters to everyone in his family that terrible first week, trying to explain. If anyone has ever thought up any good ways to escape from prison, he’d closed each letter, only half joking, now would be the time to test those ideas out. Three weeks later he’d received a postcard from his aunt Katie, a neatly scripted one-liner—Attrition—that had served as the first and last word from anyone he’d ever known. Behind several feet of concrete, a muted lunch bell now rang. He’d been a free man for fifteen minutes.

  At a quarter to one, Warden Ball appeared from the connecting building and waved him in. In the dimmed fluorescents of the office, Chang saw only the outlines of filing cabinets, stacks of boxes in the corners, Ball’s girth settling behind a desk.

  “Please,” said the warden, motioning to another plastic chair. The man absently poked through loose piles of documents on his desk. Chang had dreamed about this room, but never like this, subject to the same laws of cinderblock crumminess as the rest of his world. No plaques, no stag heads, no wall of shanks. Ball squinted into a piece of paper and announced, “Sheldon S. Chanfeld, having completed his eighteen-year prison term in full and to the satisfaction of the state of New Jersey…”

  As Chang’s eyes adjusted, a bulletin board on the far wall emerged with a slow fade-in, revealing a beautiful montage of Ball’s vacation pictures. He sat very still, taking it all in. A room he’d never been in before. Blue skies, mountain streams, smiling men in hip waders and canvas hats enjoying life for what it is, free to move beyond the edges of the photographs. The enormity of what was transpiring settled in on him, the horizons of his own life suddenly revealed, all things possible.

  “Sheldon, did you hear me?”

  “Yes,” said Chang. “No. Sorry.”

  “I said, ‘This state has a Jimmy Law.’”

  “Okay.”

  “And you do understand what this means?”

  “No.”

  Ball shared a stagy glance with the filing cabinets.

  “Sheldon. Haven’t you seen the news or read a paper in the last ten years?”

  “No,” said Chang. “We’re not allowed TV or papers in the U.”

  Ball stared for a moment, his mouth an oval. “Of course,” he finally laughed, bouncing a palm off his forehead. “That’s part of the Jimmy Law!”

  A mass rose in Chang’s peripheral vision. “Sheldon, this is Mr. Morton, your parole officer.”

  He turned, startled, to see a huge, suited black man standing in a space he’d thought filled with clutter. Morton’s head was crisply shaved, and his parallel accessories—thin spectacles, thin mustache, rigid purple bow tie—spoke to an order of authority Chang was exceedingly familiar with.

  “Good morning, Mr. Chanfield. I’m here to explain the rules. You do want to understand the rules, don’t you?”

  Chang shook the man’s hand, nodding slowly, still pivoted in his chair. Morton continued: “As you are now aware, the voters of this state have passed a Jimmy Law. This law places six stipulations on your release.” Morton folded his hands carefully in front of him. “You will be living in a halfway house for the first eighteen months of your parole period. You will not be allowed any contact with minors, be it verbal, physical, or electronic.” Morton unfurled a meaty finger for each provision. “You will register with the state police as a sex offender.” Ball handed him a sheaf of forms, blue and yellow and pink.

  “You will remain on mandatory prescription to a chemical hormone blocker of the court’s discretion, to be administered by automatic injection.”

  Chang bobbed his head.

  “Jimmy’s Law also stipulates that your immediate community be notified at all times of your presence,” Morton said, reaching into a canvas bag next to the couch. “And so…” He pulled something made of cloth from the bag, a strange bundle that reminded Chang of a Christmas tree skirt. Warden Ball perched himself on a corner of the desk. Morton unfurled the cloth. Chang understood that this was a T-shirt, but the material itself was alive with a garish TV glow, the garment casting its own light. On the front of the shirt, large, blinking red letters spelled out I AM A CONVICTED SEX OFFENDER. From behind, Warden Ball said, “That is so neat.”

  Morton looked at Chang without expression and then down to the illuminated T-shirt. After ten or fifteen seconds, the shirt went momentarily blank, then flashed a new message: PLEASE GUARD YOUR CHILDREN. “See,” Morton explained, fumbling with the cloth, “the front of
the shirt is imbedded with thousands of light pixels. There’s a small battery in there…somewhere…”

  Chang looked to the warden, then back to his new probation officer. Morton placed the blinking shirt on the couch and abruptly dropped to one knee like a shoe store clerk, gingerly producing a black rubber anklet fastened to a small box. He placed a dozen or so ampoules of sinister green into this tiny chamber, sealing it with a half-twist of his oversized thumb.

