by Dan Bevacqua
“He’s not on the list.”
“Right,” Abigail said. “We spoke to someone—”
“Told you,” Tom whispered.
“And they said he would be able to get a visitors pass—”
“No.”
“And wait,” she said.
Her head was still out of the window. He wasn’t stooping for anybody. At least not her.
“I don’t know who you spoke to,” he said, “but that information is bad. You’re on the list—okay. He’s not—no way.”
“You’ll have to go back to that diner and drop me off,” Tom said.
“If you drive out of here,” the officer said, “you can’t come back. You’ll have to file the paperwork again.”
“That took a month,” Abigail said. “It took three months of planning—then another month.”
“Well,” the officer said, leaning down finally. Abigail happened to be the kind of woman who liked the smell of Copenhagen. “I don’t know what to tell you. This isn’t a La Quinta.”
She took in the sight of the long road. The prison was a flat castle. They made tires in there, she’d read, and finely crafted tables using nothing but nontoxic glue.
“What if he gets out of the car?” she asked the corrections officer.
“Seriously?” Tom asked.
“Can we do that?” She turned to Tom. “I’m sorry.”
“That diner was five miles ago.”
“He can do that,” the officer said. “He’ll have to climb out the back. If he goes out the front, he’ll have crossed the line, and I’ll have to detain him.”
Both she and Tom raised themselves up in their seats and looked down at the road. There it was. The blue line. One couldn’t cross it.
Tom unbuckled his seatbelt and started climbing. “You know what’s so challenging about our relationship?” he asked. His ass was in her face. “It’s not that I’m a man, and you’re a woman. It’s that I’m a person, and you’re another, different person.”
She watched him flop down onto the pleather. He righted himself.
“Head rush,” Tom said. “I love you.” Grabbing his Nalgene, he opened the door and got out of the car. In a moment, he stuck his head back in. “Text me,” he said. “Please be careful.”
* * *
Abigail thought there would be more checkpoints to drive through, but there weren’t. She parked in the teal FOR VISITORS zone. She was pretty sure that what she saw in the distance were the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, but it could have been any mountain range, because Abigail didn’t care about that kind of stuff. Tom told stories about how he and his family had gone to every single national park when he was a kid, and it sounded terrible. She understood the value, but it was like, come on, really? Every one? They’d lost and found Tom’s sister on three separate occasions. The family still teased her about it. Whenever they did, Abigail saw the rage in Tom’s sister’s face.
It seems like a joke at first, she thought, but then it’s not, because it’s horrifying. The Prius beeped. Her hair was up in a wild pony. She walked—already sweating—through the lot. The visitors’ building was a common warehouse. As she checked her purse, she heard and felt the rubber of her Converse stick to the tar.
It was only women and children inside. The blue plastic bucket seats reminded Abigail of certain emergency rooms she’d passed through once upon a time. She could tell she was a bougie sight because no one bothered to look at her. Not the black women. Not the Latino women. Not the white women. Not the Asian women. Not even the kids. She checked in with the corrections officer behind the melted, bulletproof glass. It was hard to discern a face back there.
“You’ve got a red star next to your name,” the man said. “So sit tight. If they open the door, stay put. Don’t go followin’ with everybody.”
It wasn’t as if Abigail had conversations with Molly in her head. She saved those for her mother. Her dead mother had free rein to say anything—positive or negative, insult or praise. Abigail still refused to discuss things with her father. He would try to talk, and she’d think, “Shut the fuck up, man.” Sometimes she’d tell her dead mother to tell her dead father to mind his own business. It was pretty much crazy. Molly spoke to Abigail, when she did, in words and phrases. It wasn’t a dialogue. “This is insane,” was all Molly said, as Abigail sat there in the appearance of silence, and thought about how everyone—all the living ones, at least—spoke to their dead.
At the check-in, she’d had to give up her phone. She was seated, staring at her actual hands for the first time in fifteen years, when a middle-aged white man appeared. There was something of the 1970s about him. Or the ’20s. His wrinkled gray face and suit were ominous. His moustache screamed economic collapse.
