Prison Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Attention in the facility:

  count is clear, count is clear, seventeen fifteen.

  I’d seen Jennings at lunchtime, hunched at the toilet stall, ashen, making careful and deliberate movements. I offered nothing. Said nothing, except, “You look pale,” to which he replied, “I’ve been feeling like shit all week.” It was the only time I’d ever spoken to him. He shuffled out of the pod, into the sergeant’s office, and begged to be taken to medical. At first they made him walk, but when he collapsed on the steps leading into the main corridor, they rushed him to the clinic in a wheelchair.

  That’s what hit me the hardest after the lieutenant announced Jennings had passed away—that I’d hardly thought about what I witnessed earlier in the day. From the entire time between those two moments were thousands of thoughts, and not one of them was of Jennings. I defended myself. I never knew the man. I may have seen him five or six times a day, every day for the last year—even sat with him at the chow hall—yet I never knew the man, never even spoke to him. But it was the whispers in the day hall which served as the obiter dictum of Jennings’s death. It was like watching the unprepared attempt to start a fire, collectively contributing obscure memories and unverifiable facts of Jennings’s life. They threw anything on top of the cold embers that might help burn away the man’s anonymity.

  “Who?”

  “Jennings.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The old man.”

  “The one that cleans the office?”

  “No, that’s Bill. The other one.”

  “Lived with Rourke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Didn’t he work at the furniture shop?”

  “Metal products, I think.”

  “Ran AutoCAD?”

  “Something with computers.”

  “I heard his family was killed in a car accident a few years ago.”

  “Wasn’t he going home soon?”

  “First of the year.”

  There was callousness too. Jokes about his crime, or crimes.

  “What did the pedophile say when . . .”

  Laughter at a funeral is a forbidden release of fear. And it was fear we’d been so successful at avoiding until Jennings died. Not because we cared for him, but because we failed to remember him. And in doing so, he reminded us of how easy it is to lose everything, only to die before being given the chance to get a fraction of it back. So we hated him for it, and the laughter and the anger allowed us to momentarily hold our ground against death. Death, who’d moved into Jennings’s cell and refused to be intimidated. Then the guards came back to pack out his belongings.

  Attention in the facility:

  cell house 1, first pull, west side dining hall,

  cell house 7, first pull, east side dining hall,

  seventeen thirty.

  We are told that we have it easier than our predecessors. We are the last pull to chow tonight, so I watch the guards collect Jennings’s possessions. They consult Rourke about ownership of small items like toothpaste, soap, and deodorant. Appliances, like Jennings’s coffee pot and television, are easily distinguishable because his name and number are etched into the plastic. But canteen ephemera like bagels, peanut butter, aspirin, and candy that is left outside a foot locker is subject to the honesty of the surviving cellmate. Books, coffee cups, and other personal belongings are summarized on Jennings’s property sheet—a list of what he had and was allowed to have. But it is nonspecific. Caring more about quantities than actualities. With it, a correctional officer can tell how many books you own, but not which books in the cell are yours. It’s so generic, except for name and number, you can hardly tell the difference between one inmate’s and another’s.

  The guards aren’t gentle yet neither are they insensitive with the deceased’s belongings. As I watch the traces of Jennings’s existence disappear one by one into the stiff green duffel bag, I wonder about how easy I am presumed to have it. Canteen. Visits. Phone calls. Better medical care, if “better” means the clinic will subtract three dollars from my account to tell me they couldn’t find anything wrong and shove a handful of ibuprofen in my palms. We have our radios and electric razors, hot pots and alarm clocks. I heard a rumor we’ll be getting iPods or iPads in a few months, though not the actual Apple product, just something comparable in function, made in the Philippines, with a pathetic six-month warranty. I suppose that is inarguably this progress everyone speaks of. Progress toward a punishment devoid of cruelty and unusualness. Perhaps in a hundred years it will be impossible to distinguish between a life before and a life after prison walls.

  I wonder where Jennings’s belongings will go. His stuff. His things. What happens to the mementos of a man no one knows? Will the guards pick through them? I can imagine some correctional officer’s home cluttered with the possessions of the dead. Maybe the unopened items get restocked in the canteen warehouse. Or do they throw it all in the dumpster before moving along to the “memorial service”? A few words by a chaplain who may not have ever set foot inside your facility. Then what? Interment? Cremation? Burial? Something bureaucratic, efficient, and cost effective, I’m sure.

  They announce the next cell houses for chow. My belly growls and I confess to myself I would have no ethical dilemma eating a dead man’s food or watching his television until they came to claim it. Possession is such an absurd idea to me now, like the feeling of driving past a house you once lived in long ago. It is alien and familiar at the same time, and I doubt I will resume it when I am allowed to leave. That’s ironic in a way, because it’s an implicit requirement for parole—work, buy, consume, possess.

  Attention in the facility:

  night gym for cell houses 3 and 4,

  library for cell house 7,

  AA meeting in multipurpose room 1,

  Catholic Bible study in classroom 6,

  nineteen thirty.

