There is a larger yard with a basketball court and a swimming pool to which the unit has access for one and a half to two hours per day, depending on the roster. The water in the pool contains traces of blood and urine and, occasionally, excrement. I have never been in it. One of the prisoners in the unit is known to be dying. He has full-blown AIDS. He was given between two and five years to live but the smart money inside gives him two to two and a half. More than one inmate will take bets on the timing of his death. The odds shift according to rumor and speculation based on conversations and fleeting untrained observations by inmates with vested interests in the outcome. But the man must die from his illness. This is absolutely imperative. It’s understood that there’ll be no payout if the man dies from any intervening act. An addict who became a professional armed robber, he’s appealing his sentence but the courts are said to be jammed and overworked. Nobody here is disconcerted by the prospect of a successful appeal. I’ve heard it said more than once “The cunt will never die.”
There are five prisoners in the unit whom I know to have hepatitis C. Some of these are included in the group who take bets on the date of the HIV-infected armed robber’s death. This is my community. My twenty-two-hour-a-day confinement in my cell is essentially self-imposed and I have no wish to spend part of even one of those hours in the common area with the other prisoners. As it is, I still don’t feel safe. My food is delivered by prisoners. I have two hours each day where I’m potentially a target. All it takes is for the relevant prison officer to look away at the wrong time. I keep expecting this to happen, even on my way to or from the visit center.
I see Alex almost every day. It is not good for him that he comes so often. It must be destroying his life. Something is, but we never talk about it. He won’t talk about his children or about his wife who is divorcing him. Instead we talk about my case, my treatment in here, my thoughts, my memories, my parents, my ex-girlfriend—always about me. I often wish he would talk more about himself, his children, his own childhood in Europe, because I am so thoroughly tired of me. Perhaps that is part of my problem, part of why I came to take Anna’s son. I have always spent too much time hearing my own voice. It was always the loudest and the strongest. I know there was Alex and, of course, even Angelique, but they are much newer to the conversation than I am, the incessant conversation going on in my head. They have been like brief interruptions compared with my own voice droning on for as long as I can remember, driving me crazy with the idea that I, who was incapable of creating a mature and stable adult life for myself, could help the world, or could help anyone.
“But, Simon, you did create an adult world for yourself,” Alex tells me. He still tells me this, even after what I’ve done, even in here.
“No, I didn’t. I drank too much, I rarely left the apartment. I lost touch with people . . . I am an inadequate human being, a dreamer, who never grew up. People have worse parents than mine, people lose girlfriends, people lose jobs. They don’t opt out of life. They don’t borrow someone else’s child.”
“Yes. It’s true, you romanticized Anna and your relationship with her, but it’s only in taking her son that you fall off the graph.”
“You know I wasn’t going to hurt him.”
“Yes, of course I know that. I told her that the night you took him. But even now you still haven’t adequately explained why you did it. What, at the time, did you think you would be achieving?”
He has asked me this many times in many different ways since that day I called from the police station. That day, in my horror at the realization of what I had just done, not to Sam or Anna or her husband, but to myself, and in my panic under another kind of questioning, the matter of “why” seemed like something that could wait till everything else was over. But it’s still not over and I find myself so infected by the misery of this place, so caught up in the battle for my own mind, the battle to stay sane, if you can call it that, and alive, that it is genuinely hard to remember the state of mind that made it all seem like a good idea.
But he keeps asking me and, though I keep avoiding the question, when he goes and when Mr. Greer is satisfied that I am not concealing anything in any cavity of my body, the door slams shut and I try to remember my psychological state during the period leading up to the time that it seemed like a good idea. How did I come to place photos of her around my home? How many people around the world who have not yet fallen off Alex’s graph are eating dinner night after night after night on their own? There are the divorced. There are widows and widowers, of course. We think of them as old. They are not all old, but even those who are—are they in some way meant to eat dinner each night on their own? Do they deserve it? Have they earned it? How many nights must you spend alone for every night you were not on your own?
It feels ridiculous to make a salad for only yourself. You wash the lettuce, tear it apart, cut up the tomatoes, add a little dressing, and wonder whether it will feel less ridiculous, hollow, artificial, with the passage of time. Don’t add dressing. No one is watching. Try to cover the hum of the fluorescent strip light and the refrigerator with the radio. The radio is worse. It shouts at you, advertisements, drum and bass, little girl or boy groups voicing perfectly timed musical clichés to computerized accompaniments, right-wing shock jocks with switchboards lit up by fear, hate, and ignorance, or New Age flatulence masquerading as enlightenment. Turn it off and that just leaves you the hum and the salad. If you don’t add dressing, it will be over that much faster. Then you try leaving out the tomatoes. I’ve mentioned this to Alex, even offered to let him publish it as his own, include it in the DSM IV, the idea that there is a definite warning sign for people living by themselves—the salad dressing stops appearing in the salad, then the tomatoes, then the salad itself. Then you’re just left with a bowl which, sooner or later, you fill with cereal and milk and then—for the hell of it—you start to add a little scotch to the milk.
