Читать книгу You Are Free to Go - Sarah Yaw - Страница 9

A-one-and-a-two-and-a-three. Moses pushes up in the military style of the old school: one-armed! Like the black-and-white picture that hung on his childhood bedroom wall of the Air Force man, sinewy and powerful. The man in flat-front slacks, hair slicked back off his face, a cigarette hanging from his lip, Air Force jacket on the back of a chair in the background. Moses never saw his father in person, but he’d been an airman before he became a radioman, so Moses clipped the picture from Life magazine and hung it on the wall. At night he’d look at it while he listened to his father’s voice ringing across the airwaves. A man without a face, just a clear, strong voice, his father forever young. A cigarette hangs from Moses’ bottom lip now. He’s reassured as he pushes up against the humid air that he’s as strong as he’s ever been. Swipes the hair back from his eyes. Four-and-a-five-and-a-six.

“Permiso, Moses,” Jorge asks from his cot inside the cell. “Is this the letter?”

Moses ignores him. A-seven-and-a-eight.

Jorge asks again, his Ecuadorian accent still thick after all these years, “Is this letter written in the hand of mi hija after her death?”

Moses switches to his right arm, “What do I look like? An expert in fucking penmanship? Anyway, you know what it is. Stop acting like this.”

Jorge holds the letter out to Moses and shakes it; birds flutter off the locker, and off the shelf above the john. They fly up and out of the cell. “If it is a letter written by Gina after her death, then she is alive. Claro?”

“English!” Moses demands.

“Look at it, Moses. Tell me the date. Tell me, is it signed Te quiero, Gina?”

Moses ignores Jorge and enjoys the blood coursing through his veins. A-ten-and-eleven-and-a-twelve. He’s taking a break from “Death in Venice.” With the revelation of each of the story’s menacing, teeth-baring men, there’s been a tightening in his gut. What a fool he’d been, identifying with Aschenbach the way he had. “Reading this Thomas Mann is like wiping my ass with sandpaper,” he says to no one in particular, then he works faster, harder, pushing up and up and up. Sweating. He can smell himself. Vitality surges through him. He is not old.

Jorge, on the other hand, is really showing his stripes. His goggley old eyes, his slipping mind. He’s only sixty-seven, ten years Moses’ elder, but in here you age fast, like a dog. That combined with the piss-poor medical treatment and a lifetime of phenobarbital has Jorge acting like an old bat. Moses isn’t having any of it.

He’s just begun his second read of “Death in Venice.” He’s only now seeing how Aschenbach became a puff and how he should have seen it coming. What Moses wants to know is why Mann would write such a story. Aschenbach seemed like an upstanding man in the beginning. Moses is waiting for Miller to call him to report to work. He plans on asking Lila this very question when he gets there. In any case, his preliminary thesis: Aschenbach got what he deserved.

Just then, Jorge throws the blanket off his lap, looks at Moses with the veined eyes of a madman and asks, “Moses, is Gina mi hija or is she the girl that I strangled?”

Moses drops to his knees. He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and sits back on his heels. “Oh, Jesus. Let me see the letters.” He walks into the cell and takes his eyeglasses from the locker where they lay next to his typewriter and a few false starts of a paper’s beginning. He puts them on. They’re already missing an arm.

Friday night, Miller called them and as they made their way to chow, Collin caught sight of Moses’ glasses and he punched Moses in the back of his head with as much strength as he could gather, which was a lot because Collin is young and covered in tattoos. He is almost always high and either sleepy or violent because of it. Moses’ glasses soared through the air and he could hear them skid across the floor somewhere near everyone’s feet. The only guard who saw it was Miller, which meant nothing was going to be done about it. Moses had a horrible ringing in his ears and an ache in his temple from that Latino keeplock and one screaming pain radiating up from his shoulders through the base of his skull. When he stood up again, he looked Collin right in the eye and spat at him there. Collin decided to kill Moses; Moses could tell by the look that came over him. But Jorge held up his hand. Just held it up. Like Jesus or some saint. And Collin lowered his fist and instead of killing Moses, he pushed his chest into him so Moses fell against the wall. Collin slapped his face a few times to let him know what he was. “You’re nothing. You realize that?” Collin looked around and someone handed him Moses’ glasses. He took a look at them and smirked, put them on, pulled his pants up to his ribs, and pretended to be a geezer.

Georgy, hopping like a flea in a flea circus, was still screaming Fight! Fight! But Jorge turned to him and said, “Georgy, my boy, no fights tonight, or they might take away your book of numbers.” Georgy stopped his hopping; the crew of them fell back in line and made their way into the chaos of the mess hall for their nightly poisoning. At the long table, Collin looked at Moses. He was pretending to try to see him, pretending to be old. Moses stared back, took a bite of his food and nearly threw it up from pain. He stopped eating for fear he would end up in the infirmary and miss a day with Lila. Instead he focused on the silky texture of the blood red sauce the bits of chipped meat floated in and prayed the day would end soon.

