Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  “I don’t know,” I cried in exasperation. “Poetry, the weather—who knows?”

  “Would you say that they talked about possible methods or routes of escape—or perhaps about the islands around Rikers Island?”

  I sat back in my chair. She knows, I thought, she knows something. Probably much more than I did. She had taught me (in the matter of Lily Baye, in the matter of the battered child, of the lied-about lost baby) about paying attention to what was in front of me—understanding the difference between what I actually saw and what I wanted to see. Understanding my own naïveté. And understanding the difficulties of maintaining order in the institution.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I did see Polly drawing some pictures for Akilah once. That’s all.”

  Ross shook her head at me, then pressed a button on the intercom.

  “She can come in.”

  I knew who was going to be coming in before I saw her. I prepared myself for her face. And here she was: the eyes and ears in my workshop.

  She looked different. She looked serious, subdued. There was no wiseass, smart-off aspect to her at all. She walked in slowly with her head down.

  “Hi, Ms. Mattox,” she said.

  “Hi, Sallie.”

  Ross nodded at each of us.

  “Miss Mattox, Sallie Keller says she saw something transpire between Malik and Clement, which you also witnessed. She says…What did you see?”

  Sallie glanced at me, a frightened split-level glance, her only betrayal of uncertainty. What I found most eerie about her was how her diction had changed—she spoke now like a bureaucrat, a buttoned-down official witness, not like a cool street mouth: no more jailhouse bitch rap-and-swagger.

  “I believe Clement was showing Akilah Malik the safest way to travel between Rikers Island and North Brother Island. I was right behind Ms. Mattox as she came in—she may have seen even more.”

  The warden pointed at me impatiently. “Did you witness this as well?”

  “No, I only saw them drawing something on a piece of tablet paper. That’s all.”

  Sallie smiled her Picasso smile at me.

  “I know what was in front of me. There was a map being drawn for Malik by Clement. It couldn’t be missed.”

  “What happened to that map?”

  Sallie snorted, reverting in a flash to her other tongue:

  “She done ate it up like a monkey.”

  Ross looked at me.

  “I saw her put something in her mouth. Was it this map that Sallie seems certain she saw? I don’t know.”

  I moved around a little in my chair, suddenly remembering the oddly stashed poem. Sallie apparently took this as a sign of guilty discomfort.

  “Ms. Mattox may recall where the weird story that Polly Clement told the poetry class was set.”

  I looked back at her. She really was transformed. She looked older, more damaged somehow—her terrible uneven face looked balder, and its jagged across-the-middle cut more savagely raw.

  “North Brother Island,” I said. “But you’ve already told the warden that.”

  Warden Ross stared at me and then asked Sallie Keller to leave. Sallie nodded, stood up, and went out quietly. She did not look at me as she left.

  When she was gone, I shifted in my chair again and tried to think what was best to do. If Akilah had in fact gone to North Brother and taken her time about it, they’d have captured her by now. I would have assumed that the currents were too deadly for her to have negotiated easily. Even with a boat, a small craft, wasn’t it supposed to be extremely difficult to land on this island?

  I looked into Ross’s eyes and repeated these thoughts word for word. She nodded.

  “It would seem so. But it appears to those investigating that Malik did find her way to North Brother. I’m not at liberty to tell you what they found, but there was evidence that she had been there very recently.”

  “But she was gone when they arrived? How did she get off the island so fast?”

  “I can’t tell you her means of transportation onto or off of North Brother. But let’s just say that she appeared to have vanished into the sky.”

  “How?” I asked. “A small plane? A helicopter? North Brother is totally deserted—so it would be possible, right?”

  She stared at me, silent.

  “So now,” I said, “you’re interrogating Polly because you think that she’s been an accomplice somehow?”

  Again, official silence. Then what I expected.

  “I am not here to answer your questions about the connection between Clement and Malik. I’d prefer that you answered mine.”

  “The thing is,” I said, “Polly Lyle is…a little unstable, as you know. Whatever you think she’s done—I mean if you believe that she aided and abetted Akilah’s escape—you would have to bear in mind that she has a kind of tenuous grip on reality.”

  I sat forward, crackling.

  “She believes that she is, what would you say—‘channeling’ the voice of Mark Twain. You know, Mark Twain?”

  “I know who Mark Twain is,” Superintendent Ross said in an icy tone.

  I crackled back in my chair, chastened. I had offended her without meaning to. She continued warily, reciting Polly’s intake file.

  “Polly Lyle Clement came here on a vagrancy charge. She was staggering around in the shallows here off Rikers, raving about a raft she’d hidden somewhere nearby. They picked her up in the searchlights. She was shouting at the planes overhead and she was potentially violent, so she was given tranquilizers as she was processed in. She was also given a routine medical and psychiatric workup. She is delusional, as you are inferring, plus she is epileptic—prone to violent seizures. It is after these seizures that she claims to ‘see’ things. Her hallucinations, as you apparently know, are powerful and convincing. It would seem that the Mark Twain delusion came from one of these hallucinations.”