“You would have to be Abigail Kupchik,” he said.
“I would?”
He looked around the waiting room.
“Yep,” he said. “I’m Associate Warden William Claflin.”
They’d emailed. It had been strange to type without the aid of exclamation points, without the necessary courtesy of enthusiastic punctuation. She was so used to it. Everyone was. Even Leonard Roth had direct-messaged her CONGRATULATIONS!!!! when Echo Chamber came out. But Claflin wasn’t an emoji man. One did not winky-face a warden.
He shook her hand, sat down on her left, and sighed.
“Today’s my last day,” he said.
“I’m sorry?” Abigail asked.
“I’m retiring,” Claflin said. “This is it. There’s an ice cream cake in the coffee room with my name on it.” He was staring out into the air in front of his face. His moustache roiled as he spoke. “I don’t feel anything yet. It’s like nothing. That’s how it is with me. A week will go by, a month, ten years… and then one day it’s, ‘Oh, wow.’”
He turned and took her in with his sad eyes.
“Did you know that you’re the only person Vincent’s ever agreed to see?” he asked. “So many requests, and yours was the only one he’s ever granted. Not even his own mother.”
She followed him across the waiting room. They pushed through a set of double doors that he’d key-carded to open and went down a long outdoor hallway that was in fact a cage. On her left was an empty basketball court in the shadow of a three-story lock-up. The lock-up was made out of cinder blocks wedded together in a rush of concrete and spray-foam insulation. She could not believe the arms—the arms were everywhere; hundreds after hundreds; skinny; muscled; deformed; some without hands; some stumps; others fine, or nearly; most of them tattooed. The arms hung out between the bars of the cell windows either all alone, or in pairs, or in threes, or in fours. They swayed back and forth. They reached out and touched the exterior wall. They did nothing at all. Somebody coughed. Then another. Then one more.
They stopped at a door that was still inside the cage. The warden pointed at the lock-up.
“It’s a hundred and twenty-five degrees in there,” he said.
“That’s inhuman,” Abigail said. “How can they stand it?”
“They can’t,” he said. “You hear that?”
She heard nothing.
“No.”
“Exactly. Best not to move. Best not to speak. Hell is wasted energy,” he said. “Can I tell you something? I think you’ll understand.”
She already knew what he was going to say. It happened to her all the time. She knew it was her penance. She knew why they came. God had plenty of imagination, but He rehashed the same plots over and over and over again. He sent forth Abigail’s own kind to her in droves, as if out of Egypt, or the Betty Ford Clinic.
“I might’ve had a drink or two today,” the warden said. “A nip.”
“Whoop-dee-doo,” Abigail said. “How many people tried to see him?”
“Hundreds,” he said. “At least thirty-five kill-fan women. All the media requests. Not to mention your group. How many screenwriters does it take to write a movie?”
“How many put in requests?” she asked him. �
�How many from the production company?”
“Twelve,” he said. “You didn’t know?”
“Nope,” she said. “Those little fuckers.”
“You can’t trust anybody,” the warden said. “But you’re the winner. You knew her.”
Somebody somewhere buzzed them through the door. On the right side of the cage was a small dirt yard in front of a two-story cement building without any windows. A stooped black man who was about three hundred years old stood in the yard all alone with a green rake in his hand. His convict blues bagged around him. He stared at her. She waved. He didn’t wave back.
The cage ended at what appeared to be a white trailer with a high-security door welded onto it. Again, an anonymous finger buzzed them in. She was disappointed by the bulletproof Plexiglas that divided the interior in half. She had hoped it wouldn’t be there, that somehow her televised understanding of the procedural would be proven wrong, but nowadays real was fake, or vice versa. In the trailer she felt the cold gurgle of the AC unit coming from the wall. The carpet underfoot was nice and dark like an HBO limited series. The light above was a new sort of fluorescent—less horrible, less invasive, longer lasting. She took a seat on one of the gray metal chairs the warden pointed to and looked at the conversation holes drilled into the Plexiglas that was somebody’s job.
