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

“Grab him,” the man said to Graham. “Don’t let him do it himself.”

The roof was a worksite; they were always adding another level, stacking newly hardened bricks to form another floor. The workers were the first-timers, the stillsoft. But there was nobody here now, just the disarray of discontinued work. A heap of thin steel dowels waiting to be run through the stilled bodies, plastic barrels of solvent for melting their side surfaces together into a wall. In the middle of the roof was a pallet of new human bricks, maybe twenty-five or thirty of them, under a battened-down tarp. In the roar of the wind I could just make out the sound of their keening.

Graham and the man from behind the desk took me by my arms and walked me to the nearest edge. Crossing that open distance made me know again how huge the prison was. I kept my head down, protecting my ears from the cold whistle of the wind and my eyes from the empty sky.

The new story was two bricks high at the edge we reached. The glossy top side of the bricks had been grooved and torn with metal rasps so the bond would take. Graham held me by my arms and bent me over the short wall, just as Lonely Boy and the others had bent me over the toilet.

“Take a look,” said the man.

“Looks like rain to me,” said one of the nearby bricks chattily.

My view was split by a false horizon: the dark mass of the sheer face of the prison receding earthward below the dividing line, and above it the empty acres of concrete and broken glass. From the thirty-two-story height the ground sparkled like the sea viewed from an airplane.

Graham jammed me harder against the rough top of the bricks, and tilted me further towards the edge. I grunted, and watched a glob of my own drool tumble into the void.

“I hate to be fucked with,” said the man. “I don’t have time for that.”

I made a sound that wasn’t a word.

“Maybe we’ll chop your father out of the wall and throw you both off,” said the man. “See which hits the ground first.”

I managed to think how odd it was to threaten a man in prison with the open air, the ultimate freedom. It was the reverse of the hole, all space and light. But it served their purpose just as well. Something I reflected on later was how just about anything could be turned to serve purposes like this.

“What are the Horseshoe Crabs?” he said.

I’d already forgotten how this all resulted from my idiotic gambit. “There are no Horseshoe Crabs,” I gasped.

“You’re lying to me.”

“No.”

“Throw him over, Graham.”

Graham pressed me disastrous inches closer. My shirt and some of the skin underneath caught on the shredded upper surface of the wall.

“You’re not telling me why I should spare you,” said the man.

“What?” I said, gulping at the cold wind.

“You’re not telling me why I should spare you.”

“I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” I said.

Graham pulled me back.

“Are you lying to me again?” said the man.

“No. Let me talk to Floyd. I’ll find out whatever you want.”

“I want to know about the Horseshoe Crabs.”

“Yes.”

“I want to know anything he knows. You’re my listening device, direct from him to me. I don’t want any more noise in the signal. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Take him back, Graham. I’m going to have a cigarette.”

Graham took me to my cell. I climbed into the top bunk and lay still until my trembling faded.

“The kid’s getting ready to make his move,” said Ivan Detbar.

“You think so?” said Floyd.

It was dinner hour. Inmates were shambling through the corridor towards Mess Nine.

My thoughts were black, but I had a small idea.

It seemed to me that one of my problems might solve the other. The way Graham had said “not here” to the man behind the desk made me think that the man’s influence might not extend very far within the prison, however extensive and malignant it was in the world at large. I had never seen him command anyone besides Graham. Graham was in charge of my block, but the trip upstairs had made me remember the immensity of the prison.

My idea was simple, but it required physical bravery, not my specialty to this point. The cafeteria was the right place for it. With so many others at hand I might survive.

“Floyd,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“What if you weren’t going to see me anymore? Would that change anything?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Anything you’d want to say?”

“Take care, nice knowing ya,” he said.

“How about ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do’?” said Billy Lancing.

Floyd and Billy laughed at that. I let them laugh. When they were done I said, “One last question, Floyd.”

“Shoot.”

I’d thought I was losing interest, growing numb. I guess in the long sense I was. But I still had to press him a little harder before the opportunity passed. “Did you know your father?” I asked.

“You’re asking me — what? My old man?” Floyd’s eye rolled, like he thought his father had appeared somewhere in the cell.

“You knew him?”

“If I could get my hands around the neck of that son of a bitch—”

“You talk big, Floyd,” said Ivan. “What about when you had your chance?”

“Fuck you,” said Floyd. “I was a kid. I barely knew that motherfucker.”

“The Motherfuck Dog,” said John Jones. “He lives under the house—”

The tears were on my face again, and without choosing to do it I was beating my fist against the wall, against Floyd’s petrified body. Once, twice, then it was too painful to go on. And I don’t think he noticed.

I got down from the bunk. I had another place for the fury to go, a place where it might have a use. I only had to get myself to that place before I thought twice.

Dinner was meatballs and mashed potatoes covered with steaming grayish gravy. I took two cups of black coffee aboard my tray as well. I turned out of the food line and located Lonely Boy, sitting with his seconds at a table on the far side of the crowded room. Before I could think again I headed for them.

“Hey, lonely boy, you want to sit?”

I flung the tray so it spilled on all three of them. I was counting on that to slow the other two; all my attention would be on Lonely Boy. I knew I’d lose any fight that was a contest of strategy or guile, lose it badly, that my only chance was blind instantaneous rage. So I went in with my hands instead of picking up a fork or some other weapon. For my plan to work, Lonely Boy had to live. With what I knew was in me to unleash, however, his life seemed as much at risk as mine.

They pulled us apart before very long, but I’d already gotten my hands around his throat and begun hitting his head against the table, rhythmic revenge. One of his seconds had taken a tray and lashed open my scalp with it, and my blood was running into my opponent’s eyes, and my own, and mixing with the coffee on the table. The voices around us roared.

Back in the hole for the night that followed, I screamed, bled, shat. I shoved the morning tray back out as it was coming through the slot. I attacked the men that came for me. How much was pretense I can’t really say. Maybe none. When they got me into the shower I calmed down somewhat. I didn’t feel human, though. I felt mercenary and cold, like frozen acid.

They put six stitches in my scalp in the prison hospital and led me to another, larger office, with more file cabinets and chairs, more ashtrays. Graham was there, with two other men. One of the others did the talking.

Those others were my margin, I knew. My glint of light.

The one who spoke asked me about the fight.

“if I’m put back in the block with him, one of us will have to die,” I said simply.