“I’m not going to say I told you so,” said Sam Glass.
“You’d better not,” I said. “Or you will leave this life.”
We were in the Samizdat office. We’d just finished selecting the poems and stories for the new issue.
“It wasn’t a real marriage,” he said. “You have to admit it.”
“What is a real marriage?” I asked. “Can you tell me that? Does anyone have a real marriage? What the fuck is a real marriage? What is an unreal marriage? Ozzie and Harriet? Roy Rogers and Dale Evans? And a real marriage is two people living together and driving each other crazy? I love K.B.—I love him. The fact that I’ve hurt him makes me…”
I covered my face with my hands, then looked at him.
“Every time I lie to him,” I said, “I am killing his heart. Yet I know I love him.”
“Calm down,” he said.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be calm again,” I said. “There are some things you just can’t forgive yourself for. And they make you crazy and unforgivable forever.”
He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. He took a drag and I held out my hand. He looked shocked but handed it to me and I took a long pull, then coughed a little and handed it back.
“Vile,” I said.
“It is indeed.”
I was eager to change the subject, move the conversation away from my failure as a wife, a human being, a trustworthy friend.
“Have you been reading the newspapers?” I asked. “About Akilah Malik’s escape?”
“Oh, right,” he said. “I think I read something.”
“I have a poem of hers,” I said. “Do you want to read it? It may be something for Samizdat.”
He looked skeptical but took the poem and began to read.
“You’d better fucking like it,” I said. “I carried it around in my underwear for the better part of a day.”
Sam Glass gave me the same look that Polly had. Only he didn’t laugh.
“I’ saw him,” Polly said. “I saw my great-granddaddy and he spoke to me.”
“Tell me what he said.”
“You want to know about North Brother? You want to know what I seen in the air? His blessing, a falling star—it was his blessing, so I know nothing can hurt her. Nothing in the wilderness of stars can hurt her. She’s on a raft out in them stars—you can see her out there too, can’t you?”
She was still trembling, but not nearly as badly as before. She smiled at me and pushed her soaked hair back from her face.
“He hovered over and he told me that there? on North Brother? her name is carved right below the other two on the weeping willow tree. Below Lewis and Mandy. She carved it there as a sign. Falling stars and this one took. Akilah Malik—that ‘k’ at the end, with its sparkly tail. She stood right there long enough for them to land and take her away.”
She looked over at Knapp, napping.
“You saw it, Holly. I made a drawing for her of the whole island. A place for them to dock a craft and then…she wanted to know if there was a wide and open space. Maybe for a landing and takeoff. I told her there was such a space. At the north end of the island, open meadow, not so marshy. I know the exact dimensions, the latitude and longitude. I gave them to her. And from there they could take her away.”
We looked into each other’s eyes—she was telling me what she wanted them to know. It was the truth, but maybe truth slant, just enough to send them after her, not enough for them to capture her. Or maybe it was the whole truth, whatever that is. The whole truth.
“To another island,” she said. “There she was, on a deserted island in the river, and then they would lift her right up in the sky and fly her to a new beautiful island.”
“Can you say which island?”
She began shaking badly again. Her teeth chattered and I reached out again to hold her.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Forget it now. Let’s stop.”
“They sent for her,” she said, shaking. “The people sent for her—they were all in touch.”
The shaking had gotten so bad that I turned to Knapp.
“I think we need some medication.”
“No,” Polly whispered, in a terrible hoarse whisper, more like a gasp. “Listen now. Listen to me. They took her to another island. You know—a hot island, sun. Sugar and cigars. Waves rolling in. An island south of the river, south of the States.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Let’s stop now.”
Finally, whose side was I on? That of the arrogant mercurial revolutionary fugitive—that is to say, the side of radical underground politics, of inevitable change itself, as I had known it on campus and beyond? Or the side of Order, the court system, the sobersided working out of the old ambiguous pursuit of Establishment entitlements? Just-Us. What we often refer to, without reflection, as the Law. I was on Polly Lyle’s side, that was all I knew—and now I felt as if I too were breaking her down.
She stopped shaking. She looked spent—as if she’d just run a race. She was sweating heavily and her breathing was labored. She pointed in the air, smiling at me.
“You know what my great-granddaddy said? What do we care for the Statue of Liberty when we have the thing itself? What you want of a monument is to keep you in mind of something you haven’t got—something you’ve lost. I like to see a monument: a willow tree with names carved on it.”
“Officer Knapp,” I said. “Are you awake? I think Polly needs another blanket.”
There was no more out-of-the-cradle-gently-rocking America, alive in its wildest sublimity. Out in the harbor, in the moving reflections, she stood, as the vessel lights washed over her fierce face—keeping us in mind of something we no longer had. Still, the monument: the iron torch in her raised hand. The primordial feeling of crossing water—toward something we never had. Helicopter, plane. Portals open. The soul dancing like a bomb. Remote access. Her wounds from the same source as her power.
