‘We understand each other then,’ said Hobbes.
He held out his hand and Cletus shook it. Hobbes watched him walk to the door, open it and leave. As the lock clicked shut Hobbes felt a great isolation fall like a shroud and it seemed to him as if the now dark chamber of his office were the universe itself and he its only occupant. He tried to recall what Klein had said this morning. ‘Even the bravest . . .’ Hobbes couldn’t remember the rest. It was frustrating. Instead, a tune of almost unspeakable banality intruded into his isolation and wouldn’t go away.
‘When I was just a little boy,
I asked my mother, What will I be . . .’
Hobbes sat in the centre of the universe and listened to the loathsome song grind round the interior of his skull.
TWENTY
LIKE A TROPICAL wind the ancient violence of men swept in random gusts and sudden squalls throughout the interior of the Green River Penitentiary. It sucked men from their cells and pitilessly exposed them to fire and blade. It revealed without mercy the ugliness, the virulence, the heavy stench of man in his uninhibited purity of being. As it howled up and down the stacked cages of cellblock D Ray Klein lay on his bunk and waited, with all the resolve he could muster, for the less than desirable circumstances in which he found himself to improve.
His cell door was closed but wasn’t locked down. If he’d had the equipment he would have welded the steel shut. Instead he’d tied a tin cup to the bars and placed it on his locker. In the unlikely event he fell asleep and someone slid the door open the cup would fall to the floor and wake him. Paranoia suggested an alternative: the intruder could cut the string first. Klein scratched sleeping off his list. In an attempt to relax he closed his eyes and constructed fantasies of being free: reading the New York Times and drinking fresh orange juice in a diner; going to bed at three a.m. and waking up at ten; driving Devlin along I 90 to New Orleans where she’d fuck him in a cheap hotel where the ceiling fans were too slow to stop them slathering in each other’s sweat. He wondered what Devlin was doing now. Maybe soaking in a tub, or eating goat cheese salad in an air conditioned café. No, she’d be settling down to watch the Lakers game. He wondered if the Knicks would keep them to a six-point spread.
It wasn’t working.
None of the fantasies were powerful enough to divert his mind from the maelstrom of noise and suffering beyond the bars of his cell.
The rioters had devoted their first hours of command to the business of blind destruction. Anything that could be smashed, bent, dismantled or spilled had been thus smashed and spilled. Anything that could be advanced from a state of order into one of chaos had been thus advanced. And as men shat and pissed themselves in fear, the ambient smell became viler and more pervasive than usual. It put Klein in mind of Ludwig von Boltzmann and his theory of entropy. Maybe he should have laid that one on Hobbes: Disorder always increases in a closed system. Hobbes probably knew that already. From Nev Agry’s ghetto blaster on ground tier came a sound to bewilder even Boltzmann: drifting surreally through the bedlam was the genteel sound of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.
The moon in all your splendour,
Know only my heart,
Call back my Rose, My Rose of San Antone.
Lips so sweet and tender,
Like petals falling apart,
Speak once again of my love, my own . . .
As the Playboys crooned in the twilight and the sun started on its way down, the electric lights failed to come on. All power to the blocks had been cut off. It was typical that Agry would be the only man to have a fat supply of Duracells, so he could bombard them with his fucking music. He’d had the same song going on a loop all afternoon. Deep within my heart lies a melody. Shit. It was enough to make Klein get out on the tier and sing ‘Que Sera Sera’ again. Somewhere in the distance, at times even drowning out Bob Wills, the same man had been screaming – in a thin, keening, slavvering shriek – for something over an hour.
Klein discovered that he felt no pity for the screamer. In fact he found himself wishing that the guy would just shut the fuck up and die. The screaming was an indulgence. If the guy was hurt that bad he wouldn’t have been able to keep the noise up for that long. He was a goddamned fake. Someone ought to cut his throat. Or at least stomp him out. Then again maybe he was being gang fucked, in which case maybe the screams were an extravagant expression of pleasure, the freedom of total submission. It had been known. Klein called a halt to the sick drift of his thoughts. His turn might be next. A melancholy light, the last that the day was prepared to donate, filtered through the glass square into the rear of his cell. Soon it would be dark and there was no sign that power would be restored.
