Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  “Did you know he was a prisoner here?”

  “No.” I’d heard he’d been a prisoner. But I didn’t know he’d been a prisoner in the prison built of human bricks. “He’s here now?” Somehow I was stupid enough to yearn for an old friend inside the prison, to imagine they were offering a reunion.

  “He’s dead.”

  I received it as a small, blunt impact somewhere in my stomach. It was muffled by the distance of years since I’d seen him, and by my situation, my despair. Sure he was dead, I thought. Around here everything is dead. But why tell me?

  “So?” I said.

  “Listen carefully, Nick. Do you remember the unsuccessful attempt on the President’s life?”

  “Sure.”

  “The assassin, the man that was killed—that was your friend.”

  “Bottmore,” I said, confused. “Wasn’t his name Richard Bottmore, or Bottomore, something like that—”

  “That wasn’t his real name. His real name was Carl Allen Hemphill.”

  “That’s crazy.” I’d barely begun to struggle with the notion of Carl’s having been here, his death. The assassination was too much, like being suddenly asked to consider the plight of the inhabitants of the moon. The point of this conversation, the answers I was seeking, seemed to whirl further and further out of my reach. “Why would he want to do that?”

  “We’d very much like the answer to that question, Nick.” He smiled at me as though he’d said enough, and thought I could take it from there. For a blind, hot second I wanted to kill him. Then he spoke again.

  “He did his time quietly. Library type, loner. Nothing that was any indication. He was released five months before the attempt.”

  “And?”

  “He had your cell.”

  “That’s what this is about?” It seemed upside down. Was he saying that my real connection with Floyd didn’t interest them, wasn’t the point?

  “Floyd hasn’t said anything?”

  “I told you no.”

  This time it was the man at the desk who lit a cigarette, and he didn’t offer me one. I waited while he finished lighting it and arranging it in his mouth.

  When he spoke again his expression was oddly distanced. It was the first time I felt I might not have his full attention. “Hemphill left some papers behind. Very little of any value to the investigation so far. But he mentioned your father. It’s one of the only interesting leads we have.…

  “The people I work with believe Hemphill didn’t act alone. The more we dig up on his background, the more we glimpse the outlines of a conspiracy. You understand, I can’t tell you any more than that or I’ll be putting you in danger.”

  His self-congratulatory reluctance to “put me in danger” put a bad taste in my mouth. “You’re crazy,” I said. “Floyd doesn’t know anything about that.”

  “Don’t try to tell me my job,” said the man behind the desk. “Hemphill left a list of targets. This is not a small matter. It was your father’s name in his book. Not some other name. Floyd Marra.”

  I felt an odd stirring of jealousy. Carl and my father, my father who wouldn’t admit he was. “Why don’t you talk to Floyd yourself?”

  “We tried. He played dumb.”

  What if he is dumb? I wanted to say. I was trying to square these bizarre revelations with the face in the wall, the brick I’d conversed with for the past three days. Trying to picture them questioning Floyd and coming away with the impression that he was holding something vital back.

  “Can’t bug the wall, either,” said Graham. “Fuckers warn each other. Whisper messages.”

  “The wall doesn’t like us, Nick. It doesn’t cooperate. Floyd isn’t stupid. He knows who he’s talking to. That’s why we need you.”

  He doesn’t know who he’s talking to when he’s talking to me, I wanted to say.

  “I’ll ask him about Carl for you,” I said. I knew I would, for my own reasons.

  * * * *

  “Crabshit fish,” interrupted Jones. “That’s a hell of a thing.”

  It nearly expressed the way I felt. “He almost started a war,” I said to Floyd, trying harder to make my point.

  “He was a good kid,” said Floyd. “Like you.”

  “Scared like you, too,” said Ivan Detbar.

  I had to remind myself that the bricks didn’t see television or read newspapers, that Floyd hadn’t lived in the world for over thirteen years. The President didn’t mean anything to him. Not that he did to me.