“Hollywood,” the warden said. “Tinseltown. The Big Easy.”
“That’s New Orleans.”
“Sure it is,” he said. “Here’s how this happens. I will be sitting in that chair next to you. You will be sitting where you’re sitting. Two officers will bring in the inmate. You will read from the preapproved questions list only. Do not deviate. Don’t improv. No little skits.”
On her side of the Plexiglas was a short table with a manila folder on it. She opened the folder and looked at her questions. She doubted very much the warden had bothered to look at them, but maybe he had, and anyway it didn’t matter. Who knew what would happen? She wanted out of there. It was a bad idea. They didn’t get any worse. There was something wrong with her. She didn’t make good decisions. She was selfish. She didn’t think about anyone but herself. The makings of a panic attack were speeding through her brain. Her life was cracking through. She heard the clink and swish of ankle chains. The keypad beeped. A guard said, “Watch your step.”
It was like a joke:
Two drunks sit in a trailer. The door opens. A murderer walks in.
Or:
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
A murderer.
A murderer who?
PRODUCTIONS 1981–2013
11
HIS LAST APARTMENT WAS NEAR the Robertson exit on the 10. The building was out of the way but cheap. A white and blue metal sign bolted to a lamppost out on Robertson said La Cienega Heights. At night he went walking in the fancy neighborhood up on the hill. Sometimes he ran there. Not often. He could tell by the short grass and the polished cars it was Jews. There were a lot of them in LA. He didn’t know any Jews back in Massachusetts. He worked with the young ones when he did production. The guys were funny. They made a lot of jokes. The girls were pretty with faces like you’d see on old coins dug up out of the earth. You had to watch out for them, though. They had bad attitudes. They were always talking about the news. Roger didn’t care for that, but still there were times. He would go home, run a cold bath, and sit in it for an hour. He kept himself honest that way.
* * *
He was from Turners. The bridge over the falls had been under construction for his entire life. It was one lane. You had to wait on the light. The bridge was green and spanned the half mile over the river so that when he rode his bike into town it was like coming back home to an island. Any bike he’d ever had he’d stolen. Every March he’d go halfway across the bridge in the middle of the night and throw his old one in the river. The waterfall was so loud his brain wouldn’t work.
* * *
When he was eight, his mother was supposed to buy him a bike for his birthday, but then her old boyfriend came over. The next day he took the bus south to the town with the girls’ college. Bunch-a dykes, his mother liked to say. The kids left their bikes out in the yard down there. He walked in the neighborhood for an hour, saw the Mongoose up against a porch, and took it. He biked for a while. At some point he caught the bus to the hospital. His mother liked to say she was barely older than he was. She told him the government didn’t care about white people anymore. She drank. All the nurses remembered him. They said, “Hi, sweetie. Whatcha got there? Oh, wow!” They let him bring the bike inside. It was her own room, but the curtain was up. She was talking to the new boyfriend. He was there when the old boyfriend punched her in the face, but he didn’t do anything about it.
“Course there’s somethin’ wrong with him. You think I don’t know that? You think I’m retarded?”
* * *
Four times a day they walked him over to the other classroom. The aides were always women. He looked up at them. After fifth grade they said he didn’t have to hold their hands anymore. It wasn’t necessary. How was he today? It was whispers in the big classroom. Soft talk. The aides were tired from all their kindness. They were the sorts of ladies who never got haircuts. It was long braids for them, like Indians. Roger watched a wheelchair kid who looked twenty-seven get fed white gunk through a tube. The ladies had to shake the bag. They had to flick it with their fingers. Roger had to sound everything out. An aide told Roger her son was hooked too, but not on phonics. Her boyfriend had a motorcycle, she said. Did Roger like motorcycles? Did he think they were cool? Numbers made him want to kill somebody. The angry kid, Kevin, would lose his temper and then they’d have to put him in the area. Hadn’t they talked about this? Use the straps! the ladies screamed. The straps! The wheelchair kids would start to moan. They liked it. They were blind. It gave their ears something to do. If they banged their heads around enough it was like a roller coaster. Roger would watch. He’d sit there. He’d flip the pages of a book. An oversized laminate on the wall told him to IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES! It was a picture of Mars. Maybe Jupiter. Outer space.
