Food comes. Soggy carrots with most of the color boiled out of them. A stiff slice of bread. A cup of powdered milk and an oblong hunk of gray meat-origin unknown. I eat, then push the tray out into the walkway. My calluses don’t fit the grooves above this door. I’ll need new ones, and chin-ups leave my hands dripping with blood. Katas are next. Now I’m breathing hard, sweat mingling with the blood. Tiny scarlet dots spatter the powder blue section of the bars. My own decor.
I do sit-ups and math, talking quietly out loud to hear the sound of a human voice. Numbers turn to history lessons. I recount as much as I can about Auburn. The Seward House, home to the U.S. secretary of state who purchased Alaska. States and capitals. I know a song and I sing it low. Time passes.
“Rec time,” says a guard I can’t see.
My cell door rattles and hums open.
“Step out.”
I do, along with the old man and a brown-skinned young man with a long black ponytail and a thin mustache. We are led up a set of stairs to the roof. A square of concrete caged in by a ten-foot-high honeycomb of rusted metal bars. Recreation. The guard stands outside and locks us in.
The old man gives me a curious look with those magnified orbs, then he begins to shuffle around the perimeter. He is a small man and stooped, and his gnarled hands, like the broad bald spot on his head, are covered with the spots of age. The young punk stuffs his hands into his pants pockets and begins to kick at the walls of the cage. I can only see up. The walls of the roof block any view of the surrounding city.
The bleached sky is dry and crisp. The sun only a glow behind the flat cover of clouds. The sounds of license plates being stamped and wood cabinets being milled float up from unseen shops below. The air is free from the typical stink of human smells, corroded metal, dust, and paint. I breathe deep, then start to walk too, keeping on opposite sides from the old man, following his tracks in the dusting of snow, giving wide berth to the punk.
I am looking up at the place where a mourning dove flapped across the sky when I hear a cry.
The punk has the old man down and he is swinging a blade. I don’t think. I react. My snap kick goes up between the punk’s legs. He shrieks and groans, staggers and turns. The blade slashes for my face. I leap back, seeing two razors melted into the end of a toothbrush. He slashes again. I measure the arc of the pendulum. The next time, I block his wrist, kick him again between the legs, and greet his dropping face with the full force of my elbow. His nose pops like a lightbulb. I pivot, break his arm, and crush the blade hand under my heel; I stomp and grind. Stomp and grind until his screams hurt my ears.
The guard is talking into his radio, but he remains outside the cage. His eyes are calm. The old man is rising, fumbling with the plastic frames of his glasses. I help him. He coughs, but there appears to be no blood. He shuffles for the door, leaning against me.
“Let us out, Clarence,” the old man says.
Clarence looks back at us. He has a shock of salt-and-pepper hair. A neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. His eyes are permanently sad and he appears to think for a moment, then nods without a word and rattles his keys. Another guard arrives. He watches the punk while Clarence leads us back to our tank. The doors hum shut and it is quiet. I hear Clarence answering questions amid the rattle of keys. There is some shouting in the stairwell. Then the voices all fade away.
“Thank you,” says the old man. His voice is small.
I drop down and begin a set of push-ups.
“I heard them say you’ve been in the box for almost twenty years,” the old man says. His voice is a little louder now.
“Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” screams one of the prisoners who has been denied the enjoyment of recreation, but the old man keeps on as if it were the wind.
“You don’t have to do that to be safe,” the old man says. “What you just did for me? You’ve got protection now.”
I snort at this news. A fragile old man, on his back, about to be sliced open unless I’m there. That’s my protection.
“You don’t know anything,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say.
“Everything matters,” he says.
“Not if you’re me,” I say, speaking into the empty space as if I’m talking to God. “This is my life. This is my world. I don’t want to be out there with those animals.”
“Outside the wall?”
“The wall?” I say. A short laugh escapes me. “No, I mean out there. With them. I’m not one of them.”
“That’s where freedom is,” he says.
“Freedom to be someone’s punk,” I say. “Whose punk are you, old-timer?”
The old man clears his throat. His voice takes on a different cast. It has an edge.
“I survived in here. There are three rules in here if you want to survive,” he says. “First rule: Never show fear. Second rule: Never be a rat.
“I came here in 1967,” he says. “I was thirty-four years old. The biggest buck in A block took my lunch from me on the first day. He said that night, I was going to give him more than that. At two-thirty, I walked out onto the weight court and smashed his skull in with a fifty-pound dumbbell.
“Exact revenge. That’s the third rule. The most important. If you don’t do it, you’ll be a professional victim. You exact it and it’s exact. Not just a reaction, but planned out. Precise. It needs to send a message.
“If someone takes your cigarettes, you smash their hand into jelly in a doorjamb. They push you, you break their knees. Touch your food, you gouge out their eyes. Someone tries to make you his punk? You kill him. Believe me, it’s self-defense. Whatever it is they did to you? You exact a revenge that’s ten times worse, a hundred times if you can. That, they respect.”
It’s silent between us for a while. I hear my stomach rumble.
“What did they do to you when you hit that guy?” I ask.
“I got out of the box in 1970, just before the riot. I didn’t have to hurt anyone else until 1979. Killed him with antifreeze.
“That punk today? Dumbass Colombians. I poisoned one of them two years ago. That’s why I’m here. The other ones sent that kid in here to get me before I get out of SHU. Scared. They’ll keep low now, and no one’s going to touch you either. That’s the game. You don’t have to be a mole. You can bunk with me.”
I laugh again.
“What are you?” he says. “Some homophobic?”
“I’m fine right here,” I say.
“What about books?”
“What about them?” I ask.
“You can’t read in the hole.”
“I got my own dreams,” I say.
“Books are more than just dreams,” he says. “Books are like a mirror… for your soul. You can see yourself. Keep yourself neat and clean. You need that for when you get out. To fit in.”
“There’s no sense in getting out,” I say.
“No sense?” he says, dropping his voice into an urgent whisper that only I can hear. “What are you, certifiable?”
“In, out,” I say. “Jail is jail. I like it okay in my own space. I don’t care what my soul looks like.”
“I’m not talking about jail, kid,” he says. “I’m talking about out. Outside the wall. Freedom.”
“Don’t even say that,” I say, my heart thumping before I know it. I am whispering too. “I can scream louder than that guy next to you.”
“Why not say it if it’s true?”
“It’s not true,” I say. “There’s no way out.”
“Kid,” he says, “you have no idea…”
I wrap my fingers around the bars. My lips are pressed to the steel and I taste its tang through the chips in the paint.
“You’ve been here for more than forty years,” I say in a hiss. “Don’t play with me, you crazy old coot.”
It’s quiet for a time. My ears start ringing and I wonder if I have imagined it all.