They walked down to a local playground and took turns filming each other hanging upside-down from the monkey bars, camera inverted so that everything looked right-side-up. Aside from unruly clothes, hair standing on end, and increasingly reddening faces, the illusion was successful. One of them spat. The spit went straight up. Objects flew toward the “sky.” And every time something flew up instead of down, CJ and his friends telegraphed their surprise with exaggerated expressions.
I grabbed a breakfast bar and left Patty laughing on the couch, tears streaming down her face.
Lily:
My ex was a bitch cunt whore from outer space. She was a bitch because of the cruel way she abused my feelings. She was a cunt because she made me feel like everything was my fault which it wasn’t. She was a whore because she was running around out there while her man was in here. She was from outer space because no fucking human being would abandon another human being like she did in his greatest moment of need. Anyway if you can’t handle that Miss Teacher tough shit for me huh? I am just sick and tired of everyone in this world not keeping up their end of the bargain and me taking the rap all the time.
Raven
The upside-down CJ video brought with it a whole new period of crying. One would think he had died the week before. Patty took several personal days off work, watched the tapes in rotation. I tried to comfort her as best I could. My efforts had no effect. Somehow we had gone backward in time. My mission became more urgent than ever. I do not have a great imagination. Lily was stirred to life using what pieces I had. From Minerva’s story, to my mother’s meatloaf, to a con-man episode of
Wanted: America
. We are all bric-a-brac, odds and ends, I have said this somewhere, but Lily would have to contain much more of the personal ingredient if she was going to successfully draw Raven into her clutches. I would have to don the heart’s armor.
Mr. Raven,
Thank you for sharing your feelings. I suppose I should begin to expect a spirited tone from you now and then, particularly on the subject of your ex. She must have really hurt you. My ex really hurt me too. It took me a long time to get over it. I don’t say “get over him” because I got over him more quickly than I got over the psychological wounds he left behind. Basically, we were together for two years, about to get engaged, and things were going great. We went out to a lot of romantic dinners and stuff, and he kept encouraging me to move in with him. But, thank God, I didn’t.
He was not who he appeared to be.
I found out one day when I decided to surprise him at work. I knew he worked in a large downtown law firm, so I went to their headquarters and asked for him. They couldn’t find him in the directory, so they sent me to someone else who worked for the firm. That person told me that my ex hadn’t worked there for three years, and that he wasn’t a lawyer at all, but a legal proofreader. It took some digging, but I found out more, and I discovered eventually that he had a number of aliases, and that he was wanted for scamming several young women out of their money.
He had targeted me. I had never told him about my money (I have some savings, thanks to my father’s inventions) and yet he knew that I was a good target. I’m not sure what he would have done with my money,
but apparently he’d been doing this a long time. I found out that he’d been looking through my files and I confronted him about it. The next day he disappeared completely. Without a trace. No phone call, no note. And nothing since.
The police said I was lucky—he didn’t get the chance to rip me off. I say I was ripped off plenty—in the heart region. I don’t know how he was able to simulate his love for me. It is so baffling I can’t help but think he really did love me, even though I know he was really scamming me. It was horrible.
Maybe that’s why I decided to write to you in the first place. You’re not going anywhere. I will send more pictures when you write me a decent, polite letter.
Yours truly,
Lily
Dear Miss Hazelton
I got to thinking about my ex because you had asked about her in the letter before and I got so pissed off and I felt like I was writing to her instead of you and I’m real sorry.
Your story about your ex is sad but I won’t pretend I haven’t heard it before. Lots of men roam this country looking to prey on young women of means such as yourself and some of them end up living at my current
address. Give me the name of your ex and I will be happy to take care of him if I ever see him anywhere. You are a nice girl I know that already it is obvious and anyone who does that to a nice girl deserves to pay.
It makes me think of your students and their sense of fairness. What happens to that when we grow up? I’ll tell you. The system tries to make everything fair for everyone supposedly. (Tell that to the blacks.) You do something bad you go to jail you learn your lesson. That’s the fairy tale. Nobody in here is learning about fairness. Everything that happens to you in here reminds you that the world is unfair. Who should be surprised that people don’t play by the rules when they get out? I’ve got a lot of ideas about life. I’m not just some criminal. But I meant to talk about your kids. What if you could sic your kids on your ex? I bet a large group of kids could tear apart an adult man easy. That would be fair.
