Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “Sixteen weeks already. Sixteen weeks of waking up in a cold sweat with Joe leaning over your bed. Sixteen weeks of playing baseball with men who would be happy to bash in your head just for the pleasure of it. Sixteen weeks hearing the screams, knowing about Cap and Eddie, knowing about how all they want is the taste of human flesh one more time before they die. And you, in their midst.” He seemed to be enjoying his own speech. “You’re not a sociopath, son, you’re just someone who happened to kill some people and now you wish you hadn’t, and maybe you wished you were in Chino getting bludgeoned and raped at night, but at least not dealing with this zoo.”

  The bell rang. I saw Trish, the rec counselor, waving to us from over at the baseball diamond. She was pretty, and we all wanted her and we were all protective of her, too, even down to the last sociopath.

  “Looks like it’s time for phys. ed.,” Hype said. “She’s a fine piece of work, that one. Women are good for men. Don’t you think? Men can be good, too, sometimes, I guess. You’d know about that, I suppose.”

  “What am I ‘it’ for?” I asked, ignoring the implication of his comment.

  He dropped the cigarette in the dust. “You’re the one who’s getting out.”

  3

  I thought about what the old-timer’d said all day.

  In the late afternoon, I sat beside Joe on the leather chairs in the TV room after we got shrunk by our shrinks. I said, “I don’t get it. If Danny Boy wasn’t it, and ‘it’ means you get out, why the hell am I it?”

  Joe shrugged. “Maybe he means ‘you’re next.’ That old guy knows a shitload. He’s God.”

  Joe had spent his life in the system. First, at Juvy, then at Boys’ Camp in Chino, then Chino, and finally some judge figured out that you don’t systematically kill everyone from your old neighborhood unless you’re not quite right in the head. But Joe was a good egg behind the Aurora fence. He needed the system and the walls and the three hots and a cot just to stay on track. Maybe if he’d been in some strict religion or in the army, with all those rules, he never would’ve murdered anybody. He needed rules badly, and Aurora had plenty for him. He had always been gentle and decent with me, and was possibly my only friend at Aurora.

  I nudged him with my elbow. “Why would I be it?”

  “Maybe he’s gonna break you,” Joe whispered, checking the old lady at the desk to make sure she couldn’t hear him. “I heard he broke another guy out ten years ago, through the underground. That old man’s got a way to do it, if you go down in that rat nest far enough. I heard,” Joe grabbed my hand in his, his face inches from mine, “he knows where the way out is, and he only tells it if he thinks your destiny’s aligned with the universe.”

  I almost laughed at Joe’s seriousness. I drew back from him. “You got to be kidding.”

  Joe blinked. He didn’t like being made fun of. “Believe what you want. All’s I know is the old nan thinks you’re it. Can’t argue with that.”

  And then Joe kissed me gently, as he always did, or tried to do, when no one was looking, and I responded in kind. It was the closest thing to human warmth we had in that place. I pulled away from him when a psych tech was strolled in with one of the shrinks.

  4

  I wanted to believe that Hype could break me out of Aurora. I spent the rest of the day and most of the evening fantasizing about getting out, about walking out on the grass and dirt beyond the fence. Of getting on a bus and going up north where my brother lived. From there I would go up to Canada, maybe Alaska, and get lost somewhere in the wilderness where they wouldn’t come hunting for me. It was a dream I’d had since entering Aurora. It was a futile and useless dream, but I nurtured it day by day, hour by hour. I could close my eyes and suddenly be transported to a glassy river, surrounded by mountains of pure white, and air so fresh and cold it could stop your lungs; an eagle would scream as it dropped from the sky to grab its prey.

