Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (630 page)

Now I went to the wall and felt the criminals. Their fronts formed a glossy, encrusted whole, hands covering genitals, knees crushed into corners that were flush against blocked shoulders. I flashed on the memory of that long-ago day at the wall. Then my finger slipped into a mouth.

I yelped and pulled it out. I’d felt the teeth grind, hard, and it was only luck that I hadn’t really been bitten. The insensate lips hadn’t been aware of my finger, of course. The mouth was horribly dry and rough inside, not like living flesh, but it lived in its way, grinding out words without needing to pause for breath. I reached out again, felt the eyes. Useless here in the hole, but they blinked and rolled, as though searching, like mine. The mouth I’d touched went on—“never want to be in Tijuana with nothing to do, be fascinating for about three days and then you’d start to go crazy”—the voice plodding, exhausted.

I’d later see how few of the hardened spoke at all, how many had retreated into themselves, eyes and mouths squeezed shut. There were dead ones, too, here and everywhere in the wall. Living prisoners had killed the most annoying bricks by carving into the stony foreheads and smashing the chips that kept the brain alive. Others had malfunctioned and died on their own. But in the dark the handful of voices seemed hundreds, more than the wall of one room could possibly hold.

“C’mere, I’m over here. Christ.”

I found the one that called out.

“What you do, kid?”

“Robbery,” I said.

“What you do to get thrown in
here
?
Shiv a hack?”

“What?”

“You knife a guard, son?”

I didn’t speak. Other voices rattled and groaned around me.

“My name’s Jimmy Shand,” said the confiding voice. I thought of a man who’d sit on a crate in front of a gas station. “I’ve been in a few knife situations, I’m not ashamed of that. Why’d you get thrown in the bucket, Peewee?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re here.”

“I didn’t do anything. I just got here, on the bus. They put me in here.”

“Liar.”

“They checked my name and threw me in here.”

“Lying motherfucker. Show some respect for your
fucking
elders.” He began making a sound with his mummified throat, a staccato crackling noise, as if he wanted to spit at me. I backed away to the middle of the floor and his voice blended into the horrible, chattering mix.

I picked the corner opposite the door and away from the wall for my toilet, and slept huddled against the door. I was woken the next morning by a cold metal tray pressing against the back of my neck as it was shoved through a slot on the door. Light flashed through the gap, blindingly bright to my deprived eyes, then disappeared. The tray slid to the floor, its contents mixing. I ate the meal without knowing what it was.

“Gimme some of that, I hear you eating, you son of a bitch.”

“Leave him alone, you constipated turd.”

They fed me twice a day, and those incidental shards of light were my hope, my grail. I lived huddled and waiting, quietly masturbating or gnawing my cuticles, sucking precious memories dry by overuse. I quickly stopped answering the voices, and prayed that the bricks in the walls of the ordinary cells were not so malicious and insane. Of course, by the time I was sprung I was a little insane myself.

They dragged me out through a corridor I couldn’t see for the ruthless light, and into a concrete shower, where they washed me like I was a dog. Only then was I human enough to be spoken to. “Put these on, Marra.” I took the clothes and dressed.

The man waiting in the office they led me to next didn’t introduce himself. He didn’t have the grey deadness in his features that I already associated with prison staff.

“Sit down.”

I sat.

“Your father is Floyd Marra?”

“Why?” I meant to ask why I’d been put in isolation. My voice, stilled for days, came out a croak.

“Leave the questions to us,” said the man at the desk, not unkindly. “Your father is Floyd Marra?”

“Yes.”

“You need a glass of water? Get him a glass of water, Graham.” One of the guards went into the next room and came back with a paper cone filled with water and handed it to me. The man at the desk pursed his lips and watched me intently as I drank.

“You’re a smart guy, a high-school graduate,” he said.

I nodded and put the paper cone on the desk between us. He reached over and crumpled it into a ball and tossed it under the desk.

“You’re going to work for us.”

