A. Homes: The End of Alice

It will be a long day. There are many of those, moments between sunrise and sleep that stretch into centuries. I daydream, soothing myself with memories and imaginary games. I force myself to conjure. Clutching my pillow, I pretend the pillowcase is skin. I touch the sheet bunched at the bottom of the bed and think of the bones of Alice’s ankles. Beauty. I have loved. I think of the clean white sheets on my grandmother’s clothesline. I think of the little neighbor girl who liked my truck, I give myself history lessons.

Alice; naked by the lake is how she found me. She is there on the beach, standing between me and my clothing. I turn away, overcome with false modesty. She watches. She wears war paint and carries a bow and a quiver filled with white arrows ending in blue suction cups. She giggles. She points to my shriveled self hanging down below.

She finds me amusing.

Her amusement I find humiliating, arousing.

I instantly want to do something — to silence that stupid giggling.

Alice collapses, beside herself with glee.

Visitor. Two guards I’ve never seen before come to my door.

“Surprise, surprise,” they say, “long time no see.”

“Have we ever met?”

“You have a guest.”

I’ve not had a visitor in years, can’t imagine who it might be, but know better than to ask. The guards wait with leg irons and a belly chain. I take a moment and change into one of my two good shirts; it literally cracks as I unwrap it. I comb my hair, take a leak, and make sure everything is put away.

“Always important to make a good appearance, you never know who you’ll meet,” I say as the guards fit me into the various cuffs and chains.

“Big day on main street,” Kleinman says, watching them lead me away. “Good to see you getting out of the house, and wearing something decent. I wasn’t going to say anything, but you were starting to look frumpy.”

My chains rattle, the guards’ keys jingle. The great steel gates roll open.

I am taken to the visitors’ center — led through the maze on a route that is new to me. Even if my visitor is some door-to-door salesman, a fucking Fuller Brush man, I am grateful for the outing.

“I’m lost,” I tell the guards. “Didn’t the visiting room used to be off to the right?”

“It’s been reconfigured,” the guard says.

“Two years ago,” the second one adds.

“I don’t get out much,” I say.

They have no response. The men of West are not the most popular in this facility; scariest of the scary, our crimes the most criminal of them all — we are kept in a special section for the sexuals. Car thieves, petty larcenists, and common murderers will have nothing to do with us, and so, to keep the calm, the cool, we are kept entirely apart and are therefore all too easily forgotten. The visitors’ center is the crossroads; East meets West, North meets South, and you can tell who’s who by the jewelry they wear. North and South are minimalists, unadorned, low security, petty criminals really. Easterners are kept handcuffed, and all Westerners are bound at both wrist and foot. People stare.

A small room in a series of small rooms, a glass door, high glass walls, and a narrow counter — like a phone booth without a phone. Cut into the glass is a small pattern of holes, a place to speak. The lighting is harsh, fluorescent. I squint. Suddenly self-conscious, I look down at myself. My shirt is yellow, stained although I remember it being clean, new. I stare at the stains. I try to rest my hands on the counter. There is no natural position.

An old man steps into the booth.

“How are you, Chappy?” he says loudly, using my childhood nickname, a reference to a perhaps extreme affection for the product Chap Stick.

Frightened by his familiarity, I am suddenly sure that despite the glass that’s supposed to protect him from me, at any moment he’ll do something that will finish me — I imagine being shot, the bullet shattering the glass. I slump in anticipation of the impact.

“It’s me, Burt, you ass. My God, you’re awful. It didn’t occur to me that you’d be this far gone. Sit up,” he says, dusting the chair on his side of the booth with a handkerchief and then sitting down. “Jefferson Warburturn Marx.” He gives the name of my grandmother’s sister’s son, who as far as I know has been dead for years. “The third,” he adds.

My cousin, my second cousin. “You used to be younger,” I say.

“So did you. Perhaps I should have called ahead. It didn’t occur to me. I didn’t think you’d be going anywhere.”

“When did I last see you?”

“Uncle Richard’s wedding. You were in junior high, I was a freshman at Dartmouth. I got you drunk and made you eat a lot of wedding cake. I thought it would absorb the alcohol.”

“I was sick for days.”

“And how are you now?”

“Better.”

“Good,” he says. “I was worried.”

In the booth to my left a couple is kissing through the glass, tongues and all, steaming up the booth. The guard makes them stop.

Burt continues, “We got to talking about you. It still comes up, you know, and there was some wondering how you’re getting along. I was elected to investigate.”

“Curiosity killed the cat?”

“Something like that. So,” he says, clapping his hands together. “How are you getting along in here, are you adjusting?”

“It’s been twenty-three years,” I say, intending it to sound more like a reminder than a reprimand.

“Well, yes, I know. I’m sorry to have been so out of touch, it’s just that, well, the whole thing was very upsetting, scared a lot of people. Frankly, I was never frightened, just hesitant to get involved. Actually, it was more my wife…. Anyway, I’ve been awful busy, just retired last year. ”

“What time is it?”

“Haven’t you got a watch?” he asks, looking at his own, taking it off, motioning as if to hand it to me, as if I could reach through the glass and take it from him.

“Sir,” the guard says, interrupting him. “You’ll have to put that back on.”

“But I’d like to give it as a gift.”

The guard shakes his head.

“Is there a clock?” I ask. “Out front, above the entrance, a clock with one hand?”

“I didn’t notice,” Burt says, strapping the watch back on. “Do me a favor. When you leave, look up and see if there’s a clock, let me know if it’s working.”

Burt changes the subject. “Do they offer you any treatment, any hope?”

I suppress the urge to tell Burt the truth, that their idea of treatment was encouraging me to jerk off while watching porno movies with something called a plethysmograph strapped to my penis measuring my hard-on — and with them watching me through a one-way mirror, no doubt doing a little handiwork of their own. I have the urge to tell him that quite clearly my treatment was for their entertainment, but I don’t think he’d take it well.

He goes on. “Has it been a learning experience? I mean, you wouldn’t do it again, would you?”

I shake my head.

“Well, that’s good. And it’s a decent place? They don’t pick on you? There’s not a problem with the other men?”

“No problem.”

“I admire you. For toughing it out.” He blots his forehead with his handkerchief. “My reason for coming is that there were some boxes. They must have gone from your mother’s house to grandmother’s and then off to my father’s, and somehow they ended up with me. Anyway, we were cleaning out and came upon them, mostly things from your childhood, old clothes, mildewed books, rusty toys, a couple of your mother’s pie plates that you made into tambourines, that kind of thing. Long story short, they were in the basement, we thought about having a big garage sale but didn’t, and then a letter came from a new museum, the Museum of Criminal Culture?” he says, his voice going up on the end of the word culture, as though he’s checking to see if I’ve heard of it. “They’re opening in Cincinnati?” he says, again his voice rising, curling into a question mark.