Attic

by Katherine Dunn

  The gates rolled and the chemical spray killed the room. I got up. Blendina went on laying out her black cards on the bunk between her legs. Glad-Ass stood at the open gate with the empty fire extinguisher in her hand. Patsy was clawing at her. “They were going to rape me with a Tootsie Roll!” Glad-Ass said “Who?” Patsy turned, gaping, and pointed at me.

  —

  When there are crowds on the street I am afraid—they are such a distraction—they are so exciting—and have to hold onto myself very tight for fear I’ll turn around and find I’ve heaved a brick through a window or pulled somebody’s hair or clubbed someone to death without noticing—once I kicked an old lady not thinking because she looked at me disapproving dirty hippie I could see it and caught her in her unsuspecting righteous knee as she passed with the toe of my big-nosed sneaker—she dropped all her packages and when I noticed what I’d done I ran away horrified and bragged about it later as though I’d meant it.

  We took everything out of 4 cell. All the mattresses and bedding, the uniforms, the light bulb. We left only the pink steel walls and bunks and the vague white porcelain toilet gurgling at the back. We locked Patsy all alone there in the dark in 4 cell. All the girls from 4 cell moved into 3 cell. Two cell already was partially doubled up. There were fifteen of us in the one cell. Blendina was the only one who had a bunk alone. I don’t know how she got there. When I straightened up from arranging mattresses, she was there in 3 cell in the same position playing solitaire.

  Most of the girls slept two in a bunk. I and three others slept on the floor beneath the lowers.

  We all hated Patsy. We were there in 3 cell for five crowded days. Each day we hated her more. We couldn’t understand what the trouble with the authorities was. They said Patsy was nuts and didn’t belong here. We agreed and wanted to know why they didn’t get her out of here so we could have our cell back. They said they couldn’t put her into isolation because isolation was punishment and you can’t punish someone for being nuts. They couldn’t get the nuthouse guards to come and take her until a lot of papers were signed and other hoorah gone through. So Patsy stayed in 4 cell alone.

  I was finally in 3 cell and was doing everything I could to make sure I’d be asked to stay. During the day I threw paper cups full of water through the bars at Patsy. At night I pretended to hear her masturbating in the next cell.

  On the fifth day when we came back from dinner I went down to 4 cell for a look at her. She was on her knees at the back of the cell with her head in the toilet. Her Bible lay beside her. Her arms lay out on either side of the bowl. Hey! come look at this! She’s drinking out of the toilet! The other girls came and looked. Kathy shouted “Patsy! Patsy! Are you all right?” Then I realized there was something strange about the way she was just leaning into the bowl like that. Kathy ran for a matron. It was Glad-Ass again. She unlocked the gate and went in.

  I went in to the bull pen john and puked. By the time I came out they had taken her away and 4 cell was more or less back to normal with Blendina in her own bunk playing solitaire with a new deck. I went into 3 cell to find my bedding and straighten it out. It was gone. Somebody had dumped it on my old bunk in 4 cell.

  —

  Sometimes at night when the gates are closed and the lights are first off, Kathy sings. “If I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly.” I heard somewhere that on the outside she is a drummer with a country western band. She sings like a man—deep and graveled from somewhere deep between her legs.

  When the toilet in 3 cell goes bad the plumber comes with his male-smelling khakis and his heavy shoes to sit on a rear bunk and smoke while Kathy fixes it. She with her sleeves rolled up over pale long arms as hard as a boy’s and she with square hands pulling at long open-mouthed wrenches and long stiff spirals of wire—they talk outside of us over the white bowl considering its secret coldly familiar—like the abortionist or the carver of jack-o’-lanterns—we stand outside waiting—quiet—amazed at their skill—frightened as the pieces show themselves.

