Illustrations by Byron Boone
To read Part One, click here
Marlow’s euphoria at having successfully trounced the collective security regime of the entire prison was short-lived. Upon reaching his cell, he saw that Licky had returned from work and was laid out on his bunk, his head propped up on his pillow. His attention was focused on a celebrity tabloid, his fingers covered in red chili powder from the bag of pork skins he was munching on. Marlow almost made a joke about porcine cannibalism but just barely managed to hold his tongue. “Feeling better?” he asked instead, tossing his mesh bag onto his own bunk.
“Gooder’n taters, better’n snuff, not nearly as dusty,” he responded, holding up a bottle filled with an orangish-red liquid. “Since somebody done bought me somethin’ to drink for the night. What was that for?”
“I’m about to hit on something. Thought I’d spread the wealth out a bit. Should come through tomorrow. In fact, I need to clear some space. You mind if I put some of my stuff in your locker?”
“Hell nah, that’s cool. If’n it’s edible, a little mouse may nibble on some of it, though,” Licky said, trying to look like he didn’t care what Marlow’s response was.
No wonder he loses so many stamps playing cards, Marlow thought. “Mouse bites are fine, T-Rex bites unacceptable,” he said, as the cupboard squeaked open. He spent a few minutes transferring everything from his cabinet to Licky’s, leaving only a single orange juice can and a small manila envelope. All the spoils of a wasted life, he thought, as he stepped back to view his now empty locker. No sense in getting maudlin about it now, he reprimanded himself: the time for that had been three decades ago. Just a matter of hours left in this place anyhow. Thinking about having to pass those hours confined to the cell with Licky suddenly distressed him. On a whim, he grabbed his jacket, hid the book he’d brought from work inside his mattress, and headed back down the run. He heard Licky call his name, but he was far enough away that he could pretend otherwise.
It had been a few weeks since he’d hit the big yard. The politics out there were like the dayroom times fifty, and the reward was seldom worth the trouble. Still: better than having to listen to his cellie crunch through that bag of fried animal skins. “Anything a solo white boy should know?” he asked one of the armor-clad yard bosses who was processing convicts through the metal detector.
“Looks calm from here,” was all he would say, his mask making him sound like a low-rent version of Darth Vader.
“So does a tank filled with piranhas if it’s unlabeled,” he responded.
“Ain’t got time to babysit you. Shit or get off the pot,” the man made an impatient gesture with his arms. Marlow paused, biting back his retort, and then raised his own arms and submitted to a pat down before walking through the detector.
He knew enough to initially stick to the edges of the yard. Finding his way over to the track that ran in a drunken oval around the perimeter of the field, he began observing the various groups, feeling his way into the pattern. He felt he had a decent concept of the political map after a half-trip around the course; he was certain of it by the time he completed the circumference. He selected a decrepit set of bleachers firmly ensconced in no man’s land and took a seat, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket.
The day could not have been grayer, the sky looking like an immense sheet of hammered lead. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore, he thought to himself, as he took in the broad, open space in front of him. He’d lived at newer prisons, where the architecture was hyper-focused on dividing larger groups into smaller ones for ease of control, Foucault taken to the level of fetishism. Huge expanses allowing for the congregation of hundreds of prisoners had become outré and then strongly frowned upon decades before he’d even been born, and yet here it remained: the riot factory, 3.4 “incidents” per month since long before he’d pulled up on the Bluebird. A hundred or so stabbed up inmates a year did not merit the closure of an entire facility in the legislative calculus, after all.
The hardball courts were nearly empty of players, he noticed. Probably too cold, he figured. This hadn’t prevented the Letra’s soldiers from taking over the space, though, as well as the adjoining tables. Three dozen Hispanics sat around, drinking bottles of what might have looked like orange juice to a civilian. Every once in a while, someone would duck their head, do something furtive with their hands, and when they sat up and exhaled, their breath condensed in oddly thick clouds. No one was fooled. So long as nobody was getting pieces of metal stuck in them, the administration didn’t really care. Those battles had been lost a long time ago, and none of the parties cared to renegotiate the peace.
There were basketball games in progress. He saw that the races were mixing – always nice to see, and not something guaranteed. It wasn’t that long ago that these courts would have been off-limits to anyone who wasn’t black. Capital “P” Progress felt like a dead dream to him these days, but this had to count for something, he thought. Maybe in another generation or two, human beings could actually survive intact in this place.