“What?” I still meant to ask
Why,
but he had me confused. A part of me was still in the hole. Maybe some part would be always.

“You want a cigarette?” he said. The guard called Graham was smoking. I did want one, so I nodded. “Give him a cigarette, Graham. There you go.”

I smoked, and trembled, and watched the man smile.

“We’re putting you in with him. You’re going to be our ears, Nick. There’s stuff we need to know.”

I
haven’t seen my father since I was six years old,
I wanted to say.
I
can’t remember him.
“What stuff?” I said.

“You don’t need to know that now. Just get acquainted, get going on the heart-to-hearts. We’ll be in touch. Graham here runs your block. He’ll be your regular contact. He’ll let me know when you’re getting somewhere.”

I looked at Graham. Just a guard, a prison heavy. Unlike the man at the desk.

“Your father’s near the ceiling, left-hand, beside the upper bunk. You won’t have anyone in the cell with you.”

“Everybody’s going to think you’re hot shit, a real killer,” said Graham, his first words. The other guard nodded.

“Yes, well,” said the man at the desk. “So there shouldn’t be any problem. And Nick?”

“Yes?” I’d already covered my new clothes with sweat, though it wasn’t hot.

“Don’t blow this for us. I trust you understand your options. Here, stub out the coffin nail. You’re not looking so good.”

* * * *

I lay in the lower bunk trying not to look at the wall, trying not to make out differences in the double layer of voices, those from inside my cell, from the wall, and those of the other living prisoners that echoed in the corridor beyond. Only when the lights on the block went out did I open my eyes—I was willing myself back into the claustrophobic safety of the hole. But I couldn’t sleep.

I crawled into the upper bunk.

“Floyd?” I said.

In the scant light from the corridor I could see the eyes of the wall turn to me. The bodies could have been sculpture, varnished stone, but the shifting eyes and twitching mouths were live, more live than I wanted them to be. The surface was layered with defacements and graffiti, not the massive spray-paint boasts of the exterior, but scratched-in messages, complex ingravings. And then there were the smearings, shit or food, I didn’t want to know.

“—horseshoe crab, that’s a hell of a thing—”

“—the hardest nut in the case—”

“—ran the table, I couldn’t miss, man. Guy says John’s gonna beat that nigger and I say—”

The ones that cared to have an audience piped up. There were four talkers in the upper part of the wall of my cell. I’d soon get to know them all. Billy Lancing was a black man who talked about his career as a pool hustler, lucid monologues reflecting on his own cleverness and puzzling bitterly over his downfall. Ivan Detbar, who plotted breaks and worried prison hierarchies as though he were not an immobile irrelevant presence on the wall. And John Jones—that was Billy’s name for him—who was insane.

The one I noticed now was the one who said, “I’m Floyd.”

A muscle in my chest punched upward against my windpipe like a fist. Would meeting him trigger the buried memories? I felt a surge of powerful emotion, but it was virtual emotion. I didn’t know this man. I should want to.

I was trembling all over.

My father was missing an eye. From the crushed rim of the socket it looked like it had been pried out of the hardened flesh of the wall, not lost before. And his arms, crossed over his stomach, were scored with tiny marks, as though someone had used him to count their time in the cell. But his one eye lived, examined mine, blinked sadly. “I’m Floyd,” he said again.

“My name is Nick,” I said, wondering if he’d recognize it and perhaps ask my last name. He couldn’t possibly recognize me. After my week in the hole I looked as far from my six-year-old self as I ever would.

“Ever see a horseshit crap, Nick?” said John Jones.

“Shut up, Jones,” said Billy Lancing.

“How’d you know my name?” said my father.

“I’m Nick Marra,” I said.

“How’d you know my name?” he said again.

“You’re a famous fuck,” said Ivan Detbar. “Word is going around. ‘Floyd is the man around here.’ All the young guys want to see if they can take you.”

