Klein glanced at Devlin and saw a fear in her face. He returned to the candle.
‘It wasn’t physical torture, if that’s what you’re thinking. Too straightforward. Too simple. You can stretch out mental punishment for a lot longer. In the end all we had left were what we called hate fucks, you know what I mean? They’re good while they last. When they’re over you can’t bear the sound of your own breathing.’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘One night we had our last great hate fuck and afterwards I told her I didn’t want to see her any more. I was through. She told me if I walked out on her she’d fuck me up so bad I’d . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I’d heard all that stuff before and didn’t want to hear it again. I got up and left. Next morning the cops arrested me at the hospital and charged me with rape.’
‘Did you rape her?’
‘She said I did. That’s all that it means isn’t it?’
‘No it isn’t. You know it isn’t.’
‘I fucked her as hard as I’d fucked her a hundred times before. I left her with a carpet burn on her back. She came three times. You wanna read the court transcripts it’s all there. She said she’d told me to stop. She didn’t. A bunch of her PC friends testified that I’d bad-mouthed them in restaurants, I had a violent personality, I was a martial arts freak, blah, blah, blah. Most of it was true and at the same time most of it was bullshit. Everything was twisted out of context. The whole thing was just a move up from middleweight to heavy but it was the same stupid game, cutting each other’s noses off to spite our own faces. I made it worse for myself by going to see her to try talk it through before the trial. Of course it turned into an instant replay of the same old tapes, four years of cat-scratching squeezed into two hours. My lawyer nearly wept and he was right. By the time I got to trial the episode had become me threatening and harassing her.’
‘She wouldn’t withdraw the charge?’ said Devlin.
‘How could she?’ said Klein. ‘The ball was rolling. A three-ring circus. Papers, women’s groups, lawyers. And the DA licking his lips at the thought of the votes a conviction would win him. Until my trial that bastard probably thought The Female Eunuchwas a bible story. Suddenly he’s dug up two female PAs, a woman on the bench and appears on the news waving a copy of Backlash.’
Devlin smiled involuntarily, stifled it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, mortified. ‘You just . . .’
‘I know, I know,’ said Klein. ‘It is a big fucking joke. That’s what I thought. The trouble is I was right. My lawyer, who now owns my house, told me not to testify. He said the burden of proof was theirs and if they got me on the stand they’d make me look like Hannibal fucking Lecter. When she testified for the prosecution I knew I’d won. Anyone could see her heart wasn’t in it. Then, in the cross examination, my asshole lawyer virtually raped her for me, tried to make her out to be a slut on the make, which she wasn’t, and left her sobbing into her blouse. By then even I thought I’d done it. They found me guilty by a majority verdict. The judge sent me up for five to ten.’
Klein paused and scrubbed his hands over his face.
‘What was her name?’ asked Devlin.
Without taking his hands from his face Klein said, ‘I don’t care to remember.’ He swallowed the bile in his throat and took his hands down. He kept his face turned towards the wall. ‘If rape means using the act of sex to inflict pain on another then I raped her many times,’ he said. ‘But no more often, and no less, than she raped me.’
‘Sometimes the line between love and hate is very fine,’ said Devlin.
Klein didn’t answer.
‘To hurt each other that badly you must have loved each other very much. At least for a time.’
‘Yeah,’ said Klein. ‘Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned, and all that stuff. We were both guilty.’
He turned and looked at Devlin in the candlelight. Her face was haunted with pity.
‘You didn’t appeal?’ said Devlin. ‘She didn’t change her mind even after you came here?’
Klein smiled and Devlin turned a little paler.
‘Maybe she would’ve done, in time. But the week I was sent up she went one better than me and plugged herself into an insulin drip.’
Devlin flinched.
‘By the time they found her body her brain was as dead as a peeled egg. A week later they switched off the life-support machine.’
There was a silence. Devlin sat on the edge of the bed. She raised her head and opened her mouth.