If now the market determines that your job ought to go the way of the tomatoes and there is no place you have to be at any particular time anymore, you will find yourself drinking alcohol dangerously, without any pretext. Some people drink to celebrate, others to unwind after work, others to lubricate social intercourse. This is not anymore why you drink or why you drink so much more than at any other time in your life. At first, you drink because it’s one of the last things that they, the others, the still-functioning, gainfully employed, socially participating others do that you can do. Maybe you drink for the taste. Then you drink as a dare. You dare yourself to have another one when it isn’t really appropriate, to see whether anyone will notice. But there isn’t ever anyone to notice, and you drink upon the realization of this. Then you drink to see if you can get from 2:17 P.M. to 3:55 P.M. without noticing the time, without feeling it. The idea of slicing a tomato when you’ve reached this stage is completely out of the question.
No one calls, and after a while you feel pleased with how long it has been since the last time you thought about how long it had been since somebody called. You can’t remember when you last remembered. You must really be getting good at living like this. And it’s just as well because when the phone rings by this time, even when it’s a wrong number, a hang-up, or a telemarketer, you don’t want to speak to anyone. You’re in no fit state to speak to anyone. It’s not even a matter of sobriety. Even sober, you’re in no fit state to speak to anyone. You’re out of practice. When you do have to speak to someone, say, someone selling you bread, milk, cereal, toilet paper, or scotch, you have trouble. You have to practice the words and the tone of the small talk, and it always sounds stilted. You’re either too vague or too focused or too polite. The person serving you looks at you strangely and you know you’ve done it badly. You can’t do it anymore.
The neighbors can do it but not you. They’re living your life for you on your behalf. They change their cars, their houses. They don’t concern themselves with the problems of the world, its trouble spots, local and foreign. Places in which t
hey don’t live are potential vacation destinations which they will discuss with their local travel agent. On election day they vote not as their parents and their parents before them did but as their perception of their socioeconomic status demands. They read their newspapers in the thirty-second bites through which they’ve been conditioned by TV to see the world. Not that it’s ever quiet enough to read for longer amid the amplified noise they continuously pipe through their houses. You hear it, whether you want to or not. You hear them laugh at night with their dinner guests. You hear them in their beds. The groans must be exaggerated.
You ask yourself if it was ever really that good. A little numbed, you turn on a small light in another room, go to a cabinet and to a drawer that you don’t visit much anymore, and fumble in the half-light for images. And there she is, lovely as ever. There are more images, deeper and deeper in the drawer. Ah yes, you remember. It was that good. Remember her skin, you weak bastard. Concentrate and you won’t hear them. Smooth, olive, soft, a sweet scent on her neck, on the back of her neck and below her ears, and you burying your face in her hair. Remember her body. You never knew where to start. Remember the taste of her, how she would take you. Remember the different rhythms she had for you, the change in the tension of her body. Remember the tightness of her, the many ways she held you, the sweetness of it. Whatever they have next door is a far cry from what you and she once had. If you weren’t so drunk, you’d call out. They would know who it was, but to hell with them. No, not really. To hell with you, and when they do finally stop, your head is between two pillows and you are breathing in the alcohol from your own breath. They wake you in the morning. You hear them getting up. There is a point to getting up but for the life of you you can’t find it until you see, through the mess you’ve made of everything, her. The photographs of her are still with you, and you get up to go and look at them again.
The place is a mess. Things are wearing out all around you but she looks at you with those dark eyes, and the memory of how it felt to look into them suggests that maybe only she is real and that everything else, the solitary existence, the unemployment, the whole damn mess, is imagined. She has to be real. There she is in the photographs as true as anything ever was and in some of them you are there with her. You remember when each one was taken, although sometimes you wish you didn’t. In one she is sitting on your knee. You have your arms around her. Remember how that felt: her weight on your lap, your arms meeting around her waist. She is smiling. You are not. Something had made her smile, but the smile was not for joy. Perhaps it was for you, because she knew you might need it afterwards. And perhaps you looked sad for the same reason, because you had guessed there would be an afterwards. As she sat on your knee and smiled, not genteely, but with that fierce warmth and intelligence shining in her eyes that you would never again find in any other woman, did you suspect she would leave you so soon? As you carry her now to the bookshelves, as you hold her, blow dust from her, or wipe your eyes, you must have known.
