A. Homes - The End of Alice

Prison. The bell rings. Upstate New York — the cornerstone reads 1897. My room, housed in a wing known only as West, has not been redecorated for ninety-seven years.

I’ve been up for hours. There is no rest. I make notes— beginning to feel that the clock is ticking faster, there’s not much left for me. The bells — punctuation marks of the day. The bell rings and suddenly I am back. I am here, in prison, just as I was beginning to escape.

Morning count. I stand at the door, the gate to my cell. Halfway down I begin to hear the names — some days I hear as far as Wilson, but more often the sound comes in at either Stole or Kleinman. I hear their names, I know their crimes. Some days I think Kleinman should have gotten fifteen to twenty, and other days it’s five to ten. What makes me change my mind?

“Jerusalem Stole,” the sergeant calls — they are four doors down from me.

“It’s a mistake — call me Jerry,” Jerusalem answers.

I tuck my shirt in and attempt to pull myself together.

“Frazier,” the sergeant calls, and Frazier, my next-door neighbor, answers, “So what about it?”

I stand ready. When my own name is called, I review myself, my crimes, and am strangely silent.

Again, the sergeant calls my name. He presses his face to the bars of my cell and asks, “Everything all right?”

I nod.

“How come you don’t answer?”

I shrug.

“You got nothing to say?” His keys jingle. There are doors here, locks, that I believe serve no purpose at all. Trick doors. Fake doors, passageways that are roads to nowhere.

“What time is it?” I ask the sergeant.

Above the entrance to this place, and I saw it only once, twenty-three years ago, as I was coming in, above the entrance is a giant clock with only one hand.

“What time is it?”

“Ain’t it a shame,” the sergeant says, fitting his keys into the lock and undoing me. “It’s breakfast time.”

Wet eggs. Dry toast. Little bowls of cereal. Milk.

The girl. She is home for the summer, returned to her people after sophomore year at a prominent girls’ college, whose name I will keep secret, to spare the institution the embarrassment or perhaps the pride, depending on which of the trustees you might ask. And while one can recognize the benefits of a single-sex education, the high pursuits of the few remaining such colleges, one rarely discusses the drawbacks, the demand that the body suspend its development, its inclinations, while the intellect is encouraged to grow. This lack of balance causes difficulties, a uniquely female disorder where the majority of physical evidence is displayed in strange postures (political, social, and sexual), a vicious and hostile lethargy, an attractive perplexity of the eye, and as has been reported a not entirely unpleasant kind of tingling sensation in the body’s more yielding spots.

From her letter it is clear that she has been looking for years, searching out the places where all variety and versions of her chosen kind are on display, where one can browse, where it is easy to shop unnoticed. She goes to the public parks that dot every town in America, the baseball diamonds/soccer fields where they frolic in the uniforms of youth and league. They trounce and trample each other, jumping one atop the other, hurling their light flesh against that of their friends, slapping and smacking each other as though nothing else matters, as though no one is looking, or cares.

She sits on the sidelines, cheerfully applauding. “Go, go, go,” she screams when the goal is made, when the bat strikes the ball and the player rounds third and heads for home.

She frequents those places where families congregate— zoos, circus performances, little puppet theaters — and watches them among their own, bickering over souvenirs and snacks, wrapping their plump palms and lips around fluffy spirals of falsely colored cotton candy, boxes of Cracker Jacks, helium balloons, felt pennants purchased for good little boys and girls. She can be found in amusement arcades and shopping malls where the fed-up, frustrated parents of these creatures deposit their offspring, as though this modern structure, this architecture of commerce and commercial intercourse, this building itself, were a well-trained baby-sitter.

In a case such as this where one has been looking so hard for so long, it is within the range of possibility that a buildup of ocular imaginings exaggerates the Current draw so that the actual pressure within the eye from such frequent pupil dilation causes a discomfiture not unlike that found in other regions. At peak, it produces a kind of blindness — nearly classically hysterical — during which she does not see what she is doing, giving birth, so to speak, to the notion that her grabbing of his flesh is simply a hand reaching out for direction.

Perhaps quite differently from how it has previously been presented, perhaps in truth this boy is her guide rather than her demon. I have long suspected that youth knows far more than the sugar-glazed gap between mind and body allows it to articulate.

Spring semester sucked, two incompletes to finish by July, otherwise — academic probation! A paper to write, twenty to thirty pages on “The Criminal Personality”? Dare me to submit my own journal?

Wild with something, dunno what. Migraines. Aarrgghhh.

What do you do for fun in that place anyway?

On the sixth day following her return, the previous days spent in a state of deep tranquilization, a close-to-comatose, chain-reactive, biochemically linked readjustment period replete with headaches severe enough to warrant the use of prescription medication, the stunning, stoning combination of Fiorinal and Percocet — pass the bottle, dear — and the development of a full series of symptoms fully related to the life of a female nineteen-year-old — anorexia, followed by gorging on mother’s good cooking, a bloating feeling, four tempers played against declarations of love, nausea, strange dreams buried in the sound sleep of one’s own bed, diarrhea — the closet cleaned and reorganized, still more of the unending supply of childhood remnants left in plastic bags at the end of the driveway for the Salvation Army to claim, purging.

“It’s the water. The change of water never agrees with you,” her mother says.

On the seventh day, she rose anew and carefully washed and clothed herself: a floral-based bath-and-shower gel was used in the morning ritual along with fresh mint toothpaste, a talcy deodorant balanced for the acidity of a woman’s sweat — she’ll grow into it yet, damn her — and also a dab of mother’s Chanel placed on the back of her spine just above the start of her ass crack. The minutiae of her ablutions not so much described as deduced by my own interpretation, my more personal understanding of her. I would also add that using a razor found in the shower, she did, taking care to lather first with mother’s moisturizing soap, shave her legs, her armpits, and as though a gift to me, the few odd and not quite pubic hairs on her inner thigh. Thank God for the accuracy, the clean sweep, of the double blade. She then slipped into her disguise — a pair of oversize and out-of-style shorts and a shirt cast off by her father — went down to the morning meal, and then, costumed for obscurity, set out to find her man.

The amount of nervousness generated by these proceedings, these thoughts about to become deeds, was enormous. When her mother asked in a lovely and lilting voice, “Where are you going?” breaking the concentration, disturbing the frequency of the daughter’s thoughts, the obsessive-compulsive nature of her plan, her very movements, the child seemed to flicker and, for the portion of a second, to lose her mind entirely.