But worrying if he would ever have another sufficiently good idea was now a luxury he could no longer afford because it wasn’t enough to have a good idea one day. It probably wasn’t enough to have one even now. He really needed to have had one before now because, having spent five years at Columbia with only one book to show for it, an untenured academic seeking tenure was in very big trouble. It would take an internal departmental committee to decide to put him up for tenure. That was standard practice. If this happened, the matter would then go before a university-wide committee, the ‘ad hoc’ committee, which consisted of academics from all over the university. But the real cut-off point was his own department, now headed by his friend Charles McCray, and Charles had more than an inkling that Adam had nothing about to come out. Adam would have discussed it with Charles if he had. What Charles didn’t know was that it wasn’t a matter of simply buying time, even were that a simple matter. Adam had hit a brick wall. He didn’t have even the seed of something interesting. He felt he was finished and he didn’t want to put Charles through the unpleasant task of having to confirm that he was indeed finished. Charles had been leaving messages gently suggesting that they needed to talk. Their friendship and history would allow only gentleness. But for how long? The days in which it was legitimate not to have yet responded to any of Charles’ messages had evaporated till there were, so to speak, only hours left. Soon Adam’s failure to respond would itself become the first topic of their next conversation. Perhaps, after all, that’s what Adam wanted.
Adam was going to have to talk to him sooner or later about Diana, who lay beside him every night. He had almost struck her in his near convulsion shortly before 4.30 am that Monday morning, she lying asleep beside him, and he, in a time unrelated to real time, an eight-year-old boy craning his neck on the corner of 43rd Street and 5th Avenue. He had never discovered the little girl’s name, the name of the orphan in the city of orphans, and even then, just before 4.30 am that Monday morning, only hours away from teaching, from assaulting a class with his particular version of ‘What is History?’, he was still, all those years later, replacing the missing picture in his mind of the little girl victim of 1863 from the Colored Orphan Asylum with the image of Denise McNair, who had been killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, for the same reason by the same people a hundred years later.
Adam saw little eleven-year-old, feisty yet caring Denise McNair. He could have fixed on any of the other child victims. It was her eyes. More than anything else, it was her eyes. Not merely beautiful, they were expressive. They held more than a child’s eyes should hold; mischief, warmth, intelligence, sweetness, yes, but also a kind of understanding, as though she understood things you were going to need to understand. That’s who Adam saw when he saw the little girl victim of 1863 from the Colored Orphan Asylum.
‘Dad!’
On a black-and-white television screen a newsreader read the news for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. A little boy sat cross-legged in front of the television waiting to hear something to remember that might interest his father at the end of the week when he spoke to him over the telephone all the way across all those oceans. His father had once told him he ‘liked the sound of this Hawke guy’. What was his name? Bob Hawke. Ever since then Adam had collected as many facts as he could about Bob Hawke to tell his father.
Bob Hawke, an Oxford University Rhodes Scholar, was the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ first paid advocate before the Arbitration Commission, the body that determined the minimum wage for the whole country. Subsequently a president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and a member of the governing board of the International Labour Organisation, he campaigned against apartheid in South Africa, among other ills. Jake Zignelik liked the sound of the guy.
Searching for something to tell his father that might interest him, Adam would phone him from his mother’s house and talk about Bob Hawke. And Jake, when stretched for something to say to his son that mattered even a little, would often ask, ‘How’s your mate, Bob Hawke?’
The little boy sat alone cross-legged on the carpet in front of the black-and-white news broadcast and then ran around the house from room to room looking for somebody to tell. But each room was empty. Diana was still asleep. She wanted to have a child. She wanted to marry Adam and have a child with him.
‘Dad!’
Charles had been leaving messages gently suggesting that they needed to talk. Adam had hit a brick wall. He wanted to spare Charles the embarrassment of having to tell him that it was all over for him. Diana wanted them to have a child. If you have a child you have to be able to feed it.