  —

  It’s been months now. The winter is old and was just beginning when I came here. The snow is gray now even as it falls. There is more light. Even the nights are no longer totally black. Strange things happen in the cells these nights. There seem to be things moving behind the bars. I am positive now that Blendina goes on playing in the dark. I can hear her cards as I lie not sleeping. I dream strangely when I do sleep. Last night I saw all the dykes in a big public john like at the bus terminal. They were dressed as priests and were holding mass. They each went into a booth to wait for some woman to come to confession. I came in dressed as a novice nun. I went into Kathy’s booth. She blessed me and said that she had watched me sleeping in my coffin and seen me masturbating on my crucifix. I cried and repented and she took pity on me and absolved me.

  —

  It must have been two weeks before Christmas. A couple of well dressed Jaycee types came into the cell with two large cardboard boxes. Kathy talked to them and they treated her very respectfully. She and the girls from 3 cell spent that whole day stuffing envelopes and addressing them for Christmas seals. They didn’t ask me to help but I saw one of the cards drop on the floor. It had a little crippled kid on it. He was leaning on crutches and had eyes like Dorothy’s. At the top of the card was the one white word GIVE.

  —

  No one talks about it. No one says anything about what happened in the cells last night. The way the tanks are set up all the sounds from any point on the floor are carried throughout the floor by the steel of the walls and bunks. A sustained sound at a certain pitch sets up a harmonic that moves in waves returning and going out again. Last night somewhere in the tanks someone started moaning at just that pitch. It echoed through the floor until we couldn’t tell where it had started. A low steady note of unceasing pain. Others joined in, all on the same pitch and more and more people until all of C tank was moaning—was breathing out that one note. I listened and realized that the moan came from my throat too. At first I was sure the moan had sprung from B tank but I could feel the sound waves pouring back through the steel from D tank, and from far-off A tank.

  Somehow I couldn’t be sure that this moaning hadn’t come first from my own throat. It was a steady thing, not dependent on a single breath but flowing from us all without volition. I began to cry. All around me the women were crying, tears falling and sobs beating through the walls and the walls ached with our tears and the men moaned on and the walls, the steel plates between us, magnified the sound till the stone of the building shook with the sounds of men and women weeping. The windows rattled and the walls shook with the weight of the sound but no matron came to throw lights on us—no one moved in the bunks. We all lay as though dead and weeping.

  After a long time the sound died out, but so gradually that you never noticed its stopping. Even now with the white light casting metallic shadows through the bars I can feel it. Still, nobody talks about it.

  —

  That night I heard them in D tank. My bunk hangs on the last wall of C tank. On the other side, that wall holds D tank bunks. On this night there must have been a new boy. I don’t know whether D tank is colored or white. I heard a grunt and then my bunk jumped as something heavy fell on the bunk next to me with the wall of quarter-inch steel between. I could hear the voices through the wall. “How’s that gag? Man don’t let it slip. Let’s see his ass— Wow! Goddamn, he’s never been fucked! Let me on him! Hold him tight boys I’m gonna ride him hard!” My bunk shook and rattled as though I were bouncing on it. “Give it to him—give it—ram him—oh Sparky, you never did me that way!—get the hell off there and let somebody else have a turn.” It went on for a long time. I lay touching the wall, trying to reach through the steel. I heard the other girls breathing slowly. It seems to me that Blendina’s cards were still slapping on one another even here in the darkness. After a long time they left him. I heard him crying quietly next to me. His voice was warm and low even in the c
rying. I thought he must be very young.

  —

  Every day the matron comes in with the mail. She stands in the bull pen and calls out names—there are letters from lawyers and lovers and families and busy-bodies—sometimes there is money or a card—for a while the letters are being read—slowly, painfully—everything is quiet except the murmur of Kathy reading to Dorothy who never got around to going to school. Then Rose laughs at something in the letter from Seagullville. “Sherman says he’s gained five pounds since he’s been there—he’s gained two and George has gained three! He calls it George!” Then they talk and show letters—or cry or sit still looking at nothing with a letter hanging from their fingers.

  The matrons read all the mail before they hand it out—every letter is read before it is mailed from the tank. People who have been here a while pay no attention to who reads it besides the addressee. They write anything—everything—or dictate it to whoever is handy if they haven’t got “the hang of lettering.”