Roughly halfway across the yard stood the weight stacks, huge monstrosities of iron and steel. Swaggerthugs preencasted between sets, flexed muscles the lingua franca when living in the country of the Machiavellians. Thirty meters to the right were the restrooms, an ugly cinderblock structure with a rusted tin roof that promised tetanus to anyone foolish enough to try and climb it in order to escape a riot. Men came and went at a pace that hinted at serious prostate or bladder issues, but that was entirely logical, entirely expected: since the restrooms were the one space not visible to the guards in the towers, they were where the old man ran his empire, the place where all the gangs and families and cliques set down their various principles and weapons and engaged in business, where just about anything could be bought or sold, including human lives: Galt’s Gulch meets Menzoberranzan. There were probably more cell phones stockpiled in that rundown outbuilding than anywhere else in the county, Marlow presumed. The wardens were aware of this as well, but they were also aware that the old man knew where they lived, where their kids went to school, so: détente, or laissez-faire capitalism in its purest distillation, depending upon one’s point of view or personal level of involvement.
Marlow exhaled, watching his breath fog in the cold, metallic light. My little attempt to wage war against heat death, he thought: probably about as useful as any of my other battles against the forces of disorder. It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying, he mused, Winston’s quote still stubbornly clinging to his attention. It’s just that none of my quests ever produced any answers, just more questions. You keep trudging forward, amassing information, thinking at some point the haze will dissolve into something like wisdom, something true, some bedrock essences that are black and white. I looked, he thought, but all I ever found was more grayscale, finer and thinner slices of it, perhaps, but just more gray all the same. How did Winston do it? he wondered. He always seemed so secure in his place, as if he’d always just read the right book to answer whatever dilemma confronted him. How did anyone do it? How do people manage to convince themselves that they ever know enough to do much of anything? He sighed. Who would have thought I’d have become Prufrock? It just seemed like the more one knew, the more complex reality became, the more complicated the decision tree of what the right move should be. Was the key that one just had to ignore reality to varying degrees? That sure would explain a hell of a lot, he acknowledged quietly. It was either that, or you just decide that you don’t give a damn, and do what you want. And I’ve seen where that leads, he thought: nowhere good.
Winston was wrong about one thing, he reflected: his definition of hell was way off. All that metaphysical hogwash to the side, it’s really just a product of bad choices, good memory, and an active imagination: the ability to recall every rotten thing you ever did in this life and then imagine what happened because of it, exactly how much you hurt people, the way your actions rippled outward forever, like dropping an infinitely heavy stone into a vast body of water. Those echoes, those waves: you’d think they’d fade over time, some kind of inverse-square law for guilt or remorse, but they never do, they just keep razing along until it seems like you must have personally wounded every human being on the planet. No wonder I’ve grown so hesitant, he thought, leaning back in his seat. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” he silently quoted from memory, then shook his head at his own capacity for foolishness.
Prisoners grazed the yard, and Marlow idly tracked them all, pattern recognition skills trained up almost to autistic levels. He saw motion in one of the gun towers, the guard inside settling closer to his space heater. A group of men passed in front of him on the track, each carrying the same blue book. They were centered on a tall man with long, blond hair and sciurine features, who was talking animatedly, punctuating his speech with soft pointing motions of his right hand. Just before the next curve, they scattered around a thin, black man as he walked towards and through their nucleus, seeming for all the world not to have noticed their existence. Marlow laughed inside at the indignant looks the pack gave the intruder after they recoalesced in his wake. They’d never say a word to him, he knew. No one would, not unless they were suicidal. If this place belonged to anyone, it was Slim, the old man’s vizier, gray cardinal, and Wizard of Oz all rolled into one sociopathic package. You’d never know it to look at him, though. That’s what made him so scary, Marlow concluded. That, and all the bodies. Hard to ignore those.
The newcomer progressed slowly along the track until he was exactly even with Marlow, where he came to an abrupt stop. After a long pause, he turned and walked directly towards the bleachers, causing a jogger to swerve out of his way. Marlow had sufficient time only to think oh, shit before the man vaulted the rows of seats and settled right next to him.
“Charles,” he greeted him, his voice gravelly.
“Theodore.” It had been at least a few years since he’d gotten this close to the man; Marlow noticed he now had a few gray hairs cropping up in his short afro.
“Been a minute since you graced us witchyo presence.”
“I’m sure you missed me,” he responded, his mind racing to figure out the reason behind this most unexpected violation of context. Big fish generally only hung around smaller ones for one reason, after all. He tried disarming the situation with humor. “How could I resist a front row seat to this little circus of yours?”
“Sheeeit. Ain’t my circus. For damn sure, they not my monkeys.”