While the light held up, masked execution squads roamed the walkways looking for victims and drugs. As D was Agry’s block most of the action was elsewhere. Klein was thankful he wasn’t on A, or on the run in the labyrinth down below. There were old scores to settle. Justice had to be seen to be done. Petty humiliations nursed for years on end now emerged as savage vendettas. Debts small and large were collected in blood and pain. Spurned sexual advances were now made good. Retribution on a biblical scale. And every act of terror was fuelled, stoked, blasted by the prison itself. The years of confinement, the lock and counts, the flaccid cocks, the yearning of visiting-time, the wives who sought divorces and went off to fuck someone else, the hourly rituals of helplessness and degradation, the ammoniac stench of piss, the pious faces of the parole board, the crumbs of pleasure gleaned from stale cookies, from liquor brewed with a sockful of bread and a can of peaches, from a cum-stained picture of a wet-beavered woman, from a furtive blow job purchased from some sorry junkie who needed the cash. And the fear. The fear. The fear of day and the fear of night. The fear of minute to minute and the fear of hour by hour. Day by day. Year after year. The malignancy that consumed the arteries and nerves, the kidneys, the adrenals, the heart. The have-I-taken-the-wrong-seat-in-the-cinema fear. The fear of being alone and the fear of being not-alone. The am-I-too-young-and-pretty fear of having half a dozen ungreased cocks shoved up your ass one after the other in the block latrines or pinned to a bench in the chapel. The fear of waking up to each day’s dawning. The fear of life and the fear of death. The screams that now echoed round the vault sang the battle hymn of fear’s republic. Base, unqualified Fear as it staggered, blinking, naked, big with vengeance, from a thousand bitter hearts and bellowed for its own fair share of itself.
Klein contained his own fear in a hard tight ball up high behind his sternum. He contained it with reason. Superior, Platonic intelligence, rational calculation, ice cold knowledge. These weapons would see him through, as they had seen him through the last three years. If fifty men died in the riot it would be the worst in US prison history. That gave odds of fifty to one in favour of survival. If he stayed in his cell instead of wandering around amongst the crazies the odds were better still. Two days, three days, the cons would lose interest, start to get hungry and hot and bored. The riot would fizzle out into abject surrender as all riots ultimately did. All Klein had to do was stay clear.
The screams continued. Maybe it was a guy got burned in B block, coming out of shock and into intolerable pangs. Klein steeled himself. He would not ask himself what he might do to help. He would not feel pity or compassion. Let them whimper prayers to God. Let them pump themselves with booze and smack. Klein steeled himself. He would not listen to their need. He forced himself to listen instead to the trickling water and the drunken shouts. In his head he sang along to the endless circle of Agry’s goddamned tape.
It was there I found, beside the Alamo,
Enchantment strange as the blue up above . . .
Klein sat up and swung his feet from the bunk as he heard the sound of heavy feet sloshing through the water on the tier. He glanced down at the shaving mirror: a pair of boots came trudging towards his cell. Klein stood up. He pulled the .38 from his pocket. Because he wasn’t too familiar with guns he checked the cylinder agai
n: the blank round still lay under the hammer. Klein held the revolver down by his thigh. A huge figure loomed in the doorway, blocking out what little light was coming from the roof. The man lowered his head so that his long flat face could peer through the bars.
‘Doctor,’ said Henry Abbott.
‘Henry,’ said Klein.
The relief he felt was a shocking measure of his anxiety. He turned slightly to conceal the gun.
‘Come on in.’
Abbott slid the door open. The tin cup clattered to the floor. Abbott paused to look at it.
‘It’s okay,’ said Klein.
As Abbott lumbered into the cell Klein slipped the revolver back into his pocket. Klein nodded towards the bunk.
‘Sit down.’
‘I see you followed my advice,’ said Abbott.
Klein’s memory reeled back across the day trying to remember amongst all the chaos what Abbott had advised. Breakfast was the last time he’d seen Abbott. A long time ago. Klein sat down on a stool opposite the bunk. Yeah. Henry had told him to avoid all contact.
