The Evening Star (12 page)

Tommy did like working on his code late at night, when
the prison was asleep. Teddy, who owned more than a hundred dictionaries and grammars, had provided Tommy with Xeroxes of a good many alphabets and twenty or thirty grammars from which to form a basis for his code.

Actually, Tommy had no real interest in devising a super-sophisticated code that would require hundreds of years to decipher. Once, when he was about twelve, their father, who was an English professor, dragged all his kids to England and made them go to all the boring literary shrines that he himself had always wanted to see. The one thing that interested Tommy was at the Bodleian library. It was the diary of Samuel Pepys, written in a weird shorthand. Part of the diary just happened to be on exhibit the day they were there. Tommy had never heard of Samuel Pepys, but when he got home and tried to read the actual diary he couldn’t get too interested. The only really interesting thing about Mr. Pepys was that he had chosen to make up his shorthand. From the very moment that he had seen the fragment of the diary in a glass case at the Bodleian, Tommy had had the urge to develop some form of secret writing. In high school, when he still liked to read, he had ripped through quite a few books on codes and cryptology. He read about the Brontës and their secret script, and about the great codemasters and codebreakers of World War II, some of whom, he had to admit, were supersmart. Obviously you had to have a brain to do that kind of stuff.

But then, about the time he starved himself the first time, and had to go through the ridiculous force-feeding routine, he turned off reading. It was too much his dad’s kind of thing; for years his dad had always pressured him to read this book or that:
Nostromo,
for example. His dad seemed to think life would shape up and be all hunky-dory if he would just read
Nostromo,
so one weekend Tommy did read it. Then he took a paper cutter, cut the book into a million shreds, and sent it to his dad in a shoebox. No note, just shredded Conrad. After that, his dad never mentioned reading again; in fact, his dad never mentioned much of anything again—not to Tommy. He was too pissed by having this great classic turned into
confetti. This was about the time Tommy had his second bout of force-feeding, after which he gave up on starvation. If society wasn’t even going to let him have control of his own digestive tract, then the time had come to pursue more aggressive ways to hit back at it.

After he shot Julie and got sent to prison he refused to read any books except those written by people who were actually in jail. Even with that limitation he was still left with a lot of books. Jane and Teddy drew up a list and got the books for him. It was their dream, he knew, that he would use his brain to write stuff as good as Dostoevsky or Cervantes or Defoe or Genet or whoever, but Tommy didn’t plan to. He just wanted to use the code to sketch out his beliefs about murder and rebellion, and he didn’t even plan to explain the code to Teddy and Jane. He felt that true rebellion had to be undertaken absolutely alone; the minute you started sharing your plans or recruiting allies you just started society all over again. He meant to keep his plans for rebellion entirely in his own head, because his own head was all he could trust. After all, even his guts had complied with the system; they had processed the mush shoved down him when he was hospitalized.

Working a little bit every night on his code excited him. It was
his
work, and not a soul except himself knew what it meant. The prison shrinks, who kept grinding the gears of their little brains trying to think of activities that might get him motivated, hadn’t the faintest idea that he had his own work and did it with exact discipline every night.

Of course his cellmate Joey, a Mexican kid who had killed his brother and his best friend, both in one wild fit, occasionally woke up and noticed him scribbling in his notebook, but Joey had no curiosity about anything except sex and automobiles and had asked him about the notebooks only once. Joey was just twenty; he usually woke up long enough to masturbate before drifting back off to sleep to the music of Mexican rock, which he listened to night and day through his earphones.

Why Joey needed to masturbate so much, Tommy didn’t
know, unless he was just a maniacally oversexed twenty-year-old. Joey’s nickname on the cell block was Cunta—he had acquired it because he was so easy. He was the little whore of the block, available for very little—a joint, a cassette, a can of hair spray—to anybody who wanted him, even scummy old murderers or child rapists who had been in for twenty or thirty years, men who had done every act, taken every drug, had every disease, and probably still had a few diseases, old and new.