He wouldn’t indulge Jorge like this normally, but truth is he got a late start on the reading and the paper because Collin held Moses’ glasses hostage for the weekend until Jorge finally went and negotiated for them last night. Moses only had to give Collin ten bucks in commissary, and even though this nearly wiped him out, it was nothing compared to what Collin might have asked for. He owes Jorge some mind.

“Moses, look at this letter and compare it to this other letter. Are you sure it is the same hand that wrote both of these?”

Moses looks up at Jorge and he can’t believe the weak old man who looks at him desperately is his longtime friend and protector. Jorge has diminished. Always of a medium build, he’s the size of a woman now. That big, rectangular head of his, his powerful Indian nose, that shock of black hair, the deep wealth of color in his skin, the strong teeth, these have all withered and begun to disappear. Moses is disgusted by him. Repulsed by his age. His smell. He sits next to Jorge, who is holding one letter from Gina written when she was fifteen, just before his wife, Marie, told Jorge she was dead, and another letter from a few months later, after Ed Cavanaugh told Jorge that Gina was still living and began arranging weekly meetings.

Poor Jorge, Moses thinks as he compares the letters. He endured Marie’s lies for so long that, even though he saw Gina with his own eyes at Christmas five months ago, he has started to worry again that maybe Gina really was murdered by those boys. Maybe all that he’s enjoyed of her success, her acceptance to Brown, his fatherly struggle to accept her disinterest in science, her big job in television, the news that she bought herself an apartment on New York’s Upper East Side with all the rich, white people, even the postcards and letters she sends, have been nothing more than mirage. Moses blames it mostly on this place. The lack of a horizon line, or maybe it’s the constant color of cement, or it could be the half-rotten beef they’ve been eating for what seems like months that must have been rejected by the retard institutions. Whatever the cause, Jorge has convinced himself Gina is dead.

There is a change in the handwriting. Moses looks closely and can see the difference. The first is written in a big swooping hand. The second is different. The letters are small and constricted, it appears, by lines that aren’t even on the page.

“It’s the same, Jorge. Just more adult. It’s the same. I assure you.”

Jorge looks at Moses with the look of a child searching for reassurance and truth. “I don’t believe you, Moses. Thank you, my friend, mi amigo, for trying to make me feel better. Thank you. But I deserve her to be dead.”

Moses pushes the letters back into Jorge’s hands, waves his hand at him and returns to his post at his typewriter. He swats a sparrow off the top of it. But he can’t work.

He wedges himself onto the floor between the cots, pulls out his cooler, draws the hair to the side, and pulls out Lila’s compact. He looks over his shoulder to see if Jorge is looking. He’s not. He’s shuffling the letters, turning them over, looking for clues. Moses sneers and turns back to the compact, puts on his glasses and looks at himself. He looks better and stronger than he did the day before. The bruise from last week’s keeplock has blued and veined, giving him a tough-guy look. His gray skin is now pink with blood. The silver at his temples not as prominent in the cell’s dim light. He places the compact under the bed of hair and selects a soft ball of it, rolls it between his fingers, rubs it along his cheek, stashes it in his pocket.

Lila gathers letters and strides efficiently through the swinging door in the low wall. “Here,” she says. “The keeplock letters for D block, and here are the forward lists.” She hands Moses the stack and list of inmates who have been transferred to other facilities or moved to a different block. He smiles at her. She winces. “Are you OK?” She brings her right hand to her face, “Do you want to go to the infirmary?”

“I’m fine. Hey, why do you think Mann would write a story like that? Aschenbach seems like a good enough guy at the beginning. Why does he make him suffer like that?”

“That’s interesting,” she says, turning to him and putting her hand on her hip. “Wilthauser says you have to resist the desire to bring the author into it. You should look at how the story functions instead. There is a striking connection, though, between the character and Mann himself, you can tell by just reading the footnotes. So I don’t know why he does it. Maybe he does it to punish himself and his own urges.”

Moses hasn’t thought of that. He read the footnotes and now that she mentions it he remembers the connection between Aschenbach and Mann. “I have a preliminary thesis. Would you like to hear it?” he asks.

“Preliminary? Moses, the paper’s due in two days!”

“There was a delay,” he says. He would tell her Collin commandeered his glasses and he couldn’t get started until yesterday, but he’s embarrassed that he was pushed around like a weak old man.

She seals her lips shut and closes her teeth, setting her face in professorial judgement. “OK. Let’s hear it.”

“OK,” Moses turns to her and sets himself up for a little drama. “My thesis is…” He lifts his hand as if to scroll it in the damp air of the mailroom, “Aschenbach Got What He Deserved!”

“Hmm,” Lila says as she flips through the stack of letters.

This worries him terribly. Is that all she’s going to say?

“Why?” she asks.

“What do you mean why?” he grunts. He can feel his face tightening up; his stomach hurts. He shoves his left hand in his pocket and mashes the ball of her hair.