No religious books.
I keep picturing my arm around your waist. I remember being on the outside putting my arm around my girl’s waist and not thinking a thing about it. Now I would give up my right ear.
Send me another picture. Nothing naked—they don’t allow us porn here and it will get confiscated and end up in some guard’s collection.
Yours too
HJR
“Neil, I can hear you breathing.”
“Huh? I’m eating.”
“I can hear you breathing all the way over here in my cubicle. Would you please stop?”
“I can’t stop breathing.”
“Can you stop eating?”
Neil appeared behind me. I could see his reflection in my computer monitor. I did not turn around.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
“ ‘Are you writing a letter?’ ” He did a pirouette.
I shut off my monitor.
“You know,” he said, “like the graphical paperclip that comes out to help you?”
Now I turned to look at him.
“Why are you bothering me?” I asked.
“Why are you in such a bad mood?”
Despite his being annoying, Neil was one of the few people I could talk to about my personal life. It was a consistent complaint of Patty’s that I failed to cultivate and retain new friends. I was of the opinion that my old friends were plenty, despite their being dispersed across state and country. I could not see the point of starting up a bunch of new friendships. Patty was better at it, anyway, and not only in drumming up new prospects but in judging the respective character of said prospects.
Back when I tried to start new friendships, I would usually pick someone not to Patty’s liking, she would warn me about them, I would ignore her warning, and the friendship would go up in flames within a short period, Patty saying “I told you so” without ever uttering those exact words. So when I needed to talk to someone, I talked to no one, or to Neil.
“Patty’s having a stressful week, and it’s overflowing onto me, I think.”
“She still dealing with her brother?”
“She’s hit a bad stretch again.”
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s rough. We’ve had a pretty crappy week ourselves. Geraldine hit an opossum with her car the other night, and the kids have been crying about it ever since. It’s amazing how something like that can affect people.”
“Dirty little animals,” I said, “and stupid—running into the street like that.”
Dear Henry,
Your arm is around my waist. I can’t believe I just wrote that. But I did, so I’m going to let it stand. That’s
not even first base, is it? I hope I’m not being forward. I look at your letters and think, no, of course I’m not, and then I go through my day and doubt creeps in until I am with your letters again. Still, I’m not exactly sure where we stand, and I’m not sure I want to know—maybe that’s part of the excitement?
You’re right about the system, I think, and its lack of fairness. If the system was fair, my ex would be caught and locked up. The heart is not fair either, I think, because in spite of everything he planned on doing to me, I would still feel bad for him if he ended up in prison—I can’t erase that last bit of sympathy for him. I kept waiting for him to show up and explain himself. But hearts and systems aside, we all get punished somehow, don’t you think? I don’t mean in “the afterlife”—whatever that means. Here on earth our punishment seeks us out eventually.
I’ve decided that each of my letters should contain some news of the world out here, so that you can share part of my daily life with me. Will you try to do the same? I am curious about what you do with your days and nights.
Greta’s condition turned out to be worse than the doctors thought, and she required some more surgery, which turned out to be major. The district has hired a proper substitute, a fellow named Clancy something-or-other who wants all of the kids to call him Mr. Clancy and asks the same of me. He is young and incompetent and so I am the teacher de facto. The only
thing endearing about him is the fact that he wears tweed jackets with elbow patches, like an old-fashioned professor. And I suppose he is quite smart, but at this level street smarts are more important than book smarts, and he’s awfully stiff, and the kids do impressions of him behind his back. He usually ends up sitting behind my old desk grading papers and twirling his moustache—though not in a movie-villain kind of way, more like an absent-minded professor. I’m not sure, but I think “Mr. Clancy” might be developing something of a crush on me. I do not intend to encourage him.
I will send you a picture with my next letter. In the meanwhile, here’s a book for you to enjoy (and employ?):
The Greatest Love Poems of All Time
.