But she, as she was then, looks at you now, is there for you now, and you can’t think of a reason this ever has to change. Why put those photos away? It’s your past too, as much as hers. And . . . No, wait. It’s your past more than it’s hers. Alex says that’s the whole problem or that’s the start of it. You need her more than she needs you. You can admit it if you have to, but in all likelihood you won’t ever have to because nobody will see her there propped up against the bookshelves. Nobody ever comes here. And anyway, where is the harm? You look back fondly on the time you were involved with this woman. It’s as simple as that. To the poetry and novels, music and videotaped movies, to the list of things you call upon during difficult times, you add her, the memory of her, neuronal and photographic. Is that so unhealthy? People use all sorts of things to get by. Your devices are not immoral. They’re not even illegal. Or they weren’t then, before they became immoral and illegal, before they became unhealthy.
I have to have the chance to convince Anna that it was only my health that was compromised, not his. Sam was never in any danger from me. I was not the one abandoning him. I have already saved his life once. She doesn’t realize how close she came to losing him. Her marriage is a mistake born of naïveté and weakness but it produced a proud, intelligent, self-sufficient little boy. It was crazy of her to jeopardize all that he is, all that she has helped him to become, and all that he could grow up to be, by having an affair. Or was it crazy of me to try to stop her the way I did? Is Alex right? Am I really very ill and is what I have done a manifestation of that illness? Considered a risk to the wider community even before I am tried, I am refused bail and sentenced to be sentenced in the interim by the prison community who, with the wisdom and the insatiable blood lust of a mob, condemns me as a deviant who preys on children. So, I hide and wait for Alex to bring her to me. And I repeat to myself day after day after day:
If instead of being hanged by the neck
you’re thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, and people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,
you won’t say,
“Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag”—
you’ll put your foot down and live.
But every day I gag on the misery.
4. On Alex’s advice, I had retained the services of a Ms. Gina Serkin, a criminal barrister of some twelve years’ experience who was what people in her world called a “senior junior.” He said she was very bright, thorough, and good in court but not too senior to be “unavailable” for Legal Aid work. He knew her before this. Perhaps from other “problem” patients. I wasn’t sure. Since I didn’t have any experience in this sort of thing and no one else was rushing to offer me help or to recommend anyone else, I took his advice.
She came to see me at the Melbourne Assessment Prison on Spencer Street immediately after he called her and began to work on my bail application. She warned me that the media frenzy tacitly linking me to every child that had ever gone missing, coupled with the general upsurge in publicity concerning crimes in which children were the victims, had made what should have been an excellent chance of getting bail very doubtful. I was shaken by this. It wasn’t what I had expected. Nothing was. I had expected to see Anna. I hadn’t expected the police. I hadn’t expected to be charged, and once I had been charged I’d thought bail would be little more than a formality. Why should the prosecution even oppose it? I didn’t have a criminal record. I wasn’t a danger to anybody. But the police and the prosecutor thought differently. Everybody seemed to know more about the procedure, the protocol, and the grimness of my circumstances than I did. When Gina told me to be prepared to lose the bail application I somehow managed to convince myself that she was in some way trying to make a likely successful outcome look even better. I thought that perhaps she was marketing herself for future work. If I thought she’d pulled me out of the fire then I’d be more likely to use her in the event that the charges weren’t dropped. If I was stupid enough to take Sam, I was definitely stupid enough to believe nearly anything I needed to believe in order to keep going.
A guy in the same cell who’d been arrested for dealing wanted to talk. He looked like he knew the ropes. We spoke fairly frankly, and he seemed to think I didn’t have anything to worry about. It began like nearly all prison conversations with “What are you in here for?” It’s often asked in a threatening tone, the answer being just one of the variables taken into account when determining your position in the food chain. But this man, an experienced trader in almost everything prohibited, seemed rather calm and his demeanor helped me to relax a little. It wasn’t so much what he said but his manner of saying it that suggested that the criminal-justice system was just another branch of government bureaucracy. With experience or, better still, sound advice, it could be negotiated until it was a mere annoyance. He was comforting in his way. Without confessing
to anything in dispute, I did admit to him that this was my first time in trouble with the police, that I’d never been arrested before, and that I was having trouble believing I was there. In the course of my half-delirious rambling, I told him, quite incredibly, all about Anna and about her mistaken marriage to Joe. I told him how much I loved her and asked him if he had anyone. I don’t remember what he answered because I was too busy telling him how ashamed I was to be there, that this wasn’t me, that I wanted to start again, rewind my life. I told him that I just wanted to disappear. He would have been forgiven for thinking I was high. Maybe that is a way of putting it, of getting Alex to understand what it is like. You don’t need to be seeing someone to be in love with her. You can have lost touch with her, she can have hurt you, even inexplicably. If you ever felt that you really knew her and that it was what you knew that you loved, and if you remember what it was you once knew, why is it so crazy to retain that love still?
5. We were in a small café at the very end of Glenhuntly Road, opposite the beach. The sky was gray and somber, and I had just made her laugh. An involuntary convulsion had gripped her body the way it would sometimes when she laughed, and her breasts had leaped a little and my mood with them. Not knowing any other way of going about it, I pulled out a small wrapped package from my coat pocket.
Seven Types of Ambiguity Page 44
