Riverine (26 page)

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there
.

—RUMI

W
hen I returned home, I ended the long silence. I finished the letter that had sat, unsent, among the belongings I’d carted with me from place to place over the years. And Corey replied immediately. All that internal dialogue I’d generated, the fear of what would come back to me in his reply, quieted. At first I had told myself that I only needed to know that he was okay. But it was more than that. I also needed to know if my attachment to him had been one-sided, to know why it still nagged at me. I needed to know how it was possible for the lives of two people sprung from the same place to diverge in such different directions. I also felt entitled, to some extent, to some answers about what happened to him and why he’d done what he’d done. I wanted to know what facts I had missed about him. Nothing I learned in school and nothing I had learned since had given me a clear understanding of those events, and I never did like murky water. I needed to see how deep the ground beneath lay.

Before I went to see Corey for the first time since he’d been arrested sixteen years earlier, I did two things. First, using masking tape, I outlined the size of his cell, eight by twelve feet, on my living room floor. I sat down inside the rectangle. I tried to imagine his life, his body, much larger than mine when last I’d seen him, inside that space with another grown man for nearly two decades. Sitting inside the outline, I considered justice and punishment very carefully, weighed the concepts against what I had known of Corey and what function funding a potentially sixty- or seventy-year sentence fulfilled. It repaired nothing, not for the victims’ family and not for the rest of the world, though, judging from the letters I received back from him, it did seem to have repaired Corey when nothing else in the past had worked. Not jail, not boys’ school. Not his mother kicking him out. But perhaps, like plenty of other young men who’d been considered misguided punks as youths, he’d simply grown up. Only the mistakes he’d made had been much worse than those of the typical nineteen-year-old male. Then again, nothing about his upbringing had been typical. But I needed to see him to know for sure. I thought of my own teenaged self and the person I was now. Time was change, and judging from Corey’s letters, he, like me, had changed. There was a calmness to his words, an acceptance of his past, and hope, against any promise of hope, for his future. Second, I read the rules for visiting the correctional facility, wondering what it would be like. The excitement of visiting a prison I’d experienced as a child was replaced with dread. I now had too much knowledge of that system, the people who were inside, the crimes that had landed them there.

“What does your husband think?” people asked me when I told them what I was doing. “How is that relevant?” I would reply. I would never have asked his permission to visit an old friend, but in this case I did. And he said, “Why are you asking my permission? I’m not your father.” Mike supported what I was doing, and he had known about Corey for years—the basics, not all the details. Not the decades-long unrequited love angle. Saying it out loud made it sound ridiculous, even to me. He still had some questions. “I don’t understand it completely,” he said. “But anyone who made you who you are is all right by me.” My history with Corey had tumbled out in words in its entirety while my friend Jen was visiting us in Vermont in the days leading up to my visit. Mike conceded that there were things Corey knew about me that he could never know, did not
want
to know. Jen, though, was my vault. Whatever we had been through in life—relationships, bad decisions, daddy issues—she had my back and reserved judgment. She was rooting for me, for Corey, and asked me to call her afterward to tell her how it went. This time, when I saw the gun towers and the razor-wire fences, I could barely breathe.

Rule 1. On a contact visit in prison, you may briefly embrace when the inmate enters the room.

My fingers trembled and I clenched my teeth together, wishing I could wear my nighttime mouth guard all day. I carried stress in my jaw beyond sleep. If no rest came from sleeping, how then to face the day? Brief epiphanies began to creep in as I eyed the vending machines across the room:
a thousand-dollar mouth guard to prevent headaches, what a luxury. Shower curtains. Couches. What would it be like never to shower with privacy? Never to sit down on a soft surface? Who would I become without these comforts?

