by Seth Morgan
Z BLOCK
Dawn spread like fire on the Pacific fifty miles outside the Golden Gate, where twin islands like stalagmites pointed rocky fingers to a heaven black with birds. The ocean breathed in long, slow swells, rocking the trawler like a cradle.
In the trawler’s stern stood a fisherman, legs spread for balance, one hand resting on the net winch. He had fished in the lee of the desolate Farallones since boyhood and knew the tides and currents as well as he knew his mother’s face. With narrowed eyes he watched the sea flow in iridescent wrinkles between the island rookeries. Not long now, he thought. He listened carefully to the cries of the frigate birds and cormorants, sweeping his gaze across the waters beneath which his net drifted. He flexed the fingers of his winch hand.
There! Broad flashes beneath the waves, a school of fish turning as one, this way, then that. Netted! He leaned full sinew into the winch, chattering its ratchets. The wheeling birds lifted their cries.
The fisherman smiled feeling the heft of the net. Then he saw the silver bodies, waferthin and bright, tumbling upward. Nearing the surface, the light caught them, gilding them, changing them into golden coins. He locked the winch, pitched the derrick hook over the side, and hauled the bulging, wriggling net from the water. The birds made runs for the net, spearing it with razor beaks. He swung the net over the open deck and yanked the draw rope. The fish cascaded to the deck, moiling, flashbulbing in the rising light, funneling down the open hatch.
But not all the fish. Something was snagging the net, something that didn’t slip and slither. The net swung with its weight. A crab, thought the fisherman. He was used to them. Or a piece of garbage. Plenty of sportfishers spent their weekends at the Farallones tossing trash in the water.
Peering between the overlapping squares, he jabbed at the net with a gaff. Whatever it was was round, festooned with seaweed, he thought at first, a rock perhaps. He jabbed harder, hooking the gaff’s spur in the net, and yanked. The object broke free and fell tumbling to the deck with a soggy crack, and the fisherman cried out. It was a human head, a girl’s head from its profusion of matted black hair cut in bangs; though it was impossible to read the age of the bloated and garishly madeup face.
The fisherman staggered backward, the trawler’s pitch rolled the head after him. It rocked to a rest at his boots, ogling him with bulged eyes ringed with grease. Her cheek had been eaten by fish, baring her teeth in a howl that echoed the cries of the helixing birds and the fisherman’s imprecations.
Washing his hair, Joe leaned up into the showerhead as if it were the boom mike at the Grand Ole Opry, twangtonsilin I’m breakin rocks in Georgia, she’s breakin hearts in Tennessee. Rinsing off, he segued into “Make the World Go Away,” his curtain number when he’d really wrench it up from the gut, echoing blue roadhouse purgatory around the tiled showerroom.
Shutting off the water, he heard solitary clapping and wondered who it could be. He snatched aside the curtain and was staring at Rowdy McGee, who slurped, “I’m here to do just that, make your world go away.” Behind him several underlings traded arm punches and bellylaughs. “You’re going to Z Block, bowelbaby.”
Joe’s eyes flicked to the hooks where his clothing hung. The cap was gone. Terror spilled into his skull.
Joe Sing scoped the Goon Squad swing out of Custody and followed them down to T Wing, though he didn’t enter. He leaned on the Mainline wall gazing out a tall window where the sharp Sierras raked cotton from the sky. Then the wing gates crashed again and out swarmed the Squad frogmarching Joe Speaker in their midst. The Barker was naked. The obsidian stare in the black bandanna’s shadow followed them until Joe Sing was certain where they were headed. Z Block, the terminal Psych Unit. It was time to make that call.
C.O. Ng looked up from his desk in Y-l Pharmacy and smiled at the familiar lanky figure before his desk. Ng was the avatar of the sublimely venal refugee from overseas war games, weaned on Yankee waste and corruption, who fit so seamlessly into state agencies.
“I need to call a lawyer,” Joe Sing said.
“Put in a request slip,” returned Ng’s toothy grin.
“No time.” Sing nodded at the outside line beside the institutional phone on Ng’s desk. It was Joe Sing and his boys who protected Ng’s drug traffic from the Wah Ching. At a snap of Joe Sing’s fingers, Ng’s Jaguar would be repossessed.