‘Watch your suitcase! Always watch your suitcase.’
When the eight-year-old boy craned his neck to look up at the corner of 43rd and 5th he saw the face, the eyes, of Denise McNair. If you have a child you have to know its name. Don’t you have to know the names of all the children? Can you have a child and not give it a name? Can it be done? Maybe someone would tell him because he really didn’t know.
‘Dad!’
By the time Hawke had been elected Prime Minister of Australia, Adam’s mother had died of breast cancer and his father, Jake Zignelik, had died of a heart attack. Shortly before 4.30 am that Monday morning Diana woke up beside the writhing Adam, her Adam, and put her arms around him to try to calm him.
‘Shhh! It’s okay. It’s okay.’ She whispered it soothingly in the greyish-blue light of their Morningside Heights apartment in the north-west corner of an island in the city of orphans.
‘Shhh!’
She warmed his back with her body and hugged him. Adam, exhausted, was gasping for air. His cheeks were wet. She held him tighter. She loved him. She wanted to have a child with him. Adam was awake now. In a couple of weeks they would be separated.
part three
THE BUS JERKED TO A STOP at a set of traffic lights on its way uptown. The sudden change of momentum woke Lamont Williams. He had made it through the day, his fourth day as a probationary employee in Building Services at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He had even managed to find a seat on the bus, a window seat, on the first of the two buses he needed to catch to get home to the Bronx. For a moment he had fallen asleep, his head against the window, and in that moment he relived random snatches of the years he had spent in Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. He sometimes dreamed he was back there or in Woodbourne where he had spent three years before being transferred to Mid-Orange. Sometimes he dreamed of his daughter who, when he woke on the bus going home, was eight years old. Her age was one thing that didn’t depend on whether he was able to find her or not. These dreams, the ones with his daughter in them, didn’t require him to be asleep.
It was the end of his shift and the bus was crowded. His head was still against the window and no one watching would have realised he was awake as he looked around through almost closed eyes. The man seated beside him was reading the New York Post. An older white woman next to this man stood trying to read what she could of the man’s paper while holding a small cage that contained a very docile cat. Lamont had trouble making out the age or breed of the cat but preferred not to risk looking more carefully in case the cat-lady, observing he was awake and taking an interest in her cat, attempted to press a claim to his seat.
Lamont’s daughter might be anywhere in the city. Then again, she might not be in the city at all. She might not even be in the state. And yet, she could be on that very bus. It was too crowded to see everyone but even if Lamont could, he hadn’t seen his daughter since she was two and a half, so who exactly was he continually looking for since his release? How many light-skinned black girls could he find on buses, on the subway and on the street if he looked hard enough? He knew he could get arrested for looking too hard, not that that was going to stop him.
Somewhere in the city there was another bus crawling through the streets, exhaling fumes and edging its nose tentatively between the traffic. This one was just moderately crow
ded and only a handful of people were standing. One of those standing was a child. A light-skinned black girl with braided hair tied tight with red ribbons, she was aged somewhere between seven and ten. On top of a red T-shirt she wore a mid-season jacket, unzipped, as if in anticipation of a change of season in the middle of her day. Seeing a newly vacant seat towards the back of the bus in the section with the row of seats that flip up to accommodate wheelchairs the young girl took it. She could not have been sitting for much more than a minute when she offered her newly acquired seat to a man she’d just noticed who was standing talking to a seated friend of his.
The standing friend had not by any measure been desperate to sit down and when the little girl actively volunteered her seat to him he was instantly arrested by her charm, her grace, her politeness, and by the warmth of her personality. She had delivered all this with the manner of her offer and with something inside her she was too young to realise she had and certainly too young to name. After engaging her in conversation for a few minutes he asked her whether she was travelling alone. Unfazed by this question, the young girl with the braided hair tied tight with red ribbons waved her hand in the direction of the other end of the bus as if to indicate she was not travelling alone. At this the man seemed relieved.
