Even so, the religion professor informed the librarians that he believed that students were sent to the university to learn the truth, not to learn that the truth can shift based on circumstance, context, or perspective.
“Bringing pressure and light onto this work will give you a point of reference, an anchor from which you’ll make better judgments when you are assisting the young minds that come to you for help,” he told them.
The other librarians, who noticed the religion professor’s fondness for their younger colleague, urged her to dissuade him from his campaign. One day she decided to try to engage him in a group discussion.
“Would you be willing to discuss this, perhaps with my colleagues and me?”
“Perhaps you and I should get together and lay the groundwork for the meeting. I know of an excellent restaurant. They know me there and would set aside a room for us.”
She didn’t blush as he expected. She had approached him with a rock in her gut. Before the arrival of The Report, mortgages, car payments, and college tuitions had been in the balance. The religion professor may have known that or he may have been as oblivious to it as he was to the line of students that preceded his turn in front of the Librarian. In either case, he appeared to her now in a strange unflattering light. She refused his offer with a lack of emotion that caused him to squint at her as if she had suddenly become difficult to see.
She managed to create a media campaign to inoculate the library and The Report against the religion professor’s attack. The university hierarchy noticed a serious increase in inquiries and applications that seemed to coincide with the mailing of the Ban Barriers, Not Books brochure (though in truth, the increased interest was based on the play, which the Librarian had not read) and decided to promote the Librarian to Media and Public Relations.
Now, here she was, walking back to her office with a strange grade-schooler in tow after having been kept waiting for no apparent reason, having been effectively refused a meeting with her boss on the eve of a crucial news conference. On top of everything else, her distress over her demotions of the past few months began to feel like garbage she’d forgotten to take out. Back in her office, she tried to distract herself with a casual check of her e-mail and found a layoff notice from her boss, sent while she had been waiting outside his office. She called the Girl’s father, told her to wait there in the office, and marched back up to the administrative area.
The Librarian’s boss was about to send out his news release announcing that he would soon have an announcement (he intended to run for mayor and cut labor costs dramatically with “an ingenious new computer program to help and direct citizens that need help and direction without all the fussy human inconsistencies, moods, meal breaks or pay scales”); the consultant was just about to call a therapist; the Girl’s father had finally arrived at the library to pick her up; the Girl had just added the last word to her revised essay (complete with her new treatise on the relationship of silver and black being more symbiotic than that of black and white, later to be cited as her first serious art theory text) in preparation for the next news conference (whenever that might be scheduled); and the Librarian had surprised herself by hefting a fairly heavy chair over her head in preparation for bashing down her erstwhile boss’s door, when the news hit the media.
The Teacher, who didn’t own a computer, had dusted off her television and was struggling with a distorted picture and no audio when she recognized the elephant’s hide. There was video of the elephant’s guards hugging each other and weeping along with some seemingly unrelated footage of a place called the Deep Seven. Someone placed a hand over the camera lens and it all went black.
The Whistling Dragon or Every Boy’s First Murder
There’s something supernatural about the way he walks.
There’s something supernatural about the way he talks.
Coming from another world I know he doesn’t find it easy
–Anthony Moore, “The Secret”
The Librarian
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never starved or been without shelter. I haven’t done physical labor for pay since I stopped waiting tables. But you’re reading this mostly because I’ve had desperate jobs; every one of them has turned into something that would never be on any job description unless you worked for the mafia or the CIA. In each case, the real description was unwritten and what was written described only a fraction of what was real or was an outright lie. Now, I know there are folks out there thinking that sounds cool. It’s about as cool as going to a nice hotel and finding out you’ve checked in to a prison. It got to the point where I had to look up the history of the phrase “pig in a poke” because it was on a loop in my skull.
You would not think a degree in library science, especially coupled with a degree in mass communications, would lead to a desperate job. The thing is, I was better at media relations than library science and ended up with what I thought was a media job at a library. As many twists as there are to that story, it’s fairy tale-simple compared to what happened afterward: assault charges, being sued for property damage, a bit of jail time, and then things got interesting.
***
When it comes to jobs, I have always admired Marx, Freud, and Einstein. Don’t get me wrong. I am not really a Marxist and Marx had it pretty rough actually. Freud was a sexist pig and I am sketchy on the details of the general and specialized theories of relativity. I am not male, Jewish, German, or Austrian. What strikes me about what I call “The Big Three” is their unparalleled influence on the last century (the twentieth) and how that influence came strictly and utterly from what they wrote. It wasn’t their money. They commanded no armies, held no public office. They published what they thought and set one whole century on its ear. I’ve decided that’s the job for me. I am seriously revamping my resume.
