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

“Gimme some of that, I hear you eating, you sonovabitch.”

“Leave him alone, you constipated turd.”

They fed me twice a day, and those incidental shards of light were my hope, my grail. I lived huddled and waiting, quietly masturbating or gnawing my cuticles, sucking precious memories dry by overuse. I quickly stopped answering the voices, and prayed that the bricks in the walls of the ordinary cells were not so malicious and insane. Of course, by the time I was sprung, I was a little insane myself.

They dragged me out through a corridor I couldn’t see for the ruthless light, and into a concrete shower, where they washed me like I was a dog. Only then was I human enough to be spoken to. “Put these on, Marra.” I took the clothes and dressed.

The man waiting in the office they led me to next didn’t introduce himself. He didn’t have the gray deadness in his features that I already associated with prison staff.

“Sit down.”

I sat.

“Your father is Floyd Marra?”

“Why?” I meant to ask why I’d been put in isolation. My voice, stilled for days, came out a croak.

“Leave the questions to us,” said the man at the desk, not unkindly. “Your father is Floyd Marra?”

“Yes.”

“You need a glass of water? Get him a glass of water, Graham.” One of the guards went into the next room and came back with a paper cone filled with water and handed it to me. The man at the desk pursed his lips and watched me intently as I drank.

“You’re a smart guy, a high-school graduate,” he said.

I nodded and put the paper cone on the desk between us. He reached over and crumpled it into a ball and tossed it under the desk.

“You’re going to work for us.”

“What?” I still meant to ask why , but he had me confused. A part of me was still in the hole. Maybe some part would be always.

“You want a cigarette?” he said. The guard called Graham was smoking. I did want one, so I nodded. “Give him a cigarette, Graham. There you go.”

I smoked, and trembled, and watched the man smile.

“We’re putting you in with him. You’re going to be our ears, Nick. There’s stuff we need to know.”

I haven’t seen my father since I was six years old, I wanted to say. I can’t remember him. “What stuff?” I said.

“You don’t need to know that now. Just get acquainted, get going on the heart-to-hearts. We’ll be in touch. Graham here runs your block. He’ll be your regular contact. He’ll let me know when you’re getting somewhere.”

I looked at Graham. Just a guard, a prison heavy. Unlike the man at the desk.

“Your father’s near the ceiling, lefthand, beside the upper bunk. You won’t have anyone in the cell with you.”

“Everybody’s going to think you’re hot shit, a real killer,” said Graham, his first words. The other guard nodded.

“Yes, well,” said the man at the desk. “So there shouldn’t be any problem. And Nick?”

“Yes?” I’d already covered my new clothes with sweat, though it wasn’t hot.

“Don’t blow this for us. I trust you understand your options. Here, stub out the coffin nail. You’re not looking so good.”

I lay in the lower bunk trying not to look at the wall, trying not to make out differences in the double layer of voices, those from inside my cell, from the wall, and those of the other living prisoners that echoed in the corridor beyond. Only when the lights on the block went out did I open my eyes — I was willing myself back into the claustrophobic safety of the hole. But I couldn’t sleep.

I crawled into the upper bunk.

“Floyd?” I said.

In the scant light from the corridor I could see the eyes of the wall turn to me. The bodies could have been sculpture, varnished stone, but the shifting eyes and twitching mouths were alive, more alive than I wanted them to be. The surface was layered with defacements and graffiti, not the massive spray-paint boasts of the exterior but scratched-in messages, complex engravings. And then there were the smearings, shit or food, I didn’t want to know.

“—horseshoe crab, that’s a hell of a thing—”

“—the hardest nut in the case—”

“—ran the table, I couldn’t miss, man. Guy says John’s gonna beat that nigger and I say—”

The ones that cared to have an audience piped up. There were four talkers in the upper part of the wall of my cell. I’d soon get to know them all. Billy Lancing was a black man who talked about his career as a pool hustler, lucid monologues reflecting on his own cleverness and puzzling bitterly over his downfall. Ivan Detbar, who plotted breaks and worried prison hierarchies as though he were not an immobile irrelevant presence in the wall. And John Jones — that was Billy’s name for him — who was insane.

The one I noticed now was the one who said, “I’m Floyd.”

A muscle in my chest punched upwards against my windpipe like a fist. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. Would meeting my father trigger the buried memories? The emotion I felt was virtual emotion. I didn’t know this man. I should.

I was trembling all over.

He was missing an eye. From the crushed rim of the socket it looked like it had been pried out of the hardened flesh of the wall, not lost before. And his arms, crossed over his stomach, were scored with tiny marks, as though someone had used him to count their time in the cell. But his one eye lived, examined mine, blinked sadly. “I’m Floyd,” he said again.

“My name is Nick,” I said, wondering if he’d recognize it, and perhaps ask my last name. He couldn’t possibly recognize me. After my week in the hole I looked as far from my six-year-old self as I ever would.

“Ever see a horseshit crap, Nick?” said John Jones.

“Shut up, Jones,” said Billy Lancing.

“How’d you know my name?” said my father.

“I’m Nick Marra,” I said.

“How’d you know my name?” he said again.

“You’re a famous fuck,” said Ivan Detbar. “Word is going around. ‘Floyd is the man around here.’ All the young guys want to see if they can take you.”

“Horseshoe crab, horseradish fish,” said John Jones. “That’s a hell of a thing. You ever see—”

“Shut up.”

“You’re Floyd Marra,” I said.

“I’m Floyd.”

I turned away, momentarily overcome. My father’s plight overwhelmed mine. The starkness of this punishment suddenly was real to me, in a way it hadn’t been in the hole. This view out over the bunk and through the bars, into the corridor, was the only view my father had seen since his hardening.

“I’m Nick Marra,” I said. “Your son.”

“I don’t have a son.”

I tried to establish our relationship. He agreed that he’d known a woman named Doris Thayer. That was my mother’s name. His pocked mouth tightened and he said, “Tell me about Doris. Remind me of that.”

I told him about Doris. He listened intently — or I thought he was listening intently. Whenever I paused, he asked a question to keep me on the subject. At the end he said only, “I remember the woman you mean.” I waited, then he added, “I remember a few different women, you know. Some more trouble than they’re worth. Doris I wouldn’t mind seeing again.”

Awkwardly, I said, “Do you remember a boy?”

“Cheesedog crab,” said Jones. “That’s a good one. They’ll nip at you from under the surf—”

“You fucking loony.”

“A boy?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, there was a boy—” All at once my father began a rambling whispered reminiscence, about his father, and about himself as a boy in the Italian ghetto. I leaned back on the bunk and looked away from the wall, towards the bars and the trickle of light from the hallway as he told me of merciless beatings, mysterious nighttime uprootings from one home to another, and abandonment.