A stop or two after this, the young girl moved towards the exit. There were two older women, somewhere in their sixties, standing with her by the exit. They had made their way from the front of the bus. She talked freely to them and an observer of the whole scene could have been forgiven for thinking that one of these women was the little girl’s grandmother. The two women in their sixties and the young girl were among a number of passengers who got off at the next stop. Through the still open door it was possible to hear one of the women – they were in the street by then – ask the girl, ‘Are you travelling alone, dear?’
There was a story Lamont had been told in Mid-Orange about a certain cat-loving Corrections Officer who had worked there some years before Lamont’s time.
The CO had found a prisoner feeding cats that had strayed into the prison. Not only did he not write him a ticket that would have gone on the cat-feeding prisoner’s record, he also let him continue feeding the cats. Then some of the other prisoners started helping this prisoner and the CO, seeing the effect caring for the cats had on these often embittered, angry men, started bringing bags of dry cat food into the prison to help them. Then one day, when the wrong CO caught the wrong prisoner with a bag of the dry cat food, all hell broke loose and what had been tolerated till then no longer was.
After a while there were not so many cats finding their way into Mid-Orange. But somebody in authority must have noticed the effect taking care of the cats was having on those prisoners involved because, by the time Lamont had been transferred from Woodbourne to Mid-Orange, a program had been established for prisoners to care for animals. It involved dogs, not cats, and the prisoners weren’t simply feeding the dogs, they were training them. ‘Puppies Behind Bars’, the program was called. Prisoners were being taught to train dogs to be guide dogs for the blind. After September 11, some dogs were even trained for the New York Police Department and for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They were trained to sniff for explosives. Of course the dogs were not exposed to explosives in the prison but much of the training was the same as that for guide dogs. They needed to be socialised, taught how to be around people, and how to follow instructions even in situations of stress. So did the dogs.
Like many of the prisoners, Lamont had applied to work in the dog program. But hardly anybody got the chance to work in that detail. It was a feel-good story. It was even a true story. But it didn’t alter the fact that most of the programs existed in name only for the vast bulk of the Mid-Orange prison population. There just weren’t enough places in any of the programs so you put your name down and waited like you waited for everything else. If you had something to trade or to sell, or you were well connected, you received preferential treatment. The saying went, ‘It’s not who you know but who you blow.’
‘Well, you gots to be anatomically gifted one way or the other,’ Numbers had explained to Lamont not long after Lamont had been transferred from Woodbourne to Mid-Orange, just as Numbers himself had been some time earlier. When Lamont sought clarification Numbers tried to explain.
‘Well now, how else a straight brother gonna know how to give head? There’s “trial and error”, I guess, but you don’t wanna go gettin’ that wrong. And even “trial and error” don’t apply at the other end. Know what I’m saying?’
‘No.’
‘Okay, there’s some who so sensitive down there they tear up every second time they take a dump. These brothers frightened of roughage. But with some brothers it just slide up nice and easy like they was born already with Vaseline up there. So when the CO spreads your cheeks after a contact visit from family and such, this man can breathe easy knowing these dumb-ass lazy COs ain’t gonna go that far up inside of him. Now that man truly blessed. He a rich man inside; a living, breathing, walking Fort Knox. Can’t no one learn that. It’s a gift from God.’
Lamont was not so anatomically, or otherwise, blessed. He put his name down for the puppy program just as he did for plumbing, carpentry and horticulture. He got none of them. Like almost half the prisoners in Mid-Orange he worked as a porter keeping the prison clean, sweeping up cigarette butts and other garbage the prisoners had left. But it was the dog program he’d really wanted to be in, particularly after he’d caught sight of a handful of other prisoners in the distance walking and then grooming some Labs not much older than puppies. Privately he’d prided himself on his capacity to limit his wants and expectations. That seemed to him the best way to survive his sentence. Whatever comfort even cigarettes might have provided he refused to smoke them in order to avoid being addicted to a currency he would have to trade for. But seeing the dogs hurt him unexpectedly. It cut through him.