  “How’d you know him?” said Floyd. “Cellmates?”

  It was an uncharacteristic question. It acknowledged human connections, or at least it seemed that way to me. Something knotted in my stomach. “We were in school together, junior high,” I said. “He was my best friend.”

  “Best friend,” Floyd echoed.

  “After you were put here,” I said, as though the framework were understood. “Otherwise you would have known him. He was around the house all the time. Mom—Doris—used to—”

  “Get this cell rat,” said Floyd. “Talking about the past. His mom.”

  “Hey,” said Billy Lancing.

  “That’s a lot like that other one,” said Ivan Detbar. “What’s his name, Hemphill. He was a little soft.”

  “No wonder they were best friends,” said Floyd. “Mom. Hey Billy, how’s your mom?”

  “Don’t know,” said Billy. “Been a while.”

  Now I hated him, though in fact he’d finally restored me to some family feeling. He’d caused me to miss Doris. She knew who I was, would remember me, and remember Carl as I wanted him remembered, as a boy. And besides, I knew her. I didn’t remember my father and I was sick of pretending.

  What’s more, in hating him I recalled trying to share in Doris’ hatred of him, because I’d envied her the strength of the emotion. She’d known Floyd, she had a person to love or hate. I had nothing, I had no father. There was the void of my memories and there was this scarred brick, and between them somewhere a real man had existed, but that real man was forever inaccessible to me. I wanted to go back to Doris, I wanted the chance to tell her that I hated him now, too. I felt that somehow I’d failed her in that.

  I was crying, and the bricks ignored me, I thought.

  “Hemphill sure got screwed, didn’t he?” said Billy.

  “The kid couldn’t take this place,” said Ivan Detbar.

  “But he was a good kid,” said Floyd.

  “Wasn’t his fault, something tripped him up bad,” said Billy. “Something went down.”

  Through my haze of emotions—jealousy, bitterness, desolation—I realized they were offering me warnings, and perhaps some sort of apology.

  And the talk of Carl made me remember my assignment.

  “You guys talked a lot?” I said.

  “I guess,” said Floyd.

  “Nothing else to do,” said Billy. “ ’Less I’m missing something. Floyd, you been holding out on me?”

  “Heh,” said Floyd.

  “There wasn’t any talk about what he was going to do when he got out?” I asked. My task might only be an absurd joke, but at the moment it was all I had.

  “I don’t hear you talking about what you’re going to do when you get out, and you’re only doing a three-year stretch,” said my father.

  “What?”

  “That’s the last thing you want to think about now, isn’t it? Maybe when you get a little closer.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That poor kid was here at the start of ten years,” said Floyd. “Hey, Billy. You ever meet a guy at the start of a long stretch wants to talk about what he’s gonna do when he finishes!”

  “Not unless he’s planning a break, like Detbar here. Hah.”

  “I’ll do it, too,” said Detbar. “And I ain’t taking you with me, you motherfucker.”

  “But he got out,” I said, confused. “Hemphill, I mean.”

  “Yeah, but all of a sudden,” said Floyd. “He thought he was doing
ten years.”

  “Why all of a sudden?” I said. “What happened?”

  “Somebody gave him a deal. They had a job for him. Let him out if he did it.”

  “Yeah, but that just made him sorrier,” said Billy. “He was one screwed-up cat.”

  “He was okay,” said Floyd. “He just had to tough it out. Like Marra here.”

  It was as disconcerting to hear him use the last name as though it had nothing to do with him as it was to be linked again and again with Carl. The dead grown-up would-be assassin, and the lost child friend. It drew me out of my little investigation, and back to my own concerns.

  I couldn’t keep from trying again. “Floyd?” What I wanted was so absurdly simple.

  “Uh?”

  “I want to talk to you about Doris Thayer,” I said. I wasn’t going to use the word mom again soon.

  “Tell me about her again.”