I watched the door through which at any moment Corey would emerge wearing beige prison-issued slacks and a matching shirt. Though I knew better, I still expected to see the Corey I’d known as a girl: tall and strong but not overly musclebound, tan. A smile reflecting the carelessness of his youth. I had forgotten his eyes, but not his mouth. Not his knees. Not his laugh. In our recent letters, we had compared one another to ghosts, apparitions; perhaps we had made ourselves up. We compared one another to the tiny circular photographs stuffed into a broken heirloom locket: held, kept, halved, separated. We compared one another to any number of memory devices and keepsakes: tufts of hair between the pages of yellowed books, dried flowers from formal dances, familiar refrains. We sickly preserved and catalogued our history together, anemic though it was. It was overly commemorative and precious. But perhaps it was the effort, the act of remembering, that mattered.

When he did appear, at last, I was startled. He was a mountain of a man, solid and soaring as he walked toward me. In a word: gorgeous. I was caught abashed, wondering if I passed muster. In one letter, he had told me he saved the picture I’d sent him of me at eighteen, a freshman in college. Thin, blond. A too-eager smile. Still looking very much like the girl he had known.

He cracked a wide smile at me and scooped me up into a long hug, releasing me a moment before the guards would insist we part, as if he knew exactly how much he could get away with in the visiting room. And by now, he probably did know. We settled into our chairs at table seven and I reached across the tabletop to hold his hands. The opportunity for human touch was the only thing I could offer him, and I used it to try to bridge the years that had separated us. “Wow,” we said, over and over. “Holy shit,” we said, as if we’d expected to see our fourteen-year-old selves instead of adults.

As we settled into our chairs, I thought through the list of questions I wanted to ask him.
When was the last time you sat beneath the stars? Do you ever cry? How is it that you got here, exactly?
We had been writing letters to each other for almost two months this time, the third time since he’d gone to prison, but we had carefully avoided the tougher conversations that previously caused us to fall out of touch. We had avoided talking about my love and his choices, about the butterfly effect and do-overs. We had, miraculously, managed to keep the details of his transgressions gestating in the background of our letters, like unhatched chicks awaiting a birth date. But they were coming. There were things I needed to know, and the only way out was to break straight through the white, open my eyes, inhale oxygen. I still couldn’t imagine my friend, a killer. Even the word felt wrong in my mouth. I had considered coming right out and saying “What the fuck?” when he sat down. Or kissing him, erasing everything that came before. Or something else equally direct that left no room for him to misunderstand what I was asking of him, what I needed him to explain to me, such as “Tell me how you killed people. No, not how.
Why
. Or how you
could
.” But what I meant was
Explain to me how I loved a person who could do this and why I didn’t see it coming. Explain to me why I still feel the loss of you in my life
.

I kept thinking of
Badlands
, the 1973 Terrence Malick film starring Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen. In the film, Spacek plays the teenaged Holly, who lives alone with her father and spends her time confined to the porch or yard, doing her homework and twirling her baton. Her solitude was all too familiar to me. When she meets Kit, played by Sheen, she warns him that her daddy won’t want her to be seen with a garbage man, let alone one ten years older than she is. Nevertheless, the two become friends and lovers, stealing embraces in barns and along secluded riverbanks. But Holly doesn’t fall for him because he is a “bad boy” and she is a “good girl.” That trope has no place in this film. Holly seems to find Kit to be clever and surprising, nonconforming to their rural community’s attitudes in a way that opens her mind a crack. He sees her as more than just a girl. But when Kit shoots Holly’s father, apropos of nothing—“How’d it be if I shot you?” Kit says to him before he pulls the trigger—it happens like a dream gone bad. She becomes an immediate accomplice. You can hear it in Holly’s voice-over narration of the event: she doesn’t quite know what to make of it, but her life is irreparably changed. She’s suddenly free to be with Kit, but her father is dead. Early on, Holly suspects that Kit’s mental state is at least in part to blame. I found myself trying out snapshots of the inside of Kit’s mind prior to the gun’s blast. Of the inside of Corey’s mind before his knife became a weapon. I wanted to know what they were thinking the moment before their lives changed forever. I wanted Polaroids for my refrigerator that explained everything in a story-board of frozen frames.

