Jonathan Lethem - The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

A wind rose. We crossed the plain of concrete, hands in our pockets, into the shelter of the narrow streets, the high ruined offices. We were silent again, our newfound jauntiness expelled with the paint.

They were on us at the same overpass, the moment we came under its shadow. The deferred ambush was delivered now. They knocked us to the ground, displayed knives, took away our paint and money. They took Carl’s watch. Each time we stood up they knocked us down again. When they let us go it was one at a time, sent running down the street, back into the Chinese commercial street alone, a display for the shopkeepers and deliverymen, who this time jeered and snickered.

I think we were grateful to them, ultimately. The humiliation justified our never boasting about the trip to the prison wall, our hardly speaking of it back at school or in the park. At the same time, the beating served as an easy repository for the shame we felt, a shame that would otherwise have attached to our own acts, at the wall.

In fact, we six never congregated again, as though doing so would bring the moment dangerously close. I only once ever again saw the older dropout, the one whose brother was in the prison. It was during a game of touch football in the park, and he went out of his way to bully me.

Carl and I drifted apart soon after entering separate schools. I expected to know him again later. As it happened, I missed my chance.

“Stickney,” the guard called, and the man on my right stepped forward.

By the time I entered the prison, it was thirty-two stories high. I was nineteen and a fool. I’d finished high school, barely, and I was living at home, telling myself I’d apply to the state college, but not doing it. I’d been up all night drinking with the worst of the high-school crowd when I was invited along as an afterthought to what became my downfall, my chance to be a bystander at my own crime. I drove a stolen car as a getaway in a bungled armored-car robbery, and my distinction was that I drove it into the door of a black-and-white, spilling a lieutenant’s morning coffee and crushing his left forearm. The trial was suffused with a vague air of embarrassment. The judge didn’t mention my father.

“Martell.”

I’d arrived in a group of six, driven in an otherwise empty bus through underground passages to the basement of the prison, and ushered from there to a holding area. None of us were there to be hardened and built into the prison. We were all first-time offenders, meant to live inside and be frightened, warned onto the path of goodness by the plight of the bricks.

“Pierce.”

We stood together, our bodies tense with fear, our thoughts desperately narrowed. The fecal odor of the prison alone overwhelmed us. The cries that echoed down, reduced to whispers. The anticipation of the faces in the wall. We turned from each other in shame of letting it show, and we prayed as they processed us and led us away that we would be assigned different ceils, different floors, and never have to see one another. Better to face the sure cruelties of the experienced convicts than have our green terror mirrored.

“Deeds, Minkowitz.”

I was alone. The man at the desk flickered the papers before him, but he wasn’t looking at them. When he said my name, it was a question, though by elimination he should have been certain. “Nick Marra?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Put him in the hole,” he said to the guards who remained.

I must have aged ten years by the time they released me from that dark nightmare, though it lasted only a week. When the door first slammed, I actually felt it as a relief: that I was hidden away and alone, after preparing or failing to prepare for cellmates, initiations, territorial conflicts. I cowered down at the middle of the floor, holding my knees to my chest, feeling myself pound like one huge heart. I tried closing my eyes but they insisted on staying open, on trying to make out a hint of form in the swirling blackness. Then I heard the voices.

“Bad son of a bitch. That’s all.”

“—crazy angles on it, always need to play the crazy angles, that’s what Lucky says—”

“C’mere. Closer. Right here, c’mon.”

“Don’t let him tell you what—”

“Motherfuck.”

“—live like a pig in a house you can’t ever go in without wanting to kill her I didn’t think like that I wasn’t a killer in my own mind—”

“Wanna get laid? Wanna get some?”

“Gotta get out of here, talk to Missing Persons, man. They got the answers.”

“Henry?”

“Don’t listen to him—”

They’d fallen silent for a moment as the guards tossed me into the hole, been stunned into silence perhaps by the rare glimpse of light, but they were never silent again. That was all the bricks were, anymore, voices and ears and eyes; the chips that had been jammed into their petrified brains preserved those capacities and nothing more. So they watched and talked, and the ones in the hole just talked. I learned how to plug my ears with shreds from my clothing soon enough, but it wasn’t sufficient to block out the murmur. Sleeping through the talk was the first skill to master in the prison built from criminal bricks, and I mastered it alone in the dark.

Now I went to the wall and felt the criminals. Their fronts formed a glossy, encrusted whole, hands covering genitals, knees crushed into comers that were flush against blocked shoulders. I remembered that long-ago day at the wall. Then my finger slipped into a mouth.

I yelped and pulled it out. I’d felt the-teeth grind, hard, and it was only luck that I wasn’t bitten. The insensate lips hadn’t been aware of my finger, of course. The mouth was horribly dry and rough inside, not like living flesh, but it lived in its way, grinding out words without needing to pause for breath. I reached out again, felt the eyes. Useless here in the hole, but they blinked and rolled, as though searching, like mine. The mouth I’d touched went on, “—never want to be in Tijuana with nothing to do, be fascinating for about three days and then you’d start to go crazy—” The voice plodding, exhausted.

I’d later see how few of the hardened spoke at all, how many had retreated into themselves, eyes and mouths squeezed shut. There were dead ones, too, here and everywhere in the wall. Living prisoners had killed the most annoying bricks by carving into the stony foreheads and smashing the chips that kept the brain alive. Others had malfunctioned and died on their own. But in the dark the handful of voices seemed hundreds, more than the wall of one room could possibly hold.

“C’mere, I’m over here. Christ.”

I found the one that called out.

“What you do, kid?”

“Robbery,” I said.

“What you do to get thrown in here? Shiv a hack?”

“What?”

“You knife a guard, son?”

I didn’t speak. Other voices rattled and groaned around me.

“My name’s Jimmy Shand,” said the confiding voice. I thought of a man who’d sit on a crate in front of a gas station. “I’ve been in a few knife situations, I’m not ashamed of that. Why’d you get thrown in the bucket, Peewee?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re here.”

“I didn’t do anything. I just got here, on the bus. They put me in here.”

“Liar.”

“They checked my name and threw me in here.”

“Lying motherfucker. Show some respect for your fucking elders.” He began making a sound with his mummified throat, a staccato crackling noise, as if he wanted to spit at me. I backed away to the middle of the floor, and his voice blended into the horrible, chattering mix.

I picked the corner opposite the door and away from the wall for my toilet, and slept huddled against the door. I was woken the next morning by a cold metal tray pressing against the back of my neck as it was shoved through a slot in the door. Light flashed through the gap, blindingly bright to my deprived eyes, then disappeared. The tray slid to the floor, its contents mixing. I ate the meal without knowing what it was.