I don’t think you’re nice, Tom-Tom tells her. I think you’re guilty just like the rest of us.
Speak for yourself, Hamsam says, and a few guys bang their desks in agreement.
Holly smiles at Tom-Tom. She has pale eyebrows, bloodshot eyes. Her nose is long and kind of pointy. She has nice lips, I’ll give her that; they’re pink and have a clear soft shape even without lipstick, which she never wears. No makeup of any kind. I’m watching her carefully, which is something you can do with a person who never looks back, and when Tom-Tom tells her she’s guilty a kind of ripple happens in Holly’s face, and through the ripple I catch something I haven’t noticed before but I realize now that it’s been there all the time, right from day one. Pain.
Tell us about your crimes, Holly T. Farrell, Tom-Tom says.
She’s still smiling. None of your fucking business, Tom, she says.
That’s one day. They run together. All you want is for the weeks and months and years to pass so your time inside can be over like a bad dream and you can get back to your real life, but the longer you’re inside the more your old life is what starts to feel like the dream. And of course I want it back, but the problem is, when do you have the same dream twice?
Nothing changes in here: 425 steps to my maintenance job (always walking on the right side of the yellow line that runs down the middle of every corridor), 320 from there to chow, 132 to chow from D-block. Lights out at eleven, on again at five for the first count. Four more counts, with a standing count at 4 p.m. in our cells. Three stints a week in the weight cage. Four packages a year, but for me it’s usually less because the only family I’ve got is distant, so my packages are always things I order for myself.
My cell: six feet by ten, two metal trays nailed to the wall with mattresses on top that look like old taped-up cushions from patio chairs. No one ever wants the top bunk—people cut each other over bottom bunks—but I like the top because it gives me the best view of our window: five inches wide, twenty-four high. It has some kind of special glass that smears up what’s outside into murky gray shapes, maybe to keep us from masterminding our grand escape, or maybe because a window you can actually see through would just be too nice. But get this: after that second class with Holly when the door in my head opened up, I sat down on my bunk and looked at the window and all of a sudden I could see through it straight to the yard: concrete, fences, guys sucking in fresh air. I practically yelled. But I stopped myself because sudden movements or noises are not a good idea around my cellie, Davis.
Nowadays I can stay on my tray for hours looking down at those figures moving around in the gray. I watch them like I never could if they knew I was there, and I notice stuff: how Allan Beard pulls out the hair in his beard, how Hamsam walks like a chimp. How Cherry turns to the fence and cries when no one’s watching. How Tom-Tom lets the geckos sit behind his ears and climb up his ponytail. It’s better than television.
The hell are you looking at all the time? Davis asks me.
Nothing.
Then why are you looking?
Why do you care what I do?
I don’t give one blessed goddam what you do.
Good. And I go on looking, and Davis goes on hovering, which in a space this size means taking a step toward the window and then a step away from the window and staring at me. Davis is a porter, so he’s always around. He sweeps, he mops the tier halls, and in return the COs never flip our cell and Davis can stockpile shit underneath his bunk, a space that’s officially one half mine. God knows what he’s got under there—shanks, contraband, a bomb for all I know. He tucks a red-and-white checked tablecloth under his mattress so it hangs down to the floor and covers up whatever’s under there. I’ve never lifted up the tablecloth (Davis gets rabid if I go near it) but I’m curious.
I have certain reasons for asking, he says.
Asking what?
What you’re looking at.
And what reasons are those?
You answer my question, I’ll answer yours.
My answer is nothing. I’m looking at nothing.
Bullshit. No one looks at nothing.
No, you don’t look at nothing, Davis. But I do look at nothing.
Well, that’s a poor use of your time.
As far as Davis is concerned, all I do in here is waste valuable time. His whole day is organized down to the minute—hell, for all I know he budgeted an extra five to hassle me about the window. When they first put us together he gave me lectures on self-improvement, on building and achieving and dragging myself out of the muck, that kind of thing, and then at some point he decided it was hopeless. But here’s the funny part: I signed up for Holly’s class to get away from Davis one night a week. And since I started that class, everything feels different—brighter, sharper, a little strange, like I’m starting to get sick.