“Why does he deserve what he gets?”

Moses hates admitting it, but it’s a damned good question. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he says.

“Well, you should. Wilthauser always says, ‘Tell me something I don’t already know. And then prove it to me.’ So you need to say why he deserves to die in Venice.”

“Well, because he’s a puff and he can’t leave that kid. He stays around too long. Look, let’s face it the guy doesn’t know when it’s time to leave. You’d never want to invite him to a party.”

“Do you think his desire for Tadzio was merely sexual?” Lila asks. She quickly blushes at the word. It stops Moses, too. A word like sexual has never had an opportunity to bare itself in all their discussions about literature. The words have always been sandpaper dry, purposely chaste. “I mean, it’s not just Tadzio that he doesn’t want to leave. He doesn’t want to leave Venice. He can’t stand that this will be the last time he sees the place. I think…Well, Professor Wilthauser pointed out to us that isn’t it possible that maybe he’s afraid of death? And he’s holding desperately onto youth through his affection for Tadzio?”

Moses looks at her in awe. This is it! This is what he loves about Lila. About the stories they read. That he gets to have this conversation. “So you’re saying he is afraid of death?” Moses asks.

“Yes. And by holding on too long, he does get what he deserves. You’re right about that, I think.”

Right at this moment Cavanaugh comes in. Interrupting. Ruining. Fat Cavanaugh sidles up to Lila’s worktable and she quickly leaves Moses. Cavanaugh’s pants are busting. He’s fatter than ever. Moses wonders what kind of a woman would have an affair with him. Cavanaugh doesn’t look over at him. He looks concerned with Lila. She hands him a letter and he opens it, reads it and shakes his head. He smiles at her and laughs. He leans down, elbows on the counter, big ass to Moses, and speaks in a voice not at all audible on the other side of the low wall. Lila looks soft and happy. She whispers something back to him. Her body close to his.

Moses doesn’t believe what he’s seeing. Not Lila. He laughs to himself out loud. If Cavanaugh thinks he has a chance with a woman like Lila, he’s got another thing coming. But then he hears Lila giggling. Responding. Giving in to him. “I have a question,” Moses says.

They both turn without letting on that they have been close to one another.

Moses knows this job, even the parts that are hers, but he holds up a letter anyway, waves it and waits for her to walk to him. She looks like she doesn’t trust him, suddenly. She comes swiftly. She is cautious and guarded and stands farther from him than she usually does. “What’s the problem?” she asks courteously.

“Maybe Aschenbach betrayed his true nature and that’s why he got what he deserved.”

“Maybe,” she says. “Do you have a problem with a letter?” she asks tight and full of formality.

“Can’t read if this is a D or a B. Is it Darman or Barman,” he says politely smiling at her.

“Where are your glasses, Moses?” She points to them in his breast pocket. “Put them on.”

“That’s not a good idea. Can you just read it for me?”

“Moses, if you can’t read, put on your glasses.”

“Listen to the lady, Moses,” Cavanaugh says picking food from his teeth as Lila’s workstation holds him up.

“That’s a B, I think,” he says.

“Hey, put ‘em on,” Cavanaugh commands.

“He must be a new inmate,” Moses says, resisting. But he looks at the ground and shamefully takes out his glasses. An arm is missing. She read the Rules and Responsibilities of Glasses Ownership, too, and knows that there are consequences if it can’t be recovered.

“Give it to me,” Lila says. “I’ll check in the system.”

He takes his glasses off quickly and puts them back in his pocket. He hands her the letter. Without looking at him, she takes it and walks back through the swinging door over to her counter. She pulls up a stool and sits in front of her computer and begins to type quickly, the keys popping loudly. She leans over to Ed and whispers. He turns toward Moses and smiles and looks arrogant.

“It’s a B,” Lila calls to Moses.

“Thank you,” Moses says, humbly.

“What happened to you? Walk into a door?” Ed smirks. “You better watch out. These doors have a way of giving you a good pounding every once in a while.”

Moses returns to his letters. To the menial. To the mundane. To the miserable tasks of the mail. Where he once found pleasure and pride, he now only finds insult. Writing that paper, reading “Death in Venice,” talking about it with Lila as if he too were a student, the little nibble of a student’s nourishment, have ruined him for the simple pleasures of his life. What he’s always wanted was to prove his smarts. He has a good mind.

He sorts his letters, prepares his satchel for his route, and he can hardly understand how he ever found any of this satisfying. He wants to think about ideas. He wants Ed Cavanaugh to disappear. For Lila to take back her coy gestures. Her batting lashes. Her sweet hip-bend. Her come-closer whispers.

Moses swings his satchel over his shoulder. “That was a beautiful compact of your grandmother’s. Was it quite old?” he asks.

Lila turns. “It was. I’m very sad about it, though. I’ve lost it, Moses. Last I remember I had it here. I don’t know what happened to it, but it makes me sick just to think about it. You didn’t see it by any chance?”