  “I looked at this copy of the intake file we have upstairs,” I said, “and I agree there’s not much there.”

  The superintendent looked at her watch.

  “There’s a new shift coming on and I have to hold inspection.”

  “Where is Polly now? She wasn’t in the workshop tonight and—”

  “She is being held in PSA.”

  “Polly Lyle? You have her in the Bing?”

  It’s funny how you know these things. I’d thought about it. I knew that just about every woman in the workshop could stand up to the Bing for a little while. A little while—they could take it. Even Billie Dee. I flattered myself that I might even be able to stand it for a little while. But not Polly Lyle Clement.

  I stood up. I held my hands out in appeal. I was aware that I looked silly, melodramatic—but I didn’t care. Here we go again, I thought. Only this time I have it right. This time I’d figured it out.

  “Please,” I said. “Please don’t keep her in the Bing. She will die. She will not be able to survive it. Please.”

  Ross stood up too and glanced at her watch again.

  “You do remember how convinced you were not long ago that Lily Baye was a persecuted victim?”

  “I admitted my mistake there. This is not crying wolf, this is different. Polly Lyle…”

  “Clement attacked an officer as she was being questioned about her involvement in the Akilah Malik escape. Just this morning. She lost all control and had to be restrained. She was medicated and taken to PSA.”

  “Please,” I said. “Let me see her.”

  She moved around the desk and stood before me. I stayed very still and tried not to crackle.

  “I thought you would make this request. We feel that she knows more than she is telling us. She was seen talking to Malik—regularly. I will let you visit her in PSA, but the arrangement has to be that you will question her about Malik—and anything she knows about the escape and how it was put together. And where Malik is hiding out. If she cooperates, she will be released from Punitive Segregation and I have the D.A.’s word that she will
not be formally charged with obstruction of justice. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do we have an agreement on this?”

  “Yes,” I repeated. “I just need to see her as soon as possible.”

  “What we particularly want to know is where Malik is now.”

  “Yes. Okay. I understand. If I manage to find out something—will you let her go back to population?”

  She stared at me a moment. Her eyes looked very tired, but her jaw was set.

  “If you find out anything that the authorities can use, I will return her to population.”

  I held out my hand and she took it.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Can I have some time? I need to talk to her for a while. It’s hard to follow her sometimes.”

  “I’ll have the Assistant Dep go with you. And I’ll arrange for you to have forty-five minutes maximum with Clement.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  “And let me ask you one more time—and think carefully before you answer. What, if anything, changed hands between Clement and Malik when C.O. Janson saw you standing with them in the main corridor?”

  “I think I already told you,” I said. “A poem. What passed between their hands was a poem.”

  She was lying in the fetal position on her mattress. I came in with Assistant Deputy Superintendent Knapp, who was heavyset and mightily incurious. She stood in the corner and yawned and looked up at the ceiling. I felt a little sorry for her. She had told me as we walked down the hall together that she’d been up all night, pulling an extra shift, like many others. They were on emergency status, she said. They had to find out somehow where Akilah Malik had gotten to, she said. They’d all been made to look bad over this.

  I felt a little poem-line ripple and adjusted things before sitting down. Knapp didn’t notice. Neither did Polly. The soul has moments of escape, I thought. Thus Polly was gone, her soul traveling somewhere.

  I touched her shoulder. Her yellow-orange prison uniform was soaked with sweat and her pale hair was plastered to her forehead and cheek. She stirred slightly when I touched her.

  “Polly?”

  She made an unintelligible sound. Then she sat straight up suddenly, so suddenly that I cried out and jumped back. Knapp looked over, then went back to contemplating the ceiling.

  Polly was staring at me wildly. She looked utterly deranged. I called to Knapp.

  “Listen—Polly is epileptic. Has anyone taken the precaution of having a tongue depressor handy? And some medication—Dilantin, maybe? Phenobarbital?”

  Knapp looked confused.

  “Hold on a minute,” she said. She unlocked the heavy door and called out for the officer on duty at the end of the hall. I heard the muted shouts of the caged women up and down the corridor. I heard Knapp asking about what was on hand.

  She shut the door again.

  “Pierce says they got the tongue thing and the medicine.”

  I thanked her. Polly was staring at me, still blank and wild—but now there was a glimmer of recognition in her face.

  “Sis?”

  “No, Polly, it’s your teacher, Holly Mattox?”

  She touched my face with shaking fingers. Her touch was unbelievably cold.

  “Poem,” she said, and smiled. The burn on her cheek looked bright red. There was a tooth missing in the front of her mouth, lower gum—I’d never noticed that before. There was also a dark blue bruise on her forehead at the hairline.