“Right.” Silence settled between them. Slim’s hands rested on his knees, the ‘SELF MADE’ tattoos just visible on the dark skin of his fingers.
“So, when you goin’ home?”
Marlow snickered, trying to imbue the exhalation with as much dubiety as possible.
Slim smiled, and then began ticking off items by counting on his fingers. First finger: “All a sudden, debts is gettin’ cleared off my books, all friends of yours.” Second finger: “Protection fees for two years in advance with the Blast on old man Caballo, right up past his out-date.” Third finger: “Somebody paid 44 in the law library to file a writ on Cosmo’s case. I can’t prove that was you, but that’s only cuz I ain’t made it my priority to bump into the man yet. I bet if I went lookin’, I’d find out that beached whale of a cellie of yours is suddenly livin’ in the black, too. Q, E, motherfucking-D,” he concluded, giving Marlow a long, penetrating look before returning his eyes to the yard.
Well, so much for secrecy, Marlow thought. Back when they had first lived on the same wing, he’d had to remind himself that the man’s form of speech was a mere affectation, a role he played as well as a sort of trap to make people underestimate him. It had been a long time since anyone had made that mistake, though. Slim probably had the highest IQ of anyone within a couple of dozen square miles, Marlow guessed. Might as well not insult the man, he reasoned. It wasn’t like he was the gossiping type anyways. Shrugging visibly, he finally replied, “Soon.”
“They gave you parole?”
Marlow snorted. “Parole. Had lots of long, meaningful, tearful chats with those folks over the years.”
Slim grinned. “You tell them hoes the truth about everything?” His stress on that last word was that of a man who had just taken a long gander at your file and knew all sorts of unpleasant things about you.
Marlow paused. “I was accurate in everything I told them.”
“Oh. That what I asked?”
Marlow smiled – a real smile – to acknowledge the point. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not paroling.”
Slim laughed. “Dischargin’? On a what?”
“Thirty-piece.”
Slim laughed again, much longer this time, and clapped Marlow on his bicep. “My niggah, dischargin’ on a thirty. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Fuck that mercy shit.” He put two of his fingers to his lips and emitted a loud whistle. Seconds later, a man stepped out of the restrooms complex and began scanning the yard for a moment before locating his boss on the bleachers. A short conversation flashed across the space in sign language, and then the other man disappeared back inside.
“Always liked you. You kept to yo’self, stayed in yo’ lane. Can’t fight for shit, but you lived in a way that earned respect without all that. When you couldn’t avoid trouble, you got in there, though, showed you had some heart. Mostly, though, I liked you cuz you never come to me for shit. Can’t respect no man that’s gotta ask me to solve his problems for ‘im.”
“Probably not the sort of thing you should let your customers know. Disdain is not usually regarded as a good marketing technique.”
“Fuck my customers. They come to me cuz they got no other choice. They lack imagination, vision. They lazy. All them Aryan boys,” Slim waved towards the southern end of the yard, where all the white power types had their camp. “They may talk all that SS-KKK shit, but they show up to our people when they wanna get high, or get a jag, or get some pussy, because my prices is fair, because I’m fair. Hell, half of ‘em work for me anyways some kinda way, so you see what they ideology really worth. You, you wanted something, you just went out and got it, or you manned up and did without. You was subtle. I like subtle. Don’t think I didn’t know about that thing you had five, six years ago with the deliveries comin’ into the maintenance bays. All a sudden, you got money on yo’ books, you thought no one noticed? Shit was slick. That’s why I let it go. I didn’t try take it from you, or interfere. Call it professional respect.”
Marlow shook his head, embarrassed at being so exposed.
“Yeah, you cast shadows, but you don’t live in shadows. Respect, white man,” the man said, clapping him again, this time on his shoulder. “Not like these clowns,” he continued, nodding to the same group of inmates he’d run off the track earlier, who were just now completing a lap. “That’s the future right there,” he stated ironically. “Guru-man got hisself some new converts, I see. He still doin’ that screamin’ thing used to drive the guards nuts?”
Marlow had to think for a moment before recalling what Slim was talking about. “The Wilhelm Reich thing? No, he quit that business a few years ago. He’s an Urantiite now.”
“Fuck is that?”
“Oh. Uh… Jesus was an alien, Earth is evil because of a galactic lawsuit between Lucifer and God. It gets crazier from there.”
“No shit?” Slim seemed to need a moment to process this. Shaking his head dismissively, he asked, “So, what’s the count at now? He was a Christian when he rolled up.”