Davis has a project of his own that drives me pretty nuts, although I try not to give him the satisfaction: he does a daily minimum of seven hundred push-ups in our cell. I have nothing against personal fitness, but come on—seven hundred? We’re talking a level of grunting and sweating and groaning and (by the last hundred) screaming out for mercy that would be hard to take even in a giant space such as a gym. In this little trap it’s a horror show. And I don’t even mean the catcalls from everyone else on the tier about what I’m doing to Davis to make him howl like that. I mean the sheer racket of it.
But around the same time that our window glass got straightened out, Davis’s workouts started hitting me a different way. It happened when I listened to his words. The more shaky and worn out Davis gets from his push-ups, the more the normal words we all say every day start getting mixed up with old words he must’ve used at some earlier point in his life: goon and dildo and asswipe and your mama—words left over from a life that’s long gone. And once I noticed the old words Davis uses I started hearing them everywhere, because this place is a word pit—words get stuck in here, caught from when the clock stopped on our old lives. So now when a fight starts up I don’t walk away like I used to, I crowd in and wait for those ghost words to start coming up. I’ve heard chump and howler and groovy, I’ve heard fuzz and kike and kraut and coon and square and roughhouse and lightweight and freak show and mama’s boy and cancer stick and fairy and party hearty and flyboy and knuckle sandwich (don’t forget we’ve got lifers in here with false hips and false teeth who can tell you tales about rolling bums on the Bowery if you get them going), and I grab up these expressions, I trap them in my head and I save them. Because every one has the DNA of a whole life in it, a life where those words fit in and made sense because everyone else was saying them, too. I save up those words and later on I open up the notebook where I’m keeping the journal Holly told us all to keep and I write them down one by one. And for some reason that puts me in a good mood, like money in the bank.
In the next class I read again and Mel speaks up first, which is surprising because Mel hardly ever talks. Hamsam isn’t there.
I’ve got a reaction, Mel says. Actually, it’s a problem, Miss Holly.
Shoot, Holly says.
Mel clears out his throat and says, kind of formally, I would like to know what’s going to happen next.
Holly waits, she’s expecting more, and when nothing else comes out of Mel and she realizes this is the problem he’s talking about, she smiles. Mel, she says, that’s a good thing; it means the story has engaged you.
No, Mel says, it’s not a good thing. He has a soft panting voice, a high-blood-pressure voice that goes along with his body, which looks fatter every week. How he does it on the shit they serve in here I don’t know. He says, It’s not a good thing because it makes me uncomfortable.
You don’t want to make Mel uncomfortable. He’s big and dumb and dangerous. The word is he tried to kill his wife by grinding up three hundred vitamin C tablets and sprinkling the powder on her clothes and her pillow because someone told him vitamin C was toxic if you inhaled it.
Define uncomfortable, Mel,
Holly says.
I mean like I get an uncomfortable feeling inside me that’s like an empty feeling, it’s a disappointed feeling like I want to know what’s going to happen and I feel bad not knowing, like Ray’s holding out on me. And then I start to have a pissed-off feeling, pardon my French, Miss Holly.
It sounds like you’re describing anticipation, Holly says. And that’s not a problem, Mel. That’s what a writer lives and hopes for.
It’s a problem because being uncomfortable is not what I like, Mel says. The quieter he gets, the more he means it. Tell me what happens, Ray.
Mel, Holly says, and she laughs like she doesn’t believe it. You can’t make that demand. It’s not fair.
I say it’s not fair of Ray to make me wait.
Tom-Tom’s sitting next to me. He picks that desk every week, who the hell knows why. Now he’s twisting and flicking around and finally he turns to me and says, C’mon, Ray. Tell us what happens. You were there, right?
I look at him and smile. I don’t know why I like pissing Tom-Tom off. Maybe because it’s so easy.
