M Coe - New Veronia

They wouldn’t tell me where they’d locked up Jay, I guess so we wouldn’t collude on our eventual trial, or possibly so I couldn’t finish the job I’d started by shooting him in the leg. He might’ve been chumming it up with the Eye Whites, or just as likely he was alone and frightened and always watching his back. In jail, most of the guys did gravitate towards people with the same color skin as them, so maybe this made Jay feel at home; maybe jail was as close as he’d ever get to that world he’d wanted.

The endless summer of Florida, which I glimpsed sometimes through the chain link, was a cruel stagnation that reminded me of our months building New Veronia, before everything got so screwed up, before I was granted my wish to never see Jay again. When I could, I avoided reminders, like the woodworking shop onsite; I couldn’t bring myself to enter it because I knew that even the purr of a saw against wood, a feeling I had once enjoyed, would mean nothing but New Veronia to me now.

I thought about writing Toshi to check in, to prove to myself that he was truly still alive, but he’d become a distant memory, as was the kid I’d been when we were friends. It didn’t really matter to me anymore if he was dead or not, since that part of my life had been packed away and shipped off to a place I’d never get to visit.

The facility contacted my mother about my predicament, and after I added her to my list of visitors, she arrived on a bright afternoon in winter. Her hair was dyed in an obvious sort of way, with evenly spaced strips of blond in among the brown, and her face was a long oval when I’d remembered it as a heart.

“Mom,” I said as she sat across from me at the folding table. Signs everywhere said No Touching, and there was a picture, too, for the illiterates.

“I am so disappointed in you,” was the first thing she said to me in thirteen years.

“I was coming to find you,” I said.

“I would have turned you over to the police straightaway.” Her eyelashes were pale and stubby; I wondered if she’d cried off her mascara on the trip here.

“But before all this, you wanted me to come live with you in Florida, right? So that we could spend some time together?”

“None of this is my fault. I’ve been praying for you, but of course that fails if you’re fated to wickedness in the first place.”

She wore a ring on her third finger. Probably she’d replaced my dad and me as soon as she’d had the chance.

“What’s your favorite food?” I asked.

Silent, she stared at the visitors beside us, a woman jiggling a fat-headed infant.

“Do you remember that time when I was a baby”—I covertly poked her hand so that she would look at me—“and you were changing my diaper, and I peed on you?”

“No.”

“You were wearing the same necklace.” It hung over the collar of her shirt. “A gold cross.”

“Devin bought me this necklace for our fifth anniversary. I didn’t have it back then.”

The fat-headed baby started to hiccup.

I asked, “Did you leave us because Dad is a drunk?”

She didn’t move; she didn’t blink. She said, “You’re like the more extreme version of him. I feel that you’re trying to convince me of something, but I don’t know what it is.”

“I haven’t heard from him,” I said, “Dad.”

The baby opened its gummy mouth to chew on its own fingers.

She said, “He thought that if you two were apart for a little while, then maybe you’d both get back to yourselves. It had gone too far, though; I wouldn’t have been able to make any difference.”

My stomach groaned from the recent assault of a mess hall lunch. “He asked you to take me? You didn’t think up the idea yourself?”

“These things are complicated.”

“Why did you come to see me?” I asked.

She made a soft noise like a bird dying. “I needed to remind myself that I don’t know you.”

The windows in the visiting room were much larger than the one in my cell. A patch of sun on the floor had almost reached my foot.

“None of this came from me,” she said. “I would never be able to produce a… a killer.”

“Alleged.”

Finally, she looked into my face. “I’m not coming back here.”

“I know.” It wasn’t a huge loss. The visit was like finding a toy you’d misplaced years before, a toy you had missed like crazy when it had first disappeared, but that you had outgrown in the interim.

She stood to leave. “Don’t contact me. Never again.”

“I know.”

Since her, no one has visited me.

Boredom is like a mirror that refuses to reflect anything back: you look into it and look into it, expecting, but you only see an unbroken emptiness that should be filled with life. That’s how boredom and loneliness are similar: I used to think that loneliness was just emptiness, but now I know that loneliness is an absence where you feel sure something should be. Boredom and loneliness, they’re both mirrors that refuse to reflect, no matter what you put in front of them.

It’s incredible how long they can hold you in jail before you’re even brought to trial. I think I’ve been here twenty-two months, maybe. My public defender waived time in order, he said, to give us a while longer to get my defense together, but he’s got dawdling down to an art form, if he’s working on my case at all. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter much to me, because the prison they’ll send me to will be worse: higher security, crappier meals, more desperate people. I guess there’s still a chance I could be freed, but not much of one. I’ve come around to the idea that an excellent memory might be more of a detriment in the real world, and so I keep telling them that it wasn’t me, that I would never kill a man, that I would be able to remember if I had, but they don’t seem to doubt my guilt. Plus, they stuck me with attempted murder for the bullet I put in Jay, a crime that had too many pig witnesses to even think about denying.

After a while in here, when my mind started to feel like my jail cell—empty, cold, echoing—I asked if they would bring me some Shakespeare. The CO came back and handed me a bible, saying that was the closest they had. It felt like some kind of unfunny joke, reminding me about my mother and her Catholicism and maybe if I hadn’t turned away from that church, or if my mother hadn’t turned away from me, I wouldn’t be here. But maybe not; you never know. Then I began to flip through the pages. Several different types of handwriting had left messages in the margins: 2 benzos/2 oxies 17B, Clay Johnston sux dick, 10 cartons bounty on Raneek Lowes head. That gave me the idea, I guess: all those tissue-thin pages, the big margins, the nothing else to do. It all started with New Veronia, I know that much. It was Jay’s idea.

In the summer of New Veronia, I still had total belief in my own memory, but now that I’ve written pretty much to the end of it, my perfect recall has been unveiled as faulty. I tried to put everything down true to how I felt at the time, in the moment, because memory shouldn’t be tainted by what happened after, but I’m starting to think that I’ve been pushing for an impossible purity. Sometimes I look back at the margins and feel like it happened differently, or I wonder if Jay would tell it the same way, or a particular biblical word, rapturous, omnipotent, betrothed , not really my word, makes it into my retelling. I even copped an illustration of tigers from Matthew 23:12, comparing it to Jay only after the fact. And if there are different versions, different ways of getting the story across, then which one is true? Alone in my bunk, when I hear Toshi squealing, when I see the string tie cinched too tight around the man’s throat, are those exact imprints from reality, or have they been altered by my guilt?