The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

by Jonathan Lethem

  I got down from the bunk. I had another place for the fury to go, a place where it might have a use. I only had to get myself to that place before I thought twice.

  Dinner was meatballs and mashed potatoes covered with steaming grayish gravy. I took two cups of black coffee aboard my tray as well. I turned out of the food line and located Lonely Boy, sitting with his seconds at a table on the far side of the crowded room. Before I could think again I headed for them.

  “Hey, lonely boy, you want to sit?”

  I flung the tray so it spilled on all three of them. I was counting on that to slow the other two; all my attention would be on Lonely Boy. I knew I’d lose any fight that was a contest of strategy or guile, lose it badly, that my only chance was blind instantaneous rage. So I went in with my hands instead of picking up a fork or some other weapon. For my plan to work, Lonely Boy had to live. With what I knew was in me to unleash, however, his life seemed as much at risk as mine.

  They pulled us apart before very long, but I’d already gotten my hands around his throat and begun hitting his head against the table, rhythmic revenge. One of his seconds had taken a tray and lashed open my scalp with it, and my blood was running into my opponent’s eyes, and my own, and mixing with the coffee on the table. The voices around us roared.

  Back in the hole for the night that followed, I screamed, bled, shat. I shoved the morning tray back out as it was coming through the slot. I attacked the men that came for me. How much was pretense I can’t really say. Maybe none. When they got me into the shower I calmed down somewhat. I didn’t feel human, though. I felt mercenary and cold, like frozen acid.

  They put six stitches in my scalp in the prison hospital and led me to another, larger office, with more file cabinets and chairs, more ashtrays. Graham was there, with two other men. One of the others did the talking.

  Those others were my margin, I knew. My glint of light.

  The one who spoke asked me about the fight.

  “if I’m put back in the block with him, one of us will have to die,” I said simply.

  I could see a look of satisfaction on the face of the other of the two men, not Graham. I assumed Lonely Boy had been trouble to this man before. I assumed too that I’d done damage. I smiled back at this man, and I smiled at Graham.

  Graham kept his face impassive.

  The man who was talking explained to me that Lonely Boy was an established presence on block nine, that he had more support than might have been apparent—did I understand that?

  “Move me upstairs,” I said. “As far away as possible. If I see him again, I’ll have to kill him.”

  The one who was talking told me that I’d likely find men like Lonely Boy wherever I went in the prison.

  Nobody said the word rape.

  “I’ll never be in this position again,” I said. “I can promise you that. Nobody will ever be permitted to make the mistake he made.”

  The man raised his eyebrows. The other one, the smiling one, smiled. Graham sat.

  “Just move me,” I said.

  “We don’t let prisoners make our decisions for us, Mr. Marra,” said Graham.

  “Your unusual handling put me at a disadvantage in the situation, Mr. Graham. If you keep me on block nine, I intend to be treated like the other prisoners.”

  The man who had been talking turned and looked at Graham, and in that moment I knew I would be transferred.

  “Unusual handling?” said the man who’d smiled. He directed the question at me, but it was Graham who spoke.

  “He presents unique difficulties,” he said. “His father is in the prison. In the wall. I thought it was better to address it directly.”

  I took a leaf from Floyd’s book. It was pure improvisation, but my skills at lying were improving rapidly. “He isn’t my father.”

  The smiling man made an inquiring face.

  “He knew my mother, I guess. But she told me later he wasn’t my father. He’s just some guy. Just another brick to me.”

  The smiling man smiled at Graham. “This doesn’t seem to me to require special treatment.”

  “I had the impression—” Graham began.

  The smiling man laughed. “Apparently mistaken, Graham.”

  Graham laughed along.

  Graham never spoke to me again, though I lived in fear of some reprisal. I would see him moving through the corridors with the men in charge of my block or other blocks and think he was about to point a finger at me and say, “Marra, come with me,” but he never did. I don’t think he cared enormously. It might have been some relief to him to be able to say to the man behind the desk that I’d slipped away. Graham was a man with a difficult job and dealing with the man behind the desk was clearly not an easy part of it.

  I never saw the man behind the desk again.

  He was a sadist and an idiot. The two were not mutually exclusive, I understood after that day on the roof. The agency or service he worked for had assigned him the task of tracing a conspiracy he was a member of himself. Sending me in to question my father was just ritual activity. He might have been curious to know whether Hemphill had talked about what was happening to him, but he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t even bothered to wire the cell, or he’d have know how I came up with horseshoe crabs. Until I’d panicked him, triggered his paranoia with that bluff, he was just making a show of activity by torturing me. And keeping himself entertained, I suppose, killing time on an absurd assignment.

  The only deeper explanation was that I’d become a kind of stand-in for Carl, the other young prisoner they’d had in their grasp. He’d been theirs, for a time, and then he twisted loose, became history. I don’t know if what he did was a disastrous perversion of their plans, or whether it served them, but I sensed that either way they experienced a loss. The mechanism of control was more precious than any outcome. I’d become the new instrument, the new site where control was enacted. Until I broke the spell.

