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

Around us the other voices from the wall babbled on, as constant as television. I was already learning to tune them out like some natural background, crickets, surf pounding. Now even my father’s voice wove into the curtain around my exhausted senses. I fell asleep to the sound of his voice.

The next morning I joined the prison community. The two-tiered cafeteria called Mess Nine was a churning, teeming place, impossible not to see as a hive. Like the offices, it was on the interior, away from the living wall. I escaped notice until I took my full tray out towards the tables.

“Hey, lonely boy.”

“He’s not lonely, he’s a psycho. Aren’t you, man?”

“They’re afraid of this skinny little guy, he’s got to be psycho.”

“Who you kill?”

I went and set my tray on an empty corner of a table and sat down, but it didn’t stop. The inmate who’d latched on first (“lonely boy”) followed and sat behind me.

“He needs his privacy, can’t you see?” said someone else. “Let him eat and go back to his psycho cell.”

“He can’t socialize.”

“I’ll socialize him.”

“He wants to fuck the wall.”

“He was up late fucking the wall last night for sure. Little hung over, lonely boy?”

Fuck the wall , I came to know, was an all-purpose phrase, in constant use either as insult or as an expression of rebellion, of yearning, of ironic futility. The standing assumption was that the dry, corroded mouths would gnaw a man’s penis to bloody shreds in a minute. Stories circulated of those who’d tried, of the gangs who’d forced it on a despised victim, of the willing brick somewhere in the wall who encouraged it, got it round the clock and asked for more.

I survived the meal in silence. Better for the moment to truck on my reputation as a dangerous enigma than expose it with feeble protests. The fact of my unfair treatment wouldn’t inspire any more sympathy from the softer criminals than it had from Jimmy Shand, the brick in the hole. I shrugged away comments, the thrown bits of rolled-up bread, and a hand on my knee, and did more or less as they predicted by retreating to my cell. The television room, the gym, the other common spaces were challenges to be met some other day.

“Shoecat cheese!” said John Jones. “Beefshoe crab!”

“Quiet you goddamn nut!”

“If you’d seen it you wouldn’t laugh,” said Jones ominously.

They were expecting me in the upper bunk. My father had been listening to Billy Lancing tell an extended story about a hustle gone bad in western Kansas, while they both fended off Jones.

“Nick Marra,” said my father.

I was pleased, thinking he recognized me now. But he only said, “How’d you get sent up, Marra?” and I understood that he didn’t remember his own last name.

“Robbery,” I said. I still responded automatically with the minimum. My crime didn’t get more impressive with the addition of details.

“You’re in a rush?” said Floyd.

“What?”

“You haven’t got all day? You’re going somewhere? Tell your story, kid.”

We talked. He drew the tale of my crime and arrest out of me. He and Billy Lancing laughed when I got to the collision with the police cruiser, and Floyd said, “Fucking cop was probably jerking off with the other hand.”

“He’ll be telling it that way from now on,” said Billy. “Won’t you, Nick?”

“What?”

“Too good not to tell it like that,” agreed Floyd.

And then, before I could tell him again that he was my father, he began to talk about his own crimes, and his punishments, before he was hardened. “—hadn’t been sent upstairs to get the money he forgot, I woulda been killed in that crossfire like he was. ’Course my reward for living was the judge gave me all the years they wanted to give him—”

“Shit, you weren’t more than a boy,” said Billy.

“That’s right,” said Floyd. “Like this one.”

“They all look like boys to me,” said Billy. “Hey, man, tell him how you used to work for the prison godfather.”

“Jesus, that’s a long time ago,” said Floyd, like he didn’t want to get into it. “Long time ago…”

In fact he was just warming up.

The stories carried me out of myself, though I didn’t exactly believe every word. I felt I’d been warned that embellishments were not only possible but likely. Floyd and Billy showed me that prison stories were myths, rendered in individual voices. What mattered were the universals, the telling.

I’d been using my story to show a connection between myself and Floyd, but the bricks weren’t interested in connections. Billy and Floyd might have been accomplices in the job that got them sent up or they might never have met; either way they were now lodged catty-comer to one another forever, and the stories they told wouldn’t change it, wouldn’t change anything. The stories could only entertain, and get them attention from the living prisoners. Or fail to.

So I let go of trying to make Floyd admit that he was my father, for the moment. It was enough to try to understand it myself.

On the way back from dinner Lonely Boy and two others followed me back to my cell. The hall was eerily empty, every adjoining cell abandoned. I learned later that such moments were no accident, but well orchestrated. The three men twisted my arms back, pushed me into the toilet stall, out of sight of the wall, and pulled down my pants.

I will not describe them or give them names.

What they did to me took a long time.

Lonely Boy stroked the nape of my neck all through the ordeal. What they did was seldom tender, but he never stopped stroking the small hairs of my neck and talking to me. His words were all contradictions, and I soon stopped listening to them. The sound was the point anyway, a kind of cooing interspersed with jagged accusations. Rhythm and counterpoint; Lonely Boy was teaching me about my helplessness, and the music of his words was a hook to help me remember. “Little special boy, special one. Why are you the special one? What did they choose you for? They pick you out for me? They send me a lonely one? You supposed be a spy here, you want to in-fil-trate? How are you gonna spend your lonely days? You gonna think of me? I know I been thinking of you. This whole place is thinking of you. They’ll kill you if I don’t watch out for you. I’m your pro-tec-tor now—”

When I finally was alone I crawled into the lower bed and turned away from the wall. But I heard Ivan Detbar’s voice from above. He made sure he was heard.

“You don’t have to go looking to find the top dog on the floor. The top dog finds you, that’s what makes him what he is. He finds you and he’s not afraid.”

“Shit,” said Billy Lancing.

“That’s who you’ve got to take,” said Detbar. “You’ve got to get on him like thunder. There is no other way.”

“Shit,” said Billy again. “First thing I learned in the joint is a virgin asshole’s nothing to die for. It doesn’t make the list.”

Floyd wasn’t talking.

Graham and another guard took me into an office the next day, an airless room on the interior.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay what?”

“Are you doing what we told you?”

“Talking? You didn’t tell me anything more than that.”

“Don’t be smart. Your father trusts you?”

“Everything’s great,” I said. “So why don’t you tell me what this is all about.” I didn’t bother to tell him that Floyd didn’t agree that he was my father, that we hadn’t even established that after almost three days of talk.

I was feeling oddly jaunty, having grasped the depths of my situation. And I wasn’t all that impressed with Graham on his own. There wasn’t anything he could take away from me.