The Doctor said: ‘Morning, Henry.’
Abbott wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. ‘Good morning, Doctor Klein.’
Abbott’s voice sounded strange even to his own ears. No wonder. Plastication of the vocal chords. He held out his hand and the Doctor shook it. The Doctor’s hand felt small and Abbott was careful to be gentle. No one else ever shook Abbott’s hand. He did not know why. And no one else called the Doctor, ‘Doctor Klein’. It was possible that that accounted for the handshake, but Abbott wasn’t sure. It remained mysterious; and yet Abbott knew that it was of significance.
‘You’re not eating your oatmeal,’ said the Doctor.
The Doctor saw things. He observed more than most – but not everything. Abbott saw some things the Doctor did not. Since vice-versa was also the case that was to be expected. It was something they shared: and so even when the Doctor missed the incredibly obvious Abbott was there to point it out, and the Doctor accepted Abbott’s judgement as, of course, Abbott accepted his. It was mutual, then. And good.
‘You’re right,’ said Abbott. ‘It’s full of powdered glass.’
The Doctor flashed him a look grave with concern. Abbott nodded. The Doctor pushed his own bowl towards him. ‘This one’s okay,’ he said. ‘Take it.’
Abbott hesitated. ‘You’ll be hungry. I can’t.’
‘You’re a big man,’ said the Doctor. ‘You work hard. You need it more than I do.’
Abbott nodded. As usual the Doctor’s logic was irrefutable. Abbott took the bowl of congealed cereal and started to eat. As he ate he scanned the room with his eyes, without moving his head. He considered mentioning the plastic in his face but the Doctor would only worry – that was the kind of man he was – and there were more important things to discuss. Between bites he held his hand in front of his lips and spoke from the side of his mouth.
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Abbott. ‘I have something to tell you.’
The Doctor concentrated on his eggs. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I’ve detected a vibe. An irruption.’ Abbott took a swallow of his oatmeal.
‘An irruption,’ said the Doctor.
Abbott nodded. ‘Someone is going to die.’
The Doctor nodded back without looking at him. ‘You?’ he said.
‘They tried but I was too quick for them,’ replied Abbott. ‘Yesterday they added a plasticating compound to my injection to try to stop me talking. Today, powdered glass.’ He paused while two inmates, Bialmann and Crawford, walked by the table. Abbott risked a look into the Doctor’s eyes. ‘It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Then who’s the target?’
‘I don’t know yet, but I recommend you stay away from Nev Agry and his people.’
‘Sounds like good advice,’ said the Doctor.
Abbott wondered if the Doctor truly understood the risks involved. How could he, without The Word? Abbott resolved to be vigilant on his behalf. The oatmeal was finished. Abbott sipped his coffee. It was cold.
‘I advise’, he said, ‘that you keep to your cell. To be absolutely safe, avoid all contact.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Especially with the coloureds.’
‘I have to go to the infirmary,’ said the Doctor.
Of course. Abbott understood perfectly. They needed him there.
‘And I have an appointment with Warden Hobbes.’
‘Be careful,’ said Abbott. ‘Warden Hobbes is a dangerous man.’
The Doctor stood up and put his hand on Abbott’s shoulder. He squeezed firmly. For a moment Abbott felt the plastic in his face soften.
‘You too,’ said the Doctor.
Abbott looked up at him through the sense of softness now permeating his throat and liver. The Doctor’s eyes were a pale blue, with a core of fierceness at their centre wherein burned the wasting fire.
The Doctor said: ‘If you have anything else to tell me, any worries, I want you to come find me and tell me. Okay, Henry?’
Abbott rolled his jaws. The plastic was hardly noticeable now. ‘I understand.’
