Transcription (15 page)

She appeared again on the sidewalk, looking up. “Can you let me in?”

“You’re going to have to climb, darling,” Bo said.
 

“Climb?”

“I’ll show you,” Bo said.
 

James started to have second thoughts as soon as he saw Bo dropping over the side of the railing. Company was a bad idea. Bo was fun to talk to now and then, but this was opening a whole new can of worms. Before he got up the nerve to object, Danielle’s head appeared over the railing, followed closely by Bo. He was right there, making sure she didn’t fall. James stood up and offered his hand. Danielle didn’t take it. She hopped over the railing and smiled.

“I used to be more of a tomboy,” she said. “I don’t know what happened.”

“Take my seat,” Bo said.

James cursed himself for not offering first. Danielle took the other chair as James settled back into his. It occurred to him to offer his seat to Bo, but Bo had already found a spot on the railing where he could put his feet up and lean back against the side of the building where it jutted out. He looked more comfortable there than he had in the chair.

“You’ve got good trees,” Danielle said.

“See?” Bo asked.

“Yeah, ours are terrible,” she said. “Our building is at a different angle, so some of the apartments get sun in the morning, and some get it in the evening. They’re both miserable in their own way.”

“I’d take the morning,” Bo said. “I like waking up with some light.”

“It sucks on weekends,” Danielle said. “You just want to sleep in, and you end up sweating.”

“You’ve heard of curtains, right?” Bo asked.

“What about you, Jim? Didn’t you say you sleep during the day?”

James cleared his throat. “I’m not sure if I said it or not, but yes, I do. I work at night.”

“That must be lonely business,” Danielle said. “I like to have activity around when I’m focused. It makes me feel more vital or something, you know?”

James shrugged.

“Except when Chloe is practicing.”

“She still does that?” Bo asked.

Danielle rolled her eyes. “Constantly. Don’t tell her I told you—nobody is supposed to know. She’s determined that the next time she sings at karaoke, she’s going to pleasantly surprise everyone.”

“It would pleasantly surprise everyone if she just didn’t sing at all,” Bo said.

Bo and Danielle laughed.

“Oh, that’s so mean. She tries. And she loves to sing so much, but it’s just painful to listen to. I have to leave the house when she starts. Sometimes I go down to the coffee shop and take my laptop, but that seems so pretentious. It’s like you’re there just hoping someone will see you working, you know?”

“How is that worse than those meet-ups you organize every fall?” Bo asked.

“That’s totally different. That’s people getting together to support each other in the pursuit of writing. Totally different. Hey, Jim, you should come out to one of those this fall. They’re after dark. You could come write with us.”

James shook his head. “I have to write here,” he said, pointing over his shoulder. “It’s my habit. It’s necessary. And please, call me James.”

Danielle nodded quickly. She folded her lips between her teeth and then nodded again.

“Okay!” Bo said. “That didn’t sound too creepy.” He smiled at James. “I think you’ve been trapped in there alone a little too long. Did you know that James has agoraphobia?”

James shook his head.

“Oh? That’s the fear of being outside, right?”

“Open spaces and crowds,” James said. “It’s mild.”

“You handled the hike the other day very well then,” Danielle said. “Congrats.”

“Thanks,” James said.

“Oh, shit, I’ve got to go, Danny,” Bo said, looking at his phone. “I’ve got closing at the Foodway.”

“You have too many jobs,” Danielle said.

“Said the woman who doesn’t have enough jobs,” Bo said. “You coming?”

Danielle looked to James. He happened to be looking down at the floor, where the bottle of gin should have been.
 

“Sure,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to not working.”

“Okay,” Bo said. “To get down, you have to slide your leg down this post until you find the ledge from the trim. Bo began to climb down. Danielle leaned over the balcony to watch the process. She jumped onto the railing and put her leg over the side.

James kept his seat and watched.

She got as far as crouching down and sliding her leg, but then she came back up. She repeated this process several times and then stood up, shaking her head. She made eye contact with James.