  As for Carl himself, I hadn’t learned much about the tortured prisoner and would-be assassin, and I didn’t have any interest in trying to learn more. The image of my thirteen-year-old friend had been obliterated without anything taking its place. I didn’t object. He was just a ghost now, and there were plenty of more substantial ghosts available, in the wall.

  I became another prisoner in a cell, living out my hours, hoarding my grudges, protecting my back. I spent days in the weight room, years in the television room. I told lies to make the time pass. The rest of my story was no different from anyone else’s, so in the telling I made it as different as I could. I learned to use the phrase fuck the wall, though like a million other cowards I never tried it.

  I didn’t see my father again until a week before I left the prison, when I was granted a minute in my old cell.

  Billy Lancing was still the same. He looked me over when I came in and said, “Marra?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I remember you. Where’d you go?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Well, I remember you.”

  I climbed up into the top bunk.

  Ivan Detbar was dead, his eyes stilled. I recognized it instantly by now. John Jones was still raving, but more quietly, not looking for an audience anymore.

  My father was still alive, if that’s the word for it, but someone had pried out his other eye, splintering the stony bridge of his nose in the process.

  His mouth was moving, but nothing was coming out.

  “Floyd’s not good,” said Billy.

  I went over and put my hand on him. He couldn’t feel it, of course. I was touching my father, but it didn’t matter to either of us.

  I wondered if it was Graham or the man behind the desk who’d removed the eye, in some offhand act of revenge. It could as easily have been a living prisoner, someone in that top bunk who’d taken offense at too much attention, or at some joke.

  Floyd, like Billy, had listened fairly well. That was the only real difference between him and the hundreds of other bricks I’d m
et by that time. What had happened between him and Carl was absurdly simple, but the man behind the desk was puzzled, because it wasn’t supposed to happen to an assassin-in-training, or to a human brick. They’d become friends. Floyd had expressed his dim, blundering sympathy, and Carl had listened, and been drawn out of his fear.

  Which was more or less all Floyd had done with me.

  Had he pretended not to know me, pretended not to make the connection between my stories, my family history, and his? I’d stopped wondering pretty quickly. I had more immediate problems, which was part of his point, I think, if he was making one.

  Bricks only face one direction.

  I let my hand slip from the wall, and left the cell.

  SLEEPY PEOPLE

  He was no danger to her. Judith Map felt that immediately. He lay on the porch, one arm flung out across her doormat, obscuring the word WELCOME. She’d come home late from work. The street was silent, apart from crickets chirping and a far-off siren. She could see his chest rise and fall calmly. She turned her key in the door and stepped past him.

  Inside, she switched on the porch light, and looked at him through the glass pane at the top of the door. He wore jeans and workboots, and a tee-shirt which read QUICK’S LITTLE ALASKA. It was the name of the bar at the corner where her street met Schermerhorn Avenue, three blocks away. It was called Little Alaska because of the air conditioning.

  A car pulled into a drive up the street, headlights flaring over the porch where he lay. Another of her neighbors coming home. The street led nowhere, and the only cars that went past were cars that belonged to houses there. Nobody on her street walked except Judith. But the man on the porch must have walked, or been carried. From the bar, she guessed.

  She opened the door and lifted his arms and shoulders from underneath and dragged him across the threshold. His head lolled. The carpet at the entry bunched under his back, so that she had to nudge it away with her toe. She grunted, heard her own rough breath. His was still calm. She draped his arms over his stomach, and stepped out onto the porch. No one was watching. She shut the door.

  She dragged him a little farther into the room, to the space between the sofa and the coffee table. She felt a little trickle of sweat under her arms. It was enough, she’d moved him enough. She went to the kitchen and filled a glass with water. When she went back in to look at him she was struck by the beauty of his features at rest. She felt she understood him. Though she didn’t understand how he had gotten to her porch.

  She’d heard about the sleepy people, but she’d never met one before.

  She climbed over the back of the sofa and sat with her legs crossed and peered down at him. Her heart was beating fast. She wasn’t frightened. She wondered if she should bring him a blanket, then remembered that the sleepy people conserved energy, kept themselves warm. He’d been on the porch, after all. Though really this was the kind of night where it was as warm outdoors as in. A perfectly calm night, as if it had settled itself around his sleeping body. She was the only thing agitated, her breath unsteady. But she wasn’t frightened.

  Should she move him back to the porch? He might have wanted to be there. He fit nicely between the couch and the coffee table, though. She climbed over the back again, and went to her bedroom door. From that vantage he was completely out of sight. What if someone were looking for him? It would be someone from the bar, from Little Alaska. They might have left him here just because they couldn’t carry him anymore, intending to come back. Certainly her neighbors wouldn’t leave a sleepy man on her porch. But the people in the bar, the militia, never left the bar. She tangled again in the mystery of his arrival on her porch.

  It didn’t matter. She was suddenly exhausted. She pictured herself stretched out on the sofa, alongside him but perched above. It was absurd, she decided, and thrust it aside. She went into the bedroom and locked the door, quickly. That too was absurd; she might as well have left him on the porch. It was as though she wanted to abdicate the house to him and reduce her own space to the single room.