I discovered later that C.O. Knapp had been awake—off and on. Her ruse of falling asleep would have allowed her to listen in unobtrusively on most of our conversation—had we felt encouraged to speak loudly. Ross verified one or two things Polly and I had said through Knapp’s witnessing. But, then, I’d assumed that the Bing cells were bugged in any case. Only whispering worked. I told them only what Polly had told me, her mouth to my ear—only enough to get her out of the Bing.
She picked up the phone after a few rings.
“Hi, Mother,” I said.
“I sense you’re feeling sorry for yourself, but remember his words: ‘Darkling, I listen. And I am pretty much half in love with easeful death.’ And think about what he went through. Dead at twenty-four of galloping consumption. Yet he boxed the butcher’s boy, our little Johnny Keats. Barely five feet tall.”
“Great, Mom. That helps.”
“Keats: better than that modern hooey. I remember when I first read ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’…Miss Byers, my English teacher, opened our book to it once…”
“Mom? Am I living the life you wanted to live? I remember your life as if it were my own.”
“Holly, you’ve always been overly dramatic. I don’t know why. You were always like that—when you were a little girl, you—”
“Mom? K.B. and I are separated at the moment. Just taking a break.”
“I wish I knew what you wanted,” she said. “I wish I could understand what it is that makes you keep getting it wrong. Wait—is that the neighbor’s dog barking again? I’m going to have to shoot that bat-faced yapper out of a cannon! He’s like Cerberus—you know, Holly: the three-headed dog at the gates of hell? Do you know the dog I’m talking about? At the gates of hell? Why do you think you are never happy? What is it that you want?”
“I want what you wanted—and gave up. I want my own life.”
“Akilah Malik is on her way to Cuba,” I said. I was almost embarrassed to report on what Polly had told me in the Bing. It sounded like a B-grade adventure movie. Then I thought suddenl
y of the Department of Corrections as Cerberus at the gates of hell—outwitted despite its three heads, three brains, and a triple set of teeth.
She frowned at me, her face shadowed with disbelief.
It was beyond belief in some ways—but in other ways it made complete sense. The Black Freedom Front had longtime ties to the 26th of July Movement and to Castro himself. Political prisoners, political exiles—some, it’s true, wanted for crimes or acts of terrorism—had been given asylum in Cuba since Castro had taken over. And they had been aided in their travel to the island. Castro took delight in welcoming these exiles—especially when they came from his superpower neighbor to the north.
“Cuba,” I repeated. “Though maybe the authorities already know that.”
She didn’t say anything. She still looked incredulous.
“I admit this information sounds surreal,” I said. “But we had a deal. And Polly absolutely needs to go free. She had another episode—like the start of a seizure—while I was with her.”
“She will be released tomorrow—as soon as the Disciplinary Board can meet. I’ll write down all the information—and I assume that there is more—that you will give me.”
“
“Wait a minute—you told me that if I got some information for you, you’d let her go. You made it sound like you’d let her go immediately.”
She laughed, a rueful sound.
“In prison, there is no ‘immediately.’ I’m surprised that you haven’t learned that by now, Miss Mattox.”
I started to say that apparently Akilah Malik hadn’t subscribed to that theory—but I wisely, for once, kept my mouth shut.
I called Benny when I got home. She didn’t pick up, so I left her a frantic message.
“Help, Benny! If you can think of anything to help spring Polly from the Bing now, please call me. No matter how late. She’s not going to last through the night in there.”
But Benny didn’t call—she didn’t pick up her messages till morning.
I tried K.B. at home and at the hospital. He did not answer. I had hoped that he could visit the prison as a regular volunteer physician and ask to see Polly—but my efforts to reach him failed.
Sometime that same night, in despair, I slept again with Sam Glass. It happened again in his apartment, where I’d gone to break it off with him, to tell him that I didn’t ever want to sleep with him again. If I had had Polly’s gift to look into the future, I would have seen myself going through what I had to go through—leaving K.B., still loving him deeply, living with Sam Glass, but only as long as we could stand each other, which wasn’t, as it turned out, very long. I certainly didn’t fit his ideal. I was going to be unhappy in love most of my life—not all, but most of it. Mainly because I wanted to be alone, I wanted my own life, and yet couldn’t face it. The soul has its moments of escape. After Sam Glass fell asleep, I sat on the edge of the bed and dialed K.B.’s number again and again and listened to the ringing. I tried his number until three A.M., but he never picked up.
Later Benny acquired the transcript of the C.O.’s incident report and time log: Polly was left overnight in the Bing, where she had two seizures. About four A.M., she was medicated. At five in the morning, she was shouting, disoriented, and when they unlocked her door and set down a metal breakfast tray near her mattress, she waited till the door closed, then shoved the tray back out through the door slot—her Wheaties and milk and styrofoam cup of coffee scattered all over the PSA hall floor. The other locked inmates cheered as the C.O.s cleaned up the mess. They brought a second tray and she threw that one out too. A psychiatrist and two C.O.s then entered her cell to talk to her and she tried to talk, couldn’t—shouted unintelligibly. She let them put together the medication and offer it to her to drink in a paper cup—she threw it in their faces.