‘Don’t say anything,’ said Klein. ‘And don’t misunderstand me either. As far as I’m concerned, every day I’ve served I had coming to me. No one’s innocent in the River. One way or another we all wanted to be here.’
Klein sat there against the wall and watched the candle flame, as still and pure as the light in Henry Abbott’s eyes, and for the first time since they’d switched off the machine he felt a grief untarnished by anger and with the grief, peace. It was as if his heart had finally come to rest. And he wondered how Henry was doing and if he too had found his final resting, face down in the Green River waters. And Klein thought of Devlin’s quotation and wondered if by dawn all of them, just and unjust alike, wouldn’t also be cast back into the aimless chaos of matter from which they had come. He looked at the back of Devlin’s head.
‘We that were able to believe ourselves the final end of creation,’ he said.
Devlin laid her head on his lap without speaking. Her fingertips gently brushed the wounds in his ankle. The pain was reassuring. The weight of Devlin’s head against his thighs gave him a hard-on and that was reassuring too. In the end maybe these were the only things you could really count on. And he wondered, if nothing matched the rage of love to hatred turned, then what was the vice versa? Suddenly he could find neither peace nor hatred in him and he wondered where they had gone for without one or the other he felt comfortless and frightened and lost.
Then somehow Devlin did the one thing in the world that could comfort him and if she hadn’t done it he wouldn’t have known what it was, and he wondered how it was that she did know. She reached up under his towel and put her hand on his cock.
Klein stroked her hair, the short, soft bristles on the back of her neck rippling against his fingers. She pulled the towel open and took his cock in her mouth and stroked his balls and Klein trembled at the tenderness of it and he did not come for it was not yet sexual and he swore he would not cry and he did not.
Devlin sat up and pulled her shirt off over her head. Her nipples stuck out through the white cotton of her bra. She pulled her boots off and then her Levis. And as she knelt over him in her white bra and black G string he put his raw, scabbed hands on the ass he would have died for and in an instant it was more sexual than anything he’d ever known. He got up to his knees and kissed her and tasted the tobacco on her tongue. He ran his hand down her belly and into her hair. His finger found her clitoris, like a small marble rolling in oil, and she bit his face and his neck. Klein pushed her over onto her back and pulled the G string aside and licked her. She came quickly, her body arcing in a bow, the muscles on her abdomen shivering with tension. He pushed her down and made her come again, and would have kept on except she was grappling for his cock and told him to fuck her. So he did, his cock sliding in alongside the G string and it was neither a hate fuck nor a one-last-fuck-before-I-die fuck. He pulled one of her bra straps down and sucked her nipple. He didn’t try to delay his orgasm, he just went with it, fucking her with long slow strokes, and when he came he wasn’t aware of how long it had taken and he did not care, he was only aware that he loved her and that all the hate in him had gone. He lay on top of her shuddering, for a moment. Then he smiled, for he even lacked the strength to take his weight on his elbows, like the gentleman he hoped himself to be.
So Klein lay there with his eyes closed, breathing softly. He felt himself drifting off and made himself open his eyes. Devlin’s face was half-turned away from him, chiselled into fabulous planes by
the amber light, and he thought he saw the glistening trail of tears on her cheek. She was intensely beautiful. More beautiful than anything he’d ever known. He wanted to keep on looking forever but his eyelids bore down on him with the gravity of ages. He fought against them but it was beyond him, it was beyond the last vestiges of his strength. Her face slipped from sight. Her nipple was still pressed against his lips. He opened his mouth and mumbled into her breast, so low and slurred he knew she couldn’t have heard him.
‘I know this isn’t very gentlemanly,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to go to sleep.’
And Klein smiled again because he was kind of an asshole and knew it and because he really didn’t care. And then he went to sleep.