Tommy rather liked Joey—in many ways he was an ideal cellmate—and attempted once or twice to warn him about AIDS and other dangers, but Joey paid no attention. He continued to fuck everybody. He was young, cute, and careless; he liked his music and he liked fucking. Some nights he cried like a baby because he missed his mother. Joey had gotten only fifteen years and probably wouldn’t serve more than four or five. Crowded as the prisons were, they weren’t going to keep a young Mexican too long just for eliminating other Mexicans who might just soon have become part of the prison population themselves. In fact, the prison personnel treated Joey very well; they took the attitude that he had sort of saved them money and freed up beds by killing his brother and his best friend.

Also, Tommy knew, Joey whored with the prison personnel just as happily as he whored with the inmates. Joey basically fucked his way through his prison term. Tommy, on the other hand, had been celibate since the day he threw Julie out. Joey though he must be sick or something—sometimes it bothered him a little that Tommy had never shown the slightest interest in coming on to him—but Joey had sense enough to leave well enough alone. Tommy was a guy you didn’t press, whether you were his cellmate or not. He was a little like an alien or something—a little spooky in the eyes. It was okay with Joey if Tommy wasn’t interested; plenty of other people were.

Their cell was on the fourth tier. When Tommy worked he could look out across the large open space in the center of the building. Some of the personnel referred to the prison as
the Huntsville Hyatt; being on the fourth tier and having the space to look across was a little like being in one of those Hyatt hotels that had a high lobby.

At night, looking into the space gave Tommy a certain sense of peace. He could always jump into the space someday, and that would be that. Of course, he’d have to be sure to do a proper dive and land on his head. An Indian had done that once—a chief called Satanta. An old chain-smoking guard named Mack Mead, who had worked at the prison all his life, told Tommy about it.

Mack Mead collected prison lore and was eager to tell it to Tommy. Not too many prisoners were interested in prison lore. When Mack detected that Tommy had more curiosity than the ordinary murderer, he became loquacious and told Tommy more than he really wanted to hear. He even got special permission and took Tommy one day to the place in the old prison where Satanta had made his fatal jump.

“It don’t look too high,” Mack admitted, squinting upward. “But old Satanta was smart. He dove perfect. He hit right on his head and died instantly.”

Tommy filed that piece of information away. The solution to the system was a perfect dive. Sometimes he played cards with Mack in order to pry out of him whatever he could remember about other prison suicides. It didn’t take much prying. Mack loved to talk about notorious convicts who had done horrible things to themselves or to other convicts. One man had become befuddled by prison evangelists to such an extent that he cut off his own penis because he believed it had caused him to sin too much. But most of the prison suicides Mack told Tommy about were just ordinary suicides: hangings, throat cuttings, shootings—the same kinds of suicides that people resorted to whether inside or out. None of them were precise or political in the way Satanta’s had been.

Tommy looked at the space in the center of the prison often, at intervals between working on his code. He wanted to acquaint himself with the space—to let it become familiar and comfortable. He behaved very well in prison, mainly because he didn’t want to get moved. He wanted to stay on
the fourth tier with the space two steps from his cell. The space was a resource he didn’t want to risk losing. He needed the space more than he needed anything or anyone else, and that was because he was working around to the conclusion that there was only one pure form of rebellion. Once, bored to tears in his father’s house in Riverside, California, he had picked up a book by Camus and ended up reading most of it. It was called
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death,
and it interested him enough that he bought and read two or three other books by Camus. It seemed to him that they were all suicide books. At the time he had just come out of the hospital after his second attempt at starvation; the Camus books disturbed him because they made him realize that he probably hadn’t wanted to die. If he had been ready to die, why had he chosen such a sloppy method, when so many definite methods were available? His conclusion was that he
hadn’t
wanted to die—he just wanted to make sure that the system had had to go to some trouble to keep him alive. To make matters worse, all this took place at an expensive white-bread hospital in Austin, a perfect embodiment of everything he wanted to attack.

