Time of the Locust (9 page)

There and Not There

W
hen Sephiri felt brave and adventurous, when he did not long for the blackness and the ordered space of the coat closet by the front door, he ventured to his mother's closet. It was like a small room with a door that he could close. He enjoyed the two sides. One side had the swish and swirl and scratch and fluff of his mother's clothes, with the smells of coconut oil and cinnamon. The other side was completely bare, with a single wooden pole running across its width. He loved the dichotomy of the space. One side was filled to the brim with fabrics and belts and stockings and hats. The other side was filled with emptiness.

One day, he was exploring the shoe boxes on the floor while his mother was in the bathroom, and he saw something glossy stuck under the iron grate covering the air duct on the nothing side of the floor, ruining the emptiness. He lifted the grate, with some difficulty because it was old and rusted around the edges, and pulled out a photograph.

There was a man in the picture, wearing a big white shirt and black pants. His brown skin glowed in the sunny day and the green trees behind him. He held his arm around a woman standing next to him. She wore a patterned sundress the color of lemons and ­melons and candy. She was slender, and big peacock feathers dangled from each earlobe. Sephiri had a picture book with something in it that looked like the feathers and thought that this woman might have been someone in the book. But he looked again at the woman in the picture, and something called to him about her face, and then he realized that the woman looked like his mother. Her body was much smaller, though. At first, he thought the photograph must be a magic trick and wondered how she could be so differently shaped. But when he stared carefully into the woman's face, one of the few things in the Land of Air that he was sure of for as a long as he could remember, he knew that the woman was his mother.

But who was the man standing next to her? Like many things Sephiri could remember with great precision after looking just once, faces were like maps when they didn't move. An expressionless face was easier to see. He could remember the geography of eyes and eyebrows and nose and frame of mouth. The man in the picture looked something like that person his mother called Manden. He was the one who came to sit on their dangerous sofa, the same man who came to the Autism Center with his mother sometimes. His was the deep voice that stooped down to him, that talked at him. A bass sound that quivered the fine hairs in his ears.

But the man in the photograph was not the bass-voiced man, the man with the funny walk. And when Sephiri stared longer, he thought that his face looked something like his own. Still, the hair above his upper lip and on his chin got in the way, so that Sephiri had to turn the photograph over and back again to see if the magic would give him a clearer view. Sephiri looked at the man's face staring back at him through the surface of the picture and felt something: absence. The opposite of his mother. He knew her by the alarm in her room, which sounded at six o'clock every morning; the cake she baked every thirty days (that was how he knew it was a new month); the scrambled eggs for breakfast (he did not like eggs but liked to stare at the yellowness of them while he ate cereal). She soaped him in the bathtub through his rigidity or tantrums; she held him when he screamed; she smelled of coconut oil and cinnamon. Always. That was her regularity. That was the order and symmetry of her being.

But he liked the photograph. The left and right and known and unknown of it. The big man in black and white clothes on one side and the little color-laden woman on the other. And he looked at the kaleidoscope of the closet on one side and the white-walled emptiness on the other and thought that perhaps the empty side was this man's side. That the filled side, the side of lemons and melons and candy and peacock feathers, was there. That the empty-poled, barren side, the picture man's side, was not there. Something on the blank side had once been filled with something and then was not. Sephiri figured that this man had been on this side of the closet, and then he was not. He (the absence) was now the regularity of not being there. Sephiri was satisfied with the duality of this. He lifted the grate and dropped the photograph into the air duct. It slid down into the worm of black and disappeared. The empty side was not like the other constants and timetables that went with the order he knew of his mother—the nightly ritual of baths and pajamas, the steady emerald green of the mouthwash, the sanctity of the medicine cabinet, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the
tick tock tick tock
of the clock in the hallway, the repetition of the steps.

Sephiri looked again at the hole beneath the iron grate where he had dropped the picture. It was gone now, where it was supposed to be. He hid the picture where it wouldn't ruin the emptiness, in the order and safety of the black. Sephiri wondered if Air people knew about the dark and if they hid in it too.