‘Avoid all contact,’ said Klein.
A flicker of concern passed across Abbott’s face. He started to rise. ‘If you want me to, I’ll leave,’ he said.
Klein raised a hand to stop him. ‘I’m glad to have your company.’ There was a deacon-like poise to Abbott that Klein found reassuring. ‘Makes me feel safer,’ he said.
‘Why?’ said Abbott.
For a moment Klein was stuck for an answer. Like a child, Abbott had a habit of springing incredibly concrete, on first impression almost stupid, questions that on reflection proved to be piercing.
‘I guess I mean we can protect each other if there’s trouble.’
Abbott thought about that, then nodded solemnly. ‘I see.’
Abbott’s face was constructed of simple, slab-like elements conceived by his creator on a large scale. There were no wrinkles on his forehead and his mouth was never fully closed. The anti-psychotic medication he was given and which in Klein’s opinion he needed contributed to the overall effect of a flat, unreflecting surface upon which observers could inscribe whatever fantasies they chose. Abbott was as brutal, stupid, dangerous, cute or beast-like as you cared to make him. Henry himself was rarely in a position to prove himself otherwise because he didn’t get the chance: no one ever asked his side of things and, in general, people avoided his fathomless eyes.
Henry had very pure eyes: when you looked into them his eyes were all you got. Because his face was so motionless there were few crinkles, squints or brow movements, no play of muscles to set the eyes in any sort of context. Just grey irises circumscribed with brown; muddy sclera; deep sockets. Klein coughed and looked away at the drips of water falling past his door from the tier above. He was sharing his cell with a psychotic mass murderer seven inches taller and eighty pounds heavier than he was. And yet he did feel safer.
‘This trouble must be harder on you than it is on me,’ said Abbott.
Klein wondered if Abbott had somehow heard about his parole. ‘Why, Henry?’ he said.
‘Because you’re a doctor.’
Abbott’s thoughts were often oblique. He made odd connections between things. Klein said, ‘I don’t understand.’
Abbott inclined his head towards the din outside. ‘There are wounded men out there. I’ve seen them. A doctor has a duty to tend them but you are following my order to avoid contact. So you can’t. I came here to release you from the obligation I placed on you.’
Klein stared at him. The sweat rolling down his flanks felt like lice crawling on his skin.
‘That’s thoughtful of you, Henry,’ said Klein. ‘But the main reason I’m staying here is because I don’t want to get killed.’
Klein paused. Abbott blinked slowly once.
‘Your advice was good. Your vibe was correct. I know there are wounded men out there but I owe them nothing. Do you understand?’
This time Abbott didn’t blink. Neither did he nod. Klein steeled himself.
‘This isn’t my war. These aren’t my people. My knowledge doesn’t oblige me to risk my life. At other times and other places maybe it would, but not now and not here.’
Klein waited. There was a long silence. Abbott’s attention seemed temporarily elsewhere and Klein guessed that he was listening to the hallucinated voice that Abbott called The Word. In previous conversations over a long period Klein had learned that The Word controlled Abbott pretty much the way a parent controls a child. A jealous and unpredictable parent. A high percentage of The Word’s commands and vibes made good sense, and maybe more so in prison, where paranoia was wisdom, than on the outside. The Word told him which crews to avoid, which hacks to say ‘sir’ to, how fast to do his work, when to get back for lock and count, and when and when not to eat his oatmeal.
But if The Word was generally Abbott’s guide and protector it was also, at darker moments, his cruellest persecutor and most implacable foe. It was The Word that had reduced him to the trembling, filth-encrusted animal that Klein had first found squatting in the corner of its cell. It was The Word that had instructed him to wipe out his own family with a ball-peen hammer. Within the cosmology of Abbott’s mind The Word was God and Devil both. No power on earth, and certainly none in the River, could ultimately compete with The Word. When The Word spoke, Abbott could do no other than carry out its command and no bully’s threat, no officer’s club, no warden’s sanction could sway him from his purpose. Thus had Myron Pinkley lost the use of his hand. Abbott – the Abbott that thought of himself as ‘Abbott’, the Abbott that Klein was so fond of, the two hundred and sixty pound, six foot seven inch frame of muscle and bone and feeling – all this was the tool of The Word, to be sacrificed without question if so commanded.