“No,” he says. “Too bad you lost it.”

On his route he’s burdened by the mail. The bag is heavy. His limbs feel weak and leaden. The halls, always a dank and dungeonous journey, are particularly foul this late afternoon. It’s dark as night, despite the lights. There is a smell that sometimes erupts on wet days when the hundred-year-old sewer backs up, reminding them that they are little more than rats. The problem with his conversations with Lila is that they make him sensitive. They expose him to everything. Every detail of his day is infused with the meaning of his life, so this smell of shit, this occupies too much of his thinking about himself, as he wanders aimlessly into the deep of D block.

He passes Corn with his bucket and his mop on his way to push dirt around the mailroom floor. Corn says, Howyadoin, Moses? Moses ignores him. He is consumed with the angst of art. What Corn passes without comment or even notice takes on huge meaning for Moses. A spider. A web. The sound of the big metal doors opening, some by machine, others by crank. The sound of those doors shutting. The sound of his demise. He’s being dramatic, but why, he wonders, would she give a rat’s ass about Cavanaugh? Why would she turn away from him in the moment of revelation of the true meaning of the story? Why at that crucial high note would she pull the arm of the phonograph, screeching the conversation to a halt?

Each keeplock he passes looks more menacing, more violent, more disturbed until he gets to the very last cell in row five. In it sits a man Moses tries to avoid at all costs. It would figure that today he’d have a letter to deliver to him. The man sits at a desk. He is neatly dressed. He is reading from a book. Moses thinks it’s always the same book, but he doesn’t know which one it is. He’s sure it’s not the Bible because this man is as much a devil as any he’s ever known. The man is fairer than fair. His skin sees no sun. He’s lived most of his life in the hole. He is freckled and the sharp contrast of the melanin creates a pocked, rough, rocky look that is deceiving; his skin is really rather smooth. He wears a fedora. And this reminds Moses of Aschenbach, the men in brimmed hats who lead him deeper into the story, closer and closer to death.

“Caruso?” Moses asks.

The devilish man turns slowly and mechanically. There is a certain movement acquired by some of the longtime residents. It is slow, robotic, as if they are acutely aware of each muscle and the work it performs to move the parts of the body, as if the simple experience of living in a body becomes the landscape one explores over a lifetime of forced monastic introversion. This man, this Caruso, he moves like this. Men like him make Moses feel like a mosquito. Like he has a monkey brain. Can’t sit still. The simple task of waiting for the man to push out his chair, remove his glasses, adjust his pants, smooth his hands over the front of his shirt, over his low, protruding belly, adjust his brimmed cap, step his foot out from in front of the chair, then the other foot, then slowly journey across the tiny cell, makes Moses vulnerable to his preoccupations and fears. He didn’t ask Lila what the hell an in-text citation is. He forgot to have her explain a Works Cited page. He’s forgotten how he was going to proceed with his thesis. What do “Aschenbach got what he deserves” and “he feared death” have to do with one another? He is tired. He can’t remember things the way he once could. Why does it feel, he wonders as the man moves slow as a mountain, like the tectonic plates of his life are shifting and he’s about to fall into the pit?

“Moses,” Caruso says quietly.

They know each other. They don’t know each other as men. They haven’t spent long hours in conversation, but they lived in the hole side by side at the beginning of their tenures as prisoners so they know each other’s patterns. What the other sounds like when he uses the john. What the other sounds like when he cries out in his sleep. They know each other like that.

“Le-le-le-etter for you.” Moses gasps. The stutter shocks him nearly dead. It’s been too many years to count since it reared its ugly head.

“Is that a stutter, Moses? I never knew. Are you nervous? Things have worked out nicely for you, haven’t they?” Caruso asks, slowly scratching his low-slung belly with long, yellowed nails. “You’ve made a life for yourself inside, such as it is. You and I are not meant for civilized society. We must be separated at least by walls. But you are a man of strong character, Moses.” When he says this he smiles. Long, horrible teeth hang wide and yellow as popcorn.

“T-take it,” Moses struggles.

“Oh, good. A letter from one of my young admirers,” he says, his voice slow and silky, intended to chill Moses to the bone. And it does. Caruso has an unspeakable history with children. When he sees Moses cringe, he laughs, and his low hanging stomach jumps and bounces.

Moses tries to dart away, but it’s a hobble. He struggles to carry his satchel, to move quickly along the path as men hiss at him. Caruso laughs and Moses’ body aches. I’m losing my hold, he thinks, as the stutter pursues him. Ho-o-o-l-l-ly Mary Mo-o-other of Go-o-od. He tries to repeat the phrase. He’s a young man again, sitting at a desk, mouth full of marbles, a nun standing over him making him repeat the phrase: Holy Mary Mother of God. The nun. His mother. His sister, who shall remain nameless; he’s haunted by memories he hasn’t thought of in years. They swarm up and out of him like a tempest. He is losing his hold! “Since human development is human destiny…” the story read…Stop! Stop thinking like this, he thinks. His hair falls into his face. He rushes clumsily along the narrow path and remembers how, as Aschenbach tried to leave Venice the first time, he saw the Bridge of Sighs, along which, the footnote read, the condemned prisoners would proceed when walking to life imprisonment from the Ducal Palace.