The questions I had practiced quickly evaporated as we talked like regular people catching up over coffee or beers. Only the lives we compared couldn’t have been more different, on the surface. He listened to stories about my work, my writing, my children, my husband, while I asked about his time in administrative segregation, his routines, and his general wellness, still avoiding the big question about the big crime. He told me he had spent seven years total in solitary lockup. Each time, he said, he came out a better man. Not worse, like some people who go in and don’t come back entirely intact. Although, he admitted, he no longer felt altogether human. He had spent a lot of time looking at himself in the mirror. Figuring out what went wrong. Now, he was all right—altered, damaged, but all right. I saw nothing inherently
wrong
with him. He had not been diagnosed with any mental condition—I asked. He had obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but who didn’t? That seemed unrelated. He sat there talking to me, and it was normal.

“I read this article about a new theory on the big bang,” I began, after we had concluded general catching-up conversation.

“The one about the parallel universe?” he asked.

“Yes!” I said. The theory suggested that the cosmic beginning of time sent matter expanding in
two
directions, rather than one, due to already low entropy in the burgeoning universe as opposed to a gravitational exertion. The first direction was the one we knew—time’s one-way arrow leading the charge through an ever-widening universe, thanks to Newton’s second law of thermodynamics. But the second one, according to this new theory, would have expanded in the opposite direction. Theoretically, there could be, if all the same particles needed to eventually create the life we know here on Earth had been sent off in that second direction after the big bang, another world like our own.

“How did they describe it again?” he asked.

“It said that this new model ‘has one past but two futures’” It said, too, that the theory assumes the universe has an unlimited capacity for entropy, or chaos, as opposed to functioning as we know it only when entropy is low and contained. It looks more closely at the origin of the second law of thermodynamics. I paraphrased for him: gravity converts incredibly disordered systems into wonderfully ordered ones. Our universe is an example of that. “We are realizing the ancient Greek dream of order out of chaos,” the article read.

“Order out of chaos,” Corey said. “I like that.”

“It sounds like us, doesn’t it?” I said. “One past, two futures.”

He nodded and squeezed my hand.

Corey told me about his weekends, his meals, and his job in the kitchen, which he was proud of and seemed to enjoy. He was doing great now, as far as life in prison goes. Like the universe, humans will shape order out of whatever material is available. He had systems for managing things like laundry and finances. He had a schedule for phone calls with the three members of his family who still talked to him. But it wasn’t always that way. He told me about how, years ago, he obtained a cell phone in prison and met a woman in a chat room. He had been in a relationship with her for a few years, though they had never met in person. When I asked why a person would do that, he explained that the best the men inside could figure was that with all physical opportunities to connect rendered impossible, they became very good at talking and listening. They made good emotional partners.

Corey told me how he had sold weed and wine and LSD and heroin in a place I was afraid to sneeze in. But he had distanced himself now from the pitfalls of prison. He grew up, finally. He decided he had gone to ad-seg for the last time. He had never really wanted that kind of life, anyway—a criminal life, a thug life—though it was, in some ways, easier. Though he had changed, the opportunity to live a life of crime was ongoing. It was consistently the easier choice. Change was harder. People kept coming to him, asking him to involve himself in one hustle or another. He compared it to Alcoholics Anonymous—every day he had to decide not to “drink.” He had to keep saying no in order to stay straight, which got easier with time. Now, approaching forty, he valued his visits, seeing his mom and dad. Seeing me. He wouldn’t risk having it taken from him. “Please don’t come back into my life and then go again,” he said. “I don’t think I could take it a third time.”

I promised I wouldn’t.

Now Corey worked, read
National Geographic
and plenty of novels, painstakingly made Japanese paper quilled crafts with makeshift tools—cards for other inmates’ families and his loved ones. He grew his hair long and donated it to be made into wigs for cancer patients, cutting it himself with nail trimmers every three and a half years. “It’s the little good I can do in the world, after all the damage I’ve done,” he said. “And if I can make you smile, make you happy, and then you go out into the world and share that happiness with others, I feel like I’ve done something good.”