“Long distance I have to place through the switchboard …” Sing shrugged. “What’s the number?” Joe Sing passed him the card. Ng picked up the receiver with one hand and took the card with the other, reading aloud, “Marvin Maas …”
Out of the steel elevator the Goon Squad hustled Joe onto the highest security wing in the state of California. Z-3, the third level of Z Block, had no bars. The cells were solid iron boxes running the length of an iron corridor. The convicts were fed through locking food slots like gun slits. Above the slots were riveted narrow ports of twoinch glass. Through these the guards monitored convict movement by the light of yellow dimwatters behind grates in the iron ceilings.
McGee howled to the guards for the keys to the interview room at the head of the wing. He was answered by screams and moans and manic laughter reverberant from the boxes. The iron echoes merged in a single sustained ululation of madness and horror that had yet to abate by the time they entered the room.
Joe was chained to a metal folding chair. McGee ordered his thugs from the room. Blood trickled down Joe’s cheek from a wound opened on his brow when they hurled him in the elevator; he twitched his mouth, tasting its salt. McGee turned another chair backward and sat facing Joe over its back. He extracted a toothpick from his breast pocket and began picking his teeth.
“Life expectancy up here’s less than six months, penis blossom. There’s only one way you’ll get off this wing alive.” Loudly McGee sucked a shred of something barbecued stuck between his teeth, smudging his lips with orange. “Tell me where the Moon is at.”
Joe strained forward in his chains, grimacing with disbelief. “Moon? What is this, an astronomy quiz?”
“You’re a smartass, Speaker. But brains dont matter in Z-3 any more than love in a whorehouse … You robbed Baby Jewels Moses. You ripped a blue diamond. He’s asked me to help him get it back.”
“You took your time …”
McGee chuckled. “Oh, I wasnt going to let you make your little coffee break parole, if that’s what you mean. I knew you caught my little act in county jail. Those bowelbabies who threw me off the tier at San Quentin might have hit my head but they didnt hurt my memory none …” McGee clunked the heavy Teamster ring against the steel plate. “I also know it was you who helped smuggle the jack to those crips, making me a fool … So you see, I was goin to air you out anyway, Speaker.” McGee swung his nerveless leg off the chair and lurched across to stand over Joe. “But now I’m willing to cut a deal. You tell me about the diamond and I’ll let your ass off … What’s wrong? Dont believe me?”
“Ha! Why shouldnt I believe you?” Joe hadn’t meant to betray surprise.
“I get a headache when folks dont believe me,” slurped McGee. “Now where the fuck is it, pootbutt?”
“I dont know what you’re—”
The studded gauntlet nailed Joe on the chin, humming his teeth, gonging his head. He twirled, crashing to the floor with the chair chained to his back. Through blood he saw McGee’s lustrous laceup boots a foot from his head. Bending his knee, Joe braced his foot against the wall. Gathering all his hatred in his lungs, he screamed, springing off the wall, snapping his back to spin the chair so that one of its sharp legs struck McGee’s boot, cutting clear through the leather at the heel, where it was softest, drawing a spurt of blood.
McGee loosed an oath and booted Joe behind his ear. He felt himself slipping down the dark, damp walls of a cold well. From far away, as though McGee leaned over the well, calling down after him, he heard: “I’m not wasting any more time today, Speaker.
You like dope, dont you? You’ll be getting plenty up here. I’ll be back soon to see if you’ve remembered where the ice is … Pleasant dreams.”
Sheer force of will lifted Joe back up the slimy dank walls to peer over the well’s lip at the bloodied boot limping from the room.
He struggled to right himself and succeeded only in turning onto his side with the chair chained behind him. Through a corner of wiremeshed glass in the door, he watched the clock in the Z-3 corridor. For an hour while his blood crusted on the linoleum, he lay waiting. He felt relief hearing the door at last. But then his eyes flew wide with fear.
There were five of them. Four guards and an MTA in white ducks and shirt. The guards carried batons and wore helmets with the smoked Plexiglas shields down. They carried halved prison mattress shields. With their polished plastic head shells and shiny black bubble eyes, they resembled giant malevolent insects.
But the guards at least were familiar. All they could do was beat him, and he was so numb now he scarcely feared that. What iced his heart was the implement upheld by the smiling MTA. A very large hypodermic syringe filled with red viscous liquid like cough syrup.
