Chapter 29: The scar
During the first couple of days at Milan, Jared doesn’t rise from his bed unless and until absolutely necessary. He isn’t into daydreaming and if he could have observed his nights he wasn’t even into dreaming. It’s as if his brainwaves have been altered and he’s restrained at the border of alpha and beta waves. But he’s not mellow; it’s more like he’s in suspension, hovering.
Today is Thursday, his fourth fucking-A day here, and he’s just downright irritable. They haven’t moved him out of A&O and he wants to find a permanent spot. Somewhere he can be without the remotest anticipation of being moved. He craves the feeling of being settled in. He believes he’s here at Milan for the long haul, to run out the rest of his time. Lock the motherfucking cage and let me be!
After the late afternoon Count, Jared questions the hack. “When am I getting out of here?”
He gets a negative shrug. For the past several days, new guys have come in and others have been released into the population, but he remains. No one talks with him. That’s okay. Jared doesn’t seek conversation. No mail comes. No visits. He just wanders to chow, over to the stupid Education Department for some dumb movie: “Opportunities in the Waste Disposal Industry.” Another time, to an automotive repair class. It’s all just babysitting. But just wait, life’s never dull in the Joint, if one is patient—“has the time.”
It isn’t Jared’s first night disturbed by a fight. Haggling over prices, leading to slaps and raucous cursing, is common when guys are pimped in from the gay wing. Tonight, however, it’s a killing call.
“You fucking touch my fucking face and I’ll fucking cut your goddam motherfucking face off!” is his wake-up. He blinks rapidly and clears the dimming fog of night. Then he sees two guys bunched together on a bed at the end of the dorm. The other dozen or so residents are also awake and listening, like good neighbors.
“C’mon, Sweet Pea, I’m not gonna hurt you. You need a man like me—don’t fight it.”
What is ominous is the sudden silence. Continual lover’s chatter, escalating in intensity, obscenity and length not only ensures a nonviolent resolution but bestows that touch of humor that makes such outbreaks bearable, but none comes. Then, “You fucking shithead, you cut me!”
The two outlines separate, one backing up against the wall, the other dropping to the side of the bed, as if kneeling for night prayers.
“The queer motherfucker’s cut me!”
No one moves. Jared’s impulse is to reach up and change the channel.
“God, I’m bleeding,” is so simply and childishly said that all know there’s real trouble. The praying outline caves over and a telltale crack!—as an uncushioned skull hits the floor— detonates bedlam. Guys jump up, bang and push their beds, throw pillows and mattresses. For some it’s the perfect excuse to bust a few faces. “Motherfucking fags! Kill them all!” Several gays bolt and run. Others just hang around gawking and not moving. But it’s all macho posturing. Nothing happens. No fights, just standard Inside bullshit. In fact, no one approaches the fallen con until Jared jumps into the fray. He ministerially reacts to the presence of hurt as he hears the fallen con yell once, twice, three times in ever-lessening voice, “Call the guards! I’m bleeding to death!” No one responds but him.
He hurries over and kneels next to the injured guy. He starts shouting commands and his words have effect. “Get the fucking hack, asshole! Jump!”
Everything whirls electric. Hacks! Just about everyone moves, most scuttering like mice on the lam from a hungry cat. A few stay but move back a safe distance. All the screaming and yelling, the rush of guys emptying out into the TV room, all this more-than-usual commotion from the Meat Market finally draws the attention of the night hacks.
What isn’t noticed is the other outline. It’s been frozen, totally freaked out in that motionlessness that is absolute fear, existential dread and shock. It sees Jared as just another outline. It makes no distinctions and so it slices again with the razor’s edge, enticing a draw of blood so effortlessly that it spurts forward like a chorus line, all at once along its length, in cadence, in one motion.
More than the cut, Jared feels the gush of air from the guy’s strike. He cries out and recoils but not quickly enough. Red beads sprout from mid-forehead down his temple and drop to the jawbone below his left ear.
Jared tastes blood but doesn’t know it’s his own. He’s flashing on Dikbar. He doesn’t erupt into the mindless rage evoked by Bruiser. He’s amazingly steady. Onlookers can’t figure out why he’s not screaming in pain or striking out against someone. Then Quinn surfaces once again, threatening. Striking back, Jared grabs the guy’s arm, spins him around, cranks the arm upward towards the back of his head, almost not stopping at the pop! crack! as he busts it, almost yanks it off.
Jared doesn’t see the disbelief in the eyes of the other cons, hollow-eyed witnesses to the banality of cruelty. Horror and terror mingle but they’re also curiously entertained and satisfied. “Man! You really fucked him, man!”
Jared isn’t listening, not hearing anyone or anything. He’s struck a vein of blood lust and is ravenously sucking like a vampire. He scoops up the attacker’s razor and raises the guy’s right arm. As if angels sent by a merciful God, two hacks rush in just then and jump on him, sparing the guy’s life and Jared’s untimely visit to Death Row. His slash would have savaged the con’s face for he was about to deliver a righteous blow of majestic power, one energized by a source within Jared that no longer worries about the forms of force nor their masks of violence or nonviolence. It’s the presence of that Jared who long ago, deep within a mythic dream, testified that he too is a child of Cain. Who rose up and slew Quinn. It is Jared, devotee and high priest of the gods of cruelty.
