God's Gym (16 page)

You don't want to hear my confession. It might sound better in the dark.

I'm tired. I need sleep, and you're acting stupid because you can't make up your mind to go to Arizona.

My mind's made up. The prison said yes. I'm on my way.

I'll be glad when it's over and done.

And me back in the arms of my love. Will you be faithful while your sweet serial killer's away.

She tries to snatch the papers but misses. I drop them over the side of the pull-out bed. Like the bed, she is small and light.
Easy to fold up and subdue even for an older fellow. When I wrap myself around her, my body's so much larger than hers, she almost vanishes. When we fuck, or now, capturing her, punishing her, I see very little of her flesh. I'm aware of my size, my strength towering over her squirming, her thrashing, her gasps for breath. I am her father's stare, the steel gate dropping over the tiger pit in which she's naked, trapped, begging for food and water. Air. Light.

I arrive on Sunday. Two days late, for reasons I can't explain to myself. I flew over mountains, then desert flatness that seemed to go on forever. It must have been Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, not actual desert but the nation's breadbasket, so they say, fruited plains, amber waves of grain, plowed, fertilized fields irrigated by giant machines day after day spreading water in the same pattern to create the circles, squares, rectangles below. Arable soil gradually giving way to sandy grit as the plane drones westward, through clouds, over another rugged seam of mountains, and then as I peer down at the undramatic nothingness beyond the far edge of wrinkled terrain, the surface of the earth flips over like a pancake. What's aboveground buried, what's belowground suddenly exposed. Upside-down mountains are hollow shells, deep, deep gouges in the stony waste, their invisible peaks underground, pointing to hell.

A bit of confusion, bureaucratic stuttering and sputtering when confronted by the unanticipated fact of my tardy arrival, a private calling his sergeant, sergeant phoning officer in charge of visitation, each searching for verification, for duplication, for assurance certified in black and white that she or he is off the hook, not guilty of disrupting the checks and balances of prison routine. I present myself hat in hand, remorseful, apologetic,
Please, please, give me another chance please kind sir,
forgive me for missing day one and two of the scheduled three-day visit, for checking in the morning of day three instead of day one. Am
I still eligible or will I be shooed away like starving beggars from the rich man's table.

I overhear two guards discussing a coyote whose scavenging brought it down out of the slightly elevated wilderness of rock and brush beginning a few miles or so from the prison's steel-fenced perimeter. I learn how patiently guards on duty in the tower spied on the coyote's cautious trespass of their turf, a blip at first, up and back along the horizon, then a discernible shape—skinny legs, long, pointed ears, bushy tail—a scraggly critter drawn by easy prey or coyote curiosity closer and closer to the prison until it was within rifle range and the guards took turns profiling it through their sharpshooting sniper scopes, the sad-faced, cartoon coyote they christened whatever guards would christen a creature they probably will kill one day, a spook, a mirage, it seems so quick on its feet, bolder as it's allowed to approach nearer without being challenged, believing perhaps it can't be seen, flitting from shadow to shadow, camouflaged by hovering darkness, by mottled fur, a shadow itself, instantly freezing, sniffing the air, then trotting again back and forth along the skyline, skittish through coverless space, up and back, parry, thrust, and retreat, ears pricked to attention when the rare service vehicle enters or leaves the prison parking lot before dawn. Murky predawn the coyote's time, the darkness divulging it, a drop from a leaky pipe, a phantom prowling nearer and nearer as if the electrified steel fence is one boundary of its cage, an easy shot now the sharpshooters forbear taking, too easy, or perhaps it's more fun to observe their mascot play, watch it pounce on a mouse and pummel it in swift paws bat-bat-bat before its jaws snap the rodent's neck or maybe the name they named it a kind of protection for a while till somebody comes on duty one morning or premorning really when the first shift after the night shift has to haul itself out of bed, out of prefab homes lining the road to the prison entrance, shitty box houses, a few with bright patches of something growing in flowerboxes beside the front steps, boxes you can't see at that
black hour from your pickup, eyes locked in the tunnel your headlights carve, a bad-head, bad-attitude morning, pissed off, thinking about quitting this stinking job, getting the fuck out before you're caught Kilroying or cuckolded in the town's one swinging joint, cussed out, serving pussy probation till further notice, cancer eating his mama, daddy long gone, kids sick or fighting or crazy on pot or dead or in prison so he draws a bead and
pow,
blood seeps into the sand, the coyote buzzard bait by the time I eavesdrop on two guards badmouthing their assassin colleague, laughing at him, at the coyote's surprise, the dead animal still serving time as a conversation piece, recycled in this desert sparseness, desert of extremes, of keepers and kept, silence and screams, cold and hot, thirst and drunkenness, too much time, no time, where all's lost but nothing's gone.