Tuesday, the next day, is surprisingly glorious. Lila has called in sick (he assumes she needed the extra time to finish her paper), so while Moses misses seeing her, he has the entire day to write. And in the perfect spring light of day, which streams into the gallery, lavishly lighting the wings of the sparrows that dart and play and soar along the wall of bars, and after the sacred clarification of sleep, Moses decides he overreacted to Lila’s acceptance of Cavanaugh’s overtures. And this, only this, was the root of the unexpected rearing of that ugly stutter. He reminds himself that she is, above all, kind, and not one to reject another human being. Unlike Moses, she wouldn’t judge Cavanaugh harshly. She would go out of her way to make anyone feel good.

Not only does Moses wake cleansed (no hint of apprehension in his speech, thank God), when Jorge wakes, he is his old self. Lucid and fun. Kind and fatherly. He takes a walk out into the gallery and lets Moses work, even joins the others for rec and goes out into the yard so Moses can write. When he comes back in, his cheeks are flushed from the warm spring air. He is sweaty and smells like a young man. He doesn’t look at Gina’s letters maniacally. Instead he stretches out on his bed, folds his arms to support his head and starts to tell Moses stories.

Moses isn’t entirely done with his paper. He has the bulk of it written. He just needs a conclusion, and he has a general idea how he is going to wrap things up. He is going to declare that “Death in Venice” is proof positive that you better not mess with your true nature. And if you start turning into Caruso and lusting after some young boy, you’re sure as hell done for. Something to that effect only more academic. He intends, in any case, to call the lessons in the story cautionary.

Despite the loose ending, and his fear of proper documentation—the stylebook Lila loaned him is as clear as the penal code—he takes a break to enjoy Jorge’s lucidity and decides to finish the paper in the morning.

“I came here from Ecuador an orphan, entiendo.”

Moses knows, but that’s OK. He settles in on his bed, lights a cigarette, and revels in the smoke curling slowly out from between his lips and the security of Jorge’s storytelling lilt.

“I came on a boat full of café and landed in Brooklyn. Portencia,” Jorge says, “Resented the beans it took to keep me alive.” Moses knows the story: Jorge’s mother’s cancer, his evil aunt Portencia, her plot to break him by sending her son to steal Jorge’s beloved’s heart, starving Jorge until he was driven to murder; but he loves hearing it because at the end he hears how Jorge and Moses became friends and this story, like the story of one’s birth, is endlessly captivating. It fills him with peace each time he hears it.

“When I was convicted of killing the girl that I loved, I didn’t even know what happened to me! I didn’t speak Ingles. I had no education. I knew nothing of birds. I couldn’t even read Spanish! At the end of the trial, my lawyer turned to me and he say, Descuple, Jorge. It was the only word I understood him say to me. It wasn’t until I was at Sing Sing that someone told my fate to me: I was in for life!

“You know what happens to a man’s heart in that moment, Moses. I broke every rule. I spit in every face, I hit, I yelled. They moved me up here to Hardenberg, and put me in the hole. That, Moses, is where I first knew Cavanaugh.”

“Stop!” Moses puts up his hand. “Stick to the script, Jorge. I don’t want to know anything about Cavanaugh. Not today.”

“Moses, I need to tell you something I have never told no one. You need to know why I trust him. Why I give him the letter for Gina. I want to tell you because you are my dearest friend.”

Moses flicks his cigarette into the toilet and lights another. “I’m not happy about this. This is not the story I want to hear.”

“Please, Moses, permiso. It is the root of it all.”

“Get on with it, then. And cut the E-Spanish, will ya?”

“Ha! You understand all that I say. Why should I?”

“Because this is America. And in America, Jorge, we speak E-English.”

Jorge waves a hand, laughs, comes to the edge of his cot and leans forward, “This story is to show you that it is through kindness, even the most unexpected and undeserving kindness, that we are saved. You cannot use this story against Ed Cavanaugh. And you can never tell another what I am about to tell you. Agreed?”

“Why would I agree to that? I don’t even want to hear it.”

“Do you agree?”

“Who the hell else am I going to tell? You’re all I talk to anyway. Agreed.”

“OK. Ed was at Sing Sing when I was there and he had a reputation as a crier.”

“A crier? Ha!” Moses cackles.

“Shh. Moses, listen. So when he put in for a transfer up here, he got it right away. I was transferred around the same time. You see our lives have been like this. They are parallel. He was assigned to the hole and I was there soon enough. For three years we spent nearly every day together. What you must know is that he was put there as punishment for what the others thought was his weakness: He was too nice. They put him there for the same reason they put me there, to break our spirits. They wanted to make a killer out of him, and I saw in Ed’s eyes a young man like me, scared like me. We were both locked in a box with no light and no hope, for what seemed back in those long away days an endless sentence.

