Fanon (7 page)

Whether Fanon slept that night or dreamed his dream of Algerian independence or didn't sleeps with him in one of his contested graves. Why do I need to go there. To sleep. To dream with him. Through a three-inch-wide feeding slot in a solid concrete wall I ask my keeper questions. Will a little bit of conversation soften up the guard. Will he respond to my pleading. Or despise me. Lead me on. He enters the cell and appears to listen, letting me run my mouth, write my book—blah, blah, blah—till he's bored and points to the floor. I drop to my knees and beg. He readies the gag, twisting it thicker between the cogs of his fists.

Doctor Fanon. Please free me. Release me from angers and fears that consume me. Heal the divisions within me my enemies exploit to keep me in a place I despise. Myself cut up, separated into bloody pieces, doctor. Like you. Fractured, dispersed, in death as in life. Help me, doc.
Come then, comrades,
Doctor Fanon says,
it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent, and resolute.

The wheelchair folds up easily once you empty it. The backrest and seat are wide leather straps and if I stick my fist under the seat strap and punch up, the chair's braces unlock, its metal sides collapse inward. Mash the metal wings together and I have a compact package that fits conveniently into the trunk of the car I rented at the airport for this visit home. Emptying the wheelchair's not so easy. Whether I lift my mother out of it or help her leverage herself from the wheelchair into the rental car's front seat, emptying the chair's an ordeal. My mother's not heavy, the wheelchair neither heavy nor unwieldy; the difficulty stems from the chair's existence and the truth that there's no way around it, the chair a simple, evil fact we didn't expect, didn't plan for, and when it's sitting there waiting to be emptied or waiting to be filled, we hate the wheelchair's implacability, the necessity to deal with it, work around it, include it in our activities. The chair's existence spites us, hurts us like the hateful fact of the prison's stone walls incarcerating my brother these last twenty-eight years. The prison also folds up when prison visits end. Folds up for us, the visitors, anyway, though my brother remains behind, locked in a steel cage. The prison emptied of us folds up for storage in whatever compartment we allot for it, shrinking smaller and smaller once we're outside its walls, so small finally we don't see it except we're always aware that the prison sits like a wheelchair waiting to be filled or emptied, waiting for us to arrive again, lift or
squeeze my brother in again, ourselves in, a process far more difficult for him than for us, we come and go but with his legs cut out from under him, like my mother confined in her jail on wheels, he must depend on others.

For the price of an airline ticket I can reduce the four hundred miles between New York City and Pittsburgh to three quarters of an hour, not counting driving time to and from airports. Hours saved, it seems. A magic erasure of space, it seems. Except while I'm beamed at
Star Trek
speed from one place to another, my brother's clock ticks at its usual pace, minutes, hours, days bearing good news—more time served, therefore less time remaining to serve, and bad news—more time passed in jail, therefore less time for a life after prison. As both of us age and the years register on our faces, on the face of the good news/bad news clock, I understand a little better what my brother feels when he thinks about time in prison. Inside prison it's hard to ignore how little time there is, how each beginning, if not exactly an ending, is also a diminishment. The hand giving also busy taking away. My life sentence not spelled out like my brother s, but like him I've become increasingly aware that each day alive is one day less of whatever time's coming to me. My brother's prison time not my time, no one can do his time for him, no one can begin to understand the meaning of time the state subtracts from his portion, but on my island I've learned to count like him, learned the weight of minutes that accumulate and exhaust themselves simultaneously. Never one truth without the other. The count's the count. Stretching. Contracting. Counting up, counting down. Unforgivingly less, always less, even as more appears.

So what's the damned hurry. My brother ain't going nowhere. My flying carpet saves neither his time nor mine. I carry around the penitentiary walls everywhere I go, like a family snapshot in my wallet, those grimy, unmoving ramparts planted over a century ago alongside water that never stops flowing. What message did the state wish
to send by siting the prison on a riverbank. What does a river mean to an inmate who glimpses it through stone walls enclosing the island on which he's trapped. Thick, towering walls built to look like forever and last forever. I didn't know how to react when I heard the prison's going to be closed, maybe razed or maybe converted to a casino.

