I was in prison in March. They called it camp. We said to each other “how long have you been at camp?” and Jefferson, for example, would say “66 years.” There were six of us. The cells were arranged in a circle. Each had three walls made of mud bricks. Facing inwards there was no wall, only iron bars. Everyone’s cell was visible this way, though in order for you and your direct neighbor to see one another, you both had to stand right up against the bars. The floor was made of the same mud as the walls and it was cool in the night. Lying on our backs, we listened to each other breathe.
Before Dorothy, we didn’t know each other’s names. I had a view of the park outside my window and they would ask me what I saw and I would say “kids” and, mostly, that was that. Thirteen weeks, three days and seven hours into my time at camp – this exact measurement was given to me later by a man I would come to know as Mohammed – my door slid open and I fell through it because I had, at the time, been rattling the bars violently with my kicking. A burly orderly caught me, wrapped me in a tight cloth, and walked me down the stairs that spiraled through the center of the tower that held our cells. Eventually we came to a level of the building that sprawled out into offices and I was led down a hallway to a door that had a plaque: “Social Worker” and below that “Dorothy Leide.”
Dorothy was a new addition to the program. She gave me a career aptitude test and told me I could be a writer. Well. She encouraged me to start a journal, which I never did. At first I would say this to her and she would make a note. “No judgement,” she said, “but I do have to write it down.” After a few months of sessions I started to lie and say I was making entries regularly. When she asked me to see some of them, I told her they were too personal. She seemed to approve of that. I didn’t like lying to her, but I’d started to like the sessions and didn’t want to get them canceled. I’d heard that Donovan wasn’t allowed to see Dorothy after his first day, when he told her he wanted to fuck her. This was his traditional greeting, I learned, but that didn’t matter. While the orderlies still had to spray him down and clean his cell and take him down for court dates, Dorothy, it seemed, could be rid of us like scraping salt off a pretzel.
Donovan was my cellmate to my left. Jefferson was directly across from me. Al was to his right, adjacent to Donovan, and on my right was Mohammed. On Mohammed’s right was Cass, short for Cassandra. While four of us saw Dorothy, excluding Donovan of course, Cass was being taken to a different social worker named Steven. Before each of us had come, the others insisted, our cells had been empty. Later, when Jefferson died, and then Al, they were never replaced. It seemed that we were the only six ever meant to be here. So I remained in the unique position of forever being the newest camper.
As I said, it was only after Dorothy that we came to know each other’s names. She told Al to tell us his story first. Al was a short, young man, to some of us only a boy. He was 22 years old when I arrived, and though he grew to look more decrepit than Jefferson in the last years, he was still the youngest of us, and never stopped seeming boyish. He was nearly bald but boasted a thick, brown beard and – I’m only a little ashamed to say I’d noticed this, watching him in his cell doing exercises with his shirt off – a very furry shoulderline. He looked like he could be a young maniac, someone whose social anxiety and dark inclinations fed into each other like a snake eating its tail, keeping him from friends and drawing him to internet blogs that extolled the virtues of genocide. I should append that description by noting that when I first arrived at camp I thought everyone to be a terrible murderer, approximating that they were criminals a degree-and-a-half more criminal than me. It was an unfair judgement, if only because I made it based on appearance alone, or perhaps only to set myself apart.
Al was born in a suburb of Indianapolis and was there with his family a short while before his parents split up. He was five years old then and his father, having taken custody of the child, moved with him to Northern California. They settled in a small hillside town and Al would spend an hour and a half every morning on the bus to school, being the first child picked up, and an hour and a half every afternoon, being the last child dropped off. He had, he said, much time to think on those bus rides, as they wound their way through mossy, garbage-strewn forests and pre-fabricated neighborhood developments.
It was on one of those hot nights that Al spoke up. I was jammed against the side of my cell to eke out the last bit of coolness on the edge of the floor next to the wall, after having moved all about to find a place that hadn’t been warmed by my body. The top pane of Jefferson’s window was just beginning to glow with the dawn. Our bodies were restless and it was usually at this point that we would not be able to get any more sleep, but did not want to move yet in the hopes that we could, just once, drift off again. Sensing everyone’s awakeness, Al cleared his throat.
“I’m Albert,” he said, choking on the last syllable because of his dry throat. He coughed again and swallowed. “I’m Albert.” Again, this time louder. I heard the subtle sounds of necks raising, turning towards his cell. “I’m Albert and I want to tell you how I got here.” He told us about Indiana, and the towns in Northern California.