“Baptist, yeah. Then some kind of Pentecostal,” Marlow answered, trying to recall the exact order. “Then Jewish.”
“Yeah. We all recollect that shit.”
Marlow laughed. It felt good to do so. Everyone remembered the night Guru had tried to circumcise himself with the blade of a pencil sharpener. One tends not to forget the sight of a ghost-white man holding a bloody rag to his boxer shorts on his way to the ambulance, a small storm cloud of grinning officers in riot gear following behind him. “Then came the thing with astral projection. I don’t really know what to call that.”
“Niggah told me my aura was red. Right there on the run.”
“Lucky you. Mine was blue, apparently… I think Rudolf Steiner came next, then Reich. Now, Space Jesus.”
“Guess he got a few more to go before he can truly cover all the bases. He start parading around on some African tribal shit, the Zulus’ll beat his ass up.”
“He still has Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism before he has to go looking for anything more exotic than the current nonsense. Hell, before he’s done, he might even become a high priest of capitalism and join your ranks.”
“I could get behind that,” Slim said, stretching his legs out.
“Right.”
“Much easier to cut his throat from back there. Which is exactly what will happen if he try to step in my world. I said I was fair. Ain’t said shit about being nice.”
Marlow had never learned the vocabulary to have these kinds of conversations, so he didn’t say anything at all for a while. Finally, he nodded towards Guru and his flock. “You think any of it is sincere?”
“Man took a blade to his junk, Charles. Niggah’s committed. In both senses of the word.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Marlow conceded. “It’s just… his shtick has always seemed less a search for god than a search for a higher form of selfishness. But, even within the selfishness, he always seems so… I don’t know, so sure of himself. I don’t quite know how he does it.”
Slim raised an eyebrow at him and then shook his head. “There’s yo’ problem, right there,” he said, pointing a finger at him and then jabbing him in his knee with it. “You is always overcomplicatin’ shit. Sometimes that’s good,” he added, talking over Marlow’s incipient objection. “Probably serves you well in the library, translating Game of Thrones into Klingon, or whatever it is you niggahs do in there.”
“I don’t know a single word of Klingon,” Marlow spluttered.
“You and Guru-man got that complexity thing in common, though you handle it different. He finds comfort in the murkiness, you just get lost. I’m tempted to say it must be a white folk thing, but you ain’t got a monopoly on that shit. Humans always gotta be writin’ shit all over the glass, instead of just lookin’ through the motherfucker. It’s all about parsimony, you feel me? When I am confronted by a situation where I got multiple explanations for a cause, I always go wit’ the one wit’ the fewest assumptions. Occam, Hume, all that.” He gave Marlow a hard look, having let his mask slip a bit; he appeared to be waiting for the typical reaction of disbelief or surprise when he displayed his capacity for knowledge. When Marlow said nothing, he nodded at Guru and his followers. “He multiplies the assumptions to the point that nobody understand ‘em but him, and then he finds a way to market that shit so people adore him. How many commandments his alien Jesus got? How complicated is that shit? I’m betting it’s much harder to understand than basic Bible stuff.”
“I don’t know. There are 613 mitzvoth in the…”
“Ten, 613, forty-two: that’s all bullshit. That’s man shit, that’s writing on the glass. That’s assumptions built on assumptions, ignorance on ignorance, that’s correlation and causation gettin’ mixed up and producing apophenia. That’s just confusion and terror trying to cover itself up in the cold.” Slim took a deep breath, looking across the yard. “You, you went the other way, decided it was all bullshit, but rather than allowing this to power some decisions, to make you decisive and focused, you never left the stacks, you still wanderin’ all through them hoes lookin’ for some kinda esoteric solution, instead of just realizing how simple shit really is. Look,” he said after a brief pause, “when I was a kid, Russians used to control my ‘hood. That was before we ran they asses out. All us young niggahs wanted to work for them, though. They had the cars, the hoes. They top man in the district was a blimp they call Boris Mercedes. Not even his real name, just what we all called him, even though he drove a Jeep. I used to run numbers for him, then managed a trap house. One night, we was at one of his clubs, in the back. He been drinkin’ for hours, so I just ask him what his secret to success was. See, I’m not even fifteen, but I’m figuring things, you know, like how to take what he got. The man just laughs at me, and ignores me. I figure he forgot about the conversation.” Slim again stretched his legs out on the bleachers, and looked up at the nearest gun tower for a moment.
