Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  HE SAT QUIETLY then, a saddened but prosperous American executive in a good suit, his gray hair neatly barbered, his body still trim even if it had a dozen steel pins and plates and screws in it, and followed the ships out on the water. One of the hotel’s Eurasian prostitutes, dressed not too conservatively, watched him from across the lobby as she sipped a watered-down drink. Alert to the nuanced, late-night moods of international businessmen, and perhaps sensing a certain opportune grief in the stillness of his posture, she slipped over the marble floor and bent close to ask softly if he would like some company, but he shook his head no—although not, she would see, without a bit of lonely gratitude, not without a quick hungered glance of his eyes into hers—and he continued to sit calmly, with that stillness to him. Noticing this, one would have thought not that in one evening he had watched a man die, or made millions, or lied to his banker, or worried that his flesh might never go forward, but that he was privately toasting what was left of the century, wondering what revelation it might yet bring.

  WOMEN’S CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

  BEDFORD HILLS, NEW YORK

  SEPTEMBER 7, 1999

  PAINT A PERFECT BLUE SKY, paint it the color of a robin’s egg or a child’s balloon, then frame that perfect blueness with a double set of forty-foot-high chain-link fences, each topped by five feet of double-bladed steel concertina wire, and on the corners of the compound add a tower with a gray-uniformed guard sitting at the ready with a heavy AR-15—firing capacity two hundred rounds per minute, range three hundred and fifty yards. Now move your gaze inward from those shimmering boundaries across the grass being mowed by a handful of women in forest-green uniforms and toward the irregular compound of brick buildings, some, such as the hospital building, one hundred years old, and all of them in distinctly poor repair—paint peeling from window frames, bricks needing repointing, sidewalks cracked—and past the women in green pushing laundry hampers toward the West Wing psych unit, where more women in green, either delusional, depressed, or criminally insane (including the woman from upstate who killed four babies), sit watching television, rocking ceaselessly as a side effect of the medications, and then you must compel yourself onward, past the building where the women sleep in tiny rooms (adorned with pictures cut from magazines, letters from home, small shrines to children and family) toward a facility that awaits the most contradictory of populations. On the top floor rests a set of cells designed for women sentenced to execution, the possibility of that fate coming courtesy of the solemn campaign promises of New York State’s latest governor, and, on the floor below, a spotless nursery of sixteen rooms for women who have come to prison pregnant, those who have been impregnated by their husbands on conjugal visits (which, though against the rules, happens), or, less frequently, but not unheard of, those who have been impregnated in one of the consensual sexual liaisons that occur between the male guards and the women, the purposes of which, for the women, include the procurement of cigarettes, drugs, food, cosmetics, and, without being confused for affection, a welcome contrast to the flesh of another woman (that form of intimate contact being easy to find; the prison, all there know, is full of women kissing and hugging and diddling and tonguing and finger-fucking each other). Then you come to the small single rooms, where the women have been bedded with their newborns—where, as did their own mothers, they’ve learned to nurse and feed and wipe and whisper their babies to sleep. The hallway outside is gloomy but spotless, and it was here, one afternoon heavy and damp with summer, while pushing her dry mop down the linoleum, that a slender woman of twenty-seven stopped and stood listening, her eyes cast over her shoulder. A tight rope of dark hair hung down her back. She was not pretty, not exactly, but something quieter and more complicated—yes, there was something about Christina Welles that you remembered later, her fierce watchfulness, perhaps, or the silent concentration that suggested an intelligence that had no need to explain itself to others, but watch out if it did. Or you may have noticed the sadness that rested in her face when she was looking down, a sadness she felt but preferred to hide. Or it may have been none of these. What you would not have seen was a face that invited attention, welcomed conversation. Her brown eyes cut sideways at people before she decided whether she liked them, and though she had a rather devilish smile, it was rarely seen. She wished she could be more open and generous toward others, and counted her distrust among the things she did not like about herself. I don’t say enough, she told herself, unless I am angry or in love, and then I say too much. Then I say everything.