“I’ve always been the fucking ‘new kid.’ Somehow, even in high school, when everyone from Appleton Junior High and Strausberg Middle and Athens Middle came together on a new campus, when basically everyone was new, I was still the new kid. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t, like, lonely – there’s a popularity that comes packaged with that status. I had a few girlfriends in my day. I played on the squash team. I even hosted a party – it was a fucking rager, to be honest – when my dad was out of town. But it felt to me like everyone else had a history together. Their parents knew each other, or they’d all visited the same state park over the summer, or they were all friends and mutual friends online.
“I don’t know if that’s what set me up to be some kind of psychopath. A terror. I don’t really think so. Everyone’s got high school woes. Everyone’s yearbook has that page they don’t want to turn to, that they put glue all over and close it up so that when they open it again later they can’t get a glimpse of it when they flip through the pictures.
“Even when my hair started to go, I don’t think it was particularly setting me up to get here. That was a scary thing. Tufts of wet fur in the bathtub drain. My dad took me to some doctors. I don’t know what they said. It was a developmental issue. Nobody at school said anything. I started dating Sandy around that time. She felt for me, but the pity was hard to deal with. It was a gross thing between us. We couldn’t do anything but leave it unsaid. I dumped her for it. I dumped a girl for pitying me because I saw all the other couples who didn’t have that between them. Sandy was pretty, with red hair she wore in a messy bun sometimes. She started dating a football player whose name was Randy. Actually fucking Randy. You can’t make this shit up.
“I took a book out from my closet around that time. It was the gameplay guide for a Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG. My mom had bought it for me in a bookstore when I was so little. All I had liked about it was the colors on the cover. I started to create a character using the book’s instructions. He was a half-orc, an ugly guy whose sense of honor was twisted by the murder of his two older brothers as a child. Real nerd stuff. I didn’t have anyone to play with. I designed a storyline for this guy, this half-orc named Sardock. Sardock lived in a shack in the mountains and attracted passersby into his hovel so he could steal their things, cook their flesh and eat them. It didn’t make much sense, really. Now I realize it was an embodiment of the rage I felt that I couldn’t put a finger on. I still don’t get how that rage got me into trouble exactly, I mean, how it all started – as I said, everyone has that page in their yearbook, and everyone feels some kind of anger.
“When my dad went away the summer after junior year, I wanted to have a party in our house. A teammate from the squash team provided vodka from his mom’s liquor cabinet. When word got around, I had a few guys come up to me with ideas: a live band, a scavenger hunt, a spin-the-bottle game. The band brought all the sound equipment and set up on the fucking roof. It was like something out of an 80s teen movie. Naked girls. Naked guys. A lampshade on a dude’s head. A fucking paisley lampshade on a dude’s head. Most of the time I wandered around inside, cleaning up after the football team. Randy at the center of the cluster.
“When Sandy came upstairs and started nosing around in my room and came across my notebook with all of Sardock’s stories, his statistics, his high strength and low intelligence scores, she sat down by my bed and read the whole thing. When I found her there, we talked. I remember the whole thing word-for-word:
‘Hey, Albert,’ she said. ‘Hey, what the fuck is this?’
‘Stupid stuff. It’s a roleplaying game.’
‘Who do you play with?’ She asked. ‘Do you play at that comic book store above the Panera?’
‘Yes.’ I lied. ‘It’s nerd stuff, though. I don’t go there anymore.’
“(At this point I was fingering the baseball bat that was leaning behind my door. I think she saw me doing that because she slowly closed the book and stood up, backing away from me.)
‘I need to go downstairs, Al. I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s fine, Sandy. The band’s starting their second set. You should go.’
‘I’m sorry Albert. Here.’
“She tossed me the towel that hung on my closet door. It must have really reeked. You know the smell of a towel that you don’t wash in time? One fucking week you don’t put the towel in the wash and it smells like mildew forever. I was embarrassed about that. I put the bat down and I guess I wiped my face. I guess I had been crying. I think that’s a moment that I like to remember because it showed I was still human, right? I looked like a half-orc with my hairy back and my disgusting patchy scalp and my hunched posture, but I had that going for me, that I could still cry if a girl went through my shit.
“Later, Randy punched me right between the eyes. I had said something to him, vodka sloshing around my stomach setting fires. The next morning I woke up on the couch. The house was pretty clean, all things considered. Lamp shade back in place. I only had puke chunks on my shirt and on the towel, which I had clutched around my neck. Somehow, none of it got on the couch.
