“He agrees to come of his own free will?” Larry said, catching on. “Right!”
Light dawned full and bright. All at once Larry felt better about everything.
By ten-thirty the sun had gone down and the only light in the cell was from a dim wire-caged bulb set into the ceiling. Philip Von Joel sat on a filthy blanket on the floor. In one corner behind him an alcoholic pickpocket slept unevenly, belching and coughing and keeping up a seamless monologue that was a shade too quiet to hear. It amused Von Joel — though not enough to make him laugh or even smile — that an alcoholic with a bad tremor and no discernible coordination had tried to make a living in a branch of crime that required, above all, slick timing and steady hands.
In a corner by the door the third occupant of the cell, a drug addict who was even smellier than the drunk, appeared to be asleep, too, although he groaned a lot and every two minutes or so his eyes rolled open and a sharp rigor took hold of his body, straightening his spine sharply and making his head strike the wall. He was incredibly thin, dressed only in cut-off jeans. His back, legs, and arms were covered with crops of circular purplish lesions; some of them were blistered, others bled from contact with the cement floor.
The fourth prisoner lay along the wall to Von Joel’s left, swathed in rags. He looked dead.
Von Joel sat erect, distancing himself from this place, separating his senses from the confinement and the squalor. It was not easy. He was a compulsively clean man, acutely fastidious in matters of health and hygiene. In his present situation he knew it would be a mistake to think ahead: it would erode his confidence in his own ability to survive the intentions of lesser people.
What he must do, first and foremost, was cling to his sense of himself. He must remain secure in the understanding that he was above matters of simple confinement. Liberty was his medium, he would gravitate to freedom because his karma was in balance. His fundamental condition could not be withheld from him for long, because such a denial went against nature.
It was hard though. The smells were like a fog seeping into his head, clouding his certainty. The filthiness of the cell was disheartening, and there was not one pleasant thing to look at. He closed his eyes tightly, making his breathing slow and shallow. He concentrated fiercely, remembering the primary code for those who would survive and prevail; he saw it printed in silver letters against the darkness of his eyelids:
cling tightly to your personhood, your dignity, your sense of self.
Sense of self was hardest. In here, kept forcibly from all he loved and craved, it felt like old times, very old times, back in the days when he was the person they were calling him now, Eddie Myers. Those were the hardest days, days of spiritual darkness. They were gone. He was Philip Von Joel, that was his sole identity, his fresh incarnation.
He was a man of substance insulated from the world by deep, tight layers of culture and wealth. All former personas were dead and of no significance.
He closed his eyes tighter as the smell of excrement rose in a dank wave from the gurgling drunk behind him.
I am Philip Von Joel and I do not belong in this place...
The addict grunted sharply. Von Joel opened his eyes and saw him roll on his back, draw up his knees, then turn on his side again and vomit in a steaming gush on to the floor.
Von Joel jammed his eyes shut, trying not to breathe the stink. “Dignity.” He hissed, “Sense of self...”
He told himself firmly, over and over, just who he was, and that he didn’t belong in that place. He whispered his name and imagined his personhood protected by the force of his will.
The addict knelt up suddenly. His chest heaved, his wide eyes cavernous as empty sockets in the oblique light. He vomited again, spewing whatever he had left in his guts across and down his own skeleton chest. Von Joel watched the bloated insects biting, sucking, watched as the ants streamed over the puke, and swallowed, turning away. The stench was horrific, and the heat had to be way over a hundred and ten degrees. His whole body was drenched, his three-hundred-pound shirt dripping, the waistband of his tailored handmade trousers sopping. He could feel the perspiration trickle down from his neck over his belly, drip from his hair, slithering down his neck. He rested his head back against the brick wall, and then out of the corner of his eye he saw the fat cockroach crawling and inching its way along the wall toward him. He shut his eyes and his hands clenched together as he felt the insect moving onto his shoulder, but he made no move to swipe it away. As he felt its clawlike feet easing up his neck, he began to wait, timing it. Now it was crawling to his chin, positioned just below his lower lip... He waited, could feel the cockroach easing onto his lip, and he suddenly snapped his mouth open, biting the creature into two sections, then he spat it out. He had decided if he killed three, his time was up, but only on the condition he did not move a single muscle but his mouth... three: two more to go.
Susan got back to the hotel at half-past eleven. By that time Larry was pacing the floor. He had come back after nine to find the boys tucked up in bed asleep and no clue as to where Susan might be. When she finally swept in, dressed up in her best, her makeup carefully overdone, it was evident she had drunk too much. She closed the door and leaned on it, grinning lopsidedly at Larry.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “You left the kids on their own!”
“As I recall, you’re the one that said they would be fine, and anyway, they know to call down to the resident babysitter if they need anything.” Susan launched herself away from the door and struck a flamenco stance. “I’ve been to a nightclub.”
“Who with?”
“The waiter, the barman, and the swimming pool attendant.”
Larry did a swift reading of the pang he felt when she told him that. He decided it was annoyance, not jealousy.
Susan executed a couple of dance steps, then stopped, remembering something.
“Got a great joke,” she said, giggling in advance. “There’s these two old Jewish tailors, Morris and Izzy, who retire to Miami. Well, they get themselves all tanned up, looking at the young, sexy beauties, right?”
“You’re pissed as a newt.”
“So, every night Morris scores, but poor Izzy never gets a second look. ‘What am I doing wrong, Morris?’ he says. ‘I got the Bermuda shorts, the tan, the cigar — for what? None of the girls want to know.’ Morris tells him, ‘Izzy, this is what you do. Get two potatoes, slip them down your Bermudas. Okay? Just do what I say, and you can’t fail.’ So the next day Izzy gets two potatoes—”
“Oh, come on, Susie—”
“And that night he gets hold of his pal, he’s in a real rage, and he says, ‘Morris, I patrolled the beach all day with two King Edwards down my Bermudas, just like you told me to do, and all the girls did was laugh!’ Morris takes one look at him and he says, ‘Izzy, you’re supposed to put the potatoes down the front of your Bermudas!’ ”
Larry groaned. Susan began to stagger about, laughing.
“He had them at the back, get it? Like, like he’d done something in his pants.”
“I don’t think that’s funny,” Larry said, talking through her laughter. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
The telephone rang. As Larry turned to answer it Susan pushed him, her face angry suddenly.
“I’ve been waiting for you the entire vacation!” she said.
Larry jammed the receiver to his ear.
“Yeah, this is Jackson.” He listened, nodding, then his eyebrows went up a clear half-inch. “What? You’re kidding! Yeah, sure, I’ll be there. He didn’t last long, did he?” He put down the phone. “Got him!” he said, grabbing his jacket. “Eddie Myers wants to talk to us!”