The Doctor gave Abbott’s shoulder another squeeze and then was gone. As Abbott watched him disappear he caught sight of Nev Agry sitting at a table with Crawford and Bialmann. Obvious. Incredibly so. Agry normally held court, if he showed in the canteen at all, with his lieutenants – killers like Tony Shockner. Crawford and Bialmann were short timers, embezzlers, nobodies. Just being near Agry took them so close to pissing their pants they could hardly get their plastic spoons to their mouths. And there was Nev Agry, sitting back and smiling like he was just a regular guy.
And smoking with his left hand.
Abbott got up, took his tray to the garbage chute, emptied it, then headed out towards the rear gate sally without appearing to be in a hurry. As he left his tray he saw a guard – Perkins? Abbott couldn’t remember – walk over to Agry’s table and whisper in Agry’s ear. Abbott turned away. He walked faster as he felt Agry’s eyes drilling malevolent tunnels into the back of his head, as if attempting to scan the information concealed in his mind, as if trying to read the lips of The Word itself, shrouded in mystery. Abbott stopped as a sudden piece of knowledge was revealed to him.
Nev Agry normally smoked with his right hand.
And the guard, Perkins, worked on B block, with the coloureds.
Incredibly obvious.
Suddenly Abbott’s vibe was stronger than ever, an overwhelming sense of pure irruption, a deep hum emanating from the nameless chaos over which only The Word held sway.
And Abbott wondered: Will The Doctor Be Safe?
The question repeated itself again. And then again. He reached for his notebook to record it but the emanating hum suddenly became a chorus which filled the air about his head with a chant – a dance, a prayer – of deepest profundity: We Need Him.
We need him.
We need him.
Abbott blundered through a row of men, upsetting their trays, his ringing ears deaf to their oaths, and he ran, ungainly and huge, out of the babbling mess hall, down the stairs and still down, and down again, striving towards the darkness and the damp where he knew The Word would give him sanctuary. Where he knew he would be safe.
For a while.
FOUR
BY THE TIME second lock and count was over a sharpening edge of nervous tension had scraped away the insides of Klein’s viscera. Up there in his castle-keep above the main gates Hobbes had the result of Klein’s parole board review sitting on his desk. Klein checked his watch again: in ninety-four minutes he would get the verdict. His time left in the River might be numbered in hours; but it could just as easily be years. The parole system was a rack on which they kept most every con in the joint – even the two-hundred-and-twenty-year-men and triple lifers – stretched and silently screaming. They gave you ten minutes to kiss their ass in exactly the way they wanted you to. Do it right and you were a little tweety bird fluttering off into the wide blue yonder. Show the wrong attitude, or catch them on a bad day, or at a time when overcrowding wasn’t on the agenda, or when there was a law ’n order election campaign for state governor under way, and they’d throw you back under the grinding wheels for another year or more. At his last year’s review they’d turned Klein down.
He pushed the issue to the back of his mind but it was hard to keep it there. He’d pushed a lot of things to the back of his mind during his imprisonment. As his meeting with Hobbes loomed before him they had started to elbow their way back into his consciousness.
Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Henrietta Noades, for one, the prim, bespectacled bitch whose eyes had gleamed with unmistakable pleasure as the judge had sent him up for five to ten. Credited with bringing in the women voters in time for her boss’s re-election, she’d been promoted on the back of Klein’s conviction. For another there was the smoking rubble of his career. He’d never been any kind of academic hotshot; he’d never sought the stratosphere. Working in the public hospital in Galveston where he was relatively free of m
edical politics and could concentrate his energies on honing his skills and doing his job was all he’d wanted. That and his house with its view of the Gulf and his sailboat. All that was gone now and Klein was long past the futility of mourning its passing. Or so, at least, he told himself.
The fact was that deep inside the ice around his heart was an unlanced abscess of pain: the thought that he would never be allowed to return to the work for which he had sacrificed so much. Klein was a rapist. The law said so and the law had no taste for the ambiguities of human life. Klein was not guilty of the offence for which he had been sentenced. He was guilty of greater, more commonplace crimes – of selfishness and cruelty and stupidity – but not of that one. He had hurt a woman he’d once loved more than life, a woman whose name he no longer allowed into his consciousness. He’d hurt her more deeply than he could have imagined – that is, as deeply as he himself had been hurt, if he’d let himself feel it – and she had punished him savagely. And then she’d punished him again, more savagely still. But a man took whatever fate threw at him and he dealt with it. The way that he did so was the only true measure of himself that he had.