P
ART
II

Black Plains

T
he Rocky Mountains walled clear up to the sky, grim and mean, daring anything but the wind to cross them. Without mercy, they looked down from crinkled, frosty faces at the vast, desolate plain that lay at their feet, naked and helpless. And in the lonesome valley, the Black Plains Correctional Institute stared back at the Rockies with equal malice, cold to the core and just as heartless. The men who peopled Black Plains, those entombed behind its walls, those trapped at its core, those who guarded the concrete, the men who walked its watchtower ledges, perimeters, and corridors, all were covered over with the frost and had long been frozen in the deep of all things lost. The prison, endless in its intricacy of halls that led to other halls, rooms and spaces within other rooms and spaces, turns that led to other turns, shifted and reshaped itself according to the mind of the dweller, whether prisoner or guard.

Warden Andrew Stotsky walked the halls of Black Plains like a seasoned soldier, the angry wind howling outside in the dying twilight. He was no longer a young man, his grayish face etched in deep wrinkles, but he still moved with a steady gait. From above, fluorescent light showered down in chalky beams, and tiny flecks of paint coated the walls like chips of ice. He turned the corner of the corridor, the sound of his polished black loafers echoing through the interior. In all that solitude, the hush only increased the volume of memories. Often, against his will, each pace dislodged the past; he walked one hallway to another, one turn after another, and each step in the thick quiet only awakened Stotsky's thoughts as ceaseless rattling loosens the hinge screws of a lock.

At such times, he would sometimes think of his dead mother's face, when he was nineteen years old and had stood over her in that pitiful funeral parlor. It was filled only with the neatness of dark, empty chairs, the smell of carpet cleaner, and the perfume of dying hyacinths and lilies. His father had long been in the ground. His mother had no connection with her own family, and they had lived in a town of others too engrossed in the squalor of their own lives to notice that one of them had departed. He stood before the stillness of her body, nestled in the stiff white satin of the coffin. Staring down at her pale skin, Stotsky had been appalled by rouge too red hastily applied to her thin lips and the perfect circles of pink powder brushed onto each sunken cheek. It had all come together like a thick, clownish smattering of oil paint on a canvas. Viewing her face in this way—not so dissimilar to what it was when she was living, except that then the colors were made by his father's fist—lit a match to something within Stotsky.

He did not believe in second chances, as his mother did with his father. He remembered watching her cry at the kitchen table. She would sob into her hands, nursing her face. His father loomed somewhere else in that quiet house, a silence so much deeper than any silence in the halls of Black Plains. Somewhere in the darkness of the rooms his eyes flashed cobalt with anger. Stotsky remembered peeling the limp fingers from his mother's swollen eye, cupping the blood dripping from her nose with his hand. As she always did when he touched her, she would wince and wave him away. “Stop,” she would say. “Don't ax me nothin' about it.” She would later declare, as she did a thousand times, that his father hadn't meant it, that she was giving him a second chance. At this, Stotsky would look at his mother slumped in the chair and run outside. On and on he would run, until he came to the outskirts of an abandoned factory. He would press his face against the cold fence that rimmed miles of barbed wire, taste the acrid air and the dusty remnants blowing in the wind, and vow never to go back.

Stotsky's legs shook when he stood before the coffin. He stared at his mother's face, a portrait of ruin, a face that became the face of all women. And he could only stand, helpless, in the murderous ­outrage of that moment, with the cheap wall clock ticking. Then, from inside the wax-encrusted ear of the body crawled a bug. Stotsky recognized it as a potato bug, those gray ball-like creatures always in the stacks of yellowed newspapers his mother kept by the kitchen door and the damp food sacks in the pantry. As a boy, he toyed with them on the floor. He would watch them scurry, as he had scurried through the rooms of the house, as his mother had scurried from the kitchen to the bedroom and back again. And he would pick one up and marvel at how it could curl into itself, how it hardened into its own suit of armor. He admired the exoskeleton, a thing so small yet capable of repelling so much. At the coffin, Stotksy watched the potato bug crawl across the side of his mother's face, over the bridge of her nose, and settle on the pink of her other powdered cheek. There the thing held court; there it held dominion over his mother's wasted body.