“When he was by himself he never did nothing mean. He never spoke bad to no one. He just did his trabajo. Maybe he was a little quiet, intimidated. Some of the men down there they sensed this, so did the guards. The guards would force him to beat us just to toughen him up. He used to do this to me. And Moses, I tell you, I saw myself in him. Those men, they were like Portencia. Horrible and cruel. Working to make us bad, you know? When he beat me, I felt for him. It was just my body that was hurt and my body would heal, but I knew that each time he hit me it was his spirit that was destroyed. I saw it in his eyes.

“Don’t be angry, Moses,” Jorge says. “Ahh, Papito! Finally! Where have you been?” he says to the little brown bird with the thread tied to one leg that lands on his shoulder and chirps and turns his head as if in response. Jorge takes a cracker from the top of the locker, breaks off small pieces, and feeds them to the bird.

“He was just doing his job,” Jorge continues. “You know the kind of COs around here who are so brutal. He was saving himself. But he hurt himself bad. When Ed toughened up, they transferred him to D block. I too had been released out of the hole. Marie found me then and saved me by giving me Gina. And that same year, Ed and his wife, they gave birth to their hija, Shell. So we were young fathers together. Oh, I was so jealous of Ed each day when he come to work with those red eyes of his. He got no sleep her first year. He got no rest from the demands of his tough little wife. He started messing up on the job.

“One day, he was the OIC on my row and he had the keys. He was trying to let guards in and out of the gate at the stairs and trying to get the keeplocks back from the showers, and at the same time letting a crew of mess hall porters through the gate from the gallery upstairs so they could report to work and there was a group of hombres who had just come back from Industry and they were crowding around him asking him all kinds of questions. Where is the paper I requested? Can I go to the infirmary? You know how it can get, and he lost the keys. He left them in the gate. I saw them and grabbed them myself. When I saw Ed reach for his keys and realize they were not there, I said something horrible—I don’t even remember what—something to make him come after me. And he did. You’ve seen the temper they built in him. He took me down to the floor and punched me and I slipped the keys back on his belt. It was a kindness from one new padre to another, entiendo? No one noticed that Ed had committed the cardinal sin and let the keys fall in the hands of an inmate.

“I tell you this so you can know the power of such a kindness, Moses. You see I had been jealous of Ed. Jealous that he could hold his hija whenever he pleased. That he could sleep in the same bed with his esposa every night. But something changed for me after that day. I began to see myself differently. I knew that I had returned to the same person I was when I lived with mi mama in Ecuador. When I did the kindness for Ed, I felt like I had been reborn.

“After that, Ed come to me to talk. He told me terrible things that were in his heart. He told me that one night he heard his hija crying and he got up and went to her room and saw her behind the bars of her crib and he flipped. He hit her hard because he couldn’t tell the difference between his hija and one of us, you know? He said he forgot where he was and who she was. He cried. That’s how hard his heart was from this place. He told me this in return for helping him.

“When you arrived, I did not like you,” Jorge laughs and Papito jumps from side to side.

“I remember. You don’t need to remind me of all that,” Moses says, the bashful burn of a teen on his cheeks.

“When I found you,” Jorge laughs. “You were mean. Like a mongoose. You had a quick bite and you’d take anything you could get from someone. Moses, be careful. I know you took that mirror from Lila. You must return it to her, entiendo?”

Moses looks away. “Get on with it,” he says.

“I had a dream, you see. Jesús Cristo come to me and he showed me the blood on my hands. He told me that blood is the blood of passion. My crime was hunger, hurt, and fear. I recognized this in you. Your crimes were like mine. You killed that woman you loved because she beat you.

“I know why I’m here,” Moses interrupts.

“Moses, you must be honest about your crime or it will not go away. It will stay with you in death. You killed her because you wanted to save yourself. When she heard your stutter and laughed, when she beat you, you felt it in your body. The blood is on your hands, Moses, not your soul. You will be saved, but you must be honest. This is why you don’t make the phone calls no more. You must never give in to the temptation to avoid your punishment and the truth about the crime you have committed. You must promise me, even after I die, you will live an honest punishment. If you have served your time well, you will be saved. No calls and no more stealing, claro?”

Moses sneers. He doesn’t understand why he’s getting a lecture, suddenly, or how Jorge knew about the compact. “Claro,” he grunts.

“Good. Let’s thank Díos that we are going to be saved, and get a good sleep. You have much to prove tomorrow, mi amigo. I remember when I did my studies how worthy I felt. I’m proud of you, Moses. Now turn and give me some privacidad.”

Moses lies on his side, facing the wall and he hears Jorge sit on the can right next to his head. He shits. Thankfully it is not the unhealthy shit of an old, worried man, as it’s been. Jorge finishes his business, washes his hands and face in the small sink, and gets into bed.