A spiffy, spit-and-polish platinum blond guard whose nametag I read and promptly forget, Lieutenant, another guard addresses her, Lieutenant, each breast under her white blouse as large as Suh Jung's head, smiles up at me from the counter where she's installed, hands me the document she's stamped, slides me a tray for unloading everything in my pockets, stores it when I'm finished. Now that wasn't so bad, was it, sir. Gives me a receipt and a green ticket with matching numbers. Points me toward a metal detector standing stark and foursquare as a guillotine whose eye I must pass through before I'm allowed to enter the prison.

Beyond the detector one more locked door I must be buzzed through and I'm outside again, in an open-air, tunnel-like enclosure of Cyclone fencing bristling on sides and top with razor wire, a corridor or chute or funnel or maze I must negotiate while someone somewhere at a machine measures and records my every step, false move, hesitation, scream, counts drops of sweat, of blood when my hands tear at the razor wire, someone calibrating the before and after of my heart rate, my lungs.

I pass all the way through the tunnel to a last checkpoint, a small cinder-block hut squatting beside the final sliding gate guarding the visiting yard. Thirty yards away, across the yard, at a gated entranceway facing this one, guards are mustering inmates dressed in orange jumpsuits.

In a slot at the bottom of the hut's window you must surrender your numbered green ticket to receive a red one. Two groups of women and children ahead of me in line require a few minutes each for this procedure. Then I hold up the works. Feel on my back the helplessness and irritation of visits stalled. Five, ten minutes in the wire bullpen beside the hut, long enough to register a miraculous change in temperature. Less than an hour ago, crossing the parking lot from rental car to waiting room, I'd wondered if I'd dressed warmly enough for the visit. Now Arizona sun bakes my neck. I'm wishing for shade, for the sunglasses not permitted inside. My throat's parched. Will I be able to speak if spoken to. Through the hut's thick glass, bulletproof I'm guessing, I watch two officers chattering. One steps away to a wall phone. The other plops down at a shelflike minidesk, shuffles papers, punches buttons on a console. A dumb show since I couldn't hear a thing through the slab of greenish glass.

Did I stand in the cage five minutes or ten or twenty. What I recall is mounting heat, sweat rolling inside my clothes, blinking, losing track of time, not caring about time, shakiness, numbness, mumbling to myself, stiffening rage, morphing combinations of all the above, yet overriding each sensation, the urge to flee, to be elsewhere, anywhere other than stalled at that gate, waiting to be snatched inside or driven away or, worse, pinned there forever. Would I be knocked down to my knees, forced to recite my sins, the son's sins, the sins of the world. If I tried to escape, would my body—
splat—
be splashed and pulped on the razor wire or could I glide magically through the knives glinting like mirrors, not stopping till I reach a spot far, far away where I can bury my throbbing head in the coolness
miles deep below the sand, so deep you can hear the subterranean chortle of rivers on the opposite face of the planet.

At last someone arrives from a door I hadn't noticed, addressing me, I think.

Sorry. Your visit's been canceled. Computer says the inmate you want to visit is not in the facility. Call the warden's office after 9
A.M.
Monday. Maybe they can give you more information. Sorry about the mix-up. Now please stand back. Step away from the gate so the next...

"Today I believe in the possibility of love."

