When I mentioned Bianca to Causey, he said, “See, I told ya.”
“Yeah, you told me. So what’s up with them?”
“The plumes? There’s references to them in the archives, but they’re vague.”
I asked him to elaborate, and he said all he knew was that the criteria by which the plumes were judged worthy of Diamond Bar was different from that applied to the rest of the population. The process by which they entered the prison, too, was different—they referred to it as the Mystery, and there were suggestions in the archival material that it involved a magical transformation. None of the plumes would discuss the matter other than obliquely. This seemed suggestive of the pathological myths developed by prison queens to justify their femininity, but I refused to let it taint my thoughts concerning Bianca. Our lives had intertwined so effortlessly, I began to look upon her as my companion. I recognized that if my plans for escape matured I would have to leave her, but rather than using this as an excuse to hold back, I sought to know her more deeply. Every day brought to light some new feature of her personality. She had a quiet wit that she employed with such subtlety, I sometimes did not realize until after the fact that she had been teasing me; and she possessed a stubborn streak that, in combination with her gift for logic, made her a formidable opponent in any argument. She was especially fervent in her defense of the proposition that Diamond Bar manifested the principle from which the form of the human world had been struck, emergent now, she liked to claim, for a mysterious yet ultimately beneficent reason.
In the midst of one such argument, she became frustrated and said, “It’s not that you’re a non-conformist, it’s like you’re practicing non-conformity to annoy everyone. You’re being childish!”
“Am not!” I said.
“I’m serious! It’s like with your attitude toward Ernst.” A book of Max Ernst prints, one of many art books she had checked out of the library, was resting on the coffee table. She gave it an angry tap. “Of all the books I bring home, this is the one you like best. You leaf through it all the time. But when I tell you I think he’s great, you…”
“He’s a fucking poster artist.”
“Then why look at his work every single night?”
“He’s easy on the eyes. That doesn’t mean he’s worth a shit. It just means his stuff pacifies you.”
She gave her head a rueful shake.
“We’re not talking about Max Ernst, anyway,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter what we talk about. Any subject it’s the same. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand why you’re here. In prison. You say the reason you started doing crime was due to your problems with authority, but I don’t see that in you. It’s there, I guess, but it doesn’t seem that significant. I can’t imagine you did crime simply because you wanted to spit in the face of authority.”
“It wasn’t anything deep, okay? It’s not like I had an abusive childhood or my father ran off with his secretary. None of that shit. I’m a fuck-up. Crime was my way of fucking up.”
“There must be something else! What appealed to you about it?”
“The thing I liked best,” I said after giving the question a spin, “was sitting around a house I broke into at three in the morning, thinking how stupid the owners were for letting a mutt like me mess with their lives.”
“And here you are, in a truly strange house, thinking we’re all stupid.”
The topic was making me uncomfortable. “We’re always analyzing my problems. Let’s talk about you for a change. Why don’t you confide your big secrets so we can run ’em around the track a few times?”
A wounded expression came to her face. “The reason I haven’t told you about my life is because I don’t think you’re ready to handle it.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
She leaned back against the cushions and folded her arms, stared at the coffee table. “That’s not it… altogether.”
“So you don’t trust me and there’s more. Great.” I made a show of petulance, only partly acting it.
“I can’t tell you some things.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I can’t!” Her anger didn’t seem a show, but it faded quickly. “You crossed the river to come here. We have to cross our own river. It’s different from yours.”
“The Mystery.”
She looked surprised, and I told her what I had learned from Causey.
“He’s right,” she said. “I won’t talk about it. I can’t.”
“Why? It’s like a vow or something?”
“Or something.” She relaxed her stiff posture. “The rest of it… I’m ashamed. When I look back, I can’t believe I was so disreputable. Be patient, all right? Please?”
“You, too,” I said.
“I am patient. I just enjoy arguing too much.”
I put my hand beneath her chin, trying to jolly her. “If you want, we can argue some more.”
“I want to win,” she said, smiling despite herself.
“Everything’s like you say. Diamond Bar’s heaven on fucking earth. The board’s…”
“I don’t want you to give in!” She pushed me onto my back and lay atop me. “I want to break you down and smash your flimsy defenses!”
Her face, poised above me, bright-eyed and soft, lips parted, seemed oddly predatory, like that of a hungry dove. “What were we arguing about?” I asked.
“Everything,” she said, and kissed me. “You, me, life. Max Ernst.”
One day while drinking a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, taking a break from work, I entered into a casual conversation with a dour red-headed twig of a man named Phillip Stringer, an ex-arsonist who had recently moved from the eighth tier into the old wing. He mentioned that he had seen me with Bianca a few nights previously. “She’s a reg’lar wild woman!” he said. “You touch her titties, you better hold on, ’cause the next thing it’s like you busting out of chute number three on Mustang Sally!”
Though giving and enthusiastic in sex, Bianca’s disposition toward the act impressed me as being on the demure side of “reg’lar wild woman.” Nevertheless, I withheld comment.
“She was too wild for me,” Stringer went on. “It’s not like I don’t enjoy screwing chicks with dicks. Truth is, I got a thing for ’em. But when they got a bigger dick’n I got… guess I felt a tad intimidated.”
“Hell are you talking about?” I asked.
He gazed at me in bewilderment. “The plume I saw you with. Bianca.”
“You’re fucked up, man! She doesn’t have a dick.”
“You think that, you never seen a dick. Thing’s damn near wide around as a Coke can!”
“You got the wrong girl,” I told him, growing irritated.
Stringer glowered at me. “I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know who the hell I’m screwing.”