How many black men in America's prisons. How many angels fit on the head of a pin. I once kept track of the number of prisoners—black, white, brown, male, female. Now I've lost count. Lots. Lots too many of us serving sentences lots too long, especially when one of the prisoners is your brother beside you, year after year, in the visiting room of the same facility where he's been locked up over a quarter century and counting, a count adding years, subtracting years, depending on where you start, how you figure what he owes the state, what the state owes him, time remaining, good time, suspended time, double time, you could get caught up in numbers, in reckoning, how many angels can dance on a pinhead, how many black men in prison for how long, you could get confused by numbers, staggeringly large numbers, outraged by dire probabilities and obvious disproportions. Ugly masses of brute statistics impossible to make sense of, but some days a single possibility's enough to overwhelm me—how likely, how easy, after all, it would be to be my brother. Our fortunes exchanged, his portion mine, mine his. I recall all those meals at the same table, sleeping for years under the same roof, sharing the same parents and siblings (almost), same grandparents uncles aunts nieces cousins nephews, the point being, the point the numbers reveal: it would be a less than startling outcome to find myself incarcerated. This scene I'm writing could be my brother visiting me, the two of us side by side just as we sit today, myself, my brother, one declared guilty, one declared innocent, variables in an invariant formula, but me in his place, him in mine, our fates
switched, each of us nailed in our separate compartment of this hardass bench.

The length of these bolted-to-the-floor, orangish benches varies. They are staggered in uneven rows, separate islands of seats with plastic cushioned backs, shared wooden armrests, rigid seats affixed to one another, aligned so they all open in the same direction, and in order to speak face to face with the person next to you, you must twist sideways in your slot, talk across the hard armrest, or if you wish to say anything to someone two places away, you must scoot to the front of your compartment and lean past the person next to you to meet the eyes of the person you're addressing, prisoners and visitors tilting up and back as if davening before an invisible Wailing Wall. You must work even harder to have a conversation including more than one person at a time. Shout past the person next to you to be heard up and down the line of seats your group occupies.

In this case the group consists of me, my brother, and our mother, whom I've positioned as close as I can to my brother, angling her wheelchair at the end of our four-holer bench. The mobility of her wheelchair could serve as an advantage, but it doesn t. Each unmovable orange bench fronted by a low table that poses as a convenience for holding snacks purchased from the vending machines, and since there's a rule against moving tables, they also function as barricades, so I must plant my mom's wheelchair at the end of a unit of bench and table, stranding her as each bench is stranded and isolated yet also an intrusion upon the others, all visitors in each other's way, a perverse outcome so finely, successfully calibrated it must be intentional, perhaps computer generated to maximize exposure of every seat in the room to the raised platform where a guard oversees the visiting area, but also an arrangement designed to minimize intimacy between prisoner and visitor, preventing comfort, touching, privacy. No room for maneuver down at the end of our module,
where I angle the wheels of my mother's chair as best I can to achieve a feeling of closeness, and there she is, stuck for the duration of our stay though her seat's the only one in the house, besides the guard's tall stool, not fastened to the floor. The clever floor plan has anticipated the variable of a visitor confined to a wheelchair and renders my mother's chair as useless as her flesh-and-blood limbs. Technology trumping technology. Her wheels immobilized, her poor hearing worse in this low-ceilinged, concrete-walled airplane hangar space where sound eats itself, everybody's words slamming into unforgiving surfaces, messages chewed up and spit out, mangled, transformed to a harsh, deafening collective din that frustrates listening or speaking when the visiting room crowds up on weekends. I doubt my brother hears much of what my mother says, and I catch almost none of his words when his back's to me. I can't tell if he's addressing her or both of us and that's probably much more sense than she can make out of my attempts to speak to her and I wonder if my mother actually hears Rob, though his mouth is only a couple feet from her ear.