“Horseshoe crab, horseradish fish,” said John Jones. “That’s a hell of a thing. You ever see—”

“Shut up.”

“You’re Floyd Marra,” I said.

“I’m Floyd.”

I turned away, momentarily overcome. My father’s plight overwhelmed mine. The starkness of this punishment suddenly was real to me, in a way it hadn’t been in the hole. This view out over the bunk and through the bars, into the corridor, was the only view my father had seen since his hardening.

“I’m Nick Marra,” I said. “Your son.”

“I don’t have a son.”

I tried to establish our relationship. He agreed that he’d known a woman named Doris Thayer. That was my mother’s name. His pocked mouth tightened and he said, “Tell me about Doris. Remind me of that.”

I told him about Doris. He listened intently—or I thought that I could tell he was listening intently. Whenever I paused he asked a question to keep me on the subject. At the end he said only, “I remember the woman you mean.” I waited, then he added, “I remember a few different women, you know. Some more trouble than they’re worth. Doris I wouldn’t mind seeing again.”

Awkwardly I said, “Do you remember a boy?”

“Cheesedog crab,” said Jones. “That’s a good one. They’ll nip at you from under the surf—”

“You fucking loony.”

“A boy?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, there was a boy—” All at once my father began a rambling whispered reminiscence, about
his
father, and about himself as a boy in the Italian ghetto. I leaned back on the bunk and looked away from the wall, towards the bars and the trickle of light from the hallway as he told me of merciless beatings, mysterious nighttime uprootings from one home to another, and abandonment.

Around us the other voices from the wall babbled on, as constant as televisions. I was already learning to tune them out like some natural background—crickets, or surf pounding. I fell asleep to the sound of my father’s voice.

The next morning I joined the prison community. The two-tiered cafeteria called Mess Nine was a churning, teeming place, impossible not to see as a hive. Like the offices, it was on the interior, away from the living wall. I escaped notice until I took my full tray out towards the tables.

“Hey, lonely boy.”

“He’s not lonely, he’s a psycho. Aren’t you, man?”

“They’re afraid of this skinny little guy, he’s got to be psycho.”

“Who you kill?”

I went and set my tray on an empty corner of a table and sat down, but it didn’t stop. The inmate who’d latched on first (“lonely boy”) followed and sat behind me.

“He needs his privacy, can’t you see?” said someone else. “Let him eat and-go back to his psycho cell.”

“He can’t socialize.”

“I’ll socialize him.”

“He wants to fuck the wall.”

“He was up late fucking the wall last night for sure. Little hung over, lonely boy?”

“Fuck the wall,”
I
came to know, was an all-purpose phrase, in constant use either as insult or as an expression of rebellion, of yearning, of ironic futility. The standing assumption was that the dry, corroded mouths would gnaw a man’s penis to bloody shreds in a minute. Stories circulated of those who’d tried, of the gangs who’d forced it on a despised victim, of the willing brick somewhere in the wall who encouraged it, got it round the clock and asked for more.

I survived the meal in silence. Better for the moment to truck on my reputation as a dangerous enigma, however slight, than expose it with feeble protests. The fact of my unfair treatment wouldn’t inspire any more sympathy from the softer criminals than it had from Jimmy Shand, in the wall of the hole. I shrugged away comments, thrown bits of rolled-up bread, and a hand on my knee, and did more or less as they predicted by retreating to my cell. The television room, the gym, the other common spaces, were challenges to be met some other day.

“Shoecat cheese!” said John Jones. “Beefshoe crab!”

“Quiet, you goddamn nut!”

“If you’d seen it you wouldn’t laugh,” said Jones ominously.

They were expecting me in the upper bunk. My father had been listening to Billy Lancing tell an extended story about a hustle gone bad in western Kansas, while they both fended off Jones.

“Nick Marra,” said my father.

I was pleased, thinking he recognized me now. But he only said, “How’d you get sent up, Marra?” It occurred to me that he didn’t remember his own last name.