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

“But he was a good kid,” said Floyd.

“Wasn’t his fault, something tripped him up bad,” said Billy. “Something went down.”

Through my haze of emotions — jealousy, bitterness, desolation — I realized they were offering me a warning, and perhaps some sort of apology.

The talk of Carl made me remember my assignment.

“You guys talked a lot?” I said.

“I guess,” said Floyd.

“Nothing else to do,” said Billy. “Less I’m missing something. Floyd, you been holding out on me?”

“Heh,” said Floyd.

“There wasn’t any talk about what he was going to do when he got out?” I asked. My task might be only an absurd joke, but at the moment it was all I had.

“I don’t hear you talking about what you’re going to do when you get out, and you’re only doing a three-year stretch,” said my father.

“What?”

“That’s the last thing you want to think about now, isn’t it? Maybe when you get a little closer.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That poor kid was here at the start of ten years,” said Floyd. “Hey, Billy. You ever meet a guy at the start of a long stretch wants to talk about what he’s gonna do when he finishes? ”

“Not unless he’s planning a break, like Detbar here. Hah.”

“I’ll do it, too,” said Detbar. “And I ain’t taking you with me, you motherfucker.”

“But he got out,” I said, confused. “Hemphill, I mean.”

“Yeah, but all of a sudden,” said Floyd. “He thought he was doing ten years.”

“Why all of a sudden?” I said. “What happened?”

“Somebody gave him a deal. They had a job for him. Let him out if he did it.”

“Yeah, but that just made him sorrier,” said Billy. “He was one screwed-up cat.”

“He was okay,” said Floyd. “He just had to tough it out. Like Marra here.”

It was as disconcerting to hear him use the last name — as though it had nothing to do with him — as it was to be linked again and again with Carl. The dead grown-up would-be assassin and the lost child friend. It drew me out of my little investigation and back to my own concerns.

I couldn’t keep from trying again. “Floyd?” What I wanted was so absurdly simple.

“Uh?”

“I want to talk to you about Doris Thayer,” I said. I wasn’t going to use the word mom again soon.

“Tell me about her again.”

“She was my mother, Floyd.”

“I felt that way about her too,” said Floyd. “Like a mother. She really was something.” He wasn’t being funny this time. His tone was humble. It meant something to him, just not what I wanted it to mean.

“She was really my mother, Floyd. And you’re my father.”

“I’m nobody’s father, Marra. What do I look like?”

That wasn’t a question I wanted to answer. I’d learned that I didn’t even want to watch his one eye blink, his lips work to form words. I always turned slightly away. If I concentrated on his voice, he seemed more human, more real.

“Come on, Marra, tell me what you see,” said Floyd.

I realized the face of the brick was creeping into my patched-together scraps of memory. For years I’d tried to imagine him in the house, to play back some buried image of him visiting, or with Doris. Now when I tried, I saw the empty socket, the flattened skull, the hideous naked stone.

I swallowed hard, gathering my nerve, and pressed on. “How long ago did you come here?”

“Been a million years.”

“Million years ago the dogshit bird ruled the earth,” said John Jones. “Crawled outta the water, all over the place. It’s evolutionary .”

“Like another life to me,” said Floyd, ignoring him. His voice contained an element of yearning. I told myself I was getting somewhere.

“Okay,” I said. “But in that other life, could you have been somebody’s father?”

A shadow fell across the floor of my cell. I looked up. Lonely Boy was leaning against the bars, hanging there with his arms up, his big fingers inside and in the light, the rest of him in darkness.

“Looking for daddy?” he said.

The next day I told Graham I wanted another meeting. The man who never introduced himself was ready later that afternoon. I was getting the feeling he had a lot of time on his hands.

His expression was boredom concealing disquiet, or maybe the reverse. “Talk,” he said.

“Floyd doesn’t really know anything. He’s never even heard of the assassination attempt. I can’t even get him to focus on that.”

“That’s hard to believe, under the circumstances.”

“Well, start believing. You have to understand, Floyd doesn’t think about things that aren’t right in front of him anymore. His world is — small. Immediate.” Suddenly I felt that I was betraying my father, describing him like an autistic child, when what I meant was, He’s been built into a wall and he doesn’t even know who I am.

It didn’t seem right that I should have to explain it to the men responsible. But the man behind the desk still inspired in me a queasy mixture of defiance and servility. All I said was, “I think I might have something for you anyway.”

“Ah,” he said. “Please.”

I was going to tell him that he was right, there had been a conspiracy, and that Carl had been recruited from inside. An insipid fantasy ran in my mind, that he would jump up and clap me on my back, tell me I’d cracked the case, deputize me, free me. But as I opened my mouth to speak, the man across the desk leaned forward, somehow too pleased already, and I stopped. I thought involuntarily: What I’m about to tell him, he knows. And I didn’t speak.

I have often wondered if I saved my own life in that moment. The irony is that I nearly threw it away in the next. Or rather, caused it to be thrown.

“Yes?” he said. “You were going to say?”

“Floyd remembered Carl talking about some — group,” I said, inventing. “Some kind of underground organization.”

He raised his eyebrows at this. It was not what he was expecting. It seemed to take him a moment to find his voice. “Tell me about this — organization.”

“They’re called the Horseshoe Crabs,” I said. “I don’t really know more than that. Floyd just isn’t interested in politics, I guess. But anyway, that should be enough to get you started.”

“The Horseshoe Crabs.”

“Yes.”

“An in-prison underground?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Something from before.” I was a miserable liar.

I must have been looking at the floor. I didn’t even see him leave his seat and come around the desk, let alone spot the fury accumulating in his voice or expression. He was just suddenly on me, my collar in his hands, his face an inch from mine. “You’re fucking with me, Nick,” he said.

“No.”

“I can tell. You think I can’t tell when I’m being fucked by an amateur? ” He shoved me to the floor. I knocked over a trash basket as I fell. I looked at Graham. He just stood impassively watching, a foot away but clearly beyond appeal.

“What are the Horseshoe Crabs?” said the man. “Is Floyd a Horseshoe Crab?”

“He just said the name, that Carl used it. That’s all I know.”

“Stand up.”

I got on my feet, but my knees were trembling. Rightly, since he immediately knocked me to the floor again.

Then Graham spoke. “Not here.”

“Fine,” said the man, through gritted teeth. “Upstairs.”

They took me in an elevator up to the top floor, hustling me ahead of them roughly, making a point now. As they ran me through corridors, Graham pushing ahead and opening gates, living inmates jeered maliciously from their cells. They made a kind of wall themselves, fixed in place and useless to me as I went by. Graham unlocked the last door and we went up a stairway to the roof and burst out into the astonishing light of the sky. It was white, gray really, but absolutely blank and endless. It was the first sky I’d seen in two weeks. I thought of how Floyd hadn’t seen it in thirteen years, but I was too scared to be outraged for him.