  But my eyes opened; the dream was gone. In its place, the dull green of the walls, the smell of alcohol and urine, the sounds of Cap and Eddie screeching from their restraints two doors down, the small slit of window with the bright lights of the Yard on all night. Only Joe kept me warm at night, and the smell of his hair as he scrunched in bed, snoring lightly, beside me, kept alive any spirit that threatened to die inside me. I had never been interested in men on the Outside, but in Aurora, it had never seemed homosexual between us. It had seemed like survival. When you are in that kind of environment, you seek warmth and human affection, if you are at all sane. Even if sanity is just a frayed thread. Even the sociopaths sought human warmth; even they, it is supposed, want to be loved. I knew that Joe would one day kill me if I said the wrong thing to him, or if I wasn’t generous in nature toward him. He had spent his life killing for those reasons. Still, I took the risk because he was so warm and comfortable, and sometimes, at night, that’s all you need.

  The next morning I sought Hype out, and plunked myself right down next to him. “Why me?”

  He didn’t look up from his plate. “Why not you?” He had that stoned look of one who could see the invisible world. His smile was cocked, like a gun’s trigger. “Why not Doer, the compassionate? Doer, the one who serves? Why not you?”

  “No,” I said. “It could be any one of these guys. Why me? I’ve only been here four months. We don’t know each other.”

  “I know everybody. I’m infinite. I contain multitudes. Nothing is beyond me. Besides, I told you, you don’t pretend.”

  “Huh?”

  “You don’t pretend. You face things. That’s important. It won’t work if you live in your own little world, like most of these boys. You’ve got the talent.”

  “Yeah, the talent,” I said, finally deciding the old fart was as loony as the rest.

  “I saw what you did,” he said. As he spoke, I could feel my heart freeze. In the tone of his voice, the smoothness of old whiskey. “I saw how you took the gun and killed your son first. One bullet to the back of the skull, and then another to his ear, just to make sure. Then your daughter, running through the house, trying to get away from you. She was actually the hardest, because she was screaming so much and moving so fast. You’re not a good shot. It took you three bullets to bring her down.”

  “Just shut up,” I said.

  “Your wife was easy. She parked out front, and came in the side door, at the kitchen. She didn’t know the kids were dead. All she knew was her husband was under a lot of pressure and she had to somehow make things right. She had groceries. She was going to cook dinner. While she was putting the wine in the fridge, you shot her and she died quickly. And then,” Hype shook his head, “you took the dog out, too. Who would take care of it, right? With everybody dead, who would take care of the dog?”

  I said nothing.

  “Who would take care of the dog?” he repeated. “You had no choice but to take it out, too. You loved that dog. It probably was as hard for you to pull the trigger on that dog as it was to pull it on your son. Maybe harder.”

  I said nothing. I thought nothing. My mind was red paint across black night. His words meant nothing to me.

  He patted me on the back as my father had before the trial. “It’s all right. It’s over. It wasn’t anything anyone blames you for.”

  I began weeping; he rubbed his hand along my back and whispered words of comfort to me.

  “It wasn’t like that,” I managed to say, drying my tears. Although we had been left alone, I looked across the cafeteria and felt that all the others watched us. Watched me. But they did not; they were preoccupied with their meals. “It was …”

  “Oh. How was it?”

  I wiped my face with filthy hands. I was so dirty; I just wished to be clean. I fought the urge to rise up and go find a shower. “I wanted it to be me. I wanted it to be me.”

  “But you wanted to live, too. You killed your family, and then suddenly—”

  “Suddenly,” I said.

  “Suddenly, your life came back into focus. You couldn
’t kill yourself. You had to go through all of them before you found that out. Life’s like that,” he said. “The bad thing is, they’re all dead. You did it. You’re a murderer. But you’re not like these others. It wasn’t some genetic defect or some lack of conscience. Conscience is important. You couldn’t kill yourself. That’s important. I don’t want to get some fellow out who’s going to end up killing himself. You need to be part of something larger than yourself. You need God. Tell me, boy: How do you live with yourself?”

  I couldn’t look him in the eye. I was trying to think up a lie to tell him. He reached out and took my chin in his hand. He forced me to look at him.

  I remembered the warning: he milks you with those eyes.