Almost thirty years ago I tried to write a book I hoped might free my brother from a life sentence in the penitentiary. It didn't work. Everything written after that book worked even less. Now my brother's face is turned away from me because the three of us, me, him, our mother, sit lined up side by side in that order inside the State Correctional Institution of Pittsburgh (SCIP) and in order to speak to our mother parked at the end of this compartmentalized bench constructed of wood and molded, indestructible, orangish beige synthetic, he must turn his back to me. His polished bald skull a marvel—a shiny hive of buzzing busy invisible business. Many colors and textures on a canvas stretched tautly to define each ridge of bone, each phrenological knot and bump, his brown skin thinned nearly to transparency. If you had no knowledge of a skull's hardness and durability you'd think you could crack this bright shell with a
single flick of a finger the way your fingertip could shatter a crystal goblet, the way I popped my brother Rob's hard bean-head
Gotcha
when we were kids to remind him I was Big Brother and merciless when I wanted to be, pop-pop-pop, hurtful, stinging to tears forget-me-knots upside his big head or playful teasing flicks and pings, presumptive strikes, punishment, revenge, affection, nuisance—pop—
Got you, little brother, and you better not never forget, boy, you better not even think about trying to change who's on top and always will be.
I'm fascinated by the innocence of his gleaming skull, shaved clean or almost clean, a bluish five o'clock shadow here and there, and on closer inspection nicks, dents, blemishes, scrapes, healing scratches and scars, rough patches of chicken skin where the razor's worked too hard, too often, and I look away, embarrassed like I am by those telltale raw, prickly stripes where a woman's cleaned up her crotch for a bikini, embarrassed that I'm looking, ashamed for her sitting with her thighs cocked exposing her not very skillful, not very beautiful grooming, her not very secret secrets I don't desire to share on display and I avert my eyes, sorry for both of us, trying to think of something nice about her, something unprivate so next time our eyes meet, mine won't hold shame or pity, or any detectable trace of my spying or of what I noticed, what caused me to wince inside at the hopelessness and sadness of all the small vanities and disguises I cultivate, just like my brother, like the woman, like everybody, wasting time to keep other folks from seeing us the way we see ourselves, as if my cheeks freshly scraped each morning or clothes covering my nakedness convince anyone I'm not what they know I am beneath whatever cover story I piece together for the public. My brother's bare skull admonishes me. A rock fragile as breath. Beyond judgment or blame as any breath any person sucks in to remain alive.

My strongest desire after passing into the visiting area through the last remote-controlled sliding steel gate is to see my brother's face appear in the little window of the door next to the guard's platform.
The next strongest wish is to leave, get the hell out. I want the visit to be over, a good visit concluded with a big hug like the bear hugs of greeting. I want to be freed by the steel gate clanging shut behind me. No one wants to be here. But the alternative of not visiting my brother would be worse. Much worse. So the instant I arrive I would leave—flee—if I could, but I can't, don't, not so far anyway. The visit's oppressed by contradiction, squeezed between conflicting desires. Is the visit actually happening. Will I be able to handle it. This familiar turf. These terms out of my control. This prison reality forcing its rules on me. Unreal and irresistible. A woman you love hopelessly who announces she doesn't love you any longer and opens her arms for one last embrace.

In spite of my need to visit I bring the cold distance and detachment of the streets into the prison with me. I'm an outsider inside for a minute. An imposter, a traitor. Nobody can be in two places at once. Who am I. Where do I belong. Why am I here one minute, gone the next.

Rob's told me more than once he doesn't think he could make it without visits. Another time near the end of a visit, leaning back, legs shot out straight from his seat, speaking quietly with his head bowed, eyes front, addressing the emptiness the benches address, he said,
You know something, man,
he said,
I just about made up my mind last week to call Mom and tell her to tell everybody to stop coming here. Believe me,
he said,
I understand how hard it is for anybody to visit this goddamn place, especially Mom now she's old and crippled up and I hate to think about all the trouble I'm still causing all youall. Tell the truth though, man, it ain't about youall. It's about me. I made up my mind to stop visits for me, for my benefit. To save me, bro. Great to see Mom and you when you're in town and everybody else who goes through the hell of getting here. Ain't no words for the good feelings when I see my people. And looking forward to visits, hey, almost good as the real thing. But see, that's the problem. Cause visits and looking for-
ward to visits ain't the real thing. The real thing's the time I got to do. And I got to do it alone. Nobody, nothing I can depend on besides myself. In here you got to fight every minute of every day to survive. I ain't just talking about watching your back with all these fools and the games and the evil guards round here. You got to stay strong inside yourself. And the truth is nobody can help. You got to stay strong inside. Fight every minute of every day. Awake and asleep cause your dreams fuck with you too. What I'm trying to tell you,
he went on to tell me,
visits make me weak.
And suddenly he was the elder brother and the deep lines in his face made me think, Damn, mine must be deeper than his.