  In the library, I pick up a book I’ve had on hold for two months. The Bardo Todrol Chenmo; The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Only that is a mistranslation. Literally, it means The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo. A bardo isn’t one definitive moment, but rather an age or period of time that has its flourish, plateau, and decline. It is a progression of moments before, during, and after life leaves the body, but can refer to any physical or spiritual transition. Death is a bardo, not some exact instant you can point to and say, That is when he died. According to the book, one’s state of mind at the end of one bardo is crucial to one’s disposition in the next. This series of bardos is collectively called samsara, the cyclic existence of beings and becoming. From human to hungry ghosts, samsara is divided into six realms, each one a metaphor for our unstable states of mind—fear being one of the most detrimental to rebirth.

  When I return to my pod, cell 25 has been entirely disinfected of Jennings’s death. It is conspicuously off balance. The bottom bunk is devoid of sheets. A silver, rubbery pillow sits on top of the thin exercise pad of a mattress. Half the shelf space on the wall is empty and the ledge for a TV set is vacant. An empty foot locker’s lid is propped open against the wall and Rourke’s fan is on the ground, slightly angled downward, rattling at high speed to evaporate the residual moisture of a recently mopped floor. In the evaporating reflections I am haunted by a memory of my father.

  Attention in the facility:

  count time, count time, twenty-one thirty.

  I was thinking of my father’s money when I signed his DNR order. I often wonder if that qualifies as being the first crime I committed. Not technically, of course, but a crime of conscience no less, and I’ve been plagued with guilt ever since. The Bardo Todrol Chenmo says that the quality of thoughts of those surrounding the dying has a dramatic effect on the transitioning process. I hated my job, despised my marriage, and was burned out from my father going in and out of the hospital those three preceding weeks. I was in debt too. Credit cards. Loans. Thirty thousand dollars worth of emotional compensation and a newborn son. First Fidelity Nation
al Bank. That’s what I was thinking when I crossed that last T on my signature that authorized my father’s passing.

  One at a time the guards peek into my cell door window counting my body. It’s not always the same two, so the countenances I see reflect myriad emotions. Contentment. Pride. Stoicism. Self-righteousness. Judgment. I know they access our files on the department computer, reading the synopses of our crimes for entertainment. Some offer this information to certain inmates. It makes for an interesting dynamic—a hierarchy of criminal severity thriving on the economics of trickle-down loathing.

  My cellie tells me that he feels like crying. He’s been down for twenty-one years and doesn’t see parole for another five. He doesn’t miss Jennings. He feels like crying because he is Jennings. Fifty-six years old. Same age as my father when he died. It’s the proximity between Jennings’s release date and the day he died that’s getting to my cellie. Dying in prison is one thing. Dying in prison less than a month shy of your parole date is entirely different. We tell each other stories of similar tragedies. A man I knew at Sterling had a heart attack while on the can. He even looked like the Mexican version of Elvis. Rodriguez was his name. Back in prison for a six-month turnaround for parole violation. A technicality. He’d served five months of it before he died. And there was the kid who got killed six hours after he stepped off the prison bus—ran across Speer Street and died on impact. My cellie told me about a convict who’d been stabbed to death in Limon three days before he was supposed to kill his number. Another man who, on the eve of his release date, strangled his best friend over a game of pinochle.

  I think about my own mandatory release date, what brought me to prison, and whether there’s any credibility to the theory that sometimes remorse and guilt come first, then the act which justifies it.

  Attention in the facility:

  the facility has been accepted by graveyard shift, twenty-two hundred.

  The overhead lights go out. The light from my cellie’s television remains, flickering wonder on the cinder block walls I stare at. The lotus posture is uncomfortable for me, so I simply cross my legs casually. I imagine the light, with its spastic flashes and barely audible cathode tube pops to be the dharmakaya—the brilliance one sees when the body is ready to release its consciousness. They say there is a review of every thought, word, and action. Not like a movie, but rather an infinite table upon which the delicate knickknack moments of your life are arranged in all directions. You can see how they affect one another, and how they affect the lives of others. At any time while in this state, you can instantly examine any one of these tchotchkes of consciousness and be held accountable for every fingerprint, crack, and degradation you inflicted upon them. I imagine this is only a joyous prospect for a select few. Supposedly, while you’re experiencing the pain and discomfort you’ve caused others, there’s something of a divine presence, a feeling about you and within you that asks—not vocally but empathetically—Have you learned to love yet? And I go to sleep afraid and without an answer.

  Attention in the facility:

  the facility has been accepted by day shift, zero six hundred.

  When I dream of my father, he is sick. And unlike before he died, I am aware of how little time he has left. We are in a car, one of his I’d seen in an old photograph. I am driving and my father is sitting in the backseat, convalescing. I feel the shame for having spent all his money. I sense he already knows, and that he desperately wants to talk to me. Also, he senses that I want to talk to him. But we don’t speak. We just glance at each other forlornly when the other isn’t looking as I drive around a foreign city searching for a bank that does not exist. I usually wake up crying.