  Patsy got no mail while she was here.

  Blendina has never received a piece of mail.

  I got a letter about two weeks after I came here. It had been mailed in the jail and read by the deputy—it went down to the K.C.P.O.—came back and was read by the matron—then I got it. It was from Dean—a guy who had been working with my magazine crew. He got busted the same day I was for burglary. If he knocked on a door and nobody answered he broke in. They traced his robberies through nearly every town we had stopped in from Seattle to Boston—New Orleans to Kansas City.

  He was a big loud brag. He bumped against girls and came on as sincere as a used-car salesman.

  We all hated him. He always had money. Once in the car between Green River and Laramie he had singed my eyelashes when his butane lighter flamed too high. The manager looked at him hard. “Where did you get that lighter?” “I found it.” He stuck it into his pocket and was quiet a while.

  The letter said he was sorry for what he’d done—that everyone had been very kind to him and he was going to straighten up and get a good job when he got out. He prayed a little at the end. I tore it up and took a shower. I used to look at him out of the corners of my eyes sometimes.

  The other letter came a long time later. It surprised me because nobody on the outside knew I was there. I hadn’t written out. It was in ball-point pen on ruled notepaper in a big dumb hand. It said:

  “You don’t know me but I heard about you from Horace [the crew manager]. I use to work on a mag. crew and would like to help if you’ll let me. I know a good lawyer who could get you off. I’ll come and see you this Sunday and we can talk about it. If there’s anything you need like money or cigarettes or anything just let me know. Your friend Jerry Simmons.”

  I folded it up carefully with the ring holes inside and put it in my pocket. I lay on the bunk. That was Friday. Saturday I thought he would be blond and young and concerned with “human rights.” I washed my hair and brushed it dry and went to bed early.

  Sunday is visitors’ day. At the far end of the bull pen there are three little windows in the wall at eye level. They look like portholes—the glass is thick and brown from some old fire. Beneath each window is a grid. It is a microphone and speaker. You can’t see anything through the windows unless you know what you’re looking for. The speakers crackle any voice. The visitors stand in the hall outside and shout through a speaker—the inmates stand at the windows inside and shout. You’re not allowed in the bull pen during visiting hours unless you have a visitor—then they call your name. You come out of the cell fast. It’s very noisy. There are girls crowding at the windows jumping and shouting each to different people outside. They reach up their hands and touch the glass and someone on the other side touches their hand through the glass. Everyone shouts. No one can hear. Someone says “Let me see you” and a girl runs back and jumps up on the bull pen table to pose and primp and laugh. Someone says “Let me see you” and someone outside moves to the far side of the hall and poses and turns around and spreads their hands. There are fights through the glass, and flirtations, insults and innuendoes, slights and questions. Questions—what when why when who when when when. It starts at one o’clock right after lunch and goes on till three. Then it stops.

  All morning long there is fixing of hair and makeup and ironing of uniforms.

  Every week Jean washes her pink hair and rats it into cotton candy high on her head and draws thick red eyebrows that arch and then drop down to her cheekbones and takes off her size fourteen and puts on a size ten uniform and her best bra and paints her nails siren red and shows the picture of Pudge with her D.A. and cabby’s shoulders.

  Joyce puts her short poodle cut up in pink foam rollers and then combs it into bangs and puts on blue eye shadow and dark lipstick and smooths her uniform over her high full breasts and long sloping buttocks.

  Every week Kathy wets her pale hair and slicks it back into a D.A. with a short black comb—pushing it back over the ears with the heels of her hands.

  Every week Dorothy spends the night with her long hair in rags so the corkscrews will be firm and full for Sunday. She stands in front of the mirror practicing pooching her lips so her gums don’t show when she speaks.

  And all the others—even me this time—he might want me—but never Blendina.

  Lunchtime—we can’t eat—oxtail stew again—the small bones rolling on our tongues.

  The tank is warm—the pillow on my bunk is thick and white—sheets, a blanket—a pencil—4 cell is all right—you don’t have to be sociable and chatter all the time—you can’t—but then usually I don’t want to anyway.