“My dad found me like that and took me to the doctor again. The developmental thing was worth taking some meds for. Those made me sleepy and sick in the morning. I didn’t have the energy for Sardock any more. I didn’t have the attention span to read about school shootings online. It didn’t matter, though. They still busted into our house one night and wrangled me to the ground. Planning that shit these days is enough to get you locked up. I wasn’t planning anything, I said. Most of the case against me consisted of character references. All my classmates. All saying I was a twisted, tortured dude. Sandy didn’t need to take the stand. Everyone already knew the same stories about me. She was a talker, as it turned out.
“The jury pitied me. That turned out to be our fucking bonafide defense. Pity. Mental wellbeing at an all-time-low. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really work anymore. Too many prissy white killer boys being offered a second chance. Getting out at 47 and first thing they do is buy a gun and find their old teachers. So they lock you up for good, I guess.
“I’m here because I’m a freak who fell into all the wrong activities. I lied about being on the squash team. I was never on a goddamned squash team. It really was a squash player who brought the vodka. I’ll never forget the sight of that lanky dude with the squash team t shirt (believe it or don’t: their logo was an actual squash). And Sandy and I did date a few times. I’m supposed to remember that, that I had an important life experience before I got in here. Because likely, I’m never getting out. Meds or not, my hair’s going, and my back is going. What I want in the end – this is where you assholes come in – is to get out from under the weight of all this stupid, insolent, post-modern pity that forms that all-important support beam in the scaffold of normalcy.”
Cass snapped her fingers at this last, eloquent outburst. I recognized the gesture from poetry readings. We’d all sat up as we listened and by the time Al was done the rising sun was glaring through Jefferson’s window and the beam of light rested on the top of my head. It had gotten so warm that I was sweating down the back of my neck and I started to get a headache. We remained silent. Dorothy would later encourage each of us, in turn, to tell our stories. Al had broken the silence of our first few months together, and soon we knew each other’s names and what we each saw out of our windows – a different view for each, as we faced outwards radially from the tower. As I had the park view, I did the most work describing what I saw. Mohammed’s view was obscured by an air-conditioning unit and a billboard, though he could, with some stretching of the neck, see a sliver of the park himself. Nevertheless, it seemed everyone came to rely on my descriptions of the view: the park had a wide, flat pond in the center that was surrounded by winding, root-covered paths. Large boulders dotted the sparse woods and often I would see children climbing on them to the distress of their parents.
One morning that looked like a Sunday an insurance company had set up a table in the farmer’s market in the park and was handing out plastic, clacking noisemakers. All day we heard the clack clackclackclack clack clackclackclack as children ran from tree to rock to father to water fountain to playground gym to grass to pond edge with their little hands grasping a rod attached to a box and they spun it around and around and clack clack clackclackclack. That day, Mohammed told us about the car bomb his teacher encouraged him to build. He had more than a hunch that it wasn’t simply a research project, but he went through with it anyway. Mohammed insisted that the orderlies shave him daily, and I thought it had something to do with religion, the way he was so vehement, but I never found out the exact reason.
Cass had been a pirate. She was the second oldest next to Jefferson and had come to camp as a young woman. At eighteen she was up in the rigging of a frigate, which had pulled aside a merchant cargo ship and latched on for boarding, firing pistol shots down below. At fifteen she harpooned a shark that was flopping around the deck, muscling itself with surprising agility towards fear-paralyzed pirate boys. Cass’s true aim skewered one crewmate’s leg on the way to the shark’s brain, the rest of the boy mangled up in the endless rows of teeth.
Mohammed, Al, and Donovan maintained that Cass was a good storyteller but a fabricator. Her social worker, Steven, may even have told her to fill us with bullshit. I liked to listen to her. She had little shame about her past. After she spoke I and Jefferson remained, and it was implied we would share as well. Dorothy pushed me to. “Give them your history,” she said, “because it’s all you have left.” Jefferson didn’t seem to know what was going on. His breath rattled in his sleep.
Outside of us and Dorothy, there weren’t many others at camp. A few orderlies would take us back and forth from the offices for our appointments. One, a very large man, had this blotchy skin. His arms were darker on top and pinkish on the bottom. His head was tan down to the base of his neck, where, if his collar was loose, which some days it was, you could see the same pinkish skin. He walked me down the stairs to see Dorothy one day and we stopped between two doors, one leading forward to the main offices and the one behind us closed on the tower. We stood in a limbo space that provided unexpected privacy. But a privacy in jeopardy of being shattered by the swift and routine opening of either door. He pulled a paper from his breast pocket and unfolded a painting. It was an abstract pattern made of green shapes – twists and blots and curvy vines. He pointed at me and smiled. I said it was nice. It was then, four years after I came to camp, that I realized he did not speak the same language as me.