“A couple weeks later, we was in his car in the nice part of the city. Boris pull up to this high-rise, you know the type: got the doorman, nice Bentley out front, trophy wife walkin’ into the lobby with a poodle, all that shit. He just watch the place for a while, and then he ask me if I really want to know the answer to my question. He real serious, almost sad-like. I say sure, that’s why I ask it. He never looks at me, he just steady staring at this building like he plannin’ to burn it down. He ask me to think about the worst thing that any person could ever do to another. I start to say somethin’ but he stops me, tells me whatever I was gonna say, it ain’t the worst thing, that I need to think on it for a while, maybe weeks. Then he say, whenever I figure it out, to realize that all ‘round us was people that would pay a mountain o’ money to do that to someone else, so long as they could get away wit’ it. That’s all he said, and about ten minutes later, we drive off.” Slim poked Marlow in his knee again. “I thought he was full o’ shit. But the thing is, that shit, it kinda worm its way into you, like. You can’t quite get it outcho head. You start lookin’ at people, wonderin’ which of them niggahs is the kind to do some of that shit. And then you get older and you see proof. You realize that some of those motherfuckers don’t look like monsters. Some of them live in high-rises. You figure out that the world really is that sick, that some fools really will pay just about anything to live out they sick fantasy. It was a kind of poison Boris gave me. It made me into him. So, when I hear about god-this and god-that, I know that whatever ‘god’ is, it got only one rule, law, whatever: Take whatever you want, and then pay fo’ that shit. All the rest is masturbation.”
Marlow grunted, sitting back. Christ, he thought, I’ll think of a good response to that later. Or I would, if this were a normal day. This will be the last time I have to lose an argument to someone peddling a reductivist or sociopathic worldview, he realized: thank the empty heavens. It was hard to decide which Weltanschauung he liked least: Guru’s counterfeit desire for a unio mystica with his succession of gods, or Slim’s projection of his own ruthlessness onto the cosmos. No wonder he never hesitates, though. Still: parsimony was one thing, pistol-whipping reality until it obeys a man’s will another. Or at least I hope it is, he added ruefully, or humanity is fucked.
Motion attracted his attention. A man in a green jacket had just entered the yard complex and was jogging in their direction. Slim followed Marlow’s gaze.
“Ah,” he exhaled. “Settle yo’self. That’s just Ras Adwa. Go easy on the bruthah. They made him cut eight inches off his dreads, and he’s been ready to cut somebody for a couple weeks now.”
The man arrived slightly out of breath. From inside his jacket, he produced a large stainless steel thermos and two cups. The fact that he’d managed to get this obvious contraband past the detector was a kind of message, Marlow thought. So were the pair of phones evidently utilized to make this delivery possible.
“You use the French press?” Slim asked.
“Jah.”
“And the good water, the shit in the blue bottles?”
“Is not the first time I do this, mahn.”
“Thank you, Rastaman. Gone and tell Tre to hook you up with that new shit we got, the Indian shit. He’s at the office,” Slim said, nodding towards the restrooms. The man left at a slower pace than he’d arrived. “A little gift fo’ yo’ departure.” He poured a dark, steaming stream into a cup, and then held it out for Marlow to take. For about half a second, Marlow was able to maintain the thought that his coffee hook-up was probably better than Slim’s, until the liquid actually impacted his tongue.
“Oh… wow,” was all he could think to say.
“Yeah. While you niggahs was watching shadows on Plato’s cave wall of people drinking coffee, the man in front of the fire was downing cups of this shit: Black Ivory, from Thailand. Arabica beans. Elephants eat ‘em up, process the beans in they gut. Does all kinds of good shit to the proteins. Great boron to manganese ratio in they soil there, too.”
Marlow’s mouth hung ajar upon hearing all of this. Slim looked indignant. “What, a niggah can’t know terroir? Need I remind you which of us had ancestors that lived and died workin’ soil?”
“We’re drinking elephant crap coffee?” Marlow asked. Seeing Slim nod, he took another sip. “My compliments to the trunked ones. This is good shit. Literally.”
“At five hundred bucks a pound, it better be.”
Marlow choked and nearly spit out the contents of his mouth.
“Easy there. You prob’ly got mo’ money in yo’ gabber right now than you do in yo’ cell.”
“Jesus,” Marlow coughed, clearing his throat. I used to actually believe we were all in the same boat back here, he thought. What a fool I’ve been. We’re all in the same flood; his boat’s a hell of a lot better.
