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

I could see a look of satisfaction on the face of the other of the two men, not Graham. I assumed Lonely Boy had been trouble to this man before. I assumed too that I’d done damage. I smiled back at this man, and I smiled at Graham.

Graham kept his face impassive.

The man who was talking explained to me that Lonely Boy was an established presence on block nine, that he had more support than might have been apparent — did I understand that?

“Move me upstairs,” I said. “As far away as possible. If I see him again, I’ll have to kill him.”

The one who was talking told me that I’d likely find men like Lonely Boy wherever I went in the prison.

Nobody said the word rape.

“I’ll never be in this position again,” I said. “I can promise you that. Nobody will ever be permitted to make the mistake he made.”

The man raised his eyebrows. The other one, the smiling one, smiled. Graham sat.

“Just move me,” I said.

“We don’t let prisoners make our decisions for us, Mr. Marra,” said Graham.

“Your unusual handling put me at a disadvantage in the situation, Mr. Graham. If you keep me on block nine, I intend to be treated like the other prisoners.”

The man who had been talking turned and looked at Graham, and in that moment I knew I would be transferred.

“Unusual handling?” said the man who’d smiled. He directed the question at me, but it was Graham who spoke.

“He presents unique difficulties,” he said. “His father is in the prison. In the wall. I thought it was better to address it directly.”

I took a leaf from Floyd’s book. It was pure improvisation, but my skills at lying were improving rapidly. “He isn’t my father.”

The smiling man made an inquiring face.

“He knew my mother, I guess. But she told me later he wasn’t my father. He’s just some guy. Just another brick to me.”

The smiling man smiled at Graham. “This doesn’t seem to me to require special treatment.”

“I had the impression—” Graham began.

The smiling man laughed. “Apparently mistaken, Graham.”

Graham laughed along.

Graham never spoke to me again, though I lived in fear of some reprisal. I would see him moving through the corridors with the men in charge of my block or other blocks and think he was about to point a finger at me and say, “Marra, come with me,” but he never did. I don’t think he cared enormously. It might have been some relief to him to be able to say to the man behind the desk that I’d slipped away. Graham was a man with a difficult job and dealing with the man behind the desk was clearly not an easy part of it.

I never saw the man behind the desk again.

He was a sadist and an idiot. The two were not mutually exclusive, I understood after that day on the roof. The agency or service he worked for had assigned him the task of tracing a conspiracy he was a member of himself. Sending me in to question my father was just ritual activity. He might have been curious to know whether Hemphill had talked about what was happening to him, but he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t even bothered to wire the cell, or he’d have know how I came up with horseshoe crabs. Until I’d panicked him, triggered his paranoia with that bluff, he was just making a show of activity by torturing me. And keeping himself entertained, I suppose, killing time on an absurd assignment.

The only deeper explanation was that I’d become a kind of stand-in for Carl, the other young prisoner they’d had in their grasp. He’d been theirs, for a time, and then he twisted loose, became history. I don’t know if what he did was a disastrous perversion of their plans, or whether it served them, but I sensed that either way they experienced a loss. The mechanism of control was more precious than any outcome. I’d become the new instrument, the new site where control was enacted. Until I broke the spell.

As for Carl himself, I hadn’t learned much about the tortured prisoner and would-be assassin, and I didn’t have any interest in trying to learn more. The image of my thirteen-year-old friend had been obliterated without anything taking its place. I didn’t object. He was just a ghost now, and there were plenty of more substantial ghosts available, in the wall.

I became another prisoner in a cell, living out my hours, hoarding my grudges, protecting my back. I spent days in the weight room, years in the television room. I told lies to make the time pass. The rest of my story was no different from anyone else’s, so in the telling I made it as different as I could. I learned to use the phrase fuck the wall , though like a million other cowards I never tried it.

I didn’t see my father again until a week before I left the prison, when I was granted a minute in my old cell.

Billy Lancing was still the same. He looked me over when I came in and said, “Marra?”

“Yeah.”

“I remember you. Where’d you go?”

“Upstairs.”

“Well, I remember you.”

I climbed up into the top bunk.

Ivan Detbar was dead, his eyes stilled. I recognized it instantly by now. John Jones was still raving, but more quietly, not looking for an audience anymore.

My father was still alive, if that’s the word for it, but someone had pried out his other eye, splintering the stony bridge of his nose in the process.

His mouth was moving, but nothing was coming out.

“Floyd’s not good,” said Billy.

I went over and put my hand on him. He couldn’t feel it, of course. I was touching my father, but it didn’t matter to either of us.

I wondered if it was Graham or the man behind the desk who’d removed the eye, in some offhand act of revenge. It could as easily have been a living prisoner, someone in that top bunk who’d taken offense at too much attention, or at some joke.

Floyd, like Billy, had listened fairly well. That was the only real difference between him and the hundreds of other bricks I’d met by that time. What had happened between him and Carl was absurdly simple, but the man behind the desk was puzzled, because it wasn’t supposed to happen to an assassin-in-training, or to a human brick. They’d become friends. Floyd had expressed his dim, blundering sympathy, and Carl had listened, and been drawn out of his fear.

Which was more or less all Floyd had done with me.

Had he pretended not to know me, pretended not to make the connection between my stories, my family history, and his? I’d stopped wondering pretty quickly. I had more immediate problems, which was part of his point, I think, if he was making one.

Bricks only face one direction.

I let my hand slip from the wall, and left the cell.

He was no danger to her. Judith Map felt that immediately. He lay on the porch, one arm flung out across her doormat, obscuring the word WELCOME. She’d come home late from work. The street was silent, apart from crickets chirping and a far-off siren. She could see his chest rise and fall calmly. She turned her key in the door and stepped past him.

Inside, she switched on the porch light, and looked at him through the glass pane at the top of the door. He wore jeans and workboots, and a tee-shirt which read QUICK’S LITTLE ALASKA. It was the name of the bar at the corner where her street met Schermerhorn Avenue, three blocks away. It was called Little Alaska because of the air conditioning.

A car pulled into a drive up the street, headlights flaring over the porch where he lay. Another of her neighbors coming home. The street led nowhere, and the only cars that went past were cars that belonged to houses there. Nobody on her street walked except Judith. But the man on the porch must have walked, or been carried. From the bar, she guessed.