Klein reminded himself from time to time that for the first half of his three-score-and-ten, before he’d lost his way, fate had treated him well. He hadn’t fallen from the womb into some parched and desolate field in the Horn of Africa or into a toilet in some freezing tenement block. Nature had given him a decent brain and a strong body. His mother had raised him to love the written word and his father to lay a hand on no one and yet to take no man’s insult without exacting a due and dispassionate revenge.
No, fate had not cheated him. Though much had been taken, much endured, or at least he hoped so. His father had not lived to see Klein’s fall and Klein was glad. He was glad he had not had to witness the pain it would have caused him. His father would have walked with him arm in arm to the electric chair – innocent or guilty – if it had ever come to that. He would have stood by him, for he’d been forged in more generous, less ambiguous times. But no man could escape his own moment in history. These were the mean times and Klein was part of them.
Five years to ten in the Green River Pen.
Klein reflected that ‘rapist’ wasn’t a word that had much of a ring to it. Armed robber, drug-dealer, even murderer, were somewhat more respectable. In the River, hardly a bastion of feminist man, the word that had been scrawled across his life meant little. Out in the world – well, he would find out when he found out. One thing was for sure: he didn’t intend to whimper around trying to explain or justify or excuse. He would take each day as it came. He was scared of the future, he wasn’t fool enough to deny that, but he would meet it. He did not know what lay beyond the prison gates. He did not know and he did not ask. The future was a black hole and he allowed himself no dreams or hopes for what it might contain. No more castles made of sand. He knew how to live without them. The River had given him that much and that at least could not be taken away.
Klein left his cell and made his way down the spiral staircase of D block for the second time that morning. He passed through the main gate into the atrium and turned past the watchtower and down the corridor of the General Purposes wing towards the main exit door. As he walked he diverted his mind from his own maudlin thoughts by recalling Henry Abbott’s warning at breakfast. He wondered what undercurrents the big man had picked up on.
The River contained a population of unusually paranoid men – convicted criminals – who were trapped against their will in a world where paranoia was the basic currency of existence for inmates and jailers alike. Here even the calmest and most trusting of souls was haunted day and night by suspicion and fear. This was the only rational reaction to the prevailing conditions. Beyond these rational paranoids, of whom Klein was one, were another group: the clinically insane. Henry Abbott was a standout member of the latter and by and large he was avoided and ignored by sane and insane alike. Most everyone was content to write him off as a retard. But Klein knew that while the schizophrenic mind invested innocent phenomena with grossly delusional meanings, such a mind could also be abnormally sensitive to the actual, if unspoken, emotions of the people around it. The old joke about ‘just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you’ had some truth to it. So with his overdeveloped, lopsided awareness – his psychotically tuned antennae – Abbott sometimes sensed real currents that Klein was unaware of.
Nine years before, on a balmy New Year’s evening in the hill country west of Langtry, Henry Abbott had taken a heavy ball-peen hammer and with a single blow each killed all five members of his family – wife, three daughters and mother – as they slept in their beds. He’d then set fire to the house. The state troopers had found him standing in the yard watching it burn whilst singing a hymn that none of the troopers recognised. Up until that time Abbott had been a devoted husband, father and son, noted only for being – very probably – the most gargantuan teacher of high school English ever seen in a state that prided itself on the size of its menfolk. The only explanation Abbott ever offered for his crime was that ‘. . . the fires of Orc, that once did blaze with the smoke of a burning city, have been extinguished with the blood of the daughters of Urizen.’ A number of interpretations of this statement had been offered to the court by expert psychiatric witnesses but none of them were ever authenticated by Abbott himself. At no moment during the trial did any one, least of all the jury, doubt that Abbott had been afflicted by a catastrophic psychosis and had acted without legal responsibility for his actions. Yet they’d brought in a unanimous verdict that he was legally sane and therefore fit to receive the five consecutive life sentences handed down to him by the judge. This was because the jury knew that the psychiatric services offered by the state for the treatment and care of the criminally insane were so primitive and inept that a legally insane Abbott might well have been out on the street within a few years, if indeed he did not escape within hours. Instead of receiving the clinical assessment and treatment he needed, Abbott had been banished to Green River.
