"Of course you've been thinking of suicide. Everyone does. Very few ever really do it. Even men and women doing hard labor in death camps find reason to go on living. They never bite their own tongues out, or open their veins with their fingernails, or run headlong into the wall, or any of those childish jailbirds' fantasies." His voice rose. "Mrs.
Webster, you're in the upper level here. You're in special custody. Believe me, this city's slums are full of men and women, and even children, who'd cheerfully kill to have it as easy as you do."
"Then why don't you let them kill me?"
His eyes clouded. "I really wish you wouldn't be like this."
He sighed and spoke into his watchphone. After a while the goons came and took her away.
She went on hunger strike. They let her do it for three days. Then they sent her a cellmate.
Her new cellmate was a black woman who spoke no English.
She was short and had a broad, cheerful face and two missing front teeth. Her name was something like Hofuette, or Jofuette. Jofuette would only smile and shrug at Laura's
English: she had no gift for languages and couldn't remember a foreign word two days running. She was illiterate.
Laura had poor luck with Jofuette's language. It was called something like Bambara. It was full of aspirations and clicks and odd tonalities. She learned the words for bed and eat and sleep and cards. She taught Jofuette how to play Hearts. It took days but they had a lot of time.
Jofuette came from downstairs, the lower level, where the screaming came from. She hadn't been tortured; or, at least, no marks showed. Jofuette had seen people shot, however.
They shot them out in the exercise yard, with machine guns.
They would often shoot a single man with five or six machine guns; their ammunition was old, with a lot of duds that tended to choke up the guns. They had a worldful of ammunition, though. All the ammunition of fifty years of the Cold War had ended up here in African war zones. Along with the rest of the junk.
She didn't see the Inspector of Prisons again. He wasn't the guy who ran the place. Jofuette knew the warden. She could imitate the way he walked; it was quite funny.
Laura was pretty sure that Jofuette was some kind of trusty, maybe even a stool pigeon. It. didn't bother her much. Jofuette didn't speak English and Laura had no secrets anyway. But
Jofuette, unlike Laura, was allowed to go out into the exer- cise yard and mingle with the prisoners. She could get hold of little things: harsh, nasty cigarettes, a box of sugared vitamin pills, a needle and thread. She was good to have around, wonderful, better than anyone.
Laura learned about prison. The tricks of doing time. Mem- ory was the enemy. Any connection with the outside world would be, she knew, too painful to survive. She just did her time. She invented antimemory devices, passivity devices.
When it was time for a cry she would have a cry. She didn't think about what might happen to her, to David and the baby, to Galveston, to Rizome, to the world. She thought about professional activities, mostly. Writing public relations state- ments. Testifying to public bodies about Malian terrorism.
Writing campaign documents for imaginary Rizome Commit- tee candidates.
She spent several weeks writing a long imaginary sales brochure called Loretta's Hands and Feet. She memorized it and would spin it off sentence by sentence, silently, inside her head, slowly, one second per word, until she reached the end. Then she would add on a new sentence, and then start over..
The imaginary brochure was not about the baby herself, that would have been too painful. It was simply about the baby's hands and feet. She described the shape and texture of the hands and feet, their smell, their grasp, their potential usefulness if mass-produced. She designed boxes for the hands and feet, and old-fashioned marketing slogans, and ad jingles.
She organized a mental dress store. She had never been much of a fashion maven, at least not since junior high school . days, and her discovery of boys. But this was a top-of-the- line fashion outlet, a trend-setting emporium catering to the wealthy Atlanta crowd. There were galaxies of hats, march- ing armies of hosiery and shoes, whirlwinds of billowing skirts, vast technicolor brothels of sexy lingerie.
She had decided on ten years. She was going to be in this jail for ten years. It was long enough to destroy hope, and hope was identical with anguish.
A month, and a month, and a month, and a month.
And another month, and another and another and another.
And then three, and then one more.
A year.
She had been in prison for a year. A year was not a particularly long time. She was thirty-three years old. She had spent far more time outside captivity than in, thirty-two times as much. People had done far more time in prison than this.
Gandhi had spent years in prison.
They were treating her better now. Jofuette had made some kind of arrangement with one of the female goons. When the goon was on duty she let Laura run in the exercise yard, at night, when no other prisoners were present.
Once a week they brought an ancient video recorder into the cell. It had a black-and-white TV manufactured in Alge- ria. There were tapes, too. Most of them were old-fashioned
American football games. The old full-contact version of football had been banned for years now. The game was spectacularly brutaclass="underline" huge lumbering gladiators in helmets and armor. Every fourth play seemed to leave one of them sprawl- ing and wounded. Sometimes Laura would simply close her eyes and listen to the wonderful flow of English. Jofuette liked the games.
Then there were movies. The Sands of Iwo Jima. The Green
Berets. Fantastic, hallucinatory violence. Enemies would be shot and fall down neatly, like paper cutouts. Sometimes the good guys were shot, in the shoulder or arm usually. They would just grimace a bit, maybe bind it up.
One week a film arrived called The Road to Morocco. It was set in the African desert and had Bing Cosby and Bob
Hope. Laura had vague memories of Bob Hope, she thought she must have seen him when she was very young and he was very old. He was young in the film, and quite funny, in a quaint premillennial way. It hurt terribly to watch him, like having a bandage ripped away, touching deep parts of her that she had managed to numb. She had to stop the tape several times to mop at tears. Finally she snatched the tape out and jammed it back in the box.
Jofuette shook her head, said something in Bambara, and plugged the tape back in. As she did so a folded slip of tissue, cigarette paper, fell from a crevice in the box's cardboard side. Laura picked it up.
She unfolded it as Jofuette watched the TV, riveted. It was covered with smudgy, minuscule writing. Not ink. Blood, maybe. A list.
Abel Lacoste-Euro. Cons. Service
Steven Lawrence-Oxfam America
Marianne Meredith-ITN Channel Four
Valeri Chkalov-Vienna
Georgi Valdukov-Vienna
Sergei Ilyushin-Vienna
Kazuo(?) Watanabe-Mitsubishi
(?)Riza-Rikabi-EFT Commerzbank
Laura Webster-Rizome IG
Katje Selous-A.C.A. Corps and four others
10
The second year went faster than the first. She was used to it. It had become her life. She no longer thirsted for the things she had lost-she could no longer name them to herself, without an effort. She was past thirst: she was mummified. Monastic, sealed.
But she could sense the pace picking up, spiderweb tremors of movement in the distant world outside.
There were shootings almost every night now. When they took her down for exercise in the yard, she could see bullet- pounded patches in the wall, cratered, just like the Lodge had been. Below the pockmarks the baked bare earth had turned foul, carpeted with swarming flies and the coppery reek of blood.