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

I wanted more information, and I suspected I could get it.

“There’s time for that,” said Graham.

“I don’t think so. All this weird attention is going to get me killed. They think I’m a spy for you, or they don’t know what to think. I’m not going to be alive long enough for you to use me.”

I wasn’t interested in telling him about the previous night. I knew enough to know that it wouldn’t improve anything for me. The problem was mine alone. I didn’t know whether I was ever going to confront Lonely Boy, but if I did, it would be on prison terms. My priority now was to understand what they wanted from me and my father.

“You’re exaggerating the situation,” said Graham.

“I’m not. Tell me what this is about or I’ll ask Floyd.” Graham considered me. I imagine I looked different than when they first dragged me out of the hole. I felt different.

He made a decision. “You’ll be brought back here. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

The other guard took me back to my cell.

It was a few hours later that I was standing in front of the man who didn’t introduce himself the first time. He didn’t again. He just told me to sit down. Graham stood to one side.

“Do you know the name Carl Allen Hemphill?” asked the man.

“Carl,” I said, surprised.

“Very good. Have you been speaking with your father about him?”

“What? No.”

“Did you know he was a prisoner here?”

“No.” I’d heard he’d been a prisoner. But I didn’t know he’d been a prisoner in the prison built of human bricks. “He’s here now?” Somehow I was stupid enough to yearn for an old friend inside the prison, to imagine they were offering a reunion.

“He’s dead.”

I received it as a small, blunt impact somewhere in my stomach. It was muffled by the distance of years since I’d seen him, and by my situation, my despair. Sure he was dead, I thought. Around here everything is dead. But why tell me?

“So?” I said.

“Listen carefully, Nick. Do you remember the unsuccessful attempt on the President’s life?”

“Sure.”

“The assassin, the man that was killed — that was your friend.”

“Bottmore,” I said, confused. “Wasn’t his name Richard Bottmore, or Bottomore, something like that—”

“That wasn’t his real name. His real name was Carl Allen Hemphill.”

“That’s crazy.” I’d barely begun to struggle with the notion of Carl’s having been here, his death. The assassination was too much, like being suddenly asked to consider the plight of the inhabitants of the moon. The point of this conversation, the answers I was seeking, seemed to whirl further and further out of my reach. “Why would he want to do that?”

“We’d very much like the answer to that question, Nick.” He smiled at me as though he’d said enough, and thought I could take it from there. For a blind, hot second I wanted to kill him. Then he spoke again.

“He did his time quietly. Library type, loner. Nothing that was any indication. He was released five months before the attempt.”

“And?”

“He had your cell.”

“That’s what this is about?” It seemed upside down. Was he saying that my real connection with Floyd didn’t interest them, wasn’t the point?

“Floyd hasn’t said anything?”

“I told you no.”

This time it was the man at the desk who lit a cigarette, and he didn’t offer me one. I waited while he finished lighting it and arranging it in his mouth.

When he spoke again, his expression was oddly distanced. It was the first time I felt I might not have his full attention. “Hemphill left some papers behind. Very little of any value to the investigation so far. But he mentioned your father. It’s one of the only interesting leads we have.

“The people I work with believe Hemphill didn’t act alone. The more we dig up on his background, the more we glimpse the outlines of a conspiracy. You understand, I can’t tell you any more than that or I’ll be putting you in danger.”

His self-congratulatory reluctance to “put me in danger” put a bad taste in my mouth. “You’re crazy,” I said. “Floyd doesn’t know anything about that.”

“Don’t try to tell me my job,” said the man behind the desk. “Hemphill left a list of targets. This is not a small matter. It was your father’s name in his book. Not some other name. Floyd Marra.”

I felt a stirring of jealousy. Carl and my father, my father who wouldn’t admit he was. “Why don’t you talk to Floyd yourself?”

“We tried. He played dumb.”

What if he is dumb, I wanted to say. I was trying to square these bizarre revelations with the face in the wall, the brick I’d conversed with for the past three days. Trying to picture them questioning Floyd and coming away with the impression that he was holding something vital back.

“Can’t bug the wall, either,” said Graham. “Fuckers warn each other. Whisper messages.”

“The wall doesn’t like us, Nick. It doesn’t cooperate. Floyd isn’t stupid. He knows who he’s talking to. That’s why we need you.”

He doesn’t know who he’s talking to when he’s talking to me, I wanted to say.

“I’ll ask him about Carl for you,” I said. I knew I would, for my own reasons.

“Crabshit fish,” interrupted Jones. “That’s a hell of a thing.”

It nearly expressed the way I felt. “He almost started a war,” I said to Floyd, trying harder to make my point.

“He was a good kid,” said Floyd. “Like you.”

“Scared like you, too,” said Ivan Detbar.

I had to remind myself that the bricks didn’t see television or read newspapers, that Floyd hadn’t lived in the world for over thirteen years. The President didn’t mean anything to him. Not that he did to me.

“How’d you know him?” said Floyd. “Cellmates?”

It was an uncharacteristic question. It acknowledged human connections, or at least it seemed that way to me. Something knotted in my stomach. “We were in school together, junior high,” I said. “He was my best friend.”

“Best friend,” Floyd echoed.

“After you were put here,” I said, as though the framework was understood. “Otherwise you would have known him. He was around the house all the time. Mom — Doris — used to—”

“Get this cell rat,” said Floyd. “Talking about the past. His mom.”

“Heh,” said Billy Lancing.

“That’s a lot like that other one,” said Ivan Detbar. “What’s his name, Hemphill. He was a little soft.”

“No wonder they were best friends,” said Floyd. “Mom. Hey Billy, how’s your mom? ”

“Don’t know,” said Billy. “Been a while.”

Now I hated him, though in fact he’d finally restored me to some family feeling. He’d caused me to miss Doris. She knew who I was, would remember me, and remember Carl as I wanted him remembered, as a boy. And besides, I knew her. I didn’t remember my father and I was sick of pretending.

What’s more, in hating him, I recalled an old feeling of trying to share in Doris’s hatred of him, not in support but because I’d envied her the strength of the emotion. She’d known Floyd, she had a person to love or hate. I had nothing, I had no father. There was the void of my memories and there was this scarred brick, and between them somewhere a real man had existed, but that real man was forever inaccessible to me. I wanted to go back to Doris, I wanted the chance to tell her that I hated him now too. I felt that somehow I’d failed her in that.

I was crying, and the bricks ignored me, I thought.

“Hemphill sure got screwed, didn’t he?” said Billy.

“The kid couldn’t take this place,” said Ivan Detbar.