So far, whenever someone’s taken notice of me because of what I’ve written, I’ve ended up holding the bag, the poke with the above-mentioned pig. Even friends, people seriously in my corner, wound up leading me to what turned out to be a dark alley. It wasn’t their fault. They weren’t in control, and it’s about control, trust me. This latest job I’ve lost sort of started with me trying to reduce my jail time. My only tools were my words and my library science. All things considered, I was relieved to be in an institution with virtually no physical violence and fairly professional staff. (I heard stories from inmates transferred from other facilities, tales that would put hair on your teeth, believe me.) But a relatively nice lock-up is still a lock-up.
The first thing I did was whip the library into shape. Staff told me the Dewey was too complicated for most inmates to follow. I actually used that to my advantage. I told folks the COs didn’t think inmates were smart enough to check books out of the library like everyone else. Many didn’t care, but, those that did raised enough of a stink to get the Dewey in place. Next, I needed people to work the desks. I decided to train folks with relatively little time to do. I pleaded with them to send news releases to the media when they got out. I wrote the releases. All they had to do was send them and answer the inquiries about the library with the training and verbiage I gave them: how they’d been “inspired to pursue library science as a career after incarceration” (whether they intended to or not). A couple of folks actually contacted the media. It worked. News crews were at the prison gates a few weeks after the first release went out.
I should explain something here. I don’t like being on camera, in front of the mic, or even talking to print folks (in that order of most to least egregious). Ideally, I come up with the ideas that get other people publicity and stay out of the spot. But I had to bite the bullet on that one. PR for other people was not going to get me out. The only good thing about my reticence was that I didn’t have to pretend not to want to be out front. You can check the YouTube clips (Books Behind Bars). I was not ready for prime time. My shaky, pale, deer-in-the-path-of-a-freight-train look belied the months of hard work I had put into getting my story
out, but seriously added cache in terms of sincerity, not creating the library strictly for publicity, blah, blah, blah.
Even so, that wasn’t enough to get me released. In fact, one inmate told me I would be inside at least six months for every day my victim spent in the hospital. I don’t know where that formula came from but it didn’t bode well. My erstwhile boss had spent four days in the hospital after the door fell on him. I asked the woman with the formula if follow-up doctor visits counted and she said she’d have to get back to me on that.
What the library story got me were privileges. The warden allowed me to create a library newsletter both print and online. The online version could be seen by people on the outside. That’s how my friends, a former co-worker (of sorts) and her uncle, found me, and that’s what they used to eventually get me the gig that helped reduce my time.
Ironically, I despised my ex-co-worker when I first met her. Things were rocky even after we became friends. But when she stepped through the door of that visiting room, when I saw light on a face I knew from the outside and I realized no one else had come to see me, my tears streamed. I was so focused on what I had lost; I didn’t even realize my cheeks were wet until she told me. You just don’t know.
***
The CEO
I thought I had given my unfortunate, would-be biographer the “slip” as they used to say, and the Deep Seven seemed like a chance to put the last nail in a coffin I was only too glad to see closed. I could now give up on my “story” to the extent that it was mine. It had collapsed from under me (something I had in common with the former owners of the DS), turned on me, become public and out of control.
I could have tried to invest the money I had left from my salary and, along with my options, had enough to live anonymously, that is to say alone. But that seemed a bleak fate and the Seven offered me a chance to keep my distance and to acquire friends as guests. The place would have to remain closed for a while and reopen with a new name and feel, but with no “under new management signs,” no markers of the transition. One day it would simply be what it is now, “The Whistling Swan,” and everyone would have to accept that or create his, her, or its own answers to the questions about how or why it had changed.
I don’t know how much you know about so-called real estate transactions, but they can be nefarious deals, especially if you want to avoid being part of the public record, and there is little I wanted more than to avoid the public record. You must hire a lawyer. Is there anything stranger than having a stranger handle private details and information in order to guide you through a system that is anything but private? I have had to do that twice now, once to buy the building that became the Whistling Dragon, and the second time in a vain attempt to avoid Texas’s rather active death row. In a way, I was lucky to be on the American continent and in the US, as the legal system here works fairly well. But, even in the US, it works better in some places than it does in others and better for some than it does for others. Had I not virtually run out of money (what I didn’t pour into the Dragon went to bribes, leaving relatively little for legal), and had my first crime not been in a state with, as my biographer put it, “an ironic and noxious blend of the Puritanical and the reptilian,” things may have been different.
Even so, as time goes on and the effects and affects of the experiment fade, I have become less and less bothered by the notion of death, that is to say, the human sense of legacy. The strange interplay of memory, nostalgia, and hope is leaving me. Once this is over, it is over. How a species that has been able to determine the age of the Earth, extend its lifespan, and send objects to the edges of the galaxy could fear death or regret the past—to say nothing of believing in things for which there is little or no evidence, God and the afterlife for example—will be a mystery long after I am dead, reverted, or both.