The pair sat for a time in silence, drinking their liquid gold. Marlow watched the steam rise out of his cup and disappear a few inches later. What does it mean, he wondered, when even a perfectly gray world still had too much color in it? He didn’t dare ask Slim, not wanting another discourse that would leave him feeling as if he’d been run through an autoclave. All he would have told him was the truth: that it meant the prison had done its job well. Marlow didn’t need to hear that from anyone else to know the extent of the damage done. Eventually, a tall, white man with facial tats stuck his head out of the restrooms, located Slim, and flashed him a signal. Slim sighed, and then placed the cap on the thermos. “Go home, Charles,” he said, standing. “You survived, so I don’t really got no place givin’ you advice. But, since I’m here, and this is the last time we’ll speak in this life, try to simplify yo’ views. Hesitate less. Our time is limited. Nuance is everywhere, and it might be nice to talk about at a café, but you gotta compartmentalize that shit. Know when to cut through it. Think: Alexander and his knot.” He leaned in. “If you can’t sum up yo’ whole purpose for life, or even just the day, in less than ten words, you got some cuttin’ to do.”
Marlow stood, handing over his empty cup. “I don’t think I buy that,” he admitted.
Slim smiled. “I know. That’s why you is you and I is I. Why you is dischargin’, while I – well, my story ain’t complete just yet. I’m not even halfway through it, and I got some real plans for the later pages. Gone be real excitin’, I promise you. Good luck to you, library-man.” He held out his hand. Charles took it.
“What’s yours?”
“My what?”
“Your raison d’être in ten words or less.”
Slim’s smile turned off, as if the universe had thrown a switch. His eyes flattened, and it was like his gaze channeled the cold air of the day into a laser-focused arctic blast. Still gripping Marlow’s hand, he leaned in slightly, his voice a mere whisper. “I only need two, Charles. As it happen, they come from Boris too, though he shoulda remembered ‘em better: Laugh. Last.” With his other hand, Slim reached out and tapped Marlow’s cheek with something metallic. Marlow resisted the urge to flinch, and just kept his eyes locked on Slim’s. They remained connected in this strange embrace for what seemed like an eternity, until Slim suddenly spun around and walked briskly towards the restrooms, his hands twirling something long and slender before making it disappear up one of his jacket’s sleeves.
Marlow stood there, listening to the wind as it whispered an old story through the chain-link fence, waiting for his heartrate to return to normal. Go home, the man had commanded him. Where’s that, Slim? he wanted to ask, trying to dispel the moment by having some kind of last word. Looking around, he was all of a sudden done with everything in a way that felt comforting, like Slim had jabbed him with that blade and now all his will was leaking out in a pool around his feet. He didn’t even take a final look at the yard as he stepped his way down the bleachers and trudged back towards his building.
The ruckus in the dayroom somewhat snapped him out of his muddle, the aural assault rolling over him as he entered his wing. He completed a quick count of the men inside the cage: nearly sixty, a full house. He saw Licky firmly ensconced amongst the older, white crowd, watching something on the television. Near his feet stood a bottle. Good, Marlow thought. He climbed the stairs quickly, still feeling partially numb and very light. Whether this was due to the chill from outside, Slim’s sandblasting chatter, or the enormity of the day, he couldn’t tell, and no longer cared. He continued walking past his own cell when he reached his tier until he located Ironwood’s house. The man was tattooing a guy from the next wing – Hooligan, he thought he called himself, or some other such fitting and yet simultaneously moronic moniker. “Got something for me?” he asked, leaning against the bars to get a closer view of ‘Wood’s work. Thor. Typical, he thought, though he refrained from offering his opinion out loud.
“Marlow,” Ironwood responded, looking up, the insistent buzzing of his homemade rig cutting off. “Yeah, hold up.” He stood and then rummaged around in his cabinet for a moment, before handing Marlow a short, metallic cylinder. Marlow could feel something dense and slightly viscous sloshing quietly about inside.
“Li said to tell you that would burn clean, it’s good grease.”
“I appreciate it, ‘Wood. I owe you anything else?”
“Nah, we square.”
I’m about to be, Marlow thought, or as close as I’m likely to ever come to such a thing. “Okay, you two have a good night, then. Thor looks good,” he added, nodding towards Ironwood’s client’s back. One more lie to account for, he thought, as he returned to his cell. One last lie, he corrected himself, as he opened his locker and removed the small manila envelope. Inside it was an even smaller envelope containing four pink capsules. He took a quick glance outside the cell before ducking back in and locating the three bottles of hooch Licky had stashed behind his mattress. He popped the capsules open and dumped their contents evenly into each.