Never before, and not until much later, did any of the orderlies try to communicate with me. This episode was an isolated incident, but I noticed, as the weeks slipped past us like water over stones in a brook, that when Jefferson and I were brought down those tightly spiralled stairs it was always the large orderly accompanying us.
One night, I dreamed.
* * *
I am not where my body is supposed to be and it’s not nighttime. That’s how I know I am dreaming. A bike rattles along a path cut into the side of the river’s flood wall. It’s a wall made of eroded dry clay, with roots sticking out and tufts of grass poking over the top edge. The bike rattles because it is a bike in a dream and I am assuming the path is rocky. Strewn with rocks covered in a full layer of red-brown soil. Or maybe the soil is more yellow. Creaking metallic sounds.
Rattle it rattles
Rattle it rattles
Rattle it-
“What?” Dorothy says.
Another hint it is a dream: she knows what I am thinking.
“I was imitating the sound your bike was making, and I did it so many times it started to sound like words,” I say, too truthfully.
“What did you say when I asked you about your cellmate Jefferson? I couldn’t hear you.”
When his name came to me with clarity, and when Dorothy called him “your cellmate,” I might have been crying. Maybe she couldn’t hear me because I was crying.
“He wakes up in the night,” I say, “or he jolts during the day on his morning walks around his cell. Or he stops in the middle of a word and won’t talk for the rest of the day. And I know why. And I’m not telling.”
The boat we were apparently on tips on its side and we fall into the water. Lightning licks across the sky, an instant in separate frames, and lances the bright half-moon. I float in the water. Waves are slapping the sides of the upside-down boat frame. Dorothy holds me under my arms and paddles to shore with her free hand.
“How do you know he wakes in the night? Why aren’t you sleeping?” she asks.
“He just stops talking. I see his eyes fill with fear. Like a child realizing that things pass, that yesterday isn’t the same as today.”
“I don’t understand,” Dorothy says. “Can you swim?”
The water isn’t cold. That’s how I start to realize I am no longer dreaming. Dorothy’s arm is large and hairy. Her skin is blotchy. It isn’t her skin.
The orderly flips me onto my stomach. He straddles me. I can tell because his thighs feel like thighs, pressing my ribs inwards. I think he has been hitting me. I feel sore, like I had been working the day before, lifting stones and cutting down trees with a dull axe and climbing rope ladders.
“Rattle it rattles. Rattle it rattles,” I am saying. I am whispering this. For some reason, I don’t want to wake the other campers. They are probably awake. But I don’t want them to hear my sounds.
There is a feeling of something moving across my back. I know it is a paintbrush, with cold smooth paint. It traces an unknowable pattern. The paint is green, I decide. I remember the pattern. Abstract twists and blots.
* * *
I woke up. Sunlight flowed around the bars of Jefferson’s window. I woke up facing the wall and I put my hand out and touched the clay. My fingernails found purchase in its wrinkles and I began to pick at it. It crumbled easily. Dust filled the lines of my fingerprints. Obscuring my identity.
“Rattle it rattles,” I whispered, again and again.
When I stood up, Jefferson was looking at me. It was unnerving to be looked at by Jefferson, since usually he stared straight through you, straight through you and the wall and the surface of the earth and space to the end of the universe.
“Turn around,” he said. “Let me see that.”
I turned.
“It was that orderly that did this? The splotchy, big one?”
I nodded, knowing but also realizing again that the orderly was real, and that the rest was a dream.
“Did he say anything?”
“I couldn’t understand him if he did,” I said, turning around to face Jefferson again.
He was leaning against the wall. Limp. He was crying. His gaze drove right into my eyes. He told me his son used to paint like that. Zig-zags and spirals. Green was his favorite color. Jefferson’s eyes wept. He held his hand up and looked at it, grasping something small and spherical. He opened his hand flat and closed it again, closed it around that unseen object.
“Christ, Jefferson,” Cass said. Everyone was listening. “Did you kill him?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember much, anymore. Do you think I did that? Is that why I am here?”
“What do you see?” I asked, “when you’re staring out to the end of the universe?”
