The Rapist (8 page)

“For starters, I have reason to believe you’re suicidal. I’m putting your guards on a suicide watch.”

I knew what that meant. Every hour, twenty-four hours a day, a guard would come by and check on me. At night, he’d shine a bright flashlight over my face. It meant the end of what little privacy I still possessed. Worse, it meant it would be difficult to continue my practice sessions. Practice for my escape.

“I’m not the least suicidal,” I said. “And you know it.”

“That’s not what it says here,” he said, that silly grin still on his face. He picked up one of the papers he had been moving from pile to pile and held it up. “This is a report from one of the guards on the Row. He says he’s observed you staring at your razor for long moments while you shave. If that isn’t direct evidence of a suicide wish, I don’t know what is.”

So that was the way it was going to be, I thought. Very well then, I decided. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing this turn of events bothered me in the remotest. I’d still be able to practice, albeit it was going to be more difficult. Still, I could manage. I smiled back at him, a benign, passive smile.

“It will be good to have the company,” I said. “Many times at night I get to feeling somewhat lonely. You have done me a favor, and I appreciate it. It will be lovely to have someone to share a smoke with and some conversation during the night.”

His reaction was what I should have expected. He added another punishment.

“I don’t think so,” he said, losing his toothy smile for just an instant. It crept back slowly as he seemed to have an inspiration. “Your smoking privileges are canceled. I’m afraid you may injure yourself from the match flame or the cigarette itself. This is all for your own good, you know,” he added, standing up to indicate the interview was over.

“There are so many things I have to thank you for,” I said, maintaining my own smile. “I’ve wanted to quit the filthy habit for a very long time and now you’ve given me the opportunity to do so. I have heard some of the inmates and even some of the guards say that you were an inhumane man, even going so far as to call you vile names. Now I know they are wrong. You are the most humane of men. I only wish I had made your acquaintance many years ago. You might have been able to ‘save me from myself’, as they say. I appreciate these little efforts you’re making on my behalf, and, believe me, they won’t go unrewarded in the afterlife. Not if there is a true God!” I rose myself and offered him my hand.

“Out!” he said, his voice raised and angry. “Get the hell out of my office. Guard!” The guard responded immediately from his post just outside the door. “Take this man back to his cell and confiscate his cigarettes.”

As we were leaving, he said to my back, more softly this time but with a detectable note of glee, “Oh, Pinter, I’m very sorry, but I believe we went over on our appointment, and the men have already been served supper. I apologize for being responsible for your missing your meal.”

I turned, just as we reached the door. “Again, Warden, I am in your debt. How did you know I have been thinking about my weight? Just this morning I had vowed to eliminate one meal a day. I just didn’t know which one I wanted to eliminate. Now, you’ve made that decision for me. Thank you again.” And I turned and walked out ahead of the guard, my demeanor calm on the outside but seething inside.

The guard that escorted me back to the Row came back shortly after he had locked me down and handed me two stale dinner rolls through the bars.

“Here,” he said in a gruff tone, not meeting my eyes. “A man shouldn’t starve just because somebody’s an asshole.”

“I don’t want it,” I said, placing the offering on the floor outside my cell. “I’m trying to lose a few pounds and the warden was nice enough to assist me in my goal.” There was just the chance the warden had put the guard up to this, to see if he had actually gotten to me. If I accepted the gift, he’d know he had me. The guard shrugged his shoulders and picked up the rolls. “Suit yourself, buddy,” he said, walking away. “One asshole deserves another, I guess.”

The very next day, I was summoned to the green room once again. This time, I identified something in his appearance that had bothered me the previous visit but which had eluded me when I tried to identify the source of vexation. It was his eyebrows. Eyebrows have always been a feature of interest to me. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, the eyebrows are the weathervanes. And, Lars’ eyebrows were that, weathervanes. They were the sort that predicted the hurricane or the calm. If they were lying down, it was safe to go sailing. If they were bristly and quivering, it was best to head to port. Right now, they were shooting out at every angle, like a porcupine’s quills when he faces a maddened bear. If I read them correctly, a dark, ugly storm was brewing. I was right. The storm broke before I had time to sit.