  We are so afraid of eating each other. Sharks do—wolves do—it is irresistible—there are no vegetarian summer camps in the sea—the messiah leads his enclave of rusted adolescents to the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais where they consume carrot cookies and high protein vegetable patties with pure cane sugar cubes waiting for the end of the world and casting each other’s horoscopes—in the winter with the snow crusting we sat by the heater listening to newscasts of UFO sightings while Mother told us that when the aliens came they would want a few very special people to take back with them to study. She said I would be one and I sat hugging myself waiting anxiously for them to arrive—I was ready to go then and dreamed that night on my belly with my head on my arm that I woke and the pale soft hairs on my arms were long and silky and thick as goat’s hair and all over my body the white goat’s hair was growing. The Goat Woman would know—she lived in a trailer by the garbage dump and all the sick animals went to her with her cotton dresses and her shoes cut from inner tubes—she never combed her hair and the animals lived there undisturbed. I would run tiptoe desperate over the grass afraid to step on the bugs—the million bugs who would meet me in heaven when I died—and never pick a flower—never eat meat or milk or eggs for fear of them—not love of them but fear of meeting them alive in me—how disgusting they all were—the living things—and I sitting in the tree above the brindle bull giggling as the Goat Woman went past and carefully not touching what she touched and carefully not shitting near the well or the garden for fear of typhoid in the rutabagas—great bleeding yellow typhoid tomatoes.

  It’s time. Glad-Ass is calling me. It’s slow and thick all the way to the window—looking through with my hands braced against the wall of the tank—hair floating behind me—he has yellow eyes he is yellow and dark with orange hair he looks at me with holes in his face—pimple scars in Man-Tan his nails are black at the glass his teeth are showing long and bucked and black with pale vaulting gums he is tall and cheap and looks past me at Goldie dancing on the table with her long jaw hanging below black lipstick he says Hey! You know I tried to get that little piece in a bar out on Michigan Avenue a month or so ago but we couldn’t agree on the price. He is talking—looking at me again from the yellow eyes—he wants me to move back so he can see me and I hate the saddle shoes two sizes too big and my bare legs where they won’t let me have a razor to shave them and my arms
feel thick and everybody else’s argument gets tangled in the conversation. He wants me to admit I did it and he knows a lawyer if I’ll live with him in Santa Monica he has plenty of money and used to manage his own magazine crew. He can see I’m no dumby his eyes looking at Goldie but no I’ve got class and are a smart chick and have probably had a lot of help learning how to keep a fellow happy and I say yes yes of course and when? he’s gone.

  A few days later the lawyer comes and I go out of the tank into a little room with him and sit on a chair with a back instead of a bench and the lawyer thinks I did it and I did it but I won’t say again and he wants to know who’ll pay and I look at him with the biggest saddest most innocent but he goes away and Dogsbody is quite quite dead and I don’t even care any more but just want to lie quietly on the rough brown blanket on my bunk in 4 cell.

  Kathy is lonely. Linda is gone. She was tall and golden and hard young. They sat straddling the bench facing the same direction, Kathy behind—Linda’s buttocks pressed deep between her thighs. They cuddled and touched softly—gentle and ravenous. Linda sat in the key-cell with the red bulb on—her long legs reaching—long arms moving bonelessly. They talked in low tones after the lights were out. She left for two years in the federal pen—for helping her motorcycle boyfriend rob a bank—she cried—Kathy gulped and patted her awkwardly. Kathy sings now if I had the wings

  —

  Every day after lunch Dorothy writes to Mac. She and Kathy sit in the corner on the concrete with a pad and pencil—Dorothy on her knees, her belly round below her breasts—corkscrews hanging over her face whispering—Kathy with her knees up, toes pointed in, cracking her knuckles and licking the lead—I love you honey…I miss you more than anything…I’m fine and I hope you are and I hope you don’t have no more trouble with Lester…Please don’t be mad at me….