Now that some time had passed, Tommy saw his starvation attempts as things to be ashamed of. Of course he had known, from the very fact that he was in a hospital, that he wouldn’t be allowed to die. If he had really respected himself then, he would never have let them get him in a hospital in the first place.

He worked on his code a while, fiddling with some Turkish words. Perhaps his code would never be finished, but the discipline of working on it was important, anyway. Now and then, in little respites, he stared at the space in front of his cell—the space that had become his freedom.

He heard a rustling above him—Joey was awake and was fumbling for some of the cookies Aurora and Rosie had brought that morning. Tommy had immediately given the cookies to Joey—he always immediately gave away the things his grandmother brought him. He was honest about it, too. He told her he didn’t want anything from her and that he
would immediately give away whatever she brought; still, month after month, she brought him cookies or books or cassettes of classical music or something. Maybe she went home and imagined him eating the cookies or reading the books or listening to the music. She was a stubborn old woman. No matter how many times he rejected her offerings, she kept trying.

“Man, your granny makes good brownies,” Joey said, from above him. “Tell her to make chocolate chip next time.”

“You tell her,” Tommy said.

“Man, I can’t tell her, she’s not my granny,” Joe said, munching. “They ain’t gonna let her visit
me.”

Tommy said nothing.

“Want a cookie?” Joey asked. “They’re real good brownies.”

“You eat them,” Tommy said.

10

On his good nights the General dreamed of golf. On his bad nights he usually dreamed of abandonment—in those dreams Aurora was usually the person who abandoned him, and she usually did it in airports, in countries where he didn’t speak the language. Of course, there were a great many countries where he didn’t speak the language—almost all the countries fell into that category. Often Aurora seemed to abandon him in Lisbon; she
had
once abandoned him in Lisbon, after a terrible fight, and the memory of his depression in the hot little Lisbon airport infected his dreams like a virus.

This time he had a good night, though—he had just hit a perfect tee shot down the fairway when he woke up. He had seemed to be golfing with Bing Crosby, whom he actually had golfed with once, during the war—he would have liked to ask Bing a few questions, but before he was able to get any questions out he woke up, only to discover that Aurora was sitting up in bed, staring at the Yellow Pages.

“I was golfing with Bing Crosby,” the General remarked. “Did you ever meet him?”

“Certainly not—why would you suppose I’d want to?” Aurora replied, in a tone that suggested that she might not have had an especially good night herself—she rarely did after visits to the prison.

“Well, Bing was a celebrity once,” the General said. “I believe he liked to hunt quail. I was once invited to hunt quail with him in Georgia, but the hunt didn’t come off.”

“Hector, I haven’t been forced to think about Bing Crosby in years,” Aurora said. “Why are you inflicting this on me when I’m trying to concentrate?”

“You still look cute in the mornings,” the General said, noting that her bosom, at least, had not suffered as the result of the bad night.

“I know you think that’s a compliment, but as it happens cute is not a word I care to have applied to me just at this moment—or ever,” Aurora replied. “Once we’re psychoanalyzed I hope all this will change.”

The General had forgotten that Aurora wanted them to be psychoanalyzed. He was not quite clear as to what was involved, but he knew it was expensive and that you lay on a couch and talked about your parents’ sex lives, or your own sex life or something. It didn’t sound too bad—it might be a good idea to try it just to show Aurora that he was trying.

“I guess it will be easier than shock treatment,” he said. “I don’t think I’m ready for shock treatment.”

“I’ve found the name of a therapist named Bruckner,” Aurora said. “That sounds Viennese to me.”

“Vienna is in Austria,” the General reminded her unnecessarily. He took off the one glove she had allowed him to retain.

“I hope this Doctor Bruckner can do psychoanalysis,” Aurora said. “There aren’t many therapists in the phone book who sound Viennese to me.”

“Personally, I don’t see what’s the hurry,” the General said. “I never knew much about my parents’ sex life anyway.”

“Who said anything about your parents’ sex life?” Aurora asked, looking up from the phone book. In the morning light
the General looked a good deal like a mummy, but he spoke in his customary grating tones.