THIRTY
HOBBES LAY ON his divan and stared up at the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. In recent months he had taken to spending his nights here, in a small box room adjoining his wood-panelled office. He had not slept for more than an hour at a stretch in weeks and since the lockdown not at all. He had a wife and home to go to but those moments in which he could find a sufficiently compelling reason to do so had become progressively less frequent and then had ceased altogether. If his wife found this disturbing, Hobbes had not been inclined to notice, much less care. These days he sometimes had difficulty recalling her name and the image of her face rarely crossed his mind. He had no photos of her in his suite of rooms. It seemed to him that she had had at least a fair deal and probably the best of it. She had spent the bulk of his life’s earnings on herself and her house; and so to her frequent bleatings on the theme that her life lacked love and fulfilment Hobbes had turned at best a deaf, and at worst a contemptuously unsympathetic, ear. Jane Hobbes – Janet Hobbes? Rebecca? – wouldn’t have recognised love and fulfilment if those very qualities had broken into her bedroom at the dead of night and gang raped her. Hobbes smiled to himself at the thought, and then wondered why at this of all times he was thinking of her at all. Perhaps his mind was clearing itself out in preparation for its exit. For the exit was drawing near and he sensed, if he could not yet see, the dazzling light that burned on the other side.
He had surrendered his machine – and Klein had been right, the panoptic machine was his – to a historic spasm of paroxystic violence. Historic. He, John Campbell Hobbes, had made history. He had surrendered his creation in the hope that the feverish nihilism thus released might be subordinated to an end beyond itself. And it had failed. The panoptic experiment had failed as surely as the love he once had felt for his wife. The evidence was there: in the flames of B block, in the mindless bloodlust unleashed against the unprotected wretches in the hospital. He had given them a chance to demonstrate a higher sensibility and they had spat on it. He had dreamed that they might raise themselves above the parapet and cry ‘We are more than this! We are more than this filth that you have made of us!’
The room around him echoed like a vast, vacant tomb and Hobbes realised that he had spoken aloud. The time for dreams was over and the time for despair was arrived, the oceanic despair against which he had flung himself in this one last unflinching stand. Now he prepared himself to embrace it. Despair was after all the ultimate transcendence of the ego and his ego had been mashed into embers by a cosmos committed to ruin. Despair was hubristic, not humble; a radical unknowing; an abandonment; a lone voyage with no conceivable destination. He was freed at last to travel and yet a single obligation remained – to begin his journey from the only apt embarkation point: to make himself visible at the very centre of the panoptic machine he had made his own.
There was a knock at the door which Hobbes recognised as Cletus’s. He rose from the divan and brushed the creases from his suit, straightened his tie. He opened the door on the Captain’s bulky face. Cletus was dressed in the black SWAT suit that made him look more obese than he was. A wire ran from a transmitter plugged into his left ear to a radio in the front of his jacket.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said Cletus.
Hobbes walked past him without speaking and sat down behind his desk. The desk moved him, had always moved him. It had stood in this room since 1882. Underneath its glass top was an original architectural drawing, in plan, of the penitentiary. Hobbes was stricken as never before by the awesome beauty of its symmetry. He had walked every inch of the prison’s physical reality, he knew every passageway and cell. Yet it was here under the glass on his desk that its perfection lay, in the conception rather than its execution. To Hobbes the drawing embodied the glorious endpoint of the Cartesian project, the attempt to know God and Man through the application of pure reason. Those times were now over and the project was shipwrecked on the rocks of irrationality. Next to the drawing was a fragment of those very rocks: a wrinkled sheet of cheap, blue-lined paper torn from a small notebook. Hobbes had found it wrapped in plastic and wedged between the granite blocks of the wall in a cell in segregation. Scrawled upon the paper in green ink by a laborious hand was a number: 1057. Below the number were these words:
Every morn and every night,
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
Hobbes did not know who had written the verse down, nor if the verse was original or a quotation. It held for him a power and a fascination, all the greater now as he waited through this darkest hour for the light of his final dawn. Endless night. Sweet delight. He had known both sides of the coin and at last he knew that his destiny lay with the one rather than the other. At least he had not lain down with mediocrity. He slid the plate of glass to one side and pulled out the wrinkled paper, folded it along its original creases and slipped it into the breast pocket of his jacket. Cletus coughed. Hobbes had quite forgotten his presence. He looked up.