Once inside the River Abbott had entered a nightmare more merciless than any his psychotic imagination could ever have constructed. Feared and therefore hated, he was subjected to those special bigotries and punishments that are the usual lot of the mentally ill but amplified – as were all bigotries in the River – by many degrees of magnitude. He was insulted, he was shunned, he was cheated. He was deceived, robbed and exploited. Most of all he was isolated. He was six feet and seven inches tall and could carry an engine block the length of the machine shop without panting. Perhaps, if he hadn’t been so big, or so crazy, he would have been able to create some innocuous niche in which to function and exist. Others did. But Abbott couldn’t. If he wasn’t a target he was a hole in the air. Within the larger glass and steel cage of the penitentiary he was trapped inside his own personal architecture of psychic pain: a cycle of isolation, psychosis, segregation, drugs, oblivion, neglect, more isolation, more neglect and more psychosis. Savagely punished from both within and without, Henry Abbott lived beneath the underdogs.
And yet Klein owed him. During those first weeks in D block Klein had recognised the ability of the prison to turn a man’s personality upside down. He felt the fear and deprivation perverting his thinking, warping his reason. NOT MY FUCKING BUSINESS. In the relative quiet after lights out he would lie listening as the sounds of stifled weeping drifted through the bars. But that wasn’t his business. Sometimes the sounds, shameful and small, were his own. Even then it wasn’t his fucking business. Nor anyone else’s. The penitents of Green River were there to witness and endure extremes of misery without feeling a shred of pity, particularly for themselves. Pity in general was weakness and therefore dangerous and immoral. Self-pity was an evil bordering on perversion. So like the rest of them Klein, who wanted to live and survive and one day to leave, stifled the sounds of his own pain and ignored those of others.
But one night – just seven weeks into Klein’s s
entence – the voice of Henry Abbott had not been stifled.
‘Hello?’
The word had pealed around the stacked tiers of cells, echoing through the nightmares of light and heavy sleepers alike as if a damned and phantom soul were calling from the far side of creation. By the green cell light Klein read his watch at 2.03 a.m. A chill ran through his entrails as the word rang out again.
‘Hello?’
And again.
‘Hello?’
And again.
‘Hello?’
With each repetition the nature of the question changed and became more harrowing, more desperate, as if the whole vocabulary of this wounded creature had been stripped down to that single word. Is there anyone there? What do you want? Tell me. Tell me. Leave me alone. Leave me. Please, leave me. Please, let me die. Please. Let me die.
In Abbott’s cries Klein recognised the vocalised half of the harrowing dialogue – by turns raging, threatening, pleading and cowed – that the psychotic person conducts with the torturer within himself. Klein had heard the half-dialogue before, in the chaos of the emergency room, but never from the same side of the fence. In cellblock D the only attention Abbott provoked was a chorus of death threats and obscenities that blended in with and exaggerated those already raging inside his skull.
‘You’re dead, booby!’
‘I’m gonna cut your fucking dick off.’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
‘I’m warnin’ you, Abbott, you long sackashit.’
‘Go kill yourself.’
‘Yeah, go kill yourfuckenself.’
It was an unpleasant scene. But it wasn’t Klein’s business and he ignored it. Or to be more accurate, he ignored Henry Abbott, and after they tired of their shouts being ignored so did the rest of the inmates.