Of course, in terms of the afterlife, there was also the speculation of the Veiled Woman, yes, the very one that virtually closed the place with her arias and Bible-burning song. She’d walked into the venue a “true believer” in the aforementioned peculiarly strict form of Christianity that hails from the south. After some time though, she imagined that the afterlife may be as mysterious to “us” as this life is to a creature in the womb, that just as there is no way to convey to even the brightest fetus the complexity and enormity of the natural world or human society, what awaits humans at the other edge of life may be equally beyond our grasp.
Speculation has become one of my principle pastimes here on death row. I have tried to imagine what would have happened if my desire to be with people, albeit at a certain distance, had faded from me before the Deep Seven went up for sale. I probably would have invested my money and lived until I disappeared. My appetites would have changed. I may have avoided the light (I am writing this now with lights out, surely a residual of the old form) and probably would have been discovered one day by a surprised accountant or servant (would I have hired people to “keep” the house?) only to be summarily squashed. News of my disappearance would’ve made the headlines. My death would be nothing more than a strong assumption, a conclusion as unavoidable as it would have been without evidence. One moment I was present and accounted for; the next, inexplicably gone, when, in fact, I’d have become both invisible and unwelcomed.
***
The prison chaplain is a slightly pudgy, kindly man. I overheard the guards say he looked like he probably used to have his lunch money taken from him as a child. For all their chiding, he is a man of great and subtle gifts. Including my trial lawyer, he is the first person that truly understood my confession. Not that he believed how I killed. That seemed incredible even to him. What he reflected and what I began to understand for the first time was what was happening to me, how I was focused when I took their lives.
Perhaps you have had a compulsion, a desire that shreds what appeared to be the good steel net of your will, an instinct that collapses time and creates a vacuum that begs to be filled and can only be filled with a certain act, which is to say a certain reality lived through that act, the end sublimated to its means. The prison chaplain understood this, though I doubt he’d ever had such desire. It is an odd, vicious creature he knows not from experience, but from its bloody wake. When we spoke, his eyes never left mine; his expression was a combination of familiarity and loathing, as he nodded slowly and patiently absorbed my quasi-coherent ramblings, my struggle to describe being moved by fire, by a combustion of tangled emotions and rationales that nonetheless left me focused as the edge of a scalpel.
The chaplain’s attentiveness never kept him from his ultimate goal of changing me. Indeed, the more he delved into me, the more he tried to “let God reclaim” my “soul.” Every discussion we had, regardless of where it began, wound up in the same place. He could have been a politician. The media relations person at the company I ran would have kissed the chaplain’s feet for staying so on message. Once, I asked him if prison or at least a place like prison wasn’t the perfect place for someone who didn’t want to engage the world and its vices. I posited to him that it was not just the controlling atmosphere, but how the lack of activities and freedom forced one to focus on the self. The chief effect of all of this was to slow time to a crawl. He asked if I’d ever heard of monasteries, said that those places had all the good and none of the bad aspects of incarceration. But then the chaplain used the subject of time to pivot onto the curious concept of eternity. From there, it was easy to speak of what he believed would happen after we die. He was sincere and oddly nonjudgmental, as if conveying the benefits of exercise or a healthy diet. When I told him I’d had all the transformation one creature could stand, he smiled and almost laughed. It was the happiest I’d ever seen him look.
As I mentioned previously, the Whistling Dragon began life as the Deep Seven. The only remnant from the old days was a music machine I never learned to operate. The first time I saw the place was on a screen. I was sitting with my biographer trying to steer the subject away from me. The program featured
what I had to imagine were scenes recorded in the twentieth century. The images didn’t have the full range of colors or the crisp presence of most images. The sound was different as well. You could actually tell it was coming from the screen. Moreover, the content was fascinating. If the biographer said anything during the first ten minutes or so, I certainly didn’t hear her.
On screen was a man with an oversized but not life-sized doll sitting on his knee. The figure moved and spoke and, at first, I had no idea that it did so at the man’s behest. It took me a moment to notice how very close they sat to one another. Then it struck me how oddly the man held his mouth while the doll spoke. When it all dawned on me, I felt stupid, almost duped. The irony of my confusion struck me like a thunderbolt. I almost doubled over with laughter. The biographer smiled, curiously.
“I thought you were old enough to have heard that joke before,” she said.
In fact, I’d been so fascinated with the scene, I didn’t even realize the man and dummy were telling jokes. Though, indeed, what else could they have been doing? I was able to refocus when the biographer changed the image or the channel. That is when I saw a man identified as Tyrone, the “owner” of the Deep Seven, being interviewed, reluctantly, on the street. He looked nervously between the interviewer, the camera, and the place in the background. He moved away several times, causing the reporter to finally drop all of her questions. Then there were scenes inside a place I could only assume was the Deep Seven. There were no people but, somehow, it did not seem empty. Some chairs were strewn helter-skelter and some sat around square and round tables, as if waiting for patrons. It was dim and cozy with a great deal of dark brown wood.
The Official Report on Human Activity Page 6