  Listening now, she could overhear the ritual that took place each time a woman came to live in the prison nursery with her newborn, a ritual utterly contrary to human nature, yet unremarkable in this place for its bureaucratic regularity, its numbed procedurality; they were taking another baby away from his mother. I don’t want to see this, Christina thought, her fingernails pressing the mop handle. But she lingered outside the mother’s room, just close enough to see the baby boy, whose name was Nushawn, being held by his mother, Shannelle, one last time. The maternity ward administrator, a kindly woman in her forties, watched, too, as did the relative who would take care of Nushawn until his mother was free—years hence. How long, Christina wondered, how long will they let Shannelle hold her baby? The answer was not long enough, never long enough. Now Shannelle collapsed in grief around Nushawn, who, unknowing, patted at a yellow barrette in her hair. Shannelle had come to Bedford Hills pregnant, after she and her sister had gone out one night to buy candy and two men had come up and asked them where So-and-so lived. The girls, nobody’s fools, may have expected an incentive for their trouble, and after a brief negotiation walked the men over to the house in question, a distance of no more than a block, and when they knocked on the door, the police were inside, having just arrested its inhabitants for cooking and selling crack. The two girls got different public defenders, one a realist, the other a fool; Shannelle was assigned the fool, a recent law graduate of Harvard. Her sister agreed to a plea, avoided a trial, and got a year. Shannelle’s lawyer convinced her that she was innocent and that he would make an impassioned defense if she’d allow him to take her case to trial. It was the first time a white, college-educated male had ever shown such an interest in her, and so she fearfully agreed to his proposition. The jury found her guilty in forty minutes, and the judge reluctantly sentenced her according to the harsh edicts of the Rockefeller drug laws, which meant Shannelle received three years to life.

  “All right now,” sighed the nursing administrator, signaling the moment of removal. Shannelle crushed her son against herself, then looked up, eyes full. “You know I’ll just die in here,” she moaned. “I can’t, I can’t.” But her baby was gently lifted from her and placed in the arms of the waiting relative.

  Don’t look anymore, Christina told herself. She pushed her mop along the floor, over the exact edges of linoleum she’d traveled the day prior. The weeks and months were eating at her, going slower, not faster. What at first had been unendurable she had learned to suffer, and what had seemed inconsequential now stood as intolerable. Years were dragging by at the rate of decades, it seemed; time was killing her as it killed all the women there, making them sag and sicken, fatten and wrinkle, taking their hope and children and teeth. She had three years before the parole board would hear her case. Four down, three to go. Of course, seven years represented only the minimum sentence for conspiracy to possess stolen property. The maximum was twenty-five. If you misbehaved, they added time—simple as that, and nearly every other prisoner who reached the minimum sentence returned to prison with a tale of the parole board’s injustice. So you tried to build a behavior record, you tried to be agreeable and silent. Yes, she thought bitterly, here I am, so agreeable, so silent. The word, in fact, was powerless—she’d been so powerless for four years now, had tried to live by the endless fucking rules, and it hadn’t worked. She was not repentant. She was not rehabilitated. She was not “corrected.” How absurd that she’d ended up in prison. S
ure, if she could go back in time, she wouldn’t ever repeat the idiotic behavior that had landed her there. She should have quit before the very last job, told Tony Verducci and Rick that she was done with them, and everything would have been different. Yet knowing this was no consolation now, today. She had to do something, had to find out something about herself. She was willing to suffer the punishment. Maybe she wanted the punishment. She wanted something.