“I don’t understand you!” he thundered, the blood in his temples threatening to burst from their pipelines. The guard who had escorted me to his office backed up and exited with white, tight lips, as if it had been he whom his superior was shouting at. The door closed quickly behind him with nothing but a careful click. The outburst had startled me, but my face feigned indifference. I seated myself and crossed my legs. I flicked a nonexistent speck of lint from my prison denims.

“What don’t you understand?”

He sat down in his own chair, throwing his body into it like a sack of potatoes purchased at too dear a price, his desk between us like a moat. A jumble of books cut off half his upper body from my view. A volume of Jung caught my eye. Was that for show, I wondered, or had he crept into those pages? The brief flicker of respect was doused when I spied a Cliff’s Notes on the same book beneath it.

“I’m a graduate of Princeton myself. You know, I’m not naive enough to suppose all my fellow alumni to be of noble character, but I have never been able to understand sodomy or bestiality, among the usual sort of men we get in here, and I absolutely cannot understand it in one such as you! And if I were to understand those acts, there exists no provision for understanding a man who would force a large stick into someone and break it off inside.”

There it was. He was a Freudian and in the worst sense. Probably didn’t even realize it. The orifice chosen in my crime was all-important to him, in his scheme of life.
And my choice reflected on his alma mater in some convoluted manner. He had arranged his universe into a complicated set of totems, and someone had rearranged one of them, and now all his dominoes were in danger of tumbling down. He was a moron. No, worse. He was a Yale grad.

“You could stand me better if I’d chosen the more usual orifice?”
 
I offered, feeling pity for him and holding out to him the opportunity to realize his mistake. “Or, if I had attended another school, preferably a state university somewhere in the Midwest?”

Sparks flew from his eyebrows. “You’re a purely evil person. An abomination.” He stood and thrust his finger at me, his gesture like the kiss of Judas upon me. “I’ve always hated executions we hold. This is one I wouldn’t miss, believe me.”

I offered no clue to my feelings, giving only a shrug of my shoulders. I was at the whim of whatever caprice his mind invented. I was very much aware that I was the prisoner.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment, casting down his eyes, a blush tingeing his complexion. He fiddled with some papers on his desk, their rustling the only sound in the room. He acted as if his monomaniac cant had never occurred, or that it had been inconsequential, a small matter, like some mildly cross words to a friend. I could not follow his comings and goings, his mood changes, the extreme emotional poles he swung back and forth between. I pushed my chair an inch or two away from the desk and waited for his next words.

“I see by your record here that you were trained to be a teacher. Of English. Why is it you never taught?”

Who could guess his thought patterns? I gave up trying.

“I liked teaching. I detested children.”

I elaborated, as that seemed to be what he wanted. “By the age of five, children labor under the assumption they know everything worth knowing. Who knows? They may have something there. The odd thing is, the ones that feel they know the most end up with one hand on a Standard Oil gasoline pump with their name stitched over their shirt pocket and their other hand scratching their testicles, their evenings employed in watching Wheel of Fortune and wishing Vanna White would drop by their house after the show and sit on their face. If you were to bring up the name Camus in their company, they would assume you were mispronouncing a myopic cartoon character’s name, thereby proving your ignorance to them and embellishing their notion that educated persons have no horse sense, the only real intelligence worth having, in their enlightened view. In that tiny piece of their head they cavalierly term their brain, they see the world through the amber shades of a Budweiser. One such person is intolerable; a room filled with thirty-five such aberrations is an invitation to madness. Being another gooey Mr. Chips is not an ambition that ever befell me, thank you.”

He looked goggle-eyed, like a bullfrog with a cheek full of flies, one of which doesn’t taste quite right.

“You hate everything, don’t you?”

I regarded him. Such a little man. In mind, as well as in stature. He sat there, in his olive-green corduroy three-piece suit with the black tie, a small, crumpled lump of flesh. Even from where I sat I could see clumps of hair sticking out of his fleshy ears and his bulbous nose.