* * *
Years later he drove to California. He took his time. He kept off the interstate. His favorite town was in Indiana. It was only the one street. From the Citgo, he could see the library, the police station, the elementary school, the grocery store. Everything was made out of brick. He saw a cornfield that went all the way to the horizon, it looked like. The wind blew the stalks around like the hair on a caterpillar. The middle of the country was a bright green thing. He slept in his car the whole way.
* * *
He kept the Mongoose for longer than the other bikes. He intuitively grasped sentimental value. He connected memory with pain. Certain objects were more distinct than others. Certain glances. Certain views. A space between two sets of trees that looked out onto the river. He’d stand there for an hour. Feel. Pedal.
The movies were in Greenfield. The next town over. At twelve, thirteen, fourteen, he’d go there three times a week. They’d let him sweep. They’d let him take out the trash. The theater was right there on Main Street and nothing about that struck Roger as old-fashioned. He was among the last of that tribe who had populated the earth for a century. He took it for granted the marquee should power on at dusk. Green bulbs. Red bulbs. Gold ones. Titles announced with drooping and sometimes backward letters. It was called the Garden.
He liked most everything. Not the boring art ones, but everything else. He liked the trailers. He loved the flip-flap-flap of the catching reel. The smell of the burn at the edges. How the volume had to settle, then rise, get used to the room. The beam of light. Dumb comedies. The dumber the better. Cartoons. Dramas. Thrillers. Action. Romance. Horror. The dark box inside of night.
* * *
It was about his mother with the other kids. Him too. But his mother first. It was endless. It was years. He kept his head down. The long hallway. The empty athletic field, but for the lump of them
in the corner shouting hey! How’s your mom? Your mom good? She still suck dick? She still like that? We got money—can she come by later? What’cha think? Can you work it out? White trash asshole. Hey retard. Yo retard. Dick-slexic motherfucker. Hey fuckhead. Why you lookin’ at your feet all time? Your brain down there? That ain’t your brain, dummy. Should kill you.
His life was boring, repetitive, gray, human. It was like a movie he would have walked out on.
* * *
He slept in his car. When he woke up, he drove. He kept his money hid inside the spare’s well. He drove through Chicago. He’d never seen a real city before. He went at a slant across the country. One night he walked through a cavernous parking lot of idling semis, the diesel heat surrounding him, brake lines decompressing air into his legs. When he got to the diner, he shifted back around and took in the parking lot. He raised up his chin and admired the stars. Here was Oklahoma. The panhandle. Heat index of a hundred and one.
* * *
He did first grade twice. Eighth grade twice. He dropped out just before graduation and started full-time at the movie theater. He saved. His mother had a baby. He didn’t know what to call it. He didn’t know how to hold the thing.
The kids he’d grown up with and been around his whole life came into the theater. He did concessions. They acted like they’d never seen him before. He was like that. He was like someone you could sit next to for eight years and then forget he even existed. A lot of the guys from high school spoke ghetto talk now. They’d come in with their girlfriends, who were still redneck country girls, but harder, and say, “Gimme some a dem jew-jew bees. Make that two. Gimme one a dem tall johns to drink.”
* * *
He didn’t tell his mother about the computer. He kept it hidden in his closet in a brown paper bag. He could look them up now, and not only the famous ones, but the other ones whose names he didn’t know, like from the horror movies. Those ones were always new. They came out of nowhere. He’d sit in the theater after the credits were over and write down their actual names. This was hard. It meant that he had to keep notes during. He had lists he’d made in the dark like: bad friend number one, impaled sister, decapitated girl in bikini, Emily? Certain words he could spell. They’d been blasted into him. He would sound shit out. He’d go home with the list. He’d ask Jeeves. It was difficult finding out what other movies they were in, but he could do it.