He wondered if he would ever again hold his daughter in his arms, squeeze her tight, rock her to sleep. He told himself he would. He promised himself. What did she look like now? Did his daughter look like him? Did she look like her mother or like the combination of them that she was? Often in prison when he caught sight of his own reflection he tried to imagine different combinations of his face and that of his daughter’s mother merging into the face of a little girl. He was in the yard at Mid-Orange sweeping up over by a puddle one day in spring when he thought for a moment that he had it perfectly. There in the puddle, as he narrowed his eyes to a squint, was finally, completely still, a little girl’s face. That was probably how she looked. Had to be. He could summon up the image again if only he could find and hold a clear reflection of himself.
‘Three years,’ Numbers pronounced. ‘No one come no more after three years. They give up on you … like you dead. You can cross Christmas off of your calendar too. Rip it out.’
‘What’s that “three years” bullshit?’ Lamont asked.
‘I’m just saying.’
‘Ain’t no law say people don’t visit after three years.’
‘It’s a law o’ averages, Lamont.’
‘Well, if it’s an average then some people stop coming before three years up and some still coming after three years, right? That’s what average means.’
‘I guess,’ Numbers conceded before adding, ‘I ain’t never met no one here above average like that.’
Lamont spent the first three years of his six-year sentence at Woodbourne and the last three years at Mid-Orange. Of those few who came to see him from time to time at Woodbourne, it was only his grandmother who stayed the more than three-year course and continued to visit him at Mid-Orange. She wasn’t able to come very often because of her work as a kitchen hand and the distance from Co-op City. And she was elderly and not well. His cousin Michelle visited him in Mid-Orange once.
‘One good thing ‘bout Mid-Orange,’ Numbers told him when they re-met at the beginning of Lamont’s time there, ‘they got four c
offee shops within a five-mile radius. That’s more ‘n usual for your average medium-security country correctional facility. Increase the chances someone come visit you. Problem is … they all Dunkin’ Donuts. No one drive two hours eat that shit.’
During the early part of Lamont’s time at Woodbourne some of the people from his neighbourhood made the trek to visit him. His old friend Michael couldn’t come because he was serving time somewhere else. Michael had been the one to get Lamont to drive his van to the liquor store for what Lamont hadn’t realised would become an armed robbery, the one for which he’d serve six years. But Michael’s younger brother, who had only ever been an acquaintance, came quite a few times in the beginning. Lamont didn’t understand why he was coming. He wasn’t an unfriendly young man but he was a good deal younger and clearly didn’t enjoy coming and, in any case, he had Michael, his own brother, to visit in another prison if he needed an excuse to visit a prison. He didn’t like making conversation for conversation’s sake much more than Lamont did but he came anyway and asked the usual questions with the usual, maybe even more than usual, discomfort.
After a while it became clear to Lamont that Michael’s brother was coming because of Michael, possibly even on his instructions. That was the only explanation he could find. Lamont reasoned that Michael had never meant for him to become involved in the robbery. He himself had fallen under the influence of a much younger man, a reckless man with an addiction and a gun and a way of talking, a way of being, that made certain people want to be around him. The idea of robbing the liquor store was the younger man’s and he’d arrived at it only once Lamont had driven them to the liquor store. Michael said that he hadn’t known about it until he and the younger man had left Lamont in the van and gone into the store. Had Michael gone along with it? From the liquor store’s security video footage it looked as though he had. The younger man had the gun on him. Michael hadn’t known. That’s what he said. There was hardly any interval between the younger man’s conception of the plan and its execution. He was already carrying the gun. They had Lamont’s van. It must have seemed to the younger man too good an opportunity to pass up. So, Lamont figured, Michael’s younger brother had to be visiting him for Michael. It was an attempt to make things right as much as possible for the mess he’d unintentionally got him into, given he wasn’t in a position to send him any money.
The Street Sweeper Page 6