“I am dreaming as I stand. As I walk. As I talk to Dorothy. My mind isn’t all there. My memories come in and out like they are real. Nothing is vivid, so everything could be – or could be not. In my memories I am young. A young father, a young boy. The visions can last for hours. Then they disperse. It’s horrible. Then I am trapped here, decaying with nothing to live for but the next lapse in my day in which I can dream of what was and could have been. Sometimes, I’ve realized, my mind makes it up. I’ve been here 66 years but sometimes I remember getting awards at my company and having a second child, a girl. Things that never will happen revive me then leave, taunting my old mind.”
He moved to the bars of his cell while staring back at me unceasingly. He slipped his ragged, papery hand through the bars. I could see his pale fingertips. They came closer and I could see the flakes of skin along his fingernails. He stretched farther and farther, his hand now halfway across the gap between our cells, hovering above the door in the floor that led to the stairs. With a groan he pushed his shoulder between the bars. He was so thin, emaciated. His face was shoved against the metal and it made impressions in his cheeks. Tears ran down the bars and wet his shirt at his shoulder.
“Trevor. I can see my boy! I can see his hand holding the brush, criss-crossing your bare back. I can see his small shoes. If I look down at my hand, it is young and supple. It’s gripping a baseball. My feet feel the grass. Trevor! Does he know he is loved? He sits and paints and doesn’t look at me. But when I am not looking at him, I can feel his eyes. We just can’t both look at the same time. Is this by choice?”
Jefferson’s eyes rested on an invisible figure behind me. I heard a crack as he pushed his collarbone through the bars. He screamed. His fingers wavered, but continued inching towards me. The door in the floor slammed open and two guards – the first time we’d seen guards since I’d been brought in – clambered up. One held Jefferson’s arm steady while the other unlocked the door. He was taken downstairs blankly staring upwards. Donovan swore. I looked down at the park.
Jefferson was absent from his cell for over a week. Dorothy had stopped pestering me about my background, my psyche. It felt strange to be missing our cellmate. Though he wasn’t the most alert, we’d gotten used to being visible from those angles – I used to see Jefferson, Albert, and Cass fairly easily. I caught their eyes, from time to time, and through these glances we’d always hosted a wordless communion. With one member gone, the balance of our circle was thrown off. And because Jefferson’s window faced East, the sunlight that came through in the middle of the morning always fully opened into my cell, and Jefferson’s shadow, which occasionally projected its occupancy into my space, was noticeably absent.
The large orderly, too, had gone, it seemed. I wondered if he’d been connected to the scene of Jefferson’s disappearance by more than hallucination. It occurred to me that Trevor might be only as real as Albert’s orc Sardock. I pictured the big orderly, resting in a tent, painting the bodies of his victims as he cooked their meatier bits. I even conjectured that the orderly was Jefferson’s son, painting those green tattoos as he’d always done. Any fantasy only surficially mitigated the horror I felt when I thought of Jefferson’s lapses that ripped him between happiness and desolation, between a youthful hope and a cell locked on senescence.
One evening a bomb went off outside of the school that Cass could see from her window. The explosion brought guards to every perimeter of the prison. The smoke shot into the sky and languished there like a dark fog through the next morning. Mohammed knew that the bomb had arrived in a van. He knew this, it seemed, just from the sound, and from the way Cass described the wreckage of the school’s facade. Albert had two theories on the kind of explosive device that was used. I was surprised at how thorough his knowledge was until I remembered bombs would have taken up a large portion of his research on mass killing. We’d taken to speaking more freely. It seemed, for a brief two weeks, that we could start to hold conversations unprompted by Dorothy’s counsel.
“Will you tell them now?” Dorothy asked, when I related all of this to her. “It’s your history, it’s all you have left.”
“What about my writing?”
“You don’t do that,” she said. And I knew she knew. She watched me pick at a splinter in my chair’s wooden seat.
“I will start, now,” I said. And she said “good,” and she knew that I was telling the truth, and she told me that patient confidentiality really had her hands tied. She gave me several sheets of paper and a short pencil, the kind you write your scores with at the bowling alley.
We were lying down on our floors, circling like cats to seek the evening’s’ cool spots that would cradle us to sleep, when Jefferson was finally brought back. His arm was in a cast up to his neck. They had lain him in bed, but when the door closed he struggled out of the cot and stood in the center of his cell. We asked him about Trevor. He said “no, I don’t associate with his type,” and looked out of his window, past the bars and past the roofs of houses and past the treeline and past the place where, in the morning, the sun would begin its crawl onto the sky.
Thom's Stories 