And as Stotsky looked at the insect, oblivious to his mother's death as it stood atop the zenith of her cheek in triumph, he felt that smallness again, the raw vulnerability that haunted him during his father's rages, when he was an enormous mound of moving flesh and shadow over his mother, over the house, over all of them. In those moments cringing under his bed or in the closet, when he could scarcely stand to be in his own skin, he hated his father and loved him too. And he hated his mother and loved her too. And he could not bring himself to allow the last testament to this small woman and her small life ever having existed to be defaced by something that crawled from the wax of her ear. And he lifted the potato bug from his mother's cheek and held it tightly between his thumb and index finger. And when he could no longer feel it moving, when he was sure it had given up its last, he put it in his pocket. Years later, he would realize that had been the moment, not when he felt his father's fist or when he listened to the ominous sounds of flesh on flesh in the rooms of his boyhood house. It had been that squeezing moment, when he held that ball of smallness, when he stifled that defiance in the vise of his fingers, that the hunger had been born.

Warden Stotsky walked down one wing and turned the corner to another. Thick columns of stone flanked the Black Plains corridors.
The Roman Empire
, he thought, passing through a tall iron gate. There had always been other empires, other dominions. He thought of his old Japanese comrade, Hanamitsu, who had been an orderly in a death camp in Manchuria. They'd been exchanging letters ever since the Japanese corporal's days of serving time in a Russian prison. Hanamitsu had plea-bargained at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials and was granted leniency because of his low rank in the Japanese Imperial Forces and his detailed disclosure of the nature of the camp experiments. They had a strange admiration for each other, Stotsky and Hanamitsu, which continued long after the old Japanese soldier settled into an obscure thatched hut in the blue mountains of Hakuba. In their long letters over the years, they discussed life and death and the various ways both needed to be controlled. In spite of all the things they agreed on, Stotsky always felt that Hanamitsu was slightly off the mark when it came to certain matters. For instance, Hanamitsu did not believe that human will could ever be turned into something else.

Coming to the end of the dim prison corridor, Stotsky supposed that the hunger to know the secret of what his father certainly must have known (what it took to break the will of another) only grew after he buried his mother, locked up the house, and enlisted in the Army. He turned a corner that led to another corner, thinking of his old days in Vietnam, the lush treachery of the jungle, and the place he and his men called the Kennel. He thought of the seven women he and his squad had captured and locked into empty pig stalls. “She wouldn't bark,” he said out loud to the dark, thinking of the seventh woman. But why? He could still feel the oppressive humidity and smell the stench. After all these years, his curiosity about why had never waned. They had the women there, nooses around their necks, cowering on all fours, knee-deep in manure, as they sodomized them for nineteen days. “Bark,” they had said to them, yanking their heads by their ponytails.

By the tenth day, the women barked and howled on command. By the twelfth day, the women barked on their own. Except for one, the seventh. No matter what they did to her, no matter how far they went with her, she would not bark. Stotsky brought her extra food and water and asked her questions in broken Vietnamese to test her faculties. She answered him, as clear as rainwater.

If she had been insane, Stotsky felt that he would have been satisfied. He would have gone on raping her with the understanding that she was silent not because she did not want to bark but because she couldn't. On the fifteenth day, he loosened the seventh woman's noose and smeared iodine on the oozing infection ringing her neck. “Bark, bitch, and I'll let you go,” he said as he looked into her red, furious eyes. He loosened the rope a bit more and kicked her stall door open. But she did not, would not, bark.

On the nineteenth day, the section of the jungle where Stotsky and the others had been camped was attacked. The women howled through the gunfire until someone freed them like horses in a barn, and they ran about amid the burning foliage, crying and barking. The seventh woman was running, too, until she saw a knife lying next to a dead Vietnamese soldier and picked it up. She ran up behind one of the American soldiers and put its tip to his jugular, just as Stotsky was approaching. And he could see by the look on her face that she was impenetrable even at that moment. She was unreachable, even as she slashed the soldier's throat and Stotsky shot her.