Yours,
Lily
PS I saw the saddest sight this morning. I went on an early walk, to get the blood flowing. Just down my street, in the middle of the road, was an opossum someone had hit with their car. From a certain angle, he looked like he was sleeping peacefully in the road. He had the sweetest little face. But when you walked around him you could see that his skin was broken and that his innards had spilled onto the asphalt. I just wanted to cry. I still want to cry. I told someone at work about him and they dismissed me, saying that opossums were ugly and stupid. I can’t help but get torn up
about all the little animals, Henry. They’re all dying, all the time. I don’t mean to be morbid, but the world is not a fair place. I am just thankful that I have you, and that you are not going anywhere.
Henry—
Did you get my last letter? The book? I haven’t heard from you in a while. I hope I wasn’t too forward. Here is a picture to remind you to write.
Lily
Dear Lily
The picture is hot. The reason I didn’t write was because I was in the hole and they don’t let us write in there. I ended up in the hole soon after I got your first letter so there was no time to write back before I got locked up for fighting with another inmate this shithead named Stewart who was trying to put his hands on your picture. The hole is a crap place to be especially for eight days. It would have only been four but I told them the truth when they asked and said I would have killed him if given another chance. So I got four more days for telling the truth. You can see what kind of values count in here.
I’m in a counseling program because it’s a good idea if you want to get out. The more you bang your skull against the walls the longer they keep you in here. Mainly I tell them what they want to hear but after being in the hole eight days I was wiped out and I told the counselor about you. She said it was good for me to share my feelings with someone. She said not to get my hopes up too high. Remember what happened with my ex. If I wasn’t so good at controlling myself I would have ended up in the hole for another month right there for squeezing her neck. But I did a countdown and cooldown.
Those eight days were tough. I was slipping in and out of dreams by the end. Here was one: I was punching Stewart over and over. Everyone was around me cheering and the more times I punched him in the face the stranger he started to look. I punched. His face looked younger. I punched. He had glasses on. I punched. He sprouted a moustache. I punched. He fell to the ground wearing a jacket with elbow patches. Do you recognize “Mr. Clancy”? The mind is a funny thing especially in the hole.
Yours
Henry
I should mention here that I have made a painstaking effort to ensure that every one of these letters is accurate to the word. Thanks to both the intensity of the communication between Lily and Raven, and to the sparseness of my current surroundings, I have been able to transcribe these letters entirely from memory. This is because I had to “become” Lily when I wrote, and even more so when I read. In the unlikely event that I have memory trouble, all I have to do is shift my mind over one mental notch, as it were, and everything comes back clearly.
Dear Henry,
Sounds like it was a difficult time for both of us. I was in a bit of a “hole” myself, as Greta’s condition turned for the worse. She had been having minor digestive problems at first, and they got really bad. Up till then, she
thought she was just like anyone else. Turns out she was bleeding internally, from ulcers or something, and they had to operate on her. Well, once the doctors got in there, they saw she had colon cancer, which people tend to think of as a man’s disease for some reason. They took her colon out, and now she’s going to have to wear a bag for the rest of her life, which is horrifying enough, but what’s worse is that the fight is not over. She’s going through a course of chemo and radiation treatments. It’s awful. The kids (with my encouragement) made her a giant Get Well card. I went to see her at the hospital the other day. She looked physically weak, but emotionally strong. Pale and puffy but smiling, and with those eyes that could always shut down students who were horsing around. The spirit was still there. When she saw the card, though, she just wept and wept. There is nothing more horrible than watching a good, innocent person like Greta endure such senseless suffering.
The secondary upshot of this is that I haven’t been able to get rid of Mr. Clancy just yet. He’s developed a rapport with some of the kids now, and it turns out he’s got quite a sense of humor. (Very, very dry.) He’s been on-and-off touchy-feely since Greta went into chemo. He doesn’t seem to know how to act around me. I feel like he wants to be sympathetic but doesn’t know how. Or he’s playing hard to get. Don’t you wish that people, instead of being people, could just broadcast their intentions all the time, through a sign on their foreheads? Life would be a lot simpler then, and probably more honest.