  “I don’t know how,” I said, truthfully. “I wake up every morning and I think I am the worst human being in existence.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You are. But here’s the grace of Aurora. You’re it. You will get out. You will live with what you did. You will not kill yourself or commit any further atrocities.” He let go of my chin and rose from the table. “Do you love your friend?”

  “Joe?”

  “That’s right.” He nodded. “Joe.”

  ‘Two guys can’t love each other,” I said. “It’s just for now. It’s surviving. It’s barely even sexual.”

  “Ah.” He nodded slowly. “That’s good. It would be hell if you got out and you loved him and he was here. You must be careful around him, though. He is pretty, and he is warm. But he has the face of Judas. He will never truly love anyone. Now, you, you will love again. A man, perhaps. Or a woman. But not our friend Joe. Do you know what he did to the last man with whom he shared his bed? Has he ever told you?”

  I shook my head slightly.

  “Ask him,” Hype said. He walked away. From the back, he didn’t seem old. He had a young way of walking. I believed in him.

  “Tonight. Late,” Hype said to me later on, during Recreational Time. “Two-thirty. You must first shower. You must be clean. I will not tolerate filth. Then wait. I will be there. If your friend makes trouble, stop him any way you can.”

  5

  Joe could be possessive, but not in the expected way. He was not jealous of other men or women. He simply wanted to own me all the time. He wanted me to shower with him, to sit with him, to go to the cafeteria with him. Our relationship seemed simple to me: we had met about the third week in, when he caught me masturbating in the bathroom. He joined in, and this led to some necking, which led to a chill for another week. Then I got a letter from my mother in which she severed all connections with me, followed by one from my father and sister. I spent two days in bed staring at the wall. Joe came to me, and took care of me until I could eat and stand and laugh again. By that time, we were tight. I had been at Aurora for only two months when I realized that I could not disentangle myself from Joe without being murdered or tortured—it was a Joe thing. I didn’t feel threatened, however, because I had grown quite fond of his occasional groping and nightly sleepovers. In a way, it was a little like being a child again, with a best friend, with a mother and lover and friend all rolled up into one man.

  That night, when I rose from my bed at two a.m., Joe immediately woke up.

  “Doer?” he asked.

  “The can,” I said, nodding toward the hallway.

  Because Joe and I weren’t in the truly dangerous category, we and a few others were given free rein of our hallway at night. Knowing, of course, that the Night Shift Bitch was on duty at the end of the hall.

  “I’ll go, too,” Joe whispered, rising. He drew his briefs up. He had the endearing habit of leaving them down around his ankles in postcoital negligence.

  I tapped him on the chest, shaking my head.

  “Doer,” he said, “I got to go, too.”

  I sighed, and the two of us quietly went into the hall. In the bathroom, he said, “I know what’s going on.” He leaned against the shiny tile wall. “It’s Hype. Word went around. This is the night. Are you really going?”

  I nodded, not wanting to lie. He had been sweet to me. I cared a great deal for him. I would be sad without him for a time.

  “I’ll miss you,” I said.

  “I could kill you for this.”

  “I know.”

  “If you leave I’ll be lonely. Maybe it’s love, who knows?” He laughed, as if making fun of himself. “Maybe I love you. That’s a good one.”

  “No you don’t.” I knew that Joe was fairly incapable of something so morally developed as love, not because of his sexual leanings, but because of his pathology.

  “Don’t go,” he said.

  “For all I know, Hype is full of shit”

  “He’s not. I’ve seen him do this before. But don’t go, Doer. Getting out’s not so terrific.”

  “I want freedom,” I said. “Plain and simple.”

  “I want you.” Joe seemed to be getting a little testy.

  “Now, come on, we’re friends, you and me,” I said, leaning forward to give him a friendly hug.

  I didn’t see the knife. All I saw was something shiny, which caught the nearly-burnt-out light of the bathroom. It didn’t hurt going in—that was more like a shock, like hearing an alarm clock at five a.m.

  Coming out, it hurt like a motherfucker.

  He pressed his hand against the wound in my chest. “You can’t leave me.”

