One fine day a woman looks up. Lulled by the blue light of a winter morning, by the reflected shapes wavering on the floor between his feet and the desk, he appears to be startled at her gesture. With a severity of manner and a smile, both entirely appropriate to the occasion, she says:
-The Warden will see you now.
On his last morning in prison Nicholas Lehman sat across the desk from Jack Hickock. Hickock was warden, deacon, chopblock confessor, and much else beside. The ‘exit interview’ was a known formality and rare was the prisoner so cocky as to dare a last blast of rhetoric, vengeful or otherwise.
Given half a chance, things begin to go badly.
The silver lining may well be a mercury trace in the fish broth.
Darkest Hour checks its glow-in-the-pit wristwatch, quitting time just a tick, a click, a sucking whistle away.
The warden was a man of infinite subtleties and large prejudices.
He entertained objections, drew them out, provoked them even, with such equanimity as to beguile many a man more seemingly cunning than himself.
Nothing pleased him quite so much as the conventions of conversation between men with nothing to hide from one another. What they might choose to hide from the world was another matter.
In Scriptural things, cleverness would forever lick the boots of belief. And Hickock, measuring the happy imbalance of a squib or two of the more nomadic nonsense in Leviticus against the whole of the ghostly horde of white Beatitudes, plumped for the former every time. Sweet anarchy might reign in Heaven, but a jailer’s stewardship was a calendar of rules and rewards, disciplines and punishments.
When deprived of the tools of his trade, his passion, Nicholas Lehman daydreams endless action. Shoot, just shoot. Don’t look back, just keep the film coming, blackening the snowy steppes. Frame after frame of snowy virgin steppe. Black-en it. Once-nimble fingers age and ache and jagger to a clawlike spindle. The burrs whirl and the cogs go white with heat but the machine’s fine shape burns on unbuckled. There will be time to go back later. Perhaps an even wantonly desirable ‘later’. To sort it all out, in a paradise of retouched images stretching from Jalisco to Tahiti. To watch, as frame 64 (first pass) becomes frame 9 (second pass), frame 113 (third pass), frame 66 (by the fourth and bitterest contest, disappearing altogether in the fifth, only to return, collaged and dismembered, as frames 7, 40, and 200 of the final, abandoned monsterpiece). Dream this, surtitle it ‘future’, but don’t stop shooting.
The tone was subdued, the warden’s traps laid out as plain as a child’s seven-piece jigsaw.
-Many who leave here go right back out and re-offend. Not immediately, perhaps. But often. And sooner than later. And all of them get caught. One way or the other we net them all. Tell me, Nicholas …
A quick, sharp look, round lenses blazing, and a sharp, quick question.
-do you intend to go out there and …
What Warden Hickock asked was foul.
Still, Lehman didn’t flinch, didn’t even bat his eyes.
If he let his soul breathe and listen it told him.
Foul, and true.
Be humble, be attentive, listen.
The sick phrase was only, after all, what Society (sexless, prudent, blind worm of his never-again peers, his rejecters, his judges) thought he did, had done, might do again.
He seems to remember every voice as affected, a chorus of amateurs trying too hard on the big, the too-big stage. Some hand, not his, most remarkably unlike his, had penciled ‘You are so easily distracted’ along the upper margin of the legal pad. And he was.
Distracted by a delicate shadow; distracted by a momentary blaze of light gilding a fringe round something very close; distracted by the smell, the taste of wet fur; distracted by an ominous crashing in the slapstick undergrowth. What might have been the jolt of withdrawal in deep sleep or just an agile boy and his clumsy dog.
Lehman listened, breathed, and replied, as though by instinct and without thinking.
-I’d sooner kill myself, Mr. Hickock.
From the first caress of surrender, he had propelled himself towards the eventual leaving of her bed.
At midnight he pulls out but even then she doesn’t wake up. Or barely moves, the hum in the venting the house’s way of saying ‘it’s cold outside’.
Damage leaves an afterglow.
Keep shooting, keep not stopping.
Pull back the darkness and find the faces.
Give the shadows names as needed.
There was, of course, no right answer to the question whether he was a monster, and lost, but this one, at least, was not boldly or patently wrong. Hickock nodded as though pleased. Pleased, and unconvinced.
-You might have a place in my philosophy, Nicholas. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to men sitting where you’re sitting now as they’ve told me, with a smile on their face and a tear in their eye, that they’d rather be dead than be sent back inside these walls. The merits of what you’ve just said would never occur to them as a blueprint for a possible course of action. As a choice. As an option of honor, of dignity, of simple, basic decency. The world would be a far cleaner place, Nicholas, if each time some animal took it into his head to beat someone, to rob someone, to rape someone, to murder someone, they’d say a quick prayer and snuff their own valueless lives instead.
Lehman allowed himself the weakness of a slow blinking of his eyes.
It would have been unseemly to nod.
Robbe-Grillet’s alphabet begins with Z, or V, based (perhaps) on some code that no one’s seriously mad to crack. Double the ugly negative in their plod to horizon’s heaven. Or plod back from.