  She unlocked the door, and left it ajar. She could see the back of the sofa from her bed. She could hear him breathe.

  She didn’t dream, but woke thinking of him. She got out of bed to check; he was still there. His arm was threaded through the legs of the coffee table. She pictured him flinging his arms, gesticulating in the night. Otherwise he lay there exactly as she’d left him. She went to the kitchen and made herself coffee.

  When she was ready for work she lifted his shoulders again and dragged him around the other side of the sofa, and back out to the porch. She didn’t want to lock him inside. What else she wanted wasn’t clear, but she shouldn’t lock him inside. Her back grew strong from moving him daily, she imagined reading in an eighteenth-century novel. His boots clunked, one after another, over the doorjamb. She propped his head and shoulders slightly, just because it seemed righter for daytime. Anyone could see him from the street.

  There were only two other people left in her office, Tom and Eva. There had been six people working there when she started, two years before. It was telephone work. They were collecting information. The information was highly specific: the price of carpets and hardware, the cost of garbage collection and plumbing repair. The rent board had hired them to study the legitimacy of an appeal by the commission of landlords for a cost-related increase in fixed rents. She conducted phone interviews with suppliers, repairmen, and landlords picked at random. They weren’t necessarily the landlords who’d requested the increase, and they didn’t always understand the questions she asked.

  Halfway through the morning she called Eva’s cubicle instead of the next number on her list.

  “A sleepy man came to my house,” she said.

  “Sleeping?” said Eva.

  “He’s sleeping, yes. But sleepy, also. One of the sleepy people.”

  “Do you have any houseplants?” said Eva, whispering.

  “Yes.”

  “They make plants grow,” said Eva. “If you put them in the same room. Also sharpen razor blades.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s all I know. I better go, I’ve got a call.”

  “Thanks,” said Judith.

  “Sure. I think you have to put the plants pretty close to them.”

  “Okay.”

  She went back to work. She knew that Eva and Tom spoke on the phone between their cubicles all the time. Tom and Eva were in love, she guessed. They never spoke in front of her.

  She walked home a little early. He was still there, propped beside the door where she’d left him. She realized she’d been holding her breath. The evening sun cast the whole porch in yellow glaze, and the sleepy man seemed to her like a diver figurine resting at the bottom of a golden aquarium. She almost didn’t want to intrude. But she went past him, let herself in, dropped her keys on the sofa. There was half a casserole in the refrigerator; she moved it to the oven.

  She poured herself a glass of wine to go with the leftovers, and sat drinking and just nibbling, poking at the food. Through the window the porch framed a sunset that glowed and died like an ember. The street was very quiet. He was still outside, his head just below the window frame.

  A dog barked. It was night. She thought of how it wasn’t safe to leave him out all night. There were the people that roamed making trouble, the dinosaurs. They sometimes found this street, though it led nowhere particular, though it was just one of so many residential streets. She’d heard them, and seen her neighbors’ torn-up lawns, wrecked mailboxes. A sleepy person would be a natural target for the dinosaurs.

  Every sleepy person should have someone to take care of them, she thought. That seemed simple enough.

  She went out and lifted his shoulders and dragged him inside. This time she got him up onto the sofa, first sitting him against it, then hoisting him up like a baby into a car seat, finally swinging his legs up so that he turned and sank against the pillows. She closed the curtains and got her wineglass and brought it over and sa
t with him, perching her buttocks on the lip of cushion left free. The margin wasn’t enough, and she slid down to the floor between the sofa and the coffee table. She’d taken his place.

  She emptied her glass and put it on the coffee table. Outside, the dog barked again.

  She turned in the little coffin-like space and was faced with his middle. His Little Alaska tee-shirt had bunched up where she’d gripped him under his shoulders. His stomach was almost black with hair. It whorled in a devilish vee in and out of his navel and into his jeans. She was very close, having turned there. She propped herself with her elbows on the coffee table. He wasn’t fat but the jeans were tight on his hips, and there was a pinkish imprint of seam where they pinched his flesh. His fly was fastened with steel buttons. She undid the first. She could smell him a little. Her mouth tasted like wine.

  The buttons had worn out their buttonholes. She only had to nudge them apart. His penis was beating slightly, like it had a little heart of its own. She covered it with her hand, then put her lips to her knuckles. His hair tickled her nose. Under her hand his penis was twitching, growing in little throbs. His chest rose and fell as steadily as before.

  She pushed the backing cushions off the sofa to make room to fit her knee, and moved his arms up above his head, so that he resembled some sculpture she’d seen, a saint or slave carved in marble. But with stubble. Saint Stubble of Little Alaska, she thought. His erection was taut against his stomach now, the dewy pink head nestled in his black hair.

  She slipped out of her underwear and clambered on top, then reached down and placed him with her hand. She was very wet. He sighed. She imagined that he was pretending to be asleep. But he wasn’t, really. She moved slowly, keeping him inside. The backs of her thighs were a little cold.

  She brought herself to orgasm, bracing her other hand against his collarbone, not hurrying. She pitched forward. He grunted gently. Outside the dog was barking. She slid to the side and then, knees a bit tangled in her stockings and skirt, to the floor below him again.