“No! Dont medicate me down,” he gasped. It was like begging not to be buried alive.
They closed on him suddenly. Half a cell mattress covered his head, muffling his cries as his kidneys were clubbed. He felt his chains removed from the chair and resecured; heard the chair skitter across the linoleum and bang against the wall. A sharp knee savagely pinioned the small of his back to the floor. Hands ripped at his clothes. They were stripping him; he was naked. He felt the sudden prick of cold steel, felt the heavy lowgauge needle slide into his tensed buttocks, the liquid gush into his muscles. He screamed into the stinking batting.
They left him melting into a big muddy puddle on the floor. He spread across the room filling the seams between the linoleum, seeping through the cracks beneath the baseboards. His head lay sidelong on the cool floor watching himself being soaked up.
Now he was flowing down the corridor beneath the bright lights. He was a molten ectoplasmic stream coursing in a smooth, straight bed. He felt nothing but motion. The motion bent suddenly, turned and flowed through rock that opened and closed for it. The sky turned to iron that made rolling thunder. A weak sun shone behind its prison bars.
He was thirsty. It was so dark. But he was thirstier than it was dark. There, an iron sink in the corner. To reach it, he had first to recall all his molecules and command them to resolidify. To do that he had to think. It was harder to think than it was dark. The sun never moved, but he thought it took him days to reintegrate and crawl to the sink and haul himself up and he was just pursing his lips to drink when the iron world thundered again and the iron sky broke with light and he felt the cold deep in his flesh.
Once they were late dosing him. He decided to kill himself. Such a good idea, he smiled. But he was naked, nothing to hang himself with. No zippers to hack open his veins. No matches either to set himself on fire. Crawling along the wall of the cell, he came to the steel shitter and remembered how Roy toilet paroled. But feeling around, he found no flush button. Of course, they’re flushed remotely, his mind groped through its psychotropic mists. And at irregular intervals.
He heard singing and his dopey smile widened. Jumpshout gospel reboant from a nearby box. His senses coalesced sufficiently for Joe to grip his food slot and crawl up to peer through the observation port. There, directly across the corridor, a black’s face filled his observation port singing hallelujah, hallelujuh. The Z-3 guards had the corridor door to his cell open but couldn’t open the inside door to his box. Joe murkily understood them to say he had shredded his blanket, stuffing it between the door and its jamb so there wasn’t enough play to turn the lock’s tumblers. They used sledgehammers to break the lock. He sang “Peace in the Valley,” metering the hymn to the strike and rumble of iron. Louder and louder, big eyes rolled up to home until the box was breached and wildly milling clubs felled him from the port, spraying it with his blood. No easy ways out the back door even of Z-3.
Then they cracked Joe’s own iron box and sank another needle deep in his buttocks.
The hallucinations overlapped and sometimes played out simultaneously. Men in white gowns entered his world through the sky and measured him with calipers. The needlesharp tips measured his head, his limbs, his hips, buttocks, and penis. When they left, he was visited by a formless shadow which spoke, not in the voice of one but many which, differing in their rhythms and pitches and accents, echoed in his iron box with the familiar cadences of his dead, and he screamed and fell through the floor down a corkscrewing tunnel like large intestines which dropped him light as a feather onto the streets of a city he didnt know. And there before his eyes floated a teardrop of blue light. He reached for it; it danced away, just beyond his fingertips. He chased the teardrop up and down the topsyturvy funhouse streets that seemed level, only he kept falling. He lost it and ran to a newsstand to ask where it was and Hymie the Hat spit it in the air, where it gyred wildly before floating through the doors of a strip club. “Enter, enter,” beckoned Pious Wing, tipping his bishop’s miter. “Get you harder than Chinese rithmetic.” Joe chased the tearshaped flame inside. A fat old stripper with a clown’s face and greasy sacklike breasts lay on the stage rasping “Short time, sugar?” and spread her meaty thighs and the teardrop glistened in her cunt like the Devil’s blue cum. Her belly changed to Rooski’s face, and her cunt to a shotgun barrel that popped out the teardrop slow motion. It drifted over Joe’s head. He leaped and caught it finally, only it turned to water trickling through his clenched fingers. The stripclub wall became Whisper’s face, and now the teardrop froze at the corner of his eye becoming a burning point of blue light lancing his skull, then bursting, vaporizing into aquamarine mist …
It was within a misty streetlamp cone of that same color that Joe sat one summer evening when his mother had company and he wasn’t allowed inside the little house. Instead he played with a cockroach in the gutter with a stick. The cockroach was trying to reach a storm grate; Joe blocked its passage, flicked it backward over and over just before it reached its goal. It kept trying, would keep trying forever, when Joe heard his friend Melvin call. Melvin was on his bike; Joe heard the playing card snickering in its spokes. Could Joe come to his house for dinner? He stood and squashed the cockroach and followed the sound of the flickering card down the dark street.
