Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

In the program, you were required to be awake and in full uniform for count, which was held six times a day. The staff called you Offender. He was issued bedding, towels, white socks, denim trousers, gray uniform shirts, black oxfords, and a black tie. They did group calisthenics and manual labor, sanded furniture. You could only get so many disciplinary reports, though there was an appeal process. The most common thing to get kicked out for was smoking. In the classroom, a black kid in cornrows raised his hand and told the counselor: I’m in this to win this. Then they mopped their facility and made it smell like cleaning solution, the white winter sun falling in the cell windows, a slice of sky visible.

On a visitation day two months in, Mrs. Murphy told Jimmy that she saw a difference in him. It’s paying off already.

They got us running like ten miles every day.

He admitted that he already had two disciplinary reports coming. They’re saying I wasn’t in uniform at count.

It’s a test, Mrs. Murphy said. That’s how you have to look at it.

He was agitated that his wife hadn’t showed up.

His wife wasn’t feeling well, his mother said.

Some of us have to be here whether we feel well or not.

It’s not for me to say. You’re here, I know. But I’m not gonna add fuel to it.

I’m doing everything in my power in here.

I know. Don’t add fuel to it.

He didn’t know what he was trying for, he said.

Jim, she begged.

You could have told her to come.

We’ve got forty-five minutes. Let’s keep it together. I can cry on the drive back. I’m all cried-out, she grinned, exposing her missing tooth.

They ended on a hug. Seeya next time.

But towards the end of the five months, when he had already been given a final warning, he and four other offenders rolled a cigarette using an envelope for writing letters home and lit it with a tulip — a twist of toilet paper, which they ignited using a battery and a piece of foil — and smoked it standing on a footlocker and blowing their smoke into the air vent.

After he had been violated and sent to another facility to serve his full sentence, he covered his heartbreak by saying I didn’t like it there. They try to make you act like a little square boy.

The new system was different. Fresh off the bus, seven of them crossed the hard yard in orange jumpsuits carrying their blankets, while inmates whistled at them. Someone said, Put your chest down. The staff told you one story, the inmates another. Here it was all about the hustle. They didn’t want you to be square. After the urine test, they entered the cell block where inmates in black t-shirts sat at square tables rotated like diamonds. Some wore beads and crosses. One of the smaller new arrivals had the tendency to avoid confrontation, name of Mayfield. He had prominent ears. To Mayfield, they said: You look worried. You know that girl? Brittany? (meaning coward). Nice ears. Smile.

Mayfield let people hit him for fun and was placed in protective custody where you heard banging for hours and it was hard to sleep. He heard the disordered nothingness. Medicated prisoners who walked in circles, tireless walking, saying, I keep going round and round. My Dopaquel was switched to Trazodone. Got me sweating and having chills. Mayfield was going to live like that for the next fifteen years.

Jimmy was tense until he fought. The staff rushed in and broke it up and he kept his head up as he was led away. Twelve hours later, they brought him back and the tension started building again. So did the schemes. The idea was to get ahold of tobacco or coffee or anything for a buzz. He cliqued-up with a couple guys from New York who had in common that they were not black.

One was German-Italian, a young man in whose field-mouse-colored hair you could see the scars in his scalp. What hood you claim? They played cards using sugar packs from the chow hall as chips. That’s where I’m from, said Frankie. Bum-rushing Flushing. How come I ain’t never heard a you? What level you at?

Prepared to fight again, Jimmy stood up. Frankie hugged him. One love, kid. Frankie from Franklin Street, all my life, since ’93. Stay on point. We fight niggers all day in here.

He caught another case and this time got sent to Krayville, Indiana, where they admitted him on a summer day. The orientation was brief. The only thing they asked him was, Are you a Nazi or an Aryan?

He named his last prison. I was with the white boys there.

Then they put him on the vast yard with the general population and he could feel something physical immediately, an air pressure, a difficulty breathing.

He saw whites wearing flip-flops and white socks and mustaches and red jumpsuits, being released from the security housing unit, getting patted down, sticking out their tongues, arms out like Christ, white eyes with flat black circles like sharks, getting walked with leashes.

An Aryan told him:

Hey, peckerwood, you hang with us.

After they were done processing him, he rolled it up and moved in with white boys who talked about Mongols.

New York? You can tell us where Jimmy Hoffa’s at. Until then, you rent your spot with us.

They went to chow together, the yard together, they moved as a unit, posted sentries when they were working out.

You do laundry. You might have to slam something for the house. We got requirements.

The first thing he learned was that this was a war zone. There were politics and the politics were secret — you’re out of bounds asking about it, so don’t ask. In the yard, they put their towels out on the ground and did their calisthenics, following cadence called by the mob. He practiced the sequence of squat, step, lunge, squat-thrust, which were to be performed by a column of soldiers in unison while walking forward. Everyone had to be ready. The tension he had felt was constant and real. They jogged together under the Indiana sky, past the sign that said One Person At A Time mounted on the smooth synthetic brick and cement structure, the green glass of the pod windows appearing black in daylight. The facility was constructed like a mathematical puzzle, controlled from a central module by Midwesterners with deep resonant country voices.

The mob taught how to be stabbed under freezing showers, to teach you not to flinch. Their workouts were secret like Shaolin monks. Jimmy held a piece for the whites. It’s not about hate, everybody’s just clicked-up, they said, referring to the Nazi signs. It’s family. They wore Chinese symbols on their chests, eyelids, meaning strength, stealth, honor. The swastika itself was a Buddhist sign. It represented the pattern of a ghost running in an ancient field. They tattooed their faces, shaved their heads, stole the hardened steel spring from the barber’s clippers to carve a dagger out of the metal stock of their bunks, going over and over the same cuts tens of thousands of times, a form of meditation. Don’t talk about it, be about it, the powerlifters said, facing 30 years and 52 years, respectively, for burglary and burglary with sexual assault. The mind is a weapon. Tunnel vision comes into play. The guards believe they have power. What they have is the tower, an illusion. Jimmy was given what they called artillery to put in his rectum. He carried it out on the yard and removed it and secreted it in the dirt under the picnic table.

When an incident occurred in the yard, an air-raid buzzer went off that went through the entire prison and out into the fields and trees beyond the walls. Wherever you were, you dropped down on your face and spread your arms out. Five hundred convicts wearing high white sweat socks up to their knees got down on their faces in the dirt. Correctional officers sprinted out across the turf towards two men attacking a third. The frenzy is unbelievable — you watch him getting hit one, two, three, four times — falling and scrambling away, trying to run and falling. Getting hit in the back — the other attacker hits him. The officers are hitting them with batons. The fight tumbles over the picnic tables. The victim is still being stabbed. Another officer sprints around from the other side. One of the men flattens out — you see the knife flip out of his hand. They hit one with gas as he tries to get a last lick in, and he falls on his face. The victim pushes himself away with his sweatshirt in red flaps and his skin showing like someone bitten by a lion.