See, Ray won’t tell, Tom-Tom says. He’d rather sit there with a shit-eating grin all over his face.
Pardon his French, Cherry says, and he and Allan Beard start to laugh.
I write in my notebook shit-eating grin.
Mel waves away the laughs. You’ve got no reason not to tell me what happens, Ray, he says, and his voice is butter melting in a pan. The way I feel right now, he says, I’ll be personally offended if you don’t.
I have no interest in personally offending Mel. He was in the hole for three months after he stabbed a guy named Julian Sanchez with a toothbrush he’d made into a shank by scraping it over the pavement. Luckily for Sanchez, in the heat of the moment Mel accidentally used the brush end.
But when I start talking, it’s not to make Mel happy. I do it for Holly, to get her to look at me. Being inside turns us back into infants: guys kill each other over a volleyball call, they throw their food and piss and shit because what else is there? What else have we got? And I need Holly’s attention, that’s all. I need it.
Well, I say, the next thing is that Danny’s going to set up that satellite dish he’s brought and call his ex, Martha Mueller.
Okay, Mel says. And say what?
You don’t have to do this, Ray, Holly says, eyes to my left.
The main thing is, I tell Mel, Danny wants to get back together with Martha. But she won’t.
I need the words, Mel says. Right now you’re just making noise in my ear.
Holly’s waiting, but she’s not happy.
Okay, I say to Mel. Here are some words: “Hey, Martha, it’s Danny…. Yeah, I made it okay and I’m here in this old castlewith my cousin and some other people, and I’m thinking about you.” I get a heat reaction in my face, but I keep on going. “I was wishing we could…I was hoping we could—” Now I’m stumbling, hardly getting the words out, and the guys are laughing like mad. Holly, too, she can’t help it. “I was hoping we could start things over again—” Oh, fuck, I groan because I’m having a stroke, I’m dying of shame. I can’t do this, Mel.
He’s the only one not laughing. That was fine, he says. Up until the oh, fuck.
So forget I said, oh, fuck. I won’t write oh, fuck.
Mel pins his blank, mean little eyes on me. Ray, he says, like he’s talking to a kitten. Before, you were painting a picture. You had atmosphere and all that. Now you’re just going through the motions. Your heart’s not in it, man, you’re not painting a picture anymore and that shit makes me uncomfortable. Excuse the French, Miss Holly.
We’re going in circles, Holly says. I say we move on.
No one’s going to move on until Mel gives the say-so. He looks at me. Keep it coming, Ray.
I’m done, I say. Better ask the clown. I don’t even look at Tom-Tom.
Mel says something, but his voice is like a butterfly wing moving, and I can’t hear. Holly takes a step toward the desk, which is where she keeps the pendant with the emergency switch that they all wear around their necks. Holly takes off the pendant as soon as she walks in the room each week. She puts it on the desk, I guess to show that she trusts us. Now she hesitates. If she pushes that button, class is over, and she hates to lose a class. You can tell. Every one is precious to her.
Take your seat, Tom, Holly says, because now he’s on his feet.
Just stretching my legs, Tom-Tom says, and grins his hateful lizard grin at Holly, and I think how small she is in those baggy pants she wears and right then I see how the point of that outfit is to make her look and feel like a man or even a boy, to hide the female under there so she won’t feel weak. By the time Tom-Tom swings around at me, it’s too late. Holly’s nowhere near the pendant and Mel’s up too, moving fast for a fat guy.
I could stop this thing a hundred different ways. Even now, with everyone in motion. It’s that way with violence: a slow quiet opens around it and suddenly there’s all this space to move and rearrange things or shut them down. Or maybe that’s just how it seems later on, when you wish things had gone a different way. I feel Mel and Tom-Tom watching me, waiting for a sign even while they move, but I’m giving them nothing. Because I want it. Something inside me is pulling this way. I feel the mystery of it as Mel takes my desk in his hands and flips it upside down and my head smacks the floor and I lie there with my eyes shut and those electric sparks flying around against the black: I’ve made something happen and it’s happening, now, and I don’t know what it is.