“You don’t have to answer that,” he went on. “I can see by your face I’ve hit a nerve. And if that weren’t enough, I have your record to verify my opinion. There’s nothing in there that suggests any trace of a relationship with anyone except possibly your parents, and my guess is that was only out of necessity. I’ll bet the only time you’ve ever had sex was with the girl you find yourself in here for, the one you raped and killed.”

“I didn’t kill her!” I would give anything to have kept from saying that and with that much vehemence, but it came out before I could think.

“Oh? Is that right? Well, I guess we’d better reconvene the judge and jury then, because they all agreed that you had. It looks like there’s been a terrible mistake that’s been made, Pinter.” He flashed his insufferable grin once more.

“I’ve already admitted to her rape,” I said, getting myself under control. “If you want to call what happened a rape. But I didn’t kill her. She killed herself.”

“Yeah,” he said, sarcasm dripping from his voice and evident in his face, “I’ve heard your line of reasoning on that before. You really believe that crap, don’t you?”

I stood up. “I believe it because it’s the truth.” I pushed my chair in toward the desk and straightened up, looking him dead in the eye. “If you want to execute me for raping the girl, then go ahead. I don’t care. But when you punish me for breaking your law of murder then you are in error. You’ve changed the meaning of murder, the definition, to suit your purposes. I’ll let you kill me, just as you thirst to,” I said, my anger barely under control, “but under my terms, not yours. When you finally do bring an end to my existence, the knowledge of my innocence will follow you all the days of your life. As it will my jury and my judge.”

“What do you mean, under
your
terms?” He rose and walked over to stand a few inches in front of me. “Are you really planning on suicide?”

I hoped he could see the contempt in my eyes that blazed inside. “No, you idiot. I don’t have to commit suicide to beat you. You think that death will defeat me, but death is nothing, only a little space between this world and the next. But
I’ll
choose the time of my death in such a way that you’ll know dying doesn’t concern me in the least, and you’ll also know that society has erred in placing this sentence on me. I want to go back to my cell now, if you please.”

He walked back to his chair and sat down. “We have a new foreman for your execution, Pinter, a gentleman I’m to meet with tomorrow. Perhaps he will allow me the honor in your case.” His eyes gleamed and his eyebrows stood at attention. “And you will go when I dismiss you. Sit down, Pinter. I’m not finished with you just yet.”

I did as he said, knowing it was useless to protest, but I took the initiative. I know what he wanted. My soul.

“Do you know, Warden, that this country ranks third in the world in the percentage of its citizens it locks up? Only Russia and South Africa have more of their people under lock and key. Both of their governments have been overthrown. Doesn’t that scare you as a member of the ruling apparatus? There’s a warning there that I know escapes you, sir. What do you think your fate is to be as a member of the ruling class that chooses repression over reform?”

He had no answer for that. I waited for one, but since none seemed forthcoming, I went on, utilizing the opportunity to set him straight.

“You seek my feelings here, is that correct, Mr. Big-Shot Warden, Mr. Princeton Graduate? You are familiar with the particulars, at least the popular version bandied about by the press and have read the transcript of my trial, so I can only presume your interest lies in my emotions. I am sorry to disappoint. You would want me to feel contrition? Or perhaps dread at the approaching hour? You feel that as the time nears, you will be witness to sweaty palms, labored breathing, a glaze in the eye? Maybe a last-minute blathering to some ghost-god in the sky, begging mercy with foam on my lips?

“I see it in your eyes. You’re like a cat observing a mouse. You think the mouse does not know you are there or why you wait, but I have a surprise for you. This mouse is not a mouse, but a lion, and therefore capable of but one emotion: disdain. He cares not for your purpose. He sneers at your purpose. He is as the eagle, watching the watcher, knowing he is in command. The dragonfly watches the mosquito, the fish watches the dragonfly, the osprey watches the fish, and the eagle watches the osprey. Where are you in the chain? I tell you now I am the eagle and there is none higher in the chain. I think it is your hands that shall become wet. We shall see. We’ll go on with our game, you and I, since that is what you want, and to be truthful, it amuses me as well.