On the wall at Melvin’s house, a mounted fish who had lost a longago battle rolled its dusty eye down at Joe while he munched the salami sandwich. Melvin was talking to his mother in the other room. Joe heard her say never invite Joe to their house, his father was a convict. He leaped up screaming and threw the sandwich at the big stupid fish. He ran from the back of Melvin’s house across the dark yards littered with upended refrigerators and old tires and rusted barbecues. Pounding along the boards of their back porch, he heard his mother’s cries. He burst through the kitchen into the living room. She was bent naked over the back of the couch, crying, and the naked man stood grunting behind her, thumping her, hurting her. On the mantle behind them the boy saw the photograph of his strange young father slouched smoking at a nightclub table, a funny cap like a cop’s tipped back on his tall head. He screamed. His mother’s head flew up. The man jumped back and laughed. His angry purple thing shrank back into its bush. His mother jumped naked around the couch all flapping tits screaming and slapped him …
Only it wasn’t his mother, it was McGee, who had come into his box through the crack in the sky and stood over him. Joe couldn’t hear what he was telling McGee. Something about the moon in Davey Jones’s locker.
Once they took him for a Psychological Review hearing in the Interview Room. He didn’t know how he got there. He felt drool dripping from his mouth but he couldn’t wipe it away because he was chained. A shrink asked him a question he couldn’t understand, though he tried to answer, if only he could tell they
’d let him go, but too much dope, his lips were like a flat tire and all that came out was a flubbery moan. An alarm klaxon went off on one of the lower wings. Joe threw back his head and imitated its howl, laughing and crying at once.
WHAT FEAR REALLY IS
“Rick. Dental was enough for ID. Unnecessary for you to view the head.” The Medical Examiner spoke habitually in shorthand as if dictating autopsy minutes.
“I had to,” he said huskily. “Belinda wasnt only my daughter, she’s the newest subject of an ongoing murder investigation.” With fingers cramped from trembling he peeled the cellophane from a fresh Hav-A-Tampa Jewel.
“Ah-aaah.” The M.E. pointed to the NO SMOKING sign affixed to the tiled wall behind his desk, the sympathetic blinking over his halfmoon spectacles begging Tarzon to understand that rules, after all, are rules, regardless of circumstances.
Tarzon settled for chewing the unlit stogie’s plastic mouthpiece. “Where’d they find the torso?”
The M.E. questioned his own memory, “Dumpster?” Delicately, like drawing a sheet over a cadaver, he folded over the file’s top page. “Yes. Outside Cow Palace. Dumpster already on truck forks, being emptied. Sanitation worker saw torso tumble into rotary jaws. Extracted before much damage.”
“And the cause of death?”
The M.E. looked up in surprise. “Why … decapitation.”
“That much I gathered, Ralph. Maybe I should have asked what means. I’ve seen my share of severed heads, but never one so cleanly cut. Almost like a meat sheer …”
The M.E. leaned back and aimed Tarzon a scholarly squint down the bridge of his nose. “Saw a portfolio once. In medical school. Postmortem cadaver sketches. Victims of the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution. Guillotine.” The M.E. stretched the word into three exaggerated syllables, jumping at the crack of the mouthpiece between Tarzon’s teeth on the last. In a flurry he produced from his desk’s file drawer a quart of whiskey and two Dixie cups. He uncapped the bottle. At the inquiring lift of his brows, Tarzon nodded tightly. The M.E. filled a cup and Tarzon tossed it back, loosing a moan of such desolation that the M.E. asked if he shouldn’t be at home under a doctor’s care.