From the larger envelope, he now removed a pair of paperclips and twelve inches or so of rough cotton string. Sitting back on his bunk, he carefully bent and twisted the fastenings until they formed a sort of tripod with a single extension pointed directly vertical. Around what he’d constructed, he meticulously wrapped the string until he was satisfied. He then opened the canister his man in the kitchen had procured for him, and settled the wick he’d just fashioned down into the grease; sure enough, he could see the liquid moving slowly, osmotically up the structure. Once it had become saturated, he returned to the envelope, removing a piece of graphite he’d taken from a colored pencil and a razorblade he’d wound a thin wire around at one end that extended downward for ten inches. Using this contraption, his electrical outlet, and a piece of rolled up toilet paper, he had his homemade candle burning in short order. He sat for a few moments, watching the little bud of light flicker and cast shadows on the wall. On some level, he knew the thing was pretty, but the part of his mind that connected him to such thoughts was no longer online. He placed the makeshift candle inside his cupboard and removed his last can of orange juice. He drained the drink into his cup, and then used a pencil sharpener blade to cut away the bottom inch or so of the can. This he also placed in his cupboard, while he tossed what was left out onto the run.
That’s it, he thought, sitting back on his mattress. He still felt light, shallow, like a ship that had jettisoned its cargo overboard in an attempt to survive a rough storm. Was this normal? Surely I should feel something more than this? How many times have I thought about this day and tried to gauge whether I would feel tiny bubbles of trepidation, or joy, or anxiety, something, something, anything? And yet all I can really detect is exhaustion, he concluded. Thirty years of fear, self-loathing, and shock tossed into an endless blender; maybe I’m just burnt out, finally. Thirty years of habits, of not allowing myself to pursue any small shred of happiness or mental escape. Thirty years of walking on eggshells, of trying to find out where I was supposed to fit in a world I could never fit into, not ever, not if I had a sentence of a million years. Thirty years of making plans, of late nights spent devising strategies, of mapping quadratic expansions of response possibilities, of thinking n moves ahead where n was a hyperbolic function limited by the sinh of the department’s most recent barbaric policy and the cosh the number of psychopathic thugs in my vicinity. Thirty years of dreams for the library, of hopes for scamming something decent to eat when the chow hall slop wasn’t fit for human consumption, of desires to fill my time with activities worthy of basic dignity and meaning. Thirty years of desperately wanting to find a scintilla of wisdom that might have justified some portion of all of this. More than sixty percent of my life, he calculated. Every day, living like some bean-counting god or essence was shifting stones on an abacus, tallying payment, even as my faith in such a deity diminished into the zero, even as my longing for rebirth withered and died. Was it enough? That was the question, the only thing that mattered. Honest now, he thought. Don’t shrink away from it here, at the end: Was it enough to counter the damage done? Marlow sat there for a long time, staring at the wall, at the faded pronouncements of past inmates carved into or written on the concrete.
Idly, still lost in thought, Marlow bent over and removed his last book from the inside of his mattress. He traced his fingers along its spine. Probably not, he decided at last. It probably couldn’t ever be enough. For some prisoners, maybe; not for me. Maybe that’s the reason Tertullian and company got so much pleasure out of envisioning the eternal suffering of the damned. Maybe they understood guilt better than I ever credited. I sure tried to be worthy of all of this, though. That’s about the best that can be said about me, or for me. That, and the fact I haven’t done any damage to the people I care about for a long time now. I haven’t been a burden like some of these clowns, always writing or calling home for handouts. There was some relief in knowing that he wouldn’t ever be able to disappoint any of his loved ones again after this night.
That thought actually brought a slight smile to his lips. What was left? Some words, maybe, to mark his departure. He’d certainly read enough of them over the years. Probably too many of them, he posited, since none of them seemed immediately appropriate. This didn’t really surprise him. Nothing was ever perfect in this place, so he’d given up long ago on expecting mots juste to arrive exactly on time. What were those John Gay lines? “Life is a jest, and all things show it; I thought so once, but now I know it”…? Something like that. Not serious enough, he decided. Maybe that reference in The Tempest about being made of dream-stuff, he thought: that felt closer to the truth. Definitely not Hamlet’s crap about being king of infinite space whilst bounded in a nutshell. Old William never could have imagined what a life in prison would do to a person. Marlow took a sip of orange juice, thinking about the Midnight Oil song that depicts cannibals wearing smart suits and arm-wrestling on an altar. He hummed one of its lines out loud, “And I say, don’t leave your heart in a hard place.” I’m not, though, he challenged; I’ve never exposed my heart to this place. I did that part right. I came here broken, but I never let this environment inside me, where it could break me even more. That should count for something, he reasoned, while simultaneously knowing it wouldn’t to anyone who hadn’t spent at least a few years in these halls.