“I can’t do it,” she said. “I’m not tall enough.”

From the ground, Bo shouted his rebuttal. “You just have to go a little farther. You were tall enough to climb up, you can climb down.”

She tried once more, but with no more success.

“I can’t,” she said. “Bo, can you go borrow the ladder from somewhere?”

“Nonsense,” James said. He stood up.
 

Danielle looked back to him. Fear scrunched up her face. He didn’t know if the fear was of the climb, or of him.

“You can go through the living room and out the front door.”

“Oh, no,” Danielle said. “Bo said you don’t let anyone in—not even the landlord.”

James blushed. He had tipped the landlord well for privacy. Apparently, he hadn’t tipped well enough for his silence.
 

“It’s okay. Just understand, the place is a mess. I’ve got all my father’s archives in there.”

“Don’t worry,” Danielle said. “I’m a total slob. I won’t even notice, I promise.”

James nodded and dug into his pocket for the keys. If he was honest with himself, the tingling in his stomach wasn’t completely fear. Some of it was excitement. It was exciting to let Danielle enter his world. He knew he shouldn’t do it, and he knew nothing would come of it. Still, it was exciting.

He unlocked the sliding door and pushed aside the curtain.

She entered behind him. The room was dark. He closed the door and waited for his eyes to adjust. Danielle followed him closely through the maze of stacked boxes.

“This is your father’s writing?”

James didn’t answer until they reached the front door. He opened it and let the light from the hall in.

“Most of it, yes. Some of it is mine.”

“He must have been really prolific.”

James nodded. “Yes. He was.”

“I would love to read something sometime. Something of your dad’s, or maybe yours? Even if I don’t understand the subject, I like to see how people write. It fascinates me.”

James nodded. “Sorry about the mess.”

“Oh, don’t apologize. There’s nothing wrong with living how you want to live, as long as you don’t feel like you have to apologize.”

James tilted his head. He tried to figure out exactly what she meant, and came up confused.

“Okay,” she said with a smile. “Thanks for the chat. I’ll see you next time.”

She slipped through the door. James watched her round the corner to the stairs. He closed himself in again. With all the doors locked and the room appropriately dim again, James found himself in the kitchen. The alcohol was gone, of course. Even the small amount that would have been caught in the sink trap was washed away with water.

James looked at the envelope on the counter. It was the thick letter from his father—the only unread letter left. It was marked October 3
rd
.
 

Tomorrow.

James tried to forget about the letter as he got ready for the night’s work.

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Dear James,

I’ve sat here for the last twenty minutes, looking at those two words, and not knowing how to write the rest of this. This is the last letter I’ll write to you. I’m going to finish it, put it in a box, and hope that it finds you well twenty-five years from now. I know it’s not fair to reach forward into time and drop this burden on you. I love you so much. You’re my perfect boy. Every day I wish that I had somehow been stronger, or more careful, and given you a better life.

I have to write this letter, but you don’t have to read it. You can tear it up now and forget about it. I won’t hold any grudge and it doesn’t mean you’re weak. If you’ve healed from the wounds my imperfect life has inflicted on you, then so much the better. I couldn’t be more proud of you either way.

Should you choose to read on, please know that I’m going to write the rest of this letter with emotional distance that I do not feel. I’ve thought about it a lot, and it’s the only way I believe I can get through it. I love you. Please forgive me.

-Dad

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Thomas Hicks fell into a pattern. Each night, he wrote stories of terrible crimes. It was a compulsion, and he was weeks into the habit before he began to suspect the cause. It was the cell. Like The Big Four before him, Tom had been infected by the cell. It had twisted a part of his brain, and turned him into a creature of unimaginable cruelty.
 

But he was not a violent man. He’d never committed a crime more serious than stealing a newspaper. Tom was a writer, and that’s how the crimes expressed themselves. At sunset, he would sit. Then, against his will, his hands would begin to write. Out would spill tales of torture, arson, and murder. He hid the stories instinctively, stapling them and burying them in a cabinet. He couldn’t let anyone see down into his soul.