At 6:02 A.M., the medical doctor on call and two IPC (Interpersonal Communications) officers entered Polly’s cell and tried to calm her down by administering a syringeful of oblivion. She knocked off one’s eyeglasses and pushed another. At seven A.M., masked and helmeted Bing officers with nightsticks and clubs came into the cell, forced her to lie down on her stomach, and pulled her hands behind her back, handcuffing her in order to perform a cell extraction. Pepper spray was administered when she resisted. Polly was pulled by her bound legs from the cell into the hall, where she was “forcibly restrained.” At this point, it was reported that she “lost consciousness” and was returned to her PSA cell.
Benny Mathison called the ACLU for advice on how to proceed. She also called Superintendent Ross as Polly’s lawyer—and Ross told her that if Polly remained “noncombative” for the following six hours, she would be released to general population. She would see that the Disciplinary Board agreed.
I tried to write my poem. “Twinned to a future, stunned / in its white eclipse,” then later: “Like this single mind, forever / unable to refuse its over-statement.” I suddenly remembered riding in the car with my father when I was a very little girl. We drove along together at twilight and he was singing to me: his favorite song, “The Tennessee Waltz.” Then all at once a wall rose up like a gray wave before us and we drove past an immense gated fortification with guard towers like turrets at the top, rotating spotlights—I saw men with rifles looking down.
I asked him what was before us and he told me that it was a prison—Stillwater Prison, Stillwater, Minnesota. I asked him what a prison was and he explained that it was a place where people who had done bad things were taken and kept in cages. I looked back up at the towers and the searchlights and I thought about the cages and the people in them.
Then my father sang a song to me, his voice filled with beautiful sorrow, one hand on the wheel:
If I had the wings of an angel,
Over these prison walls I would fly;
I’d fly straight to the arms of my darling,
And there I’d be willing to die.
Full fathom five our grandfathers lie. The wings of an angel. Stillwater. Still water, twain deep—and the lit towers above. Twain deep. And there I’d be willing to die.
The phone rang. It was Benny.
“Did you hear the news?” she shouted. “Malik has turned up in Cuba!”
After I hung up, the phone rang again. It was K.B.
“I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch,” he said. “I worked extra shifts and have been staying at the hospital. I didn’t answer all my pages. I’m sorry. I needed to have this time.”
Before I could respond, he added, “I just heard something crazy on my car radio—something about Akilah Malik?”
I ran into Kyrilikov at Columbia on the library steps. I couldn’t help myself—I asked him if he’d heard about Akilah Malik escaping to Cuba. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he hadn’t—he had no interest at all in Western politics. Rarely read the papers.
“This runaway—is she beautiful?” he asked.
I laughed. “Why do you ask that? Yeah, she is, actually.”
He looked very serious.
“When one is young and believes in literature, one associates style with substance sometimes. Literature is not, of course, the same as politics—we learn this.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“She is in Cuba,” I noted stupidly.
“Cuba is now Russia,” he said. “And I will never go back to Russia.”
Then he waved, an Italian backward wave, and took off down the stairs. He turned and retraced his steps suddenly—then he bent and kissed my hand.
“Your life will begin to be clear to you,” he said. “And since mine is not, I wish the same for me.”
The workshop felt completely different—without Polly or Akilah, but with Sallie present like a kind of ghost-spy, the feeling was off-kilter. Still, Baby Ain’t read her new poem about the hooker named Turnpike and Billie Dee read a poem about her mother, who was dead but who showed up in Billie’s dreams. There was a line: “She watch me from a big blue cloud behind the clock on the shelf.”
Aliganth surprised everyone by pulling a poem out of her pocket and reading it. It was funny and everyone laughed. I wanted to cry because I was touched. But then Aliganth looked at me and said, “Don’t get all sobby on me—I wrote this on a bar napkin.”
Aliganth had told me that Polly Lyle had been returned to 2 Main. I asked her if I could have a pass, after the workshop, to visit her. She shook her head.
“I don’t think you’re going to want to see her right now. She in bad shape.”
“I saw her in bad shape up in the Bing. How much worse could she be now?”
Aliganth half laughed, half coughed.
“She could be more worse than you could imagine.”
It took me a while, but I persuaded her to let me have a pass. After the workshop, I sat in the empty classroom for a minute, collecting my thoughts. Then I headed up to 2 Main.
I knew the C.O. on duty in the bubble on 2 Main: Officer Macon. If I hadn’t known her, I realized, she would never have let me see Polly. Because Polly was, as Aliganth had said, in far worse shape than I had seen her before.
After I argued with Macon for a bit and talked her into letting me visit Polly in her cell—after she’d walked me down and buzzed the door open—I realized, looking at the figure looking back at me, that there was no more Polly Lyle Clement.
She was sitting straight up on her bed in her yellow-orange uniform with her hands folded in her lap, as if she were waiting for a bus or sitting in church, listening to a sermon or a choir. Her body was rigid and her face was completely devoid of expression.
When I called her name, she looked up and smiled at me, a brief flicker of a smile, but she wasn’t there behind it. Her right eye was blackened and there were swollen bruises on her brow and neck and along her arms and there were deep scratches on her hands. Her white hair was sticky with cuts, still bloody.
I took her hands and said her name again and she smiled again and nodded at me.
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