It came to him. He searched through Licky’s property, trying to locate a pen. I should have known it was going to be Beckett, he thought. Nobody understood better the way a sentence of time could destroy a man, the way nothing was more real than nothing. In small letters near the cell door he began to write:
to and fro in shadow
from inner to outer shadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself
by way of neither
Marlow sat back to review his penmanship. That wasn’t exactly perfect, he admitted, but it was close enough. He added his initials and his out-date. Close enough, he repeated to himself.
From somewhere down on Three-Row, he heard a female voice yelling. He looked at his clock: 10:22pm, rack up time. He was surprised to see it was that late; he must have been staring at the wall for quite a while. He began to hear the low, thumping beats of shoes marching up the stairs. Figures moved past, eclipsing the security lights. Licky eventually appeared, a subtle leaning in his posture the only indication of the state of his inebriation. That lean would become quite a bit more pronounced, Marlow thought, as soon as that 200 milligrams of Benadryl hits him.
“Lo, cellie,” the man greeted him warmly.
“Lo, Licky. You’re looking well. Content.”
“Just gonna give ourselves a bit of damp and somethin’ for my teeths to work on, and I’ll be superb.”
“Knock yourself out,” Marlow responded, as he watched the awkward process of Licky defying gravity long enough to plop himself onto the upper bunk.
“That any good?” Licky asked from above.
“What?”
“That book you was holding?”
Marlow looked down at the cover. “It’s about a man who escapes from a penal colony,” he said at last.
“Hell yeah, I gotta read that when you done with it.”
Marlow could hear Licky rummaging around in his cupboard, the sound of a plastic bag being torn open. He really is content, he thought, it’s not an act. Fat, drunk, ignorant, tribal: he’s a happy little goldfish swimming around in a tiny bowl, with zero concept of the limits of his universe, not until someone drops the bowl. And how is that any different than you? Marlow asked himself. You may see the room beyond the glass, but you are just as stuck as he is, just as annihilated once gravity takes over and proceeds to smash everything. I picked the wrong Beckett quote, he realized instantly. I should have used Bam’s closing words from What Where: “Time passes. That is all. Make sense who may. I switch off.”
He settled against the wall, listening as the prison slowly relaxed into silence. He waited a full hour before checking on Licky. Yep, he saw, out like a light. “Bye, Licky,” Marlow whispered to himself. His cellie was not going to have a great wakeup call, not once he’d figured out what has happened. Maybe this will shock him into thinking about something other than sticking things into his face.
Opening his cupboard, Marlow removed the candle, still dancing along, and set it on his mattress. He placed the bottom section of the aluminum can next to it. Opening the book, he carefully removed the wrapped items hidden inside and started to unpack them: a tiny plastic baggie filled with a dark substance, a cotton ball, and a syringe. He opened the former and emptied its contents into the can base and then added a bit of water from the sink. He’d imagined this moment for more than two decades. Still no fear, he acknowledged, a little pleased with himself. I think I’ve just seen this play over in my head too many times to get excited now. Or maybe you have to value yourself to be afraid.
He wrapped a sock around the edges of the can, and held the bottom over the flame. Almost instantly, the heroin started to break down, small bubbles forming as it mixed with the water. With nearly two grams, he knew he didn’t have to be cautious with the proportions. He dropped the cotton ball in the middle of the can, and observed as it soaked up the liquid, his freedom. He placed the tip of the needle into this, but fixated on the syringe’s chamber as it filled up when he drew back the plunger. Let it cool, he’d been told, so it doesn’t burn the veins. Like that matters, he scoffed internally, as he tossed the bottom of the can out under the door. He watched the candle flicker for another few minutes.
I don’t believe in you, he said to himself, directing his thoughts to places he could no longer name. If I’m wrong, though, if there is something that corresponds to a mind responsible for all of this: I was a messed up kid. I did something horrible. But it wasn’t the true measure of who I was. I don’t even understand that person anymore; he’s as alien to me as it’s possible for someone who shares my name to be. Regardless, I still paid for it, for all of it. I never asked you, or anyone else, to carry my cross. I’ve never understood how anyone could ever think of such vicarious payments for trespass to be moral. I’ve tortured myself the best way I knew how to, he nearly screamed. If that’s not good enough, then fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Marlow picked up the needle and inserted it into his left arm. In the dim candlelight, he saw the tiny spurt of blood flood into the chamber of the syringe. He leaned over and pinched the flame out, and then did the only thing he could think of to finally get even with the house.
…
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