He felt for the girls in Manninpox, but the truth was that he wouldn’t have liked to come upon one of them hiding in his garage, or rummaging through his kitchen. If Ian Rose didn’t want to think about Manninpox, it was because he did not know what to think. So he sidestepped the issue. The prison was some nine or ten miles from his house, up the road that blocked the view of the landscape those early mornings when he watched by the window. Even the name Manninpox sickened him. He hadn’t seen all of the prison’s structures up close, but he could imagine them; like all humans, he had a vivid impression of what a prison was. Where did such an impression come from? Maybe the movies or television, or some book or painting, or even some photograph… but he had the feeling that things went beyond this, that the issue was more complicated than he imagined.
“The concept of prison is so clearly engraved in our minds,” he tells me, “it’s almost as if we were born with it. Same thing with the grave. That sensation of being buried under the earth, with all the terror it implies, must also be innate. It’s not philosophy; it’s just common sense. We know what it is to take a deep breath, and we know how much space we need to move around. Thus, we deduce negatively what it would be like not being able to do either; we can imagine what it would be like to suffocate for lack of air, or to suffer a heart attack from the claustrophobia of being squeezed into a narrow cave. The grave, prison: different versions of the same thing.”
In Ian Rose’s mind, Manninpox was a series of stark, immense interior spaces, six or seven floors of cages pressed on top of each other like a vertical zoo where the animals were only allowed the minimum living space. The outside was probably a great bulk of dark concrete with sharp angles, surrounded by barbed wire and electrified fences. A simple, impenetrable, abject monument in the middle of that idyllic greenery of pine, maple, and birch. Compared to such an imposing structure, the natural inhabitants of those woods — the black bear, the red fox, or the white-tailed deer — were dwarfed. That corner of the universe had fallen under the shadow of that fortress of cement, in which who knows how many women were packed in, making the air heavy with their distress and overwhelming nature itself with their invisible but unavoidable presence.
“It used to be that every time I thought about the place I’d get goose bumps,” he says, “as if its caged women were breathing down my neck. Knowing that they were locked up used to make me claustrophobic. That’s why I didn’t think about Manninpox.”
Sometimes he couldn’t help but think about the prison, like when his dogs barked at night. During the day, he simply avoided looking in that direction and forgot it was there. He was successful at this for half of the year, but when the trees grew bare, its blackish silhouette loomed in the distance like a scorched field in the middle of the white landscape. Ian Rose knew this was an optical illusion, but it disturbed him anyway. And he was unlike Cleve, who wasn’t the kind to run away from things or stick his head in the sand. During their first winter after moving in, Cleve had tried to talk to his father about Manninpox.
“He was obsessed,” Ian Rose tells me, “to the extent that I had to ask him to stop. I told him, ‘Forget about it, Cleve. It’s bad enough that it’s there; you don’t have to make it worse by reminding me.’”
But Cleve seemed hypnotized by the place. He rode out on his bike, each time getting closer to the edge of the restricted zone; he started frequenting a dive called Mis Errores Café-Bar, right on the border between the free world and the fortress of the inmates. Rose the father knew that Rose the son had begun to spend odd hours of the day there, in that café with a Spanish name.
“It had to be in Spanish,” he says. “My Errors Café—such guilt and remorse only work in Spanish, or in Catholic.”
After Cleve’s accident, and especially because of the arrival of the package, Rose the father began picturing his son at Mis Errores with his cup of coffee, probably overwhelmed or dazzled by the nearness of the prison. He tells me that growing up Cleve was a shy kid, and he felt more at ease around dogs than around people. In that they were very much alike, but only in that. Rose the father had always felt that he was a rather average individual, but in his son he’d noticed a burgeoning sensitivity that allowed him to detect things that for others went unnoticed, and even beware of them before they happened. Like an earthquake, for example. Once, when they were living in Bogotá, Ian had heard his son say that there was going to be an earthquake, and sure enough a few hours later the earth shook dramatically, not in Colombia but in Chile. This left the father befuddled. He wasn’t sure if this meant that the child’s antennae of premonition were faulty or if in fact they were so sensitive that they could transcend borders. In any case, it was clear that a vibration as intense as the one emitting from Manninpox could not be ignored by Cleve, who had found at Mis Errores the passageway into that other dimension of reality, of women living in the shadows. It pulled him in like a magnet. He had set his mind on penetrating the walls and barbed wire and tried it a few times until he was hired as the head of a writing workshop for the inmates. How? Rose the father wasn’t sure how Cleve had done it. But he knew that’s where his son was headed each time that his son turned left into the road on his motorcycle.
“You smell like cold soup,” he told Cleve when he returned. “No doubt you were sticking your nose into that place.”
From Cleve’s Notebook
I find the idea that salvation can be found through writing trite. I get annoyed when literature is treated as a cult, or culture a religion, or museums temples, or novels bibles and writers prophets. And I can’t stand those lefties who pretend to speak for “those who have no voice,” or those well-known, more “right-minded” writers who descend from their towers for a few hours every month so that America sleeps a little better thinking that in fact things are not so bad for prisoners in this country, that they have stopped being so bad and have become a little better because someone has had the charity of teaching them how to write. In the past, prisoners looking for a miracle recited an Our Father, studied the Talmud, or paid a good lawyer. Now they write memoirs. And that’s fine, as long as no one tries to sell them the fact that by doing so they’re going to be happy or rich or forgiven by a society that will take them in like black sheep washed clean by the sacrament of literature. The only truth is that being a prisoner is a fucking misery. And yet, I have great hopes now that they have hired me to teach a writing workshop for the prisoners at Manninpox. There has to be an honest way to do it, a simple way to serve as a bridge so that they can do it for themselves, tell their stories, forgive themselves for whatever they have done or failed to do. Walter Benjamin said that narrative is the language of forgiveness. I want to believe that. And I’d like to make it possible for them to at least try.
Interview with Ian Rose
When he finished reading the manuscript, that very morning Ian Rose went into town, made a few photocopies and sent one to Samuel Ming, the editor of Cleve’s graphic novels. Aside from being the boy’s best friend, Ming was striking in his indecipherable mixed-race looks; he looked Asian but had dreadlocks, with a pair of tiny slanted eyes alongside an imposing Arab nose and large square teeth behind lips of a feminine delicacy. Rose the father sent him the manuscript with a note asking if he thought it was publishable, perhaps as an eyewitness account, or a denunciation, or maybe even as a novel. A few days later, when Ming let him know that he had looked at it, Ian Rose got in his Ford Fiesta and drove to New York City to talk with him personally.