Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

I hope that sheds a bit of light on Ricky’s circumstances leading up to his crimes. I will write more when I have time.

At the Braille workshop I finally finish Guernica and file it away in the drawer marked COMPLETED. Shirley was pleased with it. When she closed her eyes and ran her fingers over my work, her softly lined face glowed with a satisfied smile. The only tactile drawing left to do is Spiral Jetty , which is very straightforward. I believe there’s merit in trying to capture the symbolism and feeling of great visual artworks in a tactile format, but there’s no sense in pretending it’s possible with this one. The textbook publisher has chosen it because it represents an important movement in modern art. I understand the reasoning, but I’ve been to Spiral Jetty and nothing that matters about it could be captured on a sheet of thick paper. Not the manner by which Smithson built it, with heavy equipment and vigorous outdoor work, capturing the entire process on film as the spiral took shape; not the wind or sun, nor the pink water that welled between the swirls of rock; not the feeling of remoteness, having driven out to this tiny peninsula for the sake of walking in a circle while breathing in the bracing, salty air. Ironically, out of all the artworks in the textbook, it’s surely the most accessible to anyone who can’t see—and yet it’s the only one for which I can’t make a decent representation for the blind. But it’s been buried under water for thirty years, so I suppose my drawing is the closest any blind person will get to it.

I sit down at the computer to work on some transcription. When we divide up the work at the beginning of a project, I’m always assigned the sections of the book that deal with my drawings, so I know what to expect. I open the file and begin copying it into the Braille software.

The building of Smithson’s earthwork took six days. It is 15 feet wide, 1500 feet in length, and is composed entirely of natural materials, including basalt rock, earth, water and salt crystals. Water levels were unusually low at the time of the Jetty’s creation, but within a few years a rise to the pre-drought levels left the piece submerged. More recently, however, a drop in the level of the Great Salt Lake has revealed the structure and made it walkable once again. Visitors have enjoyed experiencing the rebirth of the Spiral Jetty, and its reemergence raises many questions about the proper curation of such an ephemeral piece.

I stop and reread what I have typed. Then I turn and look at Shirley, who is standing at the desk beside mine tearing open a package from a publisher. “Have you heard that Spiral Jetty is visible again?”

“Have I heard the what? ”

“The earthwork in the Great Salt Lake. It’s been buried almost my whole life, and now this book is saying it’s back.”

She shrugs, bouncing her white hair. “I don’t know anything about it.”

I scroll through the file, but it says nothing further. The only image is one of the Jetty when it was first built in 1970. I hesitate, then fold my hands in my lap and look at her with what I hope is my most reasonable, woman-to-woman expression. “Can I just… Do you think I could look it up on the internet? For research?”

She shoots me a sly look. “Clara. Really .”

“You can watch me the whole time. I just would like to verify that this is true. I had always heard that it was lost underwater, and it matters, you know, whether I’m drawing a lost artwork or one that’s accessible.”

“Why?” she asks, and I don’t reply because I have no answer to that. “It doesn’t matter one way or another. We’re not the editors. We just transcribe whatever they say, and if they said they found the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in a mall in Fresno, well then, heck, you go ahead and write it in Braille.”

I rest my forehead against my hand and lean toward the screen, reading those lines again and again, trying to make sure I’m not imagining them. Could it really be back? That broad, lonely trail I once walked with my mother, the one Ricky knew only as a lost Atlantis. Could it have returned, just the way he predicted it would? I try to picture all the rains that have fallen on that lake, all the days of blazing sun skimming the salt from its disappearing water, the passages of moon and sun like the never ending circular turns of a baby’s wind-up toy. Since the night Ricky and I stood on the beach, an eternity has passed. Tides have rolled in and out, dunes blown and shifted. Dogs have been born, chased tennis balls across the sand, been loved and grown old, died and become aching little memories. The Earth has changed, time marching on heartlessly, not caring that there is no one to cup a hand around the flame of Ricky’s life and bear witness to the whole of it.

I adjust my glasses and, in spite of everything, press on with the transcription—writing one letter, then the next, meaningless as runes.

It’s four days before Janny returns. She reappears on the other side of the bars with her arm in a sling and a distant, scowling expression on her face. “You’re back,” I say exultantly.

Officer Parker lets her in. Although it goes against procedure, they almost never cuffed Janny even before the injury, and now it would be complicated as well as essentially pointless. She steps into the cell and slides a hand to the side of the bed to orient herself. “I missed you,” I say.

“You got my Vaseline? You didn’t send it.”

“It didn’t fit in your cosmetic bag. Here.” I take it down from the shelf, but then see she can’t apply it to her own hands. “Let me do it for you. They didn’t have any at the clinic?”

“Not for me.”

I smooth a dollop of it onto her cast-free hand, massaging it into her short fingers and leathery knuckles. Her blank gaze is aimed at nothing in particular—a corner, a cinderblock—and for a few moments we stand in silence.

“Somebody there said the baby thing is true,” she says.

My heart thumps errantly, as if it is a door on which an angry person is knocking. “About me, you mean?”

“Yeah, about you. Who else you think, the Queen of England? They say she even come visit you.”

“Janny,” I say. I take another dollop of Vaseline and touch the fingers curling out from her cast, but she pulls back her hand and scowls at me. “Have you ever tried to forget something that made you feel sad?” I ask.

“Bad things I did,” she says. “Not my babies.”

“I never even held her. They took her away the minute she was born.”

“And that makes you deny her?”

I say nothing.

She presses me, her voice rising. “Makes you lie and say she never lived? Nine months she grow in your belly and you act like it’s nothing? You ashamed of her?”

“Of course I’m not ashamed of her,” I say sharply, matching her volume. “I’m ashamed of her father.”

“Bullshit. He do the same thing you do. You ashamed of you .”

She pushes past me and sits down on her bed. The glower of her expression frightens me— so unfocused, so filled with inward rage. I perch on the side of the desk, and in a quieter, more soothing tone say, “Janny, you killed Javier to protect yourself and your kids. They understand how bad he was to you, and that you wanted to get away and were afraid he would wake up and stop you. But my…my daughter can’t look at what I did and find a reason like that. If I was your mother, wouldn’t you want me not to claim you?”

“No,” she says. Her voice is dull and hoarse. “I’d want you to love me. So I’d know I wasn’t a monster’s child.”