Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

Fast footsteps approach behind me, and my cell door clangs open. “Hernandez!” the guard yells, but he hesitates. Normally the order would be to get on the ground, but that’s not a logical order to give to a blind woman with a broken arm. “Hands on the wall,” he says instead, ad-libbing.

“Fuck you, motherfucker,” she shouts, and takes a swing at the air with her healthy arm.

Another C.O. rushes into the cell, and I back into the corner. The two of them manage to get a cuff around Janny’s free wrist, and she kicks and flails as the second one works to cuff her ankles. The first turns and meets my eye. “When did this start? Was she drinking?”

“No. I’ve never seen her like this.”

Janny begins shouting in Spanish, but the only words I can pick out are the profanities. Other officers are just outside the cell now, and the two who have cuffed her wrestle her through the door and into a waist chain. Now that she isn’t threatening me directly anymore, I feel a swell of pity for her as she’s forced into chains like an animal. My cell door pulls shut, and I stand with my hands on the bars watching Janny struggle and twist away from them. “Take her to the Hole,” the sergeant orders, and as she’s pulled away suddenly a realization dawns on me.

“Don’t throw her in the Hole,” I shout. “She didn’t have dinner. She’s diabetic.”

“What?” one of the guards says.

“Take her to the clinic. Maybe it’s her blood sugar. She needs to eat.”

The guard with a hand on Janny’s cast says, “She needs a smack upside the head, is what she needs.”

“I think she’s drunk,” the sergeant says, but he looks uneasy. “All right, take her to the clinic first. We don’t want a lawsuit.”

“Can you come back and tell me how she is?” I call out, but they’re wrangling her toward the double doors amidst the howls and cheers of the other inmates. “Come back and tell me,” I shout, straining my voice to be heard over theirs, but I know it is lost in the clamor.

In the chow hall there’s a flurry of excitement. All day I’ve been hearing the distant audio from other inmates’ televisions. News reports that Penelope Robbins is being transferred here to await trial. Normally inmates don’t arrive at the prison until after their convictions, but in some cases, where there is exceptional notoriety—mine, for example—a county jail is deemed not secure or safe enough for the inmate. The reports don’t offer many details, but I suppose the daughter of a Congressman is a target at any facility. I wonder if I’ll catch a glimpse of her here.

There’s a festival air to the chow hall, a buzzing of anticipation at the arrival of this celebrity. Earlier, as I tried to read my way through a slow Friday afternoon and distract myself from worrying about Janny, I kept hearing my name in a tinny echo every few minutes. The newscasters were listing the famous inmates of the El Centro facility—the six merry murderesses, so to speak. Most of the others are in Administrative Segregation and I never see them. The majority of murderers are not as well-behaved as I am.

Today I sit alone. No one has returned to tell me how Janny is doing or where she is—privacy rules, I’m sure they’d tell me, but I think they like to control information simply for its own sake, too. During the workday I was desperate enough to quiz one of my coworkers, a woman I’ve seen getting special-diet meals in the chow hall, with questions about her symptoms. Now I feel reasonably sure Janny’s outburst was a blood sugar crisis, but still my heart is sick with worries about her—and Annemarie, as well.

I listen to the conversations around me, force myself to eat my hamburger, line up for roll call. Once we’re all back in our cells the mail delivery comes around. There’s a card from a church group that sends uplifting messages to women in prison, and I wonder how the woman who drew my name felt about her luck. There’s also an envelope with Karen Shepard’s return address in the corner. She corresponds with me from a P.O. box, which is amusing in its way. It’s not as though I’ll ever get out and track her down. Perhaps she’s worried that I could send people after her, arrange some kind of a hit or confrontation from prison. She’s a writer, so I suppose she has a good imagination.

The note from Karen is a short, rectangular slip of paper clipped to a larger photocopy. I unfold it and begin to read.

Dear Ms. Mattingly,

I hope this letter finds you well. Thank you for your recent correspondence. I am enclosing a photocopy I think might be of interest to you. In my research, sifting through many old documents in the Rowan file, I came across this letter that is dated the day of Ricky Rowan’s death. The documentation indicates it accompanied his suicide note, but it’s not clear whether it was ever released. I am aware from previous cases I have researched that private letters are usually held for the addressee, and that if that individual can’t be located, the letters are simply overlooked. This makes me curious whether that was the case with this letter, since it is only through your comments and my recent study of the court transcripts that it is clear to me who Kira is. By the time Ricky died, the relevant people may not have been cognizant of that. In any event, it is enclosed. I look forward to our ongoing communications.

{CC: photocopy from Rowan file}

Kira,

“Fight them, fight them. Call the animals.”

(Ah, hell there’s no point is there.)

BAM. Here it is. November 16, 1982—that was the day I was dying to see the Columbia land at the end of its space mission. You packed up a picnic and we drove all the way down, five and a half hours. They chased us away from the perimeter of the air force base—remember? We had to park in the desert. The sun was setting, streaks of blue and shadow, and we ate peanut butter sandwiches sitting on the hood of my car. You wrapped that Indian blanket around your shoulders when it got cold. And then we saw the fighter jet come in real fast like a wasp, then the shuttle behind it—silhouettes, both of them—dark and beautiful in the yellow sunset sky. Ominous and fragile at the same time, zipping by, speeding. Spectacular. I had to do a little dance there for it—imagine a little Bob Marley, steel drummin’, feel-good music. You laughed at me, but I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. I forgive you, I forgive you. I never blamed you in the first place. Is there enough time in a life to say that as much as you really need to? Om mani padme hum, I forgive you, I forgive you.

Funny thing—I always thought life was for the living, but now all I can do is hope there’s an afterplane, a parallel to this one where the souls go, and no God. I want to say, Kira, Kira, I’ll always be with you, but what living person can say that? “I’ll always be an angel watching over you.” Folly, I say! That’s the quandary, is that if there’s judgment then you know where I’ll be, and if there’s no judgment then I rot like the meat I am. The one sure thing now is, if life is for the living, I’m tapping out. I waste the air, turn food into shit, and even the trees can’t benefit from my CO2 output because there isn’t one motherloving tree in a hundred miles of here. It’s a zombie life and I’m going to stake it.

One last thing:

I love you, now and yesterday and tomorrow, beyond whatever’s next and deep down into the crazy time-physics we can’t even conceive now. Into the four-dimensional geometry of whatever’s there, where it’s a shape filled up with my love for you. And I know “I forgive you” isn’t the true mantra, but “forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.” Please forgive me, Kira. Forgive me for all the wrong I did you. Let me be a sky burial so the wind blowing over my bones can be like a prayer flag carrying that request to the terrible gods, so if there is a good place beyond all of this, I’ll have paid your passage with the only things I had left to give.