Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (629 page)

First published in
Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology
, January 1996

The day we
went to paint our names on the prison built of hardened criminals was the first time I had ever been there. I’d seen pictures, mostly video footage shot from a helicopter. The huge building was still as a mountain, but the camera was always in motion, as though a single angle were insufficient to convey the truth about the prison.

The overhead footage created two contradictory impressions. The prison was an accomplishment, a monument to human ingenuity, like a dam, or an aircraft carrier. At the same time the prison was a disaster, something imposed by nature on the helpless city, a pit gouged by a meteorite, or a forest-fire scar.

Footage from inside the prison, of the wall, was rare.

Carl Hemphill was my best friend in junior high school. In three years we had graduated together from video games to petty thievery, graffiti, and pot smoking. It was summer now, and we were headed for two different high schools. Knowledge that we would be drawn into separate worlds lurked indefinably in our silences.

Carl involved me in the expedition to the prison wall. He was the gadfly, moving easily between the rebel cliques that rarely attended class, instead spending the school day in the park outside, and those still timid and obedient, like myself. Our group that day included four other boys, two of them older, dropouts from our junior high who were spending their high-school years in the park. For them, I imagined, this was a visit to one of their own possible futures. They must have felt that it was possible they would be inside someday. I was sure that for me it was not that but something else, a glimpse of a repressed past. My father was a part of the prison.

It was secret not only from the rest of our impromptu party, but from Carl, from the entire school. If asked, I said my father had died when I was six, and that I couldn’t remember him, didn’t know him except in snapshots, anecdotes. The last part of the lie was true. I knew of my father, but I couldn’t remember him.

To reach the devastated section that had been the center of the city we first had to cross or skirt the vast Chinese ghetto, whose edge was normally an absolute limit to our wanderings. In fact, there was a short buffer zone where on warehouse doors our graffiti overlapped with the calligraphs painted by the Chinese gangs. Courage was measured in how deep into this zone your tag still appeared, how often it obliterated the Chinese writing. Carl and one of the older boys were already rattling their spray cans. We would extend our courage today.

The trip was uneventful at first. Our nervous pack moved down side streets and alleys, through the mists of steaming sewers, favoring the commercial zone where we could retreat into some Chinese merchant’s shop, and not be isolated in a lot or alley. The older Chinese ignored us, or at most shook their heads. We might as well have been stray dogs. When we came to a block of warehouses or boarded shops we found a suitable door or wall and tagged up, reproducing with spray paint those signature icons we’d laboriously perfected with ballpoint on textbook covers and desktops. Only two or three of us would tag up at a given stop before we panicked and hurried away, spray cans thrust back under our coats. We were hushed, respectful, even as we defaced the territory.

We were at a freeway overpass, through the gang zone, we thought, when they found us. Nine Chinese boys, every one of them verging on manhood the way only two in our party were. Had they been roaming in such a large pack and found us by luck? Or had one or another of them (or even an older Chinese, a shopkeeper perhaps) sighted us earlier and sounded a call to arms? We couldn’t know. They closed around us like a noose in the shadow of the overpass, and instantly there was no question of fighting or running. We would wait, petrified. They would deliver a verdict.

It was Carl who stepped forward and told them that we were going to the prison. One of them pushed him back into our group, but the information triggered a fast-paced squabble in Chinese. We listened hard, though we couldn’t understand a word.

Finally a question was posed, in English. “Why you going there?”

The oldest in our group, a dropout named Richard, surprised us by answering. “My brother’s inside,” he said. None of us had known.

He’d volunteered his secret, in the cause of obtaining our passage. I should chime in now with mine. But my father wasn’t a living prisoner inside, he was a part of the wall. I didn’t speak.

The Chinese gang began moving us along the empty street, nudging us forward with small pushes and scoffing commands. Soon enough, though, these spurs fell away. The older boys became our silent escort, our bodyguards. In that manner we moved out of the ghetto, the zone of warehouses and cobblestone, to the edge of the old downtown.