  A urine test cup, in fact. She wanted one of the small, crushable paper cups that the maternity unit used, sealed on the inside so that no fluid seeped out. She needed this cup; she’d been thinking about this cup for two weeks now. If she actually used it as she planned, then she assumed some retribution from the guards would come her way. They punched you out in the showers, or tore up your room on a search, which in her case meant that they’d be eager to confiscate or otherwise ruin her books, the only thing of value to her in her cell. Well, fuck them, and fuck that. The more important question was whether she might be delaying her own parole, if the thing went bad, and as she evaluated the odds, she had to conclude that, yes, she was running a risk. Yet that question remained far-off, theoretical. The problem with Mazy was here and now. Besides, Christina had been good, had avoided fights and taken all the classes she could, and used the library, pathetic and remedial as it was, and generally put up with everyone and their attitudes and their mind games, yet here was Mazy threatened with a couple of months in the SHU by Soft T. For nothing. No, not for nothing. Mazy wouldn’t give the guard what he wanted. Mazy had three children who hadn’t seen their mother in four months, and if she went into the segregated housing unit before they were due to visit in a few days—well, they all would suffer, and who knew what crazy stuff Mazy might try. She’d attempted suicide once years ago, but Christina was less worried about that than she was that Mazy would go into the SHU and then come out crazy or zombied—in which case she’d start to accumulate violations and go back into the SHU for real reasons, and maybe for a long time.

  But Christina couldn’t let that happen. They had an understanding, she and Mazy. She was stronger than Mazy, at least on the outside. But when they lay together, Christina’s head on Mazy’s dark fallen breasts, their delta of stretchmarks strangely beautiful, she felt peaceful. She could rest there, in the smell of talcum powder under Mazy’s armpits and between her legs. Mazy understood. Rest now, baby. Mazy was too good for the place, too good for almost anywhere, which was why she’d been hurt so many times. She wished only to love and be loved, even once confessing to Christina that she wished she could heal babies and children by laying her hands upon them. That she couldn’t was a genuine sorrow to her.

  In the hallway Christina passed Kathy Boudin, the Vietnam-era revolutionary who with others had robbed a Brink’s armored truck in 1981. Boudin, a distinguished-looking older woman now, still organized, still agitated, but for the inmates with AIDS. Some sympathizers had tried to break her out of Bedford Hills years back, rolling a truck up to the chain-link fence. But most of the women were in for crimes far less exotic, drug charges or assault. A good percentage were in for murder—almost always of their boyfriends or husbands. Sometimes their children. You never asked directly what people had done, yet word got around. Many of the nine hundred women there knew one another from the city, and the population included sets of sisters and cousins, and, amazingly enough, even one of grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter.

  Now Christina pushed the mop toward the maternity unit’s kitchen, where Dora was washing out plastic nursing bottles.

  “Okay, I’m here,” Christina called softly. “You get it?”

  Dora, a heavyset woman of fifty, looked up. “No, Miss Metzger locked the closet.”

  “I’ll get it, then.”

  “Oh, honey, I don’t want you to do this,” Dora whispered. She was in for the rest of her life for dropping a television on her sleeping husband’s head and then setting fire to him. She’d seen dozens of younger women thrash and scream and hurt themselves through their time in the prison.

  “Everybody think you going be sorry you do this,” warned Dora. “They catch you doing this, that’s a Tier 3 offense. They throw you in the SHU, where nobody can check up on you, girl. How you going read them books you like? How you going get some sleep and exercise, they throw you in there?”

  “He’s going to put Mazy in the SHU,” Christina said.

  “Can’t be sure of that.”

  “Yes, I can. He’s threatened her over and over, and he knows her kids are coming. He’s putting pressure on her. She’s got her whole family coming this Saturday.”

  “I know.” Dora nodded. “But it’s too dangerous.”

  “Call Miss Metzger for me.”

  “Oh, I don’t think—”

  “Just do it, Dora.”

  The heavy woman shuffled down the hallway, and Christina stood next to the door of the supply closet, which was large enough to hold the maternity unit’s stock of disposable diapers, stacked in jumbo packs to the ceiling, as well as shelves of pacifiers, boxes of ointment for diaper rash, battery-powered breast pumps, and other necessities, including, she knew, the urine test cups.

  “Christina?” came a peevish voice down the hall, followed by an officious jangling of keys—Miss Metzger, the assistant nursing administrator, a stickish woman of forty in red curls who, as far as Christina was concerned, spent too much time with her clipboard and not enough time practicing how babies got made. “Dora says there’s a problem with the closet.”