—Frantz Fanon

O
N THE SCREEN
they are chopping up Lumumba and burning his body parts in an oil drum. Two thick, red-faced, unhappy louts. Brueghel peasants sweating through khaki uniforms, working overtime to clean up the Belgian king's mess. I imagine Chantal beside me, imagine us going to a bar after the movie, and maybe I'll attempt to explain my reaction when I was a kid and first heard Lumumba's name. His name and the others—Kasavubu, Mobutu, Tshombe. Names embarrassing me, sounding like tom-toms, like jibber-jabber blabbered through big African lips at Tarzan or bwana in Hollywood movies. Black, sweaty native faces. Fat eyes rolling and showing too much white. Would I tell her I'd heard my white friends giggling at the funny names even as the news reported rape, massacres, chaos in faraway countries. Terrified Europeans fleeing, wild Africans seizing power. Mumbo-jumbo names. Cannibal names. Nigger names coming to get me. Lumumba-Tshombe-Mobutu-Kasavubu.

In Accra, Ghana, in 1960, Frantz Fanon met Patrice Lumumba. Both spoke French, Chantal's language, both were thirty-five, and in the next year both would die, Lumumba murdered in the Congo at the beginning of 1961, Fanon succumbing to leukemia in the U.S.A. at the year's end.

Today I'm much older than these dead men lived to be, these fallen heroes once old enough to be my fathers. Now I am old enough to have a son of thirty-five. How could so many years be lost in an instant. Everything and nothing changing. When Lumumba and Fanon died, I was a boy setting out to conquer the world, a world that, by disposing of them, had expressed its scorn, its determination to prevent boys like me from conquering much of anything. Mercifully or unmercifully, I knew next to nothing about either man back in 1961; I was full of myself, studying hard to win a college scholarship, intoxicated by what I believed were infinite possibilities, unlimited time. Now I understand (and believe me, derive no satisfaction from the fact) that my ignorance of these men, of their countries and legacy, did not indicate simply a personal failure of imagination. Particular kinds of information and knowledge had been erased by my education. Erased ruthlessly, systematically, with malice, just as Patrice Lumumba, Frantz Fanon, and countless others—perhaps our best women and men—have been struck down and erased.

Neither Chantal nor I recognized the face stenciled with black spray paint on a greenish gray metal shed whose purpose we didn't recognize either in a field we passed each day on our walks back and forth to the beach. Though we remained slightly curious about this somehow familiar face staring back at us, the face and the Arabic script beneath were small details during the three weeks we spent on Martinique over a Christmas holiday a dozen years ago. We were too busy falling in love. Busy fucking our brains out, so to speak. The island a perfect third partner, nibbling, provoking, overloading our senses, enslaving us subtly as we became accustomed to the constant attention of sun, palm trees sighing, the surfs murmur, the breeze's caressing fingers. But once it had registered, the face, like the island's enchanting complicity, never entirely disappeared.

Strangely, the hotel staff, other guests, shopkeepers, couldn't name the face, and most claimed to be unaware of its existence in the field where a few pale long-horned cattle were tethered near the road's edge to graze. Could the face be one of the island's fabled ghosts, a revenant, playing us. If we stopped believing, if we blinked, would it go away.

One afternoon a young man on a bicycle, an island native whose small round head bristled with spiky braids, happened to be pedaling toward us, idly zigzagging from one edge of the road to the other, and reached us just as we were opposite the shed. In English, French, and sign language we hailed him, and Chantal asked about the face. Straddling his undersized bike, supporting its weight with one foot on the ground, he stared at the shed, as if surprised it had sprouted in the field since his last trip up the road. Then he firmly shook his head, no, no, turning over his brown hands to prove they too were innocent.

A big smile said he wished to be helpful, but he shrugged his bare, bony shoulders after a glance at the shed. Now his turn to be curious, checking out Chantal, meeting my gaze for the first time before quickly hiding his eyes behind long, curled lashes. I could hear his thoughts. Whoever else I'd become, wouldn't I always be a shy, skinny brown kid daydreaming on a bike. Who are these strangers worried about a face painted on the side of a metal box, a beat-up face and gang tags and scribble-scrabble writing. Why are these people minding my business, stopping me, bothering me about a face nobody sees, this pretty blond woman and a man as brown as me with nothing better to do than stroll half naked, white hand in black hand, like trouble itself, up and down my road, on my island, asking questions about stuff nobody with good sense cares about, not asking my name, not offering some little work and tip, why else they think I be pedaling the live-long day up and back, up and back, scuffling for a little change.