The office blocks here had been home to squatters before being completely abandoned, and many windows still showed some temporary decoration, ragged curtains, cardboard shutters, an arrangement of broken dolls or toys on the sill. Other windows were knocked out, the frames tarnished by fire.

The Chinese boys slackened around us as the prison tower came into view. One of them pointed at it, and pushed Carl, as though to say,
If that’s what you came for, go.
We hurried up, out of the noose of the gang, towards the prison. None of us dared look back to question the gift of our release. Anyway, we were hypnotized by the tower.

The surrounding buildings had been razed so that the prison stood alone on a blasted heath of concrete and earth five blocks wide, scattered with broken glass and twisted tendrils of orange steel. Venturing into this huge clearing out of the narrow streets seemed dangerously stupid, as though we were prey coming from the forest to drink at an exposed water hole. We might not have done it without the gang somewhere at our back. As it was, out steps faltered.

The tower was only ten or eleven stories tall then, but in that cleared space it already seemed tremendous. It stood unfenced, nearly a block wide, and consummately dark and malignant, the uneven surfaces absorbing the glaring winter light. We moved towards it across the concrete. I understand now that it was intended that we be able to approach it, that striking fear in young hearts was the point of the tower, but at the time I marveled that there was nothing between us and the wall of criminals, that no guards or dogs or Klaxons screamed a warning to us to move away.

They’d been broken before being hardened. That was the first shock. I’d envisioned some clever fit, a weaving of limbs, as in an Escher print. It wasn’t quite that pretty. Their legs and shoulders had been crushed into the corners of a block, like compacted garbage, and the fit was the simple, inhuman one of right angle flush against right angle. The wall bulged with crumpled limbs, squeezed so tightly together that they resembled a frieze carved in stone, and it was impossible to picture them unfolded, re-stored. Their heads were tucked inside the prison, so the outer wall was made of backs, buttocks, folded swollen legs, feet back against buttocks, and squared shoulders.

My father had been sentenced to the wall when it was already at least eight stories high, I knew. He wasn’t down here, this couldn’t be him we defaced. I didn’t have to think of him, I told myself. This visit had nothing to do with him.

Almost as one, and still in perfect silence, we reached out to touch the prison. It was as hard as rock but slightly warm. Scars, imperfections in the skin, all had been sealed into an impenetrable surface. We knew the bricks couldn’t feel anything, yet it seemed obscene to touch them, to do more than poke once or twice to satisfy our curiosity.

Finally, we required some embarrassment to break the silence. One of the older boys said, “Get your hand off his butt, you faggot.”

We laughed, and jostled one another, as the Chinese gang had jostled us, to show that we didn’t care. Then the boys with spray cans drew them out.

The prison wall was already thick with graffiti from the ground to a spot perhaps six feet up, where it trailed off. There were just a few patches of flesh or tattoo visible between the trails of paint. A few uncanny tags even floated above reach, where the canvas of petrified flesh was clearer. I suppose some ambitious taggers had stood on others’ shoulders, or dragged some kind of makeshift ladder across the wastes.

We weren’t going to manage anything like that. But our paint would be the newest, the outermost layer, at least for a while. One by one we tagged up, offering the wall the largest and most elaborated versions of our glyphs. After my turn I stepped up close to watch the paint set, the juicy electric gleam slowly fading to matte on the minutely knobby surface of hardened flesh.

Then I stepped back. From a distance of ten feet our work was already nearly invisible. I squinted into the bright sky and tried to count the floors, thinking of my father. At that height the bricks were indistinguishable. Not that I’d recognize the shape of my father’s back or buttocks even up close, or undistorted by the compacting. I couldn’t even be sure I’d have recognized his face.

A wind rose. We crossed the plain of concrete, hands in our pockets, into the shelter of the narrow streets, the high ruined offices. We were silent again, our newfound jauntiness expelled with the paint.