The stories were beginning to pile up by the time his wife, Judith, became aware of, and disturbed by his new career.

“How’s the story coming?” she asked, referring the piece Tom was supposedly writing about The Big Four.

“Slow,” he said. “I need to take a few more drafts before it will be ready. I’m trying out a few new angles.”

“Maybe you need a change of scenery,” she suggested. “You work all night and sleep during the day. That has to be screwing with your perspective.”

“Trust me, it’s the only way it works for me right now.”

“Okay,” she said. “Just try to not get too ingrained. I miss you when I wake up in the middle of the night and you’re not next to me.”

“I miss you too.”

If only it were as simple as making the decision to stop writing. By sunset, his fingers practically burned for the typewriter. And once he started, there was no stopping until he finished. His hands moved automatically, his brain shut off, and he typed. He kept everything he needed close to his desk, because nothing could interrupt the writing until dawn, when the stories automatically wrapped up.

On October 2
nd
, 1977, Judith was waiting as Thomas pulled the last sheet of paper from his typewriter. Outside the window, dawn was breaking on a crisp fall morning.

“Honey,” she asked, “what are you writing?”

“It didn’t go anywhere,” he said, shaking his head. “I was trying a fresh approach, but it didn’t work.”

“You’ve been in here typing, every night, for weeks. I wish you’d tell me what you’re really working on.”

Thomas blinked slowly. “I’m too tired to talk about it. Let me get an hour of sleep, okay?”

“We are going to talk about it. Tonight.”

At some point during the day, Judith arranged for their son, James, to sleep at his best friend’s house. They would have an evening alone. She came home from work a little early to find that he’d cooked a lavish dinner. They never ate before six, but he had everything ready. He hoped to forestall the discussion. It didn’t work. As they sat down for their salads, she opened the topic.

“If you’re working on some new fiction, that’s great,” she said. “But it seems to be consuming you. It’s not healthy.”

“You know I can’t talk about it,” he said.

They had an agreement—he wasn’t required to divulge the plot of new fiction he was writing. Tom had a superstition about giving away the plot of an ongoing piece. It was like over-handling bread dough, he said. Discussing a plot had the tendency to let all the air out of a piece before it was fully-baked.

“You don’t have to tell me the plot, but you do have to tell me why you’re so obsessed. You have to tell me why you’ve been ignoring your deadline on the prison piece and working exclusively on a secret project.”

Tom sighed. He put down his fork and rested his elbows on the table. With his head lowered, he pressed into his temples with the heels of his hands.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

Judith took one of his hands in both of hers. She pulled it to her.

“What? Tell me.”

“I don’t know. It’s probably just psychosomatic. I think the prison cell infected me.”

“What? You’re sick?”

“No,” Thomas said. “I’m not sick. Well, maybe mentally sick, but I swear, it’s nothing.”

“What is it then?”

“You remember my theory about the prison. Do you remember what I said about the cell where The Big Four stayed?”

“The who?”

“Hudson, Mitchell, Hopkins, and Poole—the criminals. The guard referred to them as The Big Four. I’m going to use it in my story.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I had this theory that the cell where they all stayed somehow had something to do with it. One of the reasons I wanted to stay there was so I could see if there was a way that someone had communicated with them somehow. I had the theory that maybe someone had put a bug in their ear, you know? Somehow they didn’t all happen to go crazy on their own.”

“But the date,” she said. “You went there on a specific date, and there was nobody else at the prison, was there?”

“No. You’re right. I also wanted to see if the date pattern that Jeremy found could have anything to do with it. Jeremy had an idea that the pattern of the dates was somehow, by itself, evil. I know it sounds crazy.”

“Evil?”

“Yeah,” Thomas said with a big sigh. “Yeah. Crazy. And Jeremy’s one of the most rational people I know. Anyway, it feels like something in me changed that night. When you brought me home, I thought I had the whole story figured out. I was going to write it as a brief history on the notorious criminals, and use the coincidence of the prison cell to talk about recidivism and how prison actually engenders crime.”