On nights like tonight, Moses believes Jorge. He believes that goodness, even here in this rotten place, is possible, and that there will be peace on the other side. The pain of the procedures of his days, the humiliations that weigh him so heavily each night will all dissolve when he relinquishes his hold on this life. And he believes his passing will be peaceful because he will have lived out his sentence, paid for his crimes. He imagines that when he leaves he’ll be so pure, leaving his body will be the feeling he has when he looks at Lila and his breath suspends because she is innocence. He doesn’t need breath in that moment, looking at her. He rides on some other fuel. He has decided that the moment he leaves his body will feel like this; only it will be sweeter for every night he’s spent here. He promises himself he’s going to return Lila’s compact tomorrow.

Moses turns his head and looks over at Jorge, already a lump under the thin blanket in the bed beside him. He thanks God for his friend, and he prays someday there will be a peaceful end to it all.

Moses wakes clean and calmed from a death-like sleep. He rolls over onto his back and looks to the ceiling. There are eight black spiders running to the far right corner. He looks around to see if it is his cell he’s in or maybe heaven, and when he does he sees Jorge twisted and stiff. His torso hanging between their beds, arms over his head, Gina’s letters crumpled in his gnarled old hands, his knees bent up tenting the sheet, bruises on his skyward face.

Moses sits on the edge of his bed rereading his paper, making small edits with a pencil. Ed Cavanaugh comes in and sits down across from him on Jorge’s cot. It’s already stripped and vacant, exposing its cheap and lumpy impressions. He only died that morning, yet all his belongings, the letters he’d thumbed to shreds and the pictures he worshiped of Gina, her diploma from Brown, are already gone. But the smell is still thick from his body’s release. They mopped, but it just moved it around. The sparrows have been flying in and out in a frightened panic all morning. The chirping frenzied.

Cavanaugh looks tight and red-eyed.

Moses tries to ignore him and keeps rereading the same sentence, but he can’t focus. “The doctor’s already been here and filed his report,” Moses says.

Moses knew Jorge’s death would interrupt the regular schedule and the guards would tighten security in the block in case tempers flared, but Ed’s visit concerns him. It isn’t officially necessary. And despite Jorge’s final directive to be kind to Cavanaugh, he just can’t make himself.

Moses looks at Ed and he’s instantly pissed off at Jorge. He doesn’t like how he found him half on the floor like that. It agitated Moses. Death, like Lila, was supposed to be sweet. La dolce vida, Jorge said. But Jorge struggled. And Moses knows he wasn’t nice to the doctor; word must have reached Cavanaugh.

The doctor asked him a lot of boring questions taken straight from the form he was filling out. At approximately what time did you find Jorge Padilla?

“How would I know? I don’t own a watch,” Moses said. “What time did Miller say I yelled for him? I yelled for him when I found Jorge, so you should ask him.” The doctor didn’t react to Moses’ crankiness. He was civilian. An older Italian man who stood in the doorway of the cell with medical disinterest and recorded Moses’ answers as coldly as if he had lifted the information from a toe tag.

And can you describe in detail what you saw?

“I saw a pathetic, old Ecuadorian,” Moses said, “with blue lips, lying in a pool of his own piss, smelling like shit, clutching a bundle of letters from his daughter, who incidentally, he couldn’t anymore distinguish from the girl he murdered forty-eight years ago.”

The doctor scribbled some notes and asked, And had he demonstrated any unusual behavior lately?

“No,” Moses answered, “Did you hear what I just said to you? He was fucking demented.” The doctor didn’t answer him. He wrote a few more quick notes and left without saying goodbye. Moses returned to his paper. He had found his conclusion in the night. Aschenbach, he wrote in pencil on the draft, had betrayed his true nature because he feared death. Because of this, he left behind what he believed in, making him vulnerable to evil and turning him into what he’d once despised.

Moses looks up from the paper. Ed is acting like he has something on him. Moses wonders what the doctor told him. “When they examined Jorge they discovered a large contusion on the right side of his head and a black eye. Do you know anything about that, Moses?”

“He had epilepsy. Have you ever seen a seizure?”

“So you didn’t hear anything during the night?”

“I was asleep,” Moses says.

“You don’t seem upset. What’s your problem?”

“Look, believe what you want. He was my friend. I didn’t touch him.”

“You didn’t hear anything.”

“I heard nothing. For once, I slept like I was dead.”

Cavanaugh sits quietly for a moment. Ed’s eyes are swollen and his face more flat than usual.

“Jorge was a good father. He was a good man,” he says.

“A lot of good it did him,” Moses says, but Ed doesn’t act like he’s heard him.

“When I first met Jorge, I’d just come on the job. I had a new baby and a wife who was on me all the time to work extra shifts and make more money and Jorge was also a new father. Gina was just a tiny little thing. God, I remember those girls when they were girls. It’s all over. They’re women now, which means I’ll never understand them. And this,” he says waving his hand toward Jorge’s empty side of the cell.