The two guards restrain Jared with a choke hold and a tackle. In wrestling him to the ground they aggravate the cut on his face so that the blood loss appears greater than it is and the cut more savage. Cuffed and restrained, they haul him and the other wounded inmates off to the infirmary.
Rumors fly that night about the new guy whose face got sliced and peeled. Since neither Sean or Matt is there, and since the few resident draft resisters don’t know Jared, wild rumors speedily fly about the big guy who’s on hold in the infirmary. Word’s out that he’s the brains behind a dope ring. Then, that he’s a deep-cover snitch, in here under Protective Custody. But none of the dopers or Mafioso types can place him.
Lacking the slightest anchor in fact, the rumors multiply and intensify. They range from the fantastic to the slightly mythic. It’s told that the big guy threw off the two hacks, hoisted a bed above his head, and barely missed crushing a hack’s skull, and that he saved the wounded lover using his torn tee-shirt as a tourniquet. Such is the juicy stuff of jailhouse confabulations. Actually, these stories work to shield him. No one wants to mess with him. But for how long?
For the time being, Jared will be in the infirmary. Others already have him tagged for the morgue. These tell that Jared was the intended target, and that the story about the two fags is just a lie to cover up his role as an FBI snitch.
Jared never hears any of this.
The con who wishes that he himself was dead is the cutter. The guy he first sliced lost so much blood that he went into shock and soon after into a coma. The slicer never learns about Jared because he has no memory of attacking him. Jared had been just like the guys he’s cut in too many dreams. These, the representations of fears and abuses stemming from the cradle. It took awhile for him to even feel his shattered arm, a deformity he’ll carry till his final self-execution. Until then he’s fated to spend his days in Springfield, the Federal Loony Bin lockup. There his soulful whimpers will be muted by a gaggle of experimental drugs. The fact of his murdering—of the seducer’s coma death—soon becomes a forgotten part of his memory.
“Jackshit, you’re lucky Ace Fegan is on your case, my man, best mother-humping medic in all of Ve-et-Nam!”
Such self-adve
rtising and ceaseless chatter envelop him as this tattooed vanilla flash is fast to the task on his face.
“Look at those stitches, fella—Mother of Pearl!” He laughs and laughs. Jared flinches and squeals and slaps the steel gurney.
“Yessir, ain’t no one gonna look at you but says, Ain’t he a man!”
The formerly hidden pains surface; the protective shield raised by shock is weakening.
“Goddamn, man, got any painkillers, my fucking face feels like matches are being lit all over it!”
Ace Fegan, still in his green-issue nighties and personal slippers—“real rabbit fur, feel it”—shuffles over to the drug cabinet. He slips in the key attached to a gold chain around his neck and clink! he’s rustling several bottles.
“Red ones, whites and blues . . . Big Man, youse be feeling no pain tonight!”
Everything Ace says ends with an exclamation mark. He’s high on life without a pill, snort or a skin pop, though he is Milan’s main supplier of feel-good. He’s always having a good time groovin’ wherever he is. If fate had dealt him a different geography of birth and presence of parents, he would have made a fortune in the motivational business.
The drugs hit. Jared staggers back to his cell, he’s out like a light before he flops onto the mattress.
“Awake!”
Jared doesn’t awake with a start or a thump to his heart from fright or startle in reaction to his new surroundings. Somewhere in his mind he has reprogrammed himself to expect waking to the unfamiliar. Slowly, cautiously he opens his eyes, lets them focus, ready to accept the strange.
The pain doesn’t coordinate with the eyeballs, so it isn’t until he starts to get up to crap that the dizziness is crowned with stabs and stings. He reaches up to his forehead, traces his stitches and the identity of his new self, “Scarface.”
Mercifully, thanks to Ace Fegan, Jared’s is the slinkiest of scars, a gossamer stripe that elicits more memory than immediate conversation. Only those who inspect him while asleep are confronted with the weird effect it projects. When at rest, as his facial muscles relax, the stripe thickens and forms a ditch from which a fleshy worm of whiteness emerges. It’s as if his face is buckling and about to erupt, tearing away his humanoid mien and revealing the face of an alien creature.
Jared eyes his traveling box. His ark of the hibakusha. It’s been delivered along with him, which means that he’ll be in this Seg for a stretch. Actually, it feels good, this privacy. No FBI stoolies around. Time to read, catch up. Be left alone. He really needs some time alone. Funny, he thinks, all I have is time. This is a recurrent Inside amusement, and Jared plumbs its depth: All the time you want is no time you have.
Jared knows it isn’t time that he needs. It’s more like space or air—as if his soul is crying, “Give me some air!” Although he’s physically sound he’s slowly choking on the psychic and spiritual levels. A progressive and unstoppable vomit is rising up his throat, not just through his esophagus and associated apparatus, but through his soul, his spirit. He just isn’t sure whether he’s going to spew out a sickly soup and then feel good or eject innards essential to his being.
Before all this turns him to gut-clutching, the service panel on the door slides to a metallic thunk and the words “You got a visitor” spray in at him. Aw shit! Fucking-A, what now?” You’ve got a visitor.
Visitor? What’s Witson up to, man? Questions that guide him through the several guard posts, don’t pester him too much as he notices no one’s asking him to strip and bend over, but which are questions whose answer totally stuns him—Aaren?!