  “She was my mother, Floyd.”

  “I felt that way about her too,” said Floyd. “Like a mother. She really was something.” He wasn’t being funny this time. His tone was introspective. It meant something to him, just not what I wanted it to mean.

  “She was really my mother, Floyd. And you’re my father.”

  “I’m nobody’s father, Marra. What do I look like?”

  That wasn’t a question I wanted to answer. I’d learned that I didn’t even want to watch his one eye blink, his lips work to form words. I always turned slightly away. If I concentrated on his voice he seemed more human, more real.

  “Come on, Marra, tell me what you see,” said Floyd.

  I realized the face of the brick was creeping into my patched-together scraps of memory. For years I’d tried to imagine him in the house, to play back some buried images of him visiting, or with Doris. Now when I tried I saw the empty socket, the flattened skull, the hideous naked stone.

  I swallowed hard, gathering my nerve, and pressed on. “How long ago did you come here?”

  “Been a million years.”

  “Million years ago the dogshit bird ruled the earth,” said John Jones. “Crawled outta the water, all over the place. It’s evolutionary.”

  “Like another life to me,” said Floyd, ignoring him. His voice contained an element of yearning. I told myself I was getting somewhere.

  “Okay,” I said. “But in that other life, could you have been somebody’s father?”

  A shadow fell across the floor of my cell. I looked up. Lonely Boy was leaning against the bars, hanging there with his arms up, his big fingers inside and in the light, the rest of him in darkness.

  “Looking for daddy?” he said.

  * * * *

  The next day I told Graham I wanted another meeting. The man who never introduced himself was ready later that afternoon. I was getting the feeling he had a lot of time on his hands.

  His expression was boredom concealing disquiet, or else the reverse. “Talk,” he said.

  “Floyd doesn’t really know anything. He’s never even heard of the assassination attempt. I can’t even get him to focus on that.”

  “That’s hard to believe, under the circumstances.”

  “Well, start believing. You have to understand, Floyd doesn’t think about things that aren’t right in front of him anymore. His world is—small. Immediate.” Suddenly I felt that I was betraying my father, describing him like an autistic child, when what I meant was, He’s been built into a wall and he doesn’t even know who I am.

  It didn’t seem right that I should have to explain it to the men responsible. But the man behind the desk still inspired in me a queasy mixture of defiance and servility. All I said was, “I think I might have something for you anyway.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Please.”

  I was going to tell him that he was right, there had been a conspiracy, and that Carl had been recruited from inside. An insipid fantasy ran in my mind, that he would jump up and clap me on my back, tell me I’d cracked the case, deputize me, free me. But as I opened my mouth to speak the man across the desk leaned forward, somehow too pleased already, and I stopped. I thought involuntarily: What I’m about to tell him, he knows. And I didn’t speak.

  I have often wondered if I saved my own life in that moment. The irony is that I nearly threw it away in the next. Or rather, caused it to be thrown.

  “Yes?” he said. “You were going to say?”

  “Floyd remembered Carl talking about some—group,” I said, inventing. “Some kind of underground organization.”

  He raised his eyebrows at this. It was not what he was expecting. It seemed to take him a moment to find his voice. “Tell me about this—organization.”

  “They’re called the Horseshoe Crabs,” I said. “I don’t really know more than that. Floyd just isn’t interested in politics, I guess. But anyway, that should be enough to get you started.”

  “The Horseshoe Crabs.”

  “Yes.”

  “An in-prison underground?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Something from before.” I was a miserable liar.

  I must have been looking at the floor. I didn’t even see him leave his seat and come around the desk, let alone spot the fury accumulating in his voice or expression. He was just suddenly on me, my collar in his hand, his face an inch from mine. “You’re fucking with me, Nick,” he said.

  “No.”

  “I can tell. You think I can’t tell when I’m being fucked by an amateur?” He shoved me to the floor. I knocked over a trash basket as I fell. I looked at Graham. He just stood impassively watching, a foot away but clearly beyond appeal.