  What is it that I really miss? What is it that I’ve truly lost if not my fleeting perceptions? Perceptions of others. Of myself. Of who I’m supposed to be, and what I once was. For my entire life I considered Dad to be the quintessential lady’s man. Tall, dark, handsome. The cool, quiet type. And gentle as a lamb. He was a mechanic and a millwright and in the 1960s he even modeled for some technical publications showcasing the latest machinery his company built. Nothing like GQ, of course, but even when he was captured in the drab beige coveralls, standing next to some drill press, it was easy to see why his nickname was Butch.

  That is why, after he died, it was such a shock to discover those digital photos. I was rifling through his computer looking for information to consolidate his estate. Never in a million years could I have guessed.

  There, wearing nothing but blue garters and panty hose, was the same man who taught me how to use calipers and change the brakes on my car. It was the same man who whistled at women on the beach, went to strip clubs, and was accused by both ex-wives of being the biggest womanizer on earth. And I remember being angry and ashamed. Angry because I felt robbed of my father a second time, because his secret must have been who he really was. Ashamed because I instantly recalled a moment—one of many—of my thoughtless use of the words fag, homo, and pansy over the years that probably helped to keep him a secret from me. I didn’t need to experience the dharmakaya to show me this. I deleted the photos as viciously as Jennings’s name tag was stripped from his cell door.

  Attention in the facility:

  count is clear, count is clear, zero six twenty.

  In Tibet, they do not bury nor cremate their dead. It isn’t something to hide. It isn’t something you can cover even if you had at your disposal all the mass of the Himalayas. They have charnel grounds—hallowed stretches of mountainside where corpse, clothing, and prayer flag rot gradually over time. It is quite public and not isolated from where Tibetans live and work and play. There is even a person whose duty it is to break the body apart in a precise manner, celebrating and inviting the process in honor of the dead.

  Perhaps that’s why we are given time in these manageable Pavlovian chunks. An hour here, two there. Because it’s easier to choke down, unchewed, in a ravenous frenzy that leaves us salivating with anticipation for the next cold scraps of the clock’s gristle and bone. Ten, twenty, even thirty years can be swallowed over the course of a few thousand bardos.

  Attention in the facility:

  cell house 4, first pull to chow, cell house 6, first pull to chow,

  zero six thirty.

  They say that when you’ve memorized the entire six-week menu, you’ve been locked up too long. It is Tuesday, and I know we’re having fried eggs, diced potatoes, grits with two pieces of toast, two tablespoons of jelly, and a pat of whipped butter. I used to love this breakfast. Now I just eat it out of boredom and to avoid hunger pains while working on the rooftops fixing a heating system not even the staff know how to operate. So much effort goes into making ourselves comfortable. So little understanding about how to actually accomplish it. The talk in the chow hall is about last night’s football game, tests, work, and the usual prison bullshitting.

  By the time I return to the cell house, Rourke has moved to the bottom bunk and already has a new cellie. A young kid with a short property sheet, easily forgettable name, brand-new number, and a sentence so heavy he’ll know what he’s having for dinner two decades from now. It doesn’t take long.

  That’s the myth of institutionalization. After your first day, you’ve pretty much seen all the facility has to offer. It’s the days that follow that never seem to change. They’ve removed all the bardos, and the more this place looks like our previous lives, the easier it is to accept the facility and rid ourselves of this damned attention.

  Attention in the facility:

  work gangs out, work gangs out, zero seven hundred.

  TRAP

  BY ERIC BOYD

  Allegheny County Jail (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

  The first night was in the processing area. I desperately tried making phone calls, but the phone system only worked if you already had a wristband with a docket-identification number. You had to already be in jail to use the phones and make calls to try getting out of jail.

  Intake processing wa
s awful. I spoke with a nurse, answering questions about allergies and AIDS. She gave me some shot and it hurt like hell. Then I stood in a line, going through a machine that was blowing puffs of air.

  “What’s that?” I whispered to the guy behind me.

  “The machine? That’s the Tin Police Dog, it sniffs out drugs. See how it’s blowing air from the bottom? At the top it’s suckin’ the air back in and sniffin’. It works good, so if you got anything tucked, you better tuck it deeper.”

  After the Tin Dog, the line stood against a wall, next to a pair of showers. We were called, one by one, to step up to a desk, where a jail worker gave us our wristbands with the doc numbers and handed out a roll of bedding, three sets of red jail shirts and pants, and a bag of toiletries. The blankets looked like house insulation, and most of them were full of holes. The shirts and pants were never the right size, it seemed. Standing in line, any hope of getting out already disintegrating, I just prayed for a decent blanket and a good set of clothes; I was going to spend a year or two with them.

  “Hey, I got two soups for a good blanket,” I heard one of the men in line say to the worker handing out the welcome packages.

  “You gonna be on level one?” the worker replied.

  “Yeah, I’m just in for DUI.”

  “All right, two soups. I don’t want vegetable. I like chicken and chili.”