‘Sit down, Captain.’
‘I’ll stand, sir, if I may.’
‘As you like.’
‘I just been speaking to the Bureau of Corrections in Austin.’ Cletus rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. ‘I’ve been instructed to assume temporary command of the penitentiary, sir.’
This was a humiliation Hobbes had not expected. Now that it was here he was mildly astonished by its irrelevance.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘The Governor was kind of surprised you hadn’t seen fit to inform him of this situation we got. Frankly, sir, so was I. He feels that you are not well enough to continue your duties at this particular time.’
‘The Governor.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You have been in contact with him.’
Cletus stiffened his jaw. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘And on what evidence does the Governor base this assessment of my health?’
‘On the evidence and concerns I voiced in my report to him, sir.’
Hobbes nodded silently.
‘The Governor has dispatched a National Guard unit to back us up. Your replacement will be flown in by helicopter by morning.’
Again Hobbes nodded. Again he felt no emotion at the news. Another hour was all he needed and the help of Cletus and his men he needed not at all. It had been ordained before the Captain had knocked on his door. This merely added a modicum of urgency. There was no reason not to conduct himself with dignity.
‘Have I time to collect my possessions together?’
‘Of course, sir.’ Cletus shuffled. ‘I’m sorry it had to be this way.’
Hobbes walked around the desk. ‘I have always found you loyal and utterly dependable, Captain. It’s been an honour to serve with you.’
He held out his hand and Cletus shook it. His face was puffy and red with emotion.
‘Thank you, sir.’
A muffled sound came from Cletus’s earpiece and he pressed a thick index finger against it and squinted. He clicked his radio on and bent his head towards it.
‘That’s not possible,’ he said.
The earpiece hummed again. Cletus looked at Hobbes.
‘The lights have come on in the cellblocks,’ said Cletus.
Hobbes strode across the room to the north window, Cletus close on his heels. The ridged glass vaults of the four cell-blocks radiated a green-tinged glow into the night. At the centre of the glow the great dome capping the hub of the building was dark. Hobbes immediately understood.
‘I didn’t order this,’ said Cletus, bewildered.
‘Dennis Terry,’ said Hobbes.
Cletus nodded. ‘Shit, that old bastard must’ve got to the emergency generator. Prob’ly was him blew the main power lines this afternoon too. Excuse me, sir. I’d better get going.’
But Hobbes wasn’t listening. He stood staring at the dark glass dome. It was more than he had any right to expect. The dome: the supreme cockpit from which to launch his voyage. And yet it lacked a nimbus, the incandescence necessary for it to fulfil its function. Hobbes turned. Cletus had gone. He was alone. And exwarden Hobbes realised he no longer had any time to lose.
THIRTY-ONE
DEVLIN SAT UP in the corner of the bed, with the picture of Coley and his family just next to her on the wall, and she let go of all that she’d been holding in. She let it go quietly because she didn’t want to wake Klein and because she didn’t want to have to apologise or explain or stifle her tears yet again. She wasn’t even sure for what it was that she cried, but she cried for a long time. She was glad of the weight of Klein’s sleeping arm wrapped round her waist, and of the flickering candles. She was glad to be here, in this awful place, where abstraction finally failed her and she could surrender to raw emotion. After a while there were no more tears to come and she wiped her face on the sheet and lit one of Wilson’s Camels. Her mind wandered and it wandered a long way. When she tried to recall where it had been she found she couldn’t remember. Eventually there was a tapping on the door and she jumped. It took her a second to realise that if it had been Hector Grauerholz he wouldn’t have bothered to knock.