I drove down to the beach after school the other day, to collect my thoughts. It was one of those blue-sky days when the clouds are all bunched up over the ocean, as if waiting to come to shore after the sun goes down. The breeze was surprisingly chilly—I always forget how cold the beach can be—but I took my shoes off and walked in the sand for a while. How I wish I could share with you the feeling of freedom I experienced! There is nothing like a walk on the beach to recharge your spirits. I wonder if I could describe it to you well enough someday that you might feel you were actually there? I know we haven’t been writing each other for too long, but I must express how happy I am to have someone to share my feelings with. Sometimes I feel cooped up inside my own head. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have any release valve at all.
Write back soon!
Yours,
Lily
Lily
I got some time to look at the poetry book you sent and I have enjoyed it. At first the poems seemed like they were full of strange language. I’m not stupid but I don’t know a lot of old words. I spent some time going back and forth to the library here (yes there is one but
the books are not good) to look at the dictionary. After a while I got the hang of it. I think it was more me getting in the way than the poems being hard. These poets had some serious feelings. Some of the poems are funny like when a guy is trying to convince his girl to go to bed with him. Some of them are too show-off. There’s a few supposedly written from prison but I think they’re bullshitting. My favorite ones are the ones that make me feel like the poem is mirroring my thoughts if that makes any sense at all.
For example I read “A Dream Within A Dream” because the title reminded me of being in the hole and the poet (Edgar Allan Poe) was someone I have heard of before. Well it turns out the poem is about how I’m feeling right now. So maybe I’ll stop writing and let Mr. Poe do the talking:
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Sincerely
Henry
PS I was wondering what kinds of things your father invented.
Dear Henry,
Well, I am flattered that you’ve sent me a poem already. You must have noticed that the poem starts with a kiss! Are you trying to woo me? It’s funny, every time I write something like that, I feel good, sort of liberated, then afraid—I think it’s because I can’t see your reaction right away—I usually feel relieved only after I
receive your letters. Anyway, good to hear you’re delving into the poems.
My father invented a variety of interesting things. He was a chemist. He developed some new kinds of plastic, when he was still fairly young, and received patents for them. The licensing fees for them still feed into the estate. I did not grow up with him, being raised by my aunt and uncle mainly, but this was a matter of necessity rather than neglect. I think he hoped to make it all up to me by leaving behind a fortune. Basically, he wasn’t around much when I was growing up, and by the time he became rich, I’d gotten used to life without him. The funny thing is, I would much rather have had him around back then than have this small fortune in the bank now. Money or no money, I would still be doing the same thing. The kids are my passion.
Which brings me to the subject I’ve been avoiding for a whole page now. Mr. Clancy has announced to me, in his stiff way, that after Greta returns (it should be a matter of weeks if all goes well), he would like to ask me out for dinner. He said he wouldn’t think of doing so while we are still colleagues, but wanted to let me know that I had piqued his interest, as he put it. Now that puts me in a dilemma. Because he is a sweet man, and he seems to enjoy many of the same things I do, such as the children, and reading, and I don’t feel quite as repulsed by him as I did initially. But I cannot
pretend like you and I have not been engaged in some old-fashioned courting ourselves. Or haven’t we?
Please, please know that I will always be honest with you. The last thing I want to do is lead anyone on.
I know he’s out here and you’re in there, and that you’ve had to deal with that as a factor in the past—or at least you’ve implied as much—in dealing with your ex. You must understand, though, that it does not make a difference to me. After all, my ex was out here and he ended up being no good. I would much rather have a fulfilling relationship with an incarcerated man than a bad relationship with a man on the outside.
This letter seems awfully garbled now that I reread it. Let me put it to you as clearly as I can: If I had a sign on my forehead, it would say: “Should I tell Mr. Clancy to go away?”
(I have an answer in mind, but I’d like to hear it from you.)
Sincerely,
Lily
Dear Lily Hazelton,
I am writing to you on behalf of my cellmate Henry Joe Raven. He is in disciplinary hold at this time, and will not be able to write for a few days. He asked me to
pass on this message to you: IF YOU WANT ANY MORE LETTERS FROM ME TELL CLANCY TO GET LOST.
Thank you,
Moses Lundy