  “What are the Horseshoe Crabs?” said the man. “Is Floyd a Horseshoe Crab?”

  “He just said the name, that Carl used it. That’s all I know.”

  “Stand up.”

  I got to my feet, but my knees were trembling. Rightly, since he immediately knocked me to the floor again.

  Then Graham spoke. “Not here.”

  “Fine,” said the man, through gritted teeth. “Upstairs.”

  They took me in an elevator up to the top floor, hustling me ahead of them roughly, making a point now. As they ran me through corridors, Graham pushing ahead and opening gates, living inmates jeered maliciously from their cells. They made a kind of wall themselves, fixed in place and useless to me as I went by. Graham unlocked the last door and we went up a stairway to the roof and burst out into the astonishing light of the sky. It was white, grey really, but absolutely blank and endless. It was the first sky I’d seen in two weeks. I thought of how Floyd hadn’t seen it in thirteen years, but I was too scared to be outraged for him.

  “Grab him,” the man said to Graham. “Don’t let him do it himself.”

  The roof was a worksite; they were always adding another level, stacking newly hardened bricks to form another floor. The workers were the first-timers, the still-soft. But there was nobody here now, just the disarray of discontinued work. A heap of thin steel dowels, waiting to be run through the stilled bodies, plastic barrels of solvent for fusing their side surfaces together into a wall. In the middle of the roof was a pallet of new human bricks, maybe twenty-five or thirty of them, under a battened-down tarp. In the roar of the wind I could still just make out the sound of their keening.

  Graham and the man from behind the desk took me by my arms and walked me to the nearest edge. Crossing that open distance made me know again how huge the prison was. I kept my head down, protecting my ears from the cold whistle of the wind and my eyes from the empty sky.

  The new story was two bricks high at the edge we reached. The glossy top side of the bricks had been grooved and torn with metal rasps, so the solvent would take. Graham held me by my arms and bent me over the short wall, just as Lonely Boy and the others had bent me over the toilet.

  “Take a look,” said the man.

  “Looks like rain to me,” said one of the nearby bricks chattily.

  My view was split by a false horizon: the dark mass of the sheer face of the priso
n receding earthward below the dividing line, the empty acres of concrete and broken glass above. From the thirty-two-story height the ground sparkled like the sea viewed from an airplane.

  Graham jammed me harder against the rough top of the bricks, and tilted me further towards the edge. I grunted, and watched a glob of my own drool tumble into the void.

  “I hate to be fucked with,” said the man. “I don’t have time for that.”

  I made a sound that wasn’t a word.

  “Maybe we’ll chop your father out of the wall and throw you both off,” said the man. “See which hits the ground first.”

  I managed to think how odd it was to threaten a man in prison with the open air, the ultimate freedom. It was the reverse of the hole, all space and light. But it served their purposes just as well. Something I reflected on later was that just about anything could be turned to serve purposes like these.

  “What are the Horseshoe Crabs?” he said.

  I’d already forgotten how this all resulted from my idiotic gambit. “There are no Horseshoe Crabs,” I gasped.

  “You’re lying to me.”

  “No.”

  “Throw him over, Graham.”

  Graham pressed me disastrous inches closer. My shirt and some of the skin underneath caught on the shredded upper surface of the wall.

  “You’re not telling me why I should spare you,” said the man.

  “What?” I said, gulping at the cold wind.

  “You’re not telling me why I should spare you.”

  “I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” I said.

  122 Jonathan Lethem

  Graham pulled me back.

  “Are you lying to me again?” said the man.

  “No. Let me talk to Floyd. I’ll find out whatever you want.”

  “I want to know about the Horseshoe Crabs.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to know anything he knows. You’re my listening device, direct from him to me. I don’t want any more noise in the signal. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Take him back, Graham. I’m going to have a cigarette.”