  “Don’t kill me, Joe. I won’t leave you, I promise. You can come too.” I gasped, because I found it difficult to breathe. I felt light-headed. The burning pain quickly turned to a frozen numbness. I coughed, and wheezed, “Get help, Joe. Please.”

  Joe pressed his sweaty body against mine. I began to see brief tiny explosions of light and dark, as if the picture tube of life were going out. Joe kissed the wound where he’d stabbed me, as blood pulsed from it. “I love you this much,” he said.

  6

  I awoke in the infirmary three days later, barely able to see through a cloud of painkillers.

  I stared up at the ceiling until its small square acoustic tiles came into focus.

  When I was better, in the Yard, I sought Hype out.

  “I tried to make it,” I said.

  He said nothing. He seemed to look through me.

  “You know what he did to me,” I said. “Please, I want to get out. I have to get out.”

  After several minutes, Hype said, “Love transformed into fear. It’s the human story. The last man Joe befriended was named Frank. He grew up in Compton. A good kid. He tore off another man’s genitals with his bare hands and wore them around his neck. His only murder. Sweet kid. Twenty-two. Probably he was headed for release within a year or two. He had an A-plus evaluation. A little morbid. Used to draw pictures of beheadings. Joe latched on to him, too. Took care of him. Bathed him. Serviced him. Loved him, if you will. Then rumor went around that Frank was getting some from one of the psych techs. Totally fabricated, of course. Frank was taking a shower. Joe knocked him on the head. Strapped him to the bed, spread-eagled. Don’t ask me how, but he’d gotten a hold of a drill—the old kind, you know, you turn manually and it spins. He made openings in Frank. First in his throat to keep him from screaming. Then the rest of him. Each opening…”

  “I know,” I said, remembering the pain under my arm. Then something occurred to me. “Where did he get the knife?”

  Hype made a face, like he’d chewed something sour.

  “The knife,” I repeated. “And the drill, too. Everything’s locked up tight. You’re supposed to be God or something, so you tell me.”

  Without changing his expression, Hype said, “Joe gets out.”

  The enormity of this revelation didn’t completely hit me. “From here?”

  Hype nodded. “It’s not something I’m proud of. I can open the door for about three hours, if I use up all my energy. Joe knows it. He was the first one I took out. But he didn’t want to stay out. He only wanted out to get his toys. Then he wanted back. He’s the only one who manages to get back. Why
he wants to, I couldn’t say.”

  For the first time ever, I watched worry furrow the old man’s brow. He placed his hand against his forehead. A small blue vein pulsed there, beneath his pale skin’s surface.

  “I created the world, but it’s not perfect.”

  “Joe knows how to get out?”

  “I didn’t say that. I can get it open. I just can’t keep him from going back and forth. And then it closes again.”

  I wasn’t sure how to pose my next question, because there was a mystery to this place where men got out. I had figured it to be down in the old underground, where Hype would know the route of the labyrinthine tunnels. “Where does it go?”

  “That,” Hype sighed, “I can’t tell you, having never been through it. I just know it takes you out.”

  7

  Back in my own bed that night, trying to sleep, I felt Joe’s hand on my shoulder. He slipped swiftly between the covers to cradle my body against his.

  “Doer,” he said. “I missed you.”

  “Get off me.” I tried to shrug him away. He was burning with some fever. A few drops of his sweat touched the back of my neck.

  “No.” He tucked himself in closer to me. I could feel his warm breath on my neck. “I want you.”

  “Not after what you did.”

  He said nothing more with words. His mouth opened against my neck, and I felt his tongue heat my sore muscles. All his language came through his throat and mouth, and I let him. I hated him, but I let him. Afterward, I whispered, “I want out.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes. I don’t care if you stab me again. I want out. You going to get me out?”

  I waited a long time for his answer, then fell asleep. I was still waiting for his answer a week later.

  8

  I cornered him in the shower, placing my hands on either side of him. I could encompass his body within my arms. I stared straight into his eyes.