  She began to shake violently—her legs, stretched out now, kicked as if she were swimming. I looked at Knapp, who was living up to her name, nodding dreamily. I reached out and pulled Polly into my arms. Her teeth were rattling in her head and then her whole body convulsed. After a minute the convulsions eased and she gently moved out of my embrace and sat up straighter.

  “Tell me how you are,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I been on the river,” she said. “Lordy, it is lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all sprinkled thick with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened—Jim allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could have laid them…. We used to watch the falling stars, too, and see them streak down the sky and trail their sparkly tails behind them. Jim reckoned they had got spoiled and was flung out of the nest.”

  I brushed tears from my eyes. I couldn’t help myself. Not only because she was still shaking (though less violently now) and looked as if she might have a fit at any moment; not only because she was in the Bing and alone and sick and crazy; not only because I couldn’t do much of anything to help her; but because, in her extremity, in her madness, she turned to them: Huck and Jim on the raft—she turned to them, the untamable renegade boy and the gentle indomitable soul—and let her soul glide with them on the river of their words.

  She put out her hand and traced a finger along my tearstained cheek.

  “Don’t cry,” she said. “The stars that are flung out from the nest fall, but they don’t die. I promise.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “What can I do to help you?”

  Do we think that the world imagined is the ultimate good? What is the intensest rendezvous? Between one soul and another—or between the words that help us apprehend it—what happens as it happens? What was my rendezvous—whom did I love more? The real person before me—or the words that my imagination gave me, always, to conjure that person into words? Then I woke up: I was here now—the woman was cold, she needed a shawl. The poem is alive, it is as real as a shawl, a gun, a cup of cold water.

  I leaned in close and whispered in her ear.

  “Listen,” I said. “Polly. I haven’t told them about the ‘poem’ you wrote for our friend. I haven’t told them that I was there when you gave it to her to ‘read.’ You and I know what it said. I haven’t told them, but if you tell them now—or tell me so that I can pass it along—they will let you out of here. And they won’t pursue this further.”

  She began shaking again, a series of terrible convulsive shudders, which she controlled finally, then laughed a little.

  “What are you asking me to do again?”

  I smiled and shrugged. What was I asking?

  “Are you asking me what they’ve been tryin’ to get out of me now for hours?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What are they trying to get out of you?”

  “Where she is. And how she got there.”

  I looked around at Officer Knapp. We were whispering, but I was still worried.

  She shook her head, smiling, shaking. Then she rolled over on the mattress, away from me.

  “They want to catch her.” Her voice was muffled.

  “Polly,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll catch her. This was all planned carefully. They may find out where she’s been, but I don’t think they’re going to bring her back. But if you can tell me specifically what your navigation ‘poem’ said and where she landed—I can get you out of here.”

  She sat up again and touched my hair.

  “Forget what the Law says,” she said.

  “Hold on, Polly,” I whispered, “there’s a poem in my underpants.”

  Knapp was still nodding as I moved the paper a little.

  Polly stared at me.

  “It’s Akilah’s poem,” I said. “I can’t explain right now. I’m smuggling it out.”

  I was whispering very softly and she leaned in to hear me.

  Then Polly, beaten and nearly broken, looked at me as if I was crazy and began to laugh.

  For My Daughter

  There is a flower in a field

  I won’t compare you to that flower

  There is a bird on a branch

  I won’t say that you are its song

  You are the beginning, the first morning

  the moment in which words open their eyes

  and their
mouths and speak themselves.

  You are last night budding at my breast

  You are this morning budding at my breast

  Your face beginning to take form

  out of your powerful dreaming milk-hunger—

  More beautiful than the field flower

  More beautiful than the bird-song

  More beautiful than all comparisons to beauty—

  Which mean nothing in the face of the face of love.

  Flower-mouth on my nipple:

  You are ripped away now

  by men, your new ears opening on the sound of their

  boot-heels, their brute shouts as they pull you,

  your mouth opening, milk-filled, away from me.

  Your mouth re-filling with sound, a sound of terror,

  as they strike me, then tighten the irons that bind me.

  This is not the world I would have made for you. You deserve

  a world made by love for love—instead of this island

  where I am left, chained, without you. Instead

  of the island where I will always hear you calling for me—

  Karina Mahmud—where I cannot answer you.

  —AKILAH MALIK, POET

  twelve

  I called Benny Mathison and asked her what could be done to help Polly get out of the Bing sooner rather than later.

  She laughed.

  “You must be kidding,” she said. “They do what they want.”

  “What about this guy,” I cried. “Geraldo? Can he help?”

  “No,” she said. “The last time he investigated the Women’s House it was on a tip that said there was a hunger strike going on. It turned out that the ‘strike’ was a floorwide diet—promoted by the Candy Whatever-It-Is Charm School.”

  “So he won’t come back?”

  “Get real.”

  “What can you do to help?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said wearily. Then: “Okay, just tell me the facts. I was having breakfast, but I’ll find a pen and write this down.”