  “I noticed earlier that you need more diapers,” Christina said.

  “Mmmn, I don’t think so,” Miss Metzger answered with friendly condescension, confident of her tastefully lurid makeup, her third-rate nursing degree, and her ability to choose sensible shoes. “We just got them in a few days ago.” She put a territorial hand on the doorknob.

  This babe looks likes she’s been trying to have sex with her lipstick, Christina thought. “I’ll show you, okay?”

  “Maybe you should finish the hall.”

  “I will, but let me show you.”

  Miss Metzger opened the closet door and stood back. Christina had been in the closet dozens of times and quickly studied the diaper supply, noting the two sizes of diapers and counting the packages.

  “It looks good to me,” Miss Metzger said.

  Christina sighed. “We have eight babies in the ward now, after Nushawn is gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I heard two are coming Thursday?”

  Miss Metzger nodded. “Yes, that’s right”

  “You have twenty-seven days until the next diaper delivery?”

  “Well, I don’t—Let’s see.” Miss Metzger pulled out a pocket calendar scrawled with reminders and appointments. “Yes, it’s twenty-seven days. So”—she swept her hand at the immense wall of diapers—“I think we really do have enough, don’t you?”

  “No, Miss Metzger, I really don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, the babies each use about seven diapers a day,” Christina began, stepping into the closet, the urine test cups on a shelf near her head. “It averages out to that. Seven diapers a day multiplied by twenty-seven is one hundred and eighty-nine diapers per baby until the next shipment comes. So, for the eight babies, it’s one thousand, five hundred and twelve to last them the whole twenty-seven days.”

  Christina paused. She knew her math was right; it always was.

  Miss Metzger nodded importantly. “Okay, I understand.”

  “But two more babies arrive in two days, and even assuming that they arrive with a few diapers each, you’ll need twenty-four days times seven, times two, which is three hundred and thirty-six diapers. Fifteen-twelve plus three-thirty-six is eighteen-forty-eight. The jumbo packages of newborn size you have in there have thirty-two diapers in each. To cover your requirements, you need fifty-eight packs of the newborn size. I count only fifty-four.”

  Miss Metzger stared dully at the wall of diapers.

/>   “But it’s more complicated than that. Three of those babies are almost three months old. They’re ready to start wearing size small in, say, two weeks. If the diapers are too tight, then it’s—it’s a rash of diaper rashes. So, for those babies, you need three babies times seven diapers daily times thirteen days, which is two hundred and seventy-three size small diapers. I see you have there eight packets of the smalls, which contain twenty-eight diapers each. Eight times twenty-eight is two hundred and twenty-four. So, if you bump those three babies up in two weeks, then you’re forty-nine size small diapers short.”

  Miss Metzger stepped toward the wall of diapers, frowning to herself, and that was exactly when Christina pocketed one of the urine test cups.

  “But if you order more size smalls, we can subtract the two hundred and seventy-three diapers from the original total requirement of eighteen forty-eight newborn size, which leaves fifteen seventy-five newborn. That number divided by thirty-two, the number in each packet, comes out to forty-nine-point-two size newborn packets. You have fifty-four. So, if you reorder size small, you’ll definitely have enough size newborn.”

  “I see,” said Miss Metzger uncertainly.

  “But if you don’t order more size small, then you’ll be forced to use size newborn for all the babies all the time. And with the new babies coming, you’ll run out. Let’s see—you have fifty-four packets and you need fifty-eight. That’s four times thirty-two, which is one twenty-eight. At ten babies—three of whom probably have diaper rash because their diapers are now too tight—times seven diapers a day”—Christina glanced at her watch, remembering the problem with Soft T—“seventy diapers every twenty-four hours … and you’re one twenty-eight short … it’s the early afternoon now, so you’ll run out of diapers sometime in the morning of the twenty-sixth day. One day short before the truck comes.”