Stotsky arrived at the end of that corridor and turned a corner that led to another corner. The question concerned him still. Would she ever have barked, had it been the twenty-third day or the ­fortieth? He had no way to be sure. Looking at her face in those seconds, he still wanted to know before putting her down. Later, he wondered why he felt no remorse for needing to know this, ­although he had no intention of sparing her life. But it all ran ­together in his head long before he left the jungle. He dreamed about that woman still, and she glared back at him through the foliage of time with the same resoluteness, with the same citadel in her eyes.

What he felt about all of that was something like the disgust at having been the victim of a practical joke. Could a man's will ever truly be broken by another, snapped like a twig and reattached in a different manner? Reactions could be had through various measures, through persuasions. This much he knew. But after the blood dried, after injuries healed and compliance was obtained, he wondered if soul and will could then be repositioned, morphed into something of another's making.

“Warden.” A sullen voice plowed through the stillness of the hallway.

Stotsky turned around to find Secured Housing guard Jimmy Eckert, always severe in demeanor, with his crooked mouth and his stringy blond hair plastered to his forehead. He was Stotsky's most dedicated guard. It seemed as if he was on duty no matter the day, no matter the hour. The way he crept around had always annoyed Stotsky, and he would have long ago dismissed him except that he valued his special skills in the Secured Housing wing, also known as solitary confinement. He was useful, and Stotsky had always been mildly amused by the zeal with which he seemed to perform his duties. Besides, Eckert rarely spoke. Stotsky immediately assumed that he was approaching him with a matter of importance.

“There was some trouble,” said Eckert, looking gravely at the warden. It was at times like this, when he was standing in front of Warden Andrew Stotsky, that his disdain for Stotsky's smugness and arrogance was acute. Eckert was never troubled in this way when he was down below, where he ruled the rodents, where time itself was of his own making. It gave him much pleasure, however, to bring news of a certain rodent under his watch, since he had caught a glimpse of the warden's discomfort in his presence all those years ago. “There was a problem with one particular rodent,” he said.

“What is it? Which one?” Stotsky snapped.

“There was refusal to comply,” said Eckert, enjoying the slow disclosure. “He wouldn't eat. He's on lockdown now.”

“Well?” Stotsky asked. “Is it all under control?”

Eckert nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“And? Which one was it?” asked Stotsky.

“Zero-two-seven-six-three,” said Eckert. He looked at the warden evenly, showing neither respect nor scorn.

Warden Stotsky was momentarily silent. Besides that look that had been in the eyes of 02763 on his first day at Black Plains, there had been other things Jimmy Eckert had said about him since. How he was not like the others in the solitary confinement wing. How he seemed to survive on something other than food and water. “A feeling I have,” the guard would say. Eckert claimed to have learned to sense the flavor of an inmate, what he would and wouldn't do, what it would take to crack him, turn him into something else. He claimed that there was a wildness within this prisoner, not like an animal in the woods but like a bird that might take flight. It was all ridiculous to Stotsky. How would Eckert know? How would a man whose entire past and present had become the prison know anything about what made someone different? It was impossible that this strange troll he depended on to stomach the fatal intimacy of the solitary confinement wing knew about anything other than being buried alive.

“Are you sure it's under control?” Stotsky asked.

Eckert spread his hands out as if affirming an important truth. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Stotsky looked from Eckert to the shadows in the corridor. Horus Thompson. Inmate number 02763. Twenty-five years to life for the stalking and cold-blooded murder of a police officer. He thought of Horus Thompson's induction day, how he glared at him even after the beating he had taken. “Welcome, rodent,” he had said to him. Normally, Stotsky anticipated the arrival of a new one like the opening to the first chapter of a book. Stotsky looked forward to what he liked to call the “interview.” It was the gateway experience of a new inmate, when he was made to feel the fullness of Black Plains for the very first time. This event still brought him satisfaction. It filled him with the sense that it was not important what a rodent expressed at the beginning. What was important was what he came to realize at the end. What he himself and all that came to Black Plains, willingly or involuntarily, came to realize: there was no escape.