His books and the ones she gave him, a Judas every twelve. Rilke seems only and always on about vanity. A fortune cookie’s wisdoms made epiphanic because he-she (the reader) feels the feeling of having thought they thought of them first. But any criticism is an ant’s Absolute. And Holderlin, or was it Heine, now, then, but who cares the what, the why, the whether? The blurbs, saying nothing, say it all.
And the German books he finds unlisted in the divorce papers’ inventory of what she’s left him.
The warden had a few more things to say.
Lehman’s ears tuned upon the tone, geared to any trick question which might stiletto from the bland bouquet of platitudes.
He kept his eyes on Hickock’s narrow lips and let his mind wander lightly through the wide room.
There was no driveway outside the warden’s window.
Still, look out and remember another window once looked out of.
Snails slide in the gravel after a light summer rain, their shells an oily black, stenciled with dits of silver.
Photographs can’t replace or compete with the soft breath of the gutter, filled with the rain’s runoff, its flood of red or yellow leaves, buoyant and quick and spinning just slightly slower as they near the cataractive drain.
Condillac.
Alameda.
Salazar.
A story could be pumped from each syllable, and with the passage of each new quarter hour any story will do.
Tycho Brahe’s.
Catsgore United’s.
Up Yours.
Yours truly and a glimmer of hate.
In the so what of a harpstrum.
Lehman had been careful, on those few and previous summons, not to look at the framed photograph on the warden’s desk. A single glance, years ago, and the image was there to stay. A gardened shot of Hickock and Hickock’s wife, with between them, on the white cast-iron bench, Hickock’s blond and sunny-eyed daughter.
It was enough to know it was there and set at an angle to the visitor’s chair that practically purred – I dare you!
She turns in her sleep. Rolls over under the sheet’s impressionable cling, sighs as though some succubus has entered, rearing his abandoned spot. He closes his eyes and almost catches his soul’s evaporation, snaking smokelike along the ceiling, the rope of elopement dangling her distracted wrists. Insomnia piles up its blights: headaches, numbness, the ongoing bleat of interrupted vandals.
Her poise, framed in the darkroom door, and her face, mouth set to a thin and serious line (to show she took him seriously) and the question which never varied.
-How’s it coming?
He felt like a potty-bound four year old, grimacing the mid-pass of a solemn movement. She fancied him a smalltime sam. Her cruelty to her credit if not to his benefit.
He dreams a snog in a cobwebbed corner, jolly ‘No. 37’ hung round his neck, somewhere, sometime, the forgotten hierarchical jockeys, galloping freeze-framed through a Pantheon of drooling pricks. And oh, the clock’s stuttering bitch.
-… just fifteen left to go … I’m almost done … forty minutes, tops … almost done …
His fantasies were not of wealth and fame but rather of bills gone unpaid, diapers stanching unchanged, dogs howling hungry by the freezing gate, and throughout it all, the marvelous patience she would reveal! Silent as tip-toe while some monstrous image leaked slowly down the red-lit page.
He’d hoped it would be worth it.
She knew it wasn’t.
Lehman’s arrest, his trial, the first two months of imprisonment had taught him the meaning of humiliation. In the five years following he had learned humility.
A platitudinous phrase, tested in the cynics’ fire; a pebble washed smooth in stressful seas: ‘the world doesn’t get better, but we do.’
Such comfort as was to be had was more, he thought, than he deserved.
He stared at Hickock and imagined blond hair matting with blood, sunny eyes filling with tears.
The volume’s down on the TV, world like liquid under glass, or verging on washout before insomnia’s indiscriminate eye. His heart lifts to see hope’s banner sagging.
Clipping, banking, a slack pacific choreography that goes on until the camera, bored, turns away. Even with his eyes drugged with middle distance, even as his mind pisses about among the stars, changes in light never catch him unaware. For an hour now daylight has been announcing itself. That moody, slightly chillier hour, blue that contains both milkiness and dilution, the wind always seeming to rise as the night drops off. He sees it, feels it, resents it with an odd sense of welcome.
Coming over the wall and across the misty garden.
The interview ended with a handshake as firm as it was cold.
-Where to then?
-Catsgore, sir. Collect a few things and.
-Best of luck, then. Don’t forget what you’ve learned with us, Nicholas. For your own sake, don’t forget.
Another, all-too feminine someone else, a fountain of slim brilliance from the days when catastrophe was not yet a building dream. Bane of his existence, light of his love, mother of his abortions. She comes toward him, hair wet from the shower or a swim (why does the significant detail of ‘which was it’ elude him now?) He spoons her in, stubble cool as moss, and every pretty thing cries out in perfect curling pitch.
He’d thought the things he wanted were out of reach, a fugitive Grail forever two trains ahead. Sparta without the slaves and pain; Zen without the shaveheaded know-it-alls (or know-nothings, as they might say, knowingly). He hungered for an emptying out, not a filling up, but objects conspired and joy put itself for sale on the cheap. Till there was nothing to complain of, her fingers nursing his pulse’s morse: we are alive.
In the corridor Lehman wiped his hand clean on the leg of his uniform as the guard smirked amiably and hair-trigger.
-Hey, Lehman, he squinted.
-how much time do you expect you’ll spend missing us?
Lehman glanced up at the ceiling before returning the squint.
-Precious little, he said.
-Same here, the guard laughed.
-precious little, Lehman.