  “You were taking Depo-Lupron?” Morton asked, fully turning Chang and securing the device around a pale ankle.

  “Um…yeah.”

  “This stuff is stronger,” the man said, looking up, still grasping the silly, skinny limb.

  “The law also makes your employment mandatory. Let me ask you something, Mister Chanfield. Do you have any prospects for employment?”

  Chang shook his head.

  “Do you have any relatives or friends who might be able to provide you with gainful employment?”

  Chang looked at the shirt. “No.”

  “Well then,” Morton continued, standing slowly, repositioning his center of gravity. “We will have to get you a job.”

  The two-story halfway house sat on the edge of a dead lot in an unincorporated tract of land north of Linden. Chang wondered if they had given this place a name yet, or if it had ever had one before. The outside of the house stank of skunk. Morton and two state troopers chaperoned him into the front kitchen, the foam panels of the drop ceiling popping out of place as the door slammed behind them, little eddies of cat fur swirling momentarily in the corner. On a shelf thick with orange paint, Chang noticed a familiar array of prison commissary staples: hard candies, ramen, Spam, Tang.

  A squat old lady signed a form on another clipboard, a bill of lading, and Morton was off. “I will call you in the morning, Sheldon,” he said, pulling the door shut behind him. Chang stood at attention, holding his small box of toiletries and folded clothes. He expected an introduction or instructions, but the old woman only muttered, walking down the hall. He followed her past a doorless lavatory, to a room next to the stairs. “Yeah, see,” she offered, “they always release you guys on Sundays. And that really screws us up.” They stood like this for a moment, at the threshold of his new room, and then she continued up the stairs, leaving him behind. In the room he found a bed, an open closet, a chipboard dresser that once had handles. He understood there were no doors here, no way to hide wrongdoing. The loose metal frame of the box spring swayed beneath his weight. He missed the stainless steel furnishings of cell U-42—the safe little submarine berth he would never see again.

  Later that afternoon, a deliveryman made him sign yet another form on yet another clipboard. This was for a week and a half’s supply of electronic T-shirts, each sheathed in warm dry cleaners’ plastic. Chang carefully hung the shirts in his narrow closet and laid on the bed for a long while, watching the words blink out of time with each other, the plastic and coat hangers and flaking closet walls lit in endless combinations of pink and shadow. At some point he must have dozed off. Later, Chang saw another man in the doorway also watching the small light display in his closet, the stranger’s own shirt announcing his guilt to the waking world in great, blinking Helvetica: CAUTION—I AM A POTENTIAL SEXUAL PREDATOR.

  There had been an attack a week before his sentencing. He’d overheard his public defender discussing the matter with a bailiff in amused whispers. He still remembered the man’s name—Freddie Bolson. On the second night of a twelve-year term for child pornography, someone in general population had torn out Freddie’s throat with a jagged wedge of aluminum. There were no witnesses.

  That had been the first night Chang had really cried—not the showy sobs of his arrest, but a private, keening wail he’d not known himself capable of, a death song from his throat, his eyes, all the tender spots of his body. But after the sentencing, his attorney had explained that there had been a trajectory change. Bolson’s sacrifice meant Chang’s survival. He would be held in a new wing for protective custody. He had been rerouted.

  The next morning, Morton called on the hall phone and gave instructions for the city bus. Chang made some instant coffee and carefully slid into the shirt, finding it heavy and strangely cold, as if wet. Next to the kitchen he found a wood-paneled room holding bare, discolored cloth couches. No one was home. When there was nothing else to do and no more time to linger, he stood by the front door for a long moment, remembering Freddie Bolson, tenderly caressing the knob as if he could coax the house into allowing him to stay.

  Nothing happened on the two-block walk. The bus stop, deserted, hid no ambush. The driver looked at the awful words on his shirt and pointed to a small slot for dollar bills. Fellow riders bobbed along indifferently. Public transportation brought Chang through neighborhoods that looked distinctly familiar, and at a particular intersection he stepped out into welcoming sunlight. Boxy cars raced past toward more pressing matters. Across an expanse of asphalt he saw his destination, a shopping mall he distantly remembered attending in a past life.

