I staggered up, but Causey, who had also been borne to his knees by the ferocity of the cry, remained in that posture, his lips moving as though in prayer, and it occurred to me that his experience of what had happened must have been far different from mine to produce such a reverent reaction. I turned again to Quires, realizing I could not help him, that he did not want my help, yet moved to give it nonetheless, and thus I did not see Colangelo break from the tunnel behind us… nor did I see him push Causey into the pit. It was Causey’s outcry, shrill and feeble in contrast to Quires’, but unalloyed in its terror, that alerted me to danger. When I glanced back I saw that he had vanished into the depths, his scream trailing after him like a snapped rope, and on the spot where he had knelt, Colangelo stood glaring at me, Causey’s chisel in his right hand. Had he forced a confrontation in the anteroom, anywhere in the upper levels of the prison, I would not have been so afraid, for though he was taller and heavier, I was accustomed to fighting men bigger than myself; but that dread place eroded my confidence, and I stumbled away from him, groping for my own chisel. He said nothing, made no sound apart from the stentorian gush of his breath, pinning me with his little eyes. The wan light diminished the pinkness of his skin. His lips glistened.
“The hell is your problem?” I said; then, alarmed by the reverberations of my voice, I added in a hushed tone, “I didn’t do shit to you.”
Colangelo let out an enervated sigh, perhaps signaling an unraveling of restraint, and rushed at me, slashing with the chisel. I caught his wrist and he caught mine. We swayed together on the edge of the pit, neither of us able to gain an advantage, equal in strength despite the difference in our sizes. The excited squeaking of the rats created a wall around us, a multiplicity of tiny cheers hardened into a shrill mosaic. At such close quarters, his anger and my fear seemed to mix and ferment a madness fueled by our breath, our spittle. I wanted to kill him. That was all I wanted. Everything else—Quires, Causey, the panic I had previously felt—dwindled to nothing.
Colangelo tried to butt me. I avoided the blow and, putting my head beneath his chin, pushed him back from the pit. He went off-balance, slipped to one knee. I wrenched my left arm free and brought my elbow hard into his temple. He slumped, still clutching my wrist, preventing me from using my chisel. I threw another elbow that landed on the hinge of his jaw, an uppercut that smacked into the side of his neck and elicited a grunt. He sagged onto his side as I continued to hit him, and when he lost consciousness I straddled his chest and lifted the chisel high, intending to drive it into his throat; but in straightening, I caught sight of Quires hanging at the center of his chains. He did not look at me, but I was certain that in some way he was watching, aware of the moment. How could he not be? He was the substance of the prison, its spirit and its fleshly essence, the male host in whom the spider of female principle had laid its eggs, and as such was witness to our every thought and action. I sensed from him a caution. Not reproval, nothing so pious. In the thin tide of thought that washed between us there was no hint of moral preachment, merely a reminder of the limit I was on the verge of transgressing. What was it Ristelli had said? “Innocents and murderers. The system tolerates neither.” Madness receded, and I came to my feet. Prison logic ordained that I should push Colangelo into the pit and spare myself the inevitability of a second attack; but the logic of Diamond Bar, not Vacaville, commanded me. Numbed by the aftershocks of adrenaline and rage, I left him for the rats or whatever else fate might have in store, and with a last glance at Quires, suspended between the light of heaven and the pit, like the filament in a immense bulb, I began my ascent.
I had in mind to seek out Berbick or someone else whom Causey had befriended, to tell them what had come 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 imminence, 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—it had the insubstantiality of a banner fluttered across a window, hiding a dreadful country from my sight.