They were on us at the same overpass, the moment we came under its shadow. The deferred ambush was delivered now. They knocked us to the ground, displayed knives, took away our paint and money. They took Carl’s watch. Each time we stood up they knocked us down again. When they let us go it was one at a time, sent running down the street, back into the Chinese commercial street alone, a display for the shopkeepers and deliverymen, who this time jeered and snickered.

I think we were grateful to them, ultimately. The humiliation justified our never boasting about the trip to the prison wall, our hardly speaking of it back at school or in the park. At the same time, the beating served as an easy repository for the shame we felt, shame that otherwise would attach to our own acts, at the wall.

In fact, we six never congregated again, as though doing so would bring the moment dangerously close. I only once ever again saw the older dropout, the one whose brother was in the prison. It was during a game of touch football in the park, and he went out of his way to bully me.

Carl and I drifted apart soon after entering separate schools. I expected to know him again later. As it happened I missed my chance.

* * * *

“Stickney,” the guard called, and the man on my right stepped forward.

By the time I entered the prison it was thirty-two stories high. I was nineteen and a fool. I’d finished high school, barely, and I was living at home, telling myself I’d apply to the state college, but not doing it. I’d been up all night drinking with the worst of the high-school crowd when I was invited along as an afterthought to what became my downfall, my chance to be a bystander at my own crime. I drove a stolen car as a getaway in a bungled armored-car robbery, and my distinction was that I drove it into the door of a black-and-white, spilling a lieutenant’s morning coffee and crushing his left forearm. The trial was suffused with a vague air of embarrassment. The judge didn’t mention my father.

“Martell.”

I’d arrived in a group of six, driven in an otherwise empty bus through underground passages to the basement of the prison, and ushered from there to a holding area. None of us were there to be hardened and built into the prison. We were all first-time offenders, meant to live inside and be frightened, warned, onto the path of goodness by the plight of the bricks.

“Pierce.”

We stood together, our bodies tense with fear, our thoughts desperately narrowed. The fecal odor of the prison alone overwhelmed us. The cries that echoed down, reduced to whispers. The anticipation of the faces in the wall. We turned from’ each other in shame of letting it show, and we prayed as they processed us and led us away that we would be assigned different cells, different floors, never have to see one another. We would rather face the sure cruelties of the experienced convicts than have our green terror mirrored.

“Deeds, Minkowitz.”

I was alone. The man at the desk flicked the papers before him, but he wasn’t looking at them. When he said my name it was a question, though by elimination it was the one of which he could have been certain. “Nick Marra?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Put him in the hole,” he said to the guards who remained.

I must have aged ten years by the time they released me from that dark nightmare, though it only lasted a week. But when the door first slammed I actually felt it was a relief that I was hidden away and alone, after preparing or failing to prepare for cellmates, initiations, territorial conflicts. I cowered down at the middle of the floor, holding my knees to my chest, feeling myself pound like one huge heart. I tried closing my eyes but they insisted on staying open, on trying to make out a hint of form in the swirling blackness. Then I heard the voices. “Bad son of a bitch. That’s all.”

“—crazy angles on it, always need to play the crazy angles, that’s what Lucky says—”

“C’mere. Closer. Right here, c’mon.”

“Don’t let him tell you what—”

“Motherfuck.”

“—live like a pig in a house you can’t ever go in without wanting to kill her I didn’t think like that I wasn’t a killer in my own mind—”

“Wanna get laid? Wanna get some?”

“Gotta get out of here, talk to missing persons,
man.
They got the answers.”

“Henry?”

“Don’t listen to him—”

They’d fallen silent for a moment as the guards tossed me into the hole, been stunned into silence perhaps by the rare glimpse of light, but they were never silent again. That was all the bricks were anymore, voices and ears and eyes; the chips that had been jammed into their petrified brains preserved those capacities and nothing more. So they watched and talked, and the ones in the hole just talked. I learned to plug my ears with shreds from my clothing soon enough, but it wasn’t sufficient to block out the murmur. Sleeping through the talk was the first skill to master in the prison built from criminals, and I mastered it alone in the dark.