  Morton waited inside. He made a motion for Chang to follow, leading him through a wide corridor of unlit vending machines to an empty concourse. “You are now an employee of Pretzel Connection, Sheldon.” Morton pointed to a small food stand, bracketed by comically oversized wagon wheels and shielded by a large cloth umbrella from the overhead air duct. Chang circled the food cart, finding a fresh paper hat and still another clipboard thick with forms. “These,” Morton said, resting one finger on the paperwork, “you will need to read.” Chang nodded.

  “Money goes in this lockbox here, Sheldon. You do not accept tipping. Bus schedules, wages, your W-2, lunch times, supervisor phone numbers? It is all included on your clipboard. There’s a map of the mall that way,” Morton pointed, not smiling. “You will not enter the mall any lower than level six. That injection anklet you wear has a tracking device on it. I can tell where your leg is anywhere in this state, give or take a foot. I can be here in three and a half minutes. That’s clocked. I find your leg below level six? I find you loitering where you’re not supposed to? I will kill you. Believe that I have that authority. Do you understand?”

  Chang nodded again, stuck on the first page of the Pretzel Connection paperwork: PLEASE READ THIS NOTICE. IT LIMITS OUR LIABILITY.

  “Say it out loud, nice and clear.”

  “I understand,” Chang said.

  Some nights he could feel the anklet giving him spider kisses, seeping its antidote into his dreams, making him logy for the bus ride to work. Behind his Pretzel Connection station, a wall of brown butcher paper covered the glass entrance to an abandoned JCPenney. Chang would keep his back to this, uncomfortable with the darkness peeking out from behind the curled paper. At least a hundred feet of old tile stretched in front of him before the railing of the terrace. Past that, he saw rows of vacant retail space, some units shuttered with steel roll bars, some framed in streaked glass.

  From this vantage point, he could see only one functioning business: Cutlery Connection. He’d spent his first two lunch breaks eating jalapeño pretzels and window-browsing the store’s useless nostalgia—old gas station signs, rounded Betty Boop lunchboxes, tacky tin wall hangings of Princess Di and Madonna. Blazing track lights lit up the window’s centerpiece, a beautiful collection of knives labeled, in flowing old-timey cursive, The Mariner Collection. In his past life, he used to wander through stores like this, fantasizing what he would buy everyone for Christmas if he had been compelled, by forces unknown, to shop at one store only.

  Some days Pretzel Connection had no customers. When they did, it was always lone men, stragglers from the parking lot, oblivious to his animated shirt. On his fifth lunch break, Chang finally walked to the railing and peered over. The mall continued underground for at least twenty stories, maybe more; his eyes were bad. The dull roar he’d mistaken for air conditioning had been a distant river of shoppers.

 
; On his second Wednesday of freedom, he was rereading his employee handbook, memorizing random paragraphs.

  “Hello? Is anyone here?”

  He looked up to see a small woman grasping the railing with one hand, leaning blankly toward the space he occupied.

  “Yes. Right here.”

  “Do you sell pretzels?”

  “Pretzels. I do sell pretzels.”

  “I know this is a long shot, but do you still carry the mango ones?”

  He checked his clipboard, surprised to discover that he did indeed have a half dozen mango pretzels in the hold.

  “Yes,” he called out.

  “Oh, good! Good! Keep talking and I’ll walk to you.”

  He put his paper hat back on, feeling like a ghost.

  “What do you want me to talk about?”

  She smiled, producing a tiny silver cane and lightly tapping each tile once.

  “That’s good. Anything.”

  “Well, you’re getting closer.” He realized that her eyes were not still, but slowly moving, as if examining huge works of overhead sculpture.

  “I just heard this morning that there was one of these pretzel carts on the top level, and I’ve been craving these all week. Even though I didn’t want to get my hopes up.”

  “You work in the mall.”

  “At The Secret Garden. The bookstore. Not the lingerie place.”

  “I haven’t been down that far yet.”

  She was close enough for the faint glow of his shirt to illuminate her features, like old neon.

  “Really. Are you new here?”

  “Yes. Second week.”

  “Ah! Well, allow me to officially welcome you to the southeastern corner of Heritage Park Mall. I’m Astrid.” She offered a petite hand in his direction, the cane retracting into the other palm with a smooth mechanical motion. He realized she resembled an older, shorter Ingrid Bergman.

  “I’m Chang.”