I had in mind to seek out Berbick or someone else whom Causey had befriended, to tell them what had become of him and to determine from their advice whether or not to make the events of the night and morning known to the board. Perhaps, I thought, by opening the sealed door I had violated an inviolate taboo and would suffer as a result. I might be blamed for Causey’s death. But as I trudged wearily up along the switchbacks, the emotion generated by my fight with Colangelo ebbed away, and the awful chamber in which we had struggled began to dominate my thoughts. Its stench, its solitary revenant, its nightmarish centrality to the life of the prison. With each step, I grew increasingly horrified by my acceptance of the place and the changes it had worked in me. It had neutered my will, obscured my instincts, blinded me to perversity. The things I had done… Bianca, Joy, my devotion to that ridiculous mural. What had I been thinking? Where the fuck had Tommy Penhaligon gone? I wanted to be who I was at that precise moment: someone alert to every shadow and suspicious presence; open to the influence of emotion and not governed by a pathological serenity that transformed violent men into studious, self-examining drones and, were you to believe the plumes, less violent men into women. If I returned to my cell and confided in Berbick, thereby obeying the rule of the prison, sooner or later I would be sucked back in and lose this hard-won vantage from which I could perceive its depravity and pathetic self-involvements. I had no good prospects in the world, but all I could aspire to in Diamond Bar was that one day I would go shuffling through the yard, an old man dimly persuaded that he had been gifted with the grasp of a holy principle too great for the brains of common men to hold, a principle that was no more than a distorted reflection of the instrumentality responsible for his dementia. Instead of heading to my cell, when I reached the eighth stair I kept walking down through the hill toward the annex gate, past the cells of sedate men who had grown habituated to the prison, past those of agitated new arrivals; and when I reached the gate—it was, of course, unlocked—I threw it open and stood on the threshold, gazing out upon a beautiful spring morning. Cool and bright and fresh. A lacework of sun and shadow under the dark firs. The river running green with snowmelt. I had no fear of the quick-flowing current; I had crossed it once in handcuffs, and unfettered I would cross it all the more easily. Yet I hesitated. I could not, despite my revulsion for what lay behind me, put a foot forward on the path of freedom. I felt something gathering in the woods, a presence defined by the sound of rushing water, the shifting boughs and pouring wind. A wicked immanence, not quite material, needing me to come out from the gate a step or two in order to be real. I berated myself for a coward, tried to inject my spine with iron, but second by second my apprehension grew more detailed. I had a presentiment of jaws, teeth, a ravenous will, and I backed away from the gate, not far, but far enough to slow my pulse, to think. No one walked out of prison. There must be watchers… a single watcher, perhaps. A mindless four-footed punishment for the crime of flight. I told myself this was the same illusion of threat that had driven me inside the walls many months before, but I could not disregard it. The beckoning green and gold of the day, the light rippling everywhere—these had the insubstantiality of a banner fluttered across a window, hiding a dreadful country from my sight.
Once kindled, fear caught in me and burned. The flickering of sun on water; the stirring of fallen needles; mica glinting on the face of a boulder: these were unmistakable signs of an invisible beast who slumbered by the steps of the prison. I heard a noise. It may have been someone starting a chainsaw downriver, a car engine being revved, but to my ears it was a growl sounded high in a huge throat, a warning and a bloody promise. I sprang to the gate and slammed it shut, then rested against the cold metal, weak with relief. My eyes went to the second level of the tier. Gazing down at me was a man in a guard’s uniform, absently tapping the palm of his hand with a nightstick. I could hear the slap of wood on flesh, counting out the time with the regularity of a metronome, each stroke ticking off the ominous fractions of his displeasure. Finally, as if he had become sure of me, he sheathed the nightstick and walked away, the sharp report of his boot heels precisely echoing the now-steady rhythm of my heart.
I spent the remainder of the day and half the night staring at the discolorations on the wall opposite my bunk—they had never come in fully, never developed into a complicated abstraction as had the walls of my fellow prisoners, possibly because the walls upon which I expended most of my energy were the ones in the anteroom of the new wing. Yet during those hours I saw in their sparse scatter intimations of the scriptlike fungus inscribed upon the walls of the chamber at the heart of the law, indecipherable to me now as Arabic or Mandarin, tantalizingly inscrutable—I suspected they were the regulations by which we lived, and contemplating them soothed me. I could not avoid recalling the chamber and the man suspended therein, but my thoughts concerning these things were speculative, funded by neither fear nor regret. If it had been Quires, one hundred and sixty years old and more, tortured for half that span, this lent credence to Causey’s assertion that Czerny, LeGary, Ashford, and Holmes were the original board of Diamond Bar who had been photographed with the warden in 1917… and what did that say about the potentials of the prison? Time and again I returned to the truths I had sensed as Quires cried out from his chains, the dualities of punishment and sacrifice he seemed to incorporate. It was as if he were a battery through which the animating principle of the place was channeled. This was a simplistic analogy, yet when coupled with the image of a Christlike figure in torment, simplicity took on mythic potency and was difficult to deny. Now that I had proved myself unequal to traditional freedom, I was tempted to believe in the promised freedom of the new wing, in all the tenuous promise of Diamond Bar. The illusion of freedom, I realized, was the harshest of prisons, the most difficult to escape. Ristelli, Causey, Czerny, and Bianca had each in their way attempted to lead me to this knowledge, to demonstrate that only in a place like Diamond Bar, where walls kept that illusion at bay, was the road to freedom discernable. I had been a fool to disregard them.
Near midnight, a skinny, towheaded man stopped in front of my cell door and blew cigarette smoke through the bars from his shadowed mouth. I did not know him, but his arrogance and deferential attitude made me suspect he was a familiar of the board. “You’re wanted at the annex gate, Penhaligon,” he said, and blew another stream of smoke toward me. He looked off along the corridor, and in the half-light I saw the slant of a cheekbone, skin pitted with old acne scars.
In no mood to be disturbed, I asked, “What for?”
“Man’s being transferred. Guess they need a witness.”
I could not imagine why a transfer would require witnesses, and I felt the creep of paranoia; but I did not think the board would resort to trickery in the exercise of their power, and, reluctantly, I let the man escort me down through the annex.
The gate was open, and gathered by the entranceway, in partial silhouette against the moonstruck river, was a group of men, ten or twelve in all, consisting of the board and their spokesmen. Their silence unsettled me, and once again I grew paranoid, thinking that I was to be transferred; but then I spotted Colangelo off to one side, hemmed in against the wall by several men. His head twitched anxiously this way and that. The air was cool, but he was perspiring. He glanced at me, betraying no reaction, either he did not register me or else he had concluded that I was only a minor functionary of his troubles.