Klein knew that even the most powerful drugs had failed to silence The Word’s voice. They helped suppress the persecutory, self-punishing, contemptuous side of its tongue, the side that periodically scourged Abbott into a state of suicidal self-neglect, but the voice never completely disappeared. Probably, thought Klein, it even spoke to Abbott in his dreams. But if this lonely, withdrawn, expressionless man, this shell that at times seemed almost an automaton, was indeed all that was left of Abbott, who then was The Word? In his friendship with Abbott Klein had become fascinated with The Word. He longed to meet him, to converse with him, but Abbott was capable only of a garbled translation of The Word’s words and then only when he was feeling particularly secure. Klein’s belief was this: that The Word was not the voice of God. The Word was God.
Abbott had once towered over his English students and moved their hearts with the music of poets long dead. Now he could at best string together a simple sentence denuded of metaphor or hidden meaning. It was all gone. He was all gone. Almost. What little of Abbott remained to himself was God’s humble servant and the elaborate hellhole in which Abbott’s body was imprisoned was merely a new Garden of Eden. In Klein’s mind a moment came when you had to put aside the kind of knowledge Devlin had such command of – the genetics and biochemistry and the psychodynamics and emotional expressivity and the dopamine levels and the 5-hydroxy tryptamine receptors – and just stand in the shoes of the madman and take a look for yourself. Maybe that was impossible. But there had been vertiginous moments in Abbott’s company when Klein had come close, when he’d felt the imprint of a total power, when the prison had become the merest backdrop to the primal drama of God – The Word – and man. Not the God of Christ or Abraham or Mohammed but a prereligious God. The God who ruled before make-believe or metaphor or imagination were invented, before choice, before will, before Good and Evil, perhaps even before language. Abbott’s ego, his self, him, was a very small remnant; an eroded stump of ‘I’; a few fragments glued together with fear and maybe – Klein hoped so – the bit of human recognition that Klein gave him. Ruling the empyrean above this wretched figure was The Word, a being, a force, a limitless authority contained entirely within the limitless space of Abbott’s mind and
yet separate from him, from Abbott, alien to him, and utterly and frighteningly so. Abbott’s ego had given up all claim to rule his own vast internal universe and clung instead to a squalid island of consciousness at the edge of an infinity.
So while Abbott endured oatmeal with glass, the foul labour in the sewers, imprisonment, forced medication, and all the other insults and injuries of which his life was composed, The Word enjoyed – The Word was – unimaginable freedom and power. Who knew what force had cleaved the two – God and Man – asunder? Klein, for sure, did not know. But in these quiet moments when he sat alone with Abbott and listened to the soft breathing of The Word who might at any moment order his death, Klein often wondered what would happen if the two were to be joined together again. What would become of the shuffling, retarded giant if he were suddenly filled again with the God that was himself? What fire would blaze in those flat blank eyes? What sound would echo like the crack of doom from within that massive chest?
And again, at such moments, Klein would wonder what had happened to the God within his own self. Klein was appallingly sane. He saw himself sometimes as Abbott’s mirror image. Where Abbott’s self was a broken slave cowering at the feet of a dark God that was himself but didn’t know it, Klein’s God was a thin shadow of a deity, virtually extinguished by the glaring floodlights of knowledge, science, insight and rationality. Free will, choice, understanding, imagination, the ability to calculate consequence and outcome – these were the foemen of God, the chains that confined him to a narrow cell in the bowels of that same infinity over which Abbott’s Word enjoyed total dominion. In this sense Klein knew he was as fragmented as Abbott: where Abbott sifted through the broken pieces of self and came up with a derelict shell of humanity that lived, literally, in the sewer of the sewer of the world, Klein had sifted the fragments of God in a search for some purpose beyond mere survival and had ended up in cellblock D telling his companion: ‘I know there are wounded men out there but I owe them nothing.’