“I promise you; I didn’t hear or see anything.” Moses doesn’t want the boys thinking he’s getting friendly with Ed Cavanaugh. He imagines Collin sending Georgy to spy so he can run back and tell him if Moses is in with Cavanaugh or not.

Ed taps his foot and looks up at the ceiling like it might fall on him. Moses can feel everything going horribly wrong. He imagines what they’ll do once they know Ed’s in here blabbing like a Goddamned girl. With Jorge gone, he has no protection. And he needs some peace so he can finish his paper. He needs to give it to Lila this afternoon.

“I’m sure you know all about Marie. She’s one for the books.”

“No. I don’t know anything about her.” Moses isn’t lying. Jorge sheltered Moses from the emotion of his unexpected family life because it was unfair to bring it up.

“It’s only a matter of time for any of us, I suppose,” Ed says and then seems to understand for the first time that he’s let himself go in front of Moses. He stands up quickly. “I’ll be in touch once they find out the cause of death. I’m sure you’d like to know. In the meantime, I’m going to have to take those papers and the typewriter. And that book over there. It’s standard procedure.”

Cavanaugh takes his paper right from his hands, packs up all of Moses’ scraps, his typewriter, his World Literature Anthology, the stylebook he needs to complete the documentation and walks out of the cell. Moses’ rabbit heart beats. He watches Cavanaugh leave and can hardly breathe.

It isn’t until he sees her that the tidal surge of his mourning hits him and lifts him up, suspending him in a state of acute and tender sorrow. He stands in the entrance of the mailroom, and it doesn’t feel like his feet are even on the floor. Her back is to him. She doesn’t yet know that he is there. He imagines walking up behind her and resting his cheek on her shoulder, nestling his nose in her hair and resting. Just resting. Taking a moment. It isn’t until hours after a tragedy that people of Moses’ nature realize that indeed they have endured an event that trumps all others, a calendar-clearing travesty that wipes away goals, expectations, hopes, desires, and, above all, familiarity.

Lila turns. “Oh, sweet Jesus, Moses. I didn’t know you were there.”

Moses doesn’t feel like he is. He feels like there are two worlds. The world where Lila, Ed Cavanaugh, his paper, his typewriter, Wilthauser, the morgue where Jorge lays, the prison, its guts and functions, the other prisoners, the outside world, the town, the cars on the streets, the traffic lights, the cawing crows, the river, the dark sky, its clouds, the wetness of spring all exist, and then there is the world in which Moses finds himself. It is a different place entirely.

“Are you OK?” Lila asks.

He reaches out to her, as if he’s going to be able to reenter her atmosphere. He waves her over with a meek flop of his hand. He wanders over to his workstation because he could use something to help hold him up against the weight of his disappointment and loss.

“You look rotten. Did you stay up late working on the paper?”

The paper! She doesn’t know. “I d-do-on’t ha-a-a-a-ave it,” he suffers; his speech sounds like a typewriter.

Her eyes widen in shock. “Moses, have you had a stroke?”

He shakes his head and attempts to speak, but it’s as though the words have become bullets and someone else is firing the gun.

“I’m calling the infirmary.”

“N-n-n-o!” Moses yells and she turns around. He holds a finger up to her to tell her to wait. Wait just a fucking minute, he thinks. He puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out the ball of her hair.

“What is that?” Lila asks.

He shakes his head. Wrong pocket. He puts it away and puts his hand in the other pocket and his fingers find the compact. He pulls it out slowly and reaches it out to her.

She takes an unbalanced step backward into the swinging door in the low wall. It hits her in the calves.

Moses points to the compact with his chin. “He-e-ere.”

She shakes her head. Refuses to come to him. She starts to back away, so he lifts his arm into the air and makes like he’ll smash the thing on the floor. “No, don’t!” she says. “I’ll come.” She steps cautiously forward and reaches into his hand. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Moses.” She starts to cry. “What’s wrong with you?”

“S-s-s-top crying!” he demands. “Just stop.”

She swallows and looks down at the compact. “I’m going to have to report for you this. I don’t have a choice, you know. You’ve left me no choice, Moses.”

Moses looks down, ashamed. He watches her comfortable rubber shoes turn away from him. No, he thinks. Don’t leave me, please. Just don’t leave me, he murmurs. His ears fill with the wild sound of wind. It’s the ether that fills the space between worlds that he’s hearing. He is so terribly alone now. He is standing in the middle of the mailroom, but it feels as if he is a lone man on a lone planet. He lunges forward, ripping through the divide, crosses to where she is on the other side of the low wall, grabs her hair, knots his fingers in the back of it, and pulls her to his side of the room. He wrestles her close to him. Holds her tightly in place. Rests his cheek on her shoulder, noses her hair; hair caresses the tops of his closed eyelids.