She’s scared, I can smell it. She kneels down and puts her hand on my head and I feel her skin, her palm and thin warm fingers on my forehead and attached to those fingers is a body with life pushing out from inside it. Holly Farrell. Her hand on my head. It’s the weird and terrible way of this place that a little thing, a hand on a head, can matter so much.
I wait as long as I can. Then I open up my eyes and look at her. She looks back: soft worried bloodshot eyes. Pale blue.
Enough drama, she says. Up. And she goes to meet the COs at the door.
Class ends early that day.
Eventually Howard left for town. When he was gone, Danny tracked down the room where he’d slept, gathered up the parts of his satellite dish, and hauled them back through the garden to the round pool. He circled it, trying to figure out which spot would give his dish its straightest shot at that nice blue oval of sky. Now that he was alone, Danny noticed how clear and hot the sunlight was, full of buzzing insects. Also how weeds had squeezed up between the panels of marble around the pool and made them uneven, like they were floating on water. There was a marble bench next to the pool, and facing it from the other side was a sculpted head with a dried-out spigot for a mouth. Danny realized it was Medusa, her angry noggin wrapped up in marble snakes.
The pool stink didn’t bother him now, maybe because he was about to get on the phone. How could a satellite phone affect Danny’s sense of smell? someone’s probably asking. Well, he’d lived a lot of places since moving to New York: nice ones (when it was someone else’s place), and shitty ones (when it was his place), but none of them had ever felt like home. For a long time this bothered Danny, until one day two summers ago he was crossing Washington Square talking on his cell phone to his friend Zach, who was in Machu Picchu in the middle of a snowstorm, and it hit him—wham—that he was at home right at that instant. Not in Washington Square, where the usual crowd of tourists were yukking it up to some raunchy comedian in the empty fountain, not in Peru, where he’d never been in his life, but both places at once. Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny, and it sure as hell was easier to land than a decent apartment. All he needed was a cell phone, or I-access, or both at once, or even just a plan to leave wherever he was and go someplace else really really soon. Being in one place and thinking about another place could make him feel at home, which was why knowing he was about to get on that phone made the pool smell seem faint, a thing he’d already left behind.
&nbs
p; He picked a spot near Medusa and went to work. Danny was no engineer, but he could follow a manual and get a job done. He set up the physical contraption, a long folded-up umbrella that was the actual dish, plus a tripod, plus a keypad, plus the phone itself, which was heavy and fat like cell phones ten years ago. Then he started in on the programming, backing up after each dead end: wrong country codes, foreign operators, recordings in languages he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. He was hearing something, he was connected to someone, and the joy of that after almost seventy-two hours of total isolation got Danny through the snags with a smile.
An hour later he was punching in the password to his New York voice mail, half dizzy from that carbonation he got in his chest whenever a long time had passed since he’d checked it. Each new message starting up made Danny’s heart stretch like it was reaching out for something. And each time, once he realized what the message was, he got a shove of disappointment. Mom: Where are you now? in that worn-out voice he’d gotten so used to it barely made him feel guilty anymore. Bill collectors he ID’d in two words or less and deleted. His sister Ingrid, the spy (how else would his parents have figured out that the restaurant where he was maître d’ing was a “total mobster hangout” within twenty-four hours of her last visit?), Just checking in. Yeah, right. A dozen friends reporting on bars and parties and clubs, all of which was fine but none of which was the thing. Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny’s whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this. Unexpected stuff could hit him like the thing at first: a girl he’d forgotten giving his number to suddenly calling up out of the blue, a friend with some genius plan for making money, better yet a person he’d never heard of who wanted to talk. Danny got an actual physical head rush from messages like these, but as soon as he called back and found out the details, the calls would turn out to just be about more projects, possibilities, schemes that boiled down to everything staying exactly like it was.
The Keep Page 6