The Captives

by Debra Jo Immergut

  Lu took Miranda’s arm then and pulled her out of April’s earshot. “Mimi, I can find who is giving it to her. If I have to slice their throat, I will make them stop. I will fix this trouble. Please do not worry.”

  That night, enraged by the lack of bingo, two ladies on 4D set fire to a bed. A schizophrenic paraplegic almost died of smoke inhalation in her wheelchair. The min-max ladies were split up and sent off to Marcy, Beacon, and a modular unit on the grounds of Altona, seven hours to the north.

  THEN MIRANDA ENCOUNTERED A HEADLESS BODY IN THE HYGIENE room.

  Smelling of dank concrete and overchlorination, the row of shower compartments was the grimmest part of Building 2A&B. On this day, as all others, she had come into the room just before dinner, when it was ordinarily empty. Despite the grottiness, she appreciated the respite from the noise of the unit.

  A metal folding chair had been dragged into the corner, where the ceiling plaster peeled away and dangled floorward in fronds like elephant ears, exposing a grid of steam pipes, bits of insulation, and dark intermural spaces that were notorious hiding spots for contraband. On the chair tottered a headless body, on tiptoes, a skinny twist of torso and legs in baggy state pants and a black shiny shirt. The long feet were bare, and one taut arm clawed at the ceiling in a desperate fashion. The other arm appeared to be shoved up into the same hole that had swallowed the head.

  Miranda stopped stock-still. But it was too late. The body had heard her enter.

  “Who is it?” a voice hissed from the hole.

  “Greene,” she replied reluctantly.

  “Greene! Help me. I’m fucking stuck up here!”

  It was Dorcas Watkins. Miranda put down her soap and shampoo with a grimace. She approached the chair warily.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Help me the fuck loose!” The free arm began scrabbling at the ceiling plaster again.

  Miranda climbed up on the chair, holding Watkins around the waist to steady herself. “Don’t you try anything on me,” muttered the stuck woman.

  Miranda let go of her waist and braced herself against the top of a stall. She began breaking off bits of plaster, ducking this way and that as they dropped past her to explode on the floor.

  “It’s hot up in here,” complained Watkins. “My neck is twisted.”

  “Hang on,” said Miranda.

  As the hole grew larger, Watkins was able to move a bit. “Okay,” she muttered, “we are getting out, getting free.”

  A wide slab of plaster collapsed as Miranda grabbed at it. She lost her footing.

  A glimpse of the head above, freed, face glittered with sweat. Miranda landed, hard, on the concrete, and as she stared up, dumbfounded, she saw Dorcas slip a white plastic bag down the front of her pants.

  Twinges ricocheted through her rump and back.

  Dorcas jumped off the chair and looked down on Miranda, her gleaming face hanging over her like a moon. “Thank you, Greene.” She extended her hand and Miranda took it. Dorcas pulled her up to her feet. “You tell anybody about this, I will gut you.”

  Miranda just glared at her and turned away. She picked her way through the plaster debris.

  “You are thinking of what’s in that bag and your sweet April,” said Dorcas. “You might be thinking about discussing with folks you shouldn’t.”

  Miranda chose a farther stall. Turned the faucet, which let out an alarming squeal. She didn’t take off her clothes, didn’t step under the water. She stood aside, listening. Suddenly an arm reached around the stall wall, Dorcas grabbed her by the hair. Miranda swung her arms, but before she could strike, her face went first through the hot spray and then smashed into the rust-striped wall. Immediately, pain, a soaring thought-obliterating pain, overtook her nose and forehead. She crumpled to the floor, clutching her hands to her face.

  “You need to be more careful. You slip in the shower, you will hurt yourself. Or rat on folks. That’s a dangerous lifestyle, Greene.”

  Miranda just lay there, slowly curling in on herself like something crustacean amid the wetness. Her blood flowed over her hands, she heard the smacking of Dorcas’s feet against the cement as she left the room. The shower’s weak streams patted her back in ineffectual solace.

  I seek redemption now, Ms. Hance. I hope to find a path back to a meaningful life. On the yellow paper with the red lines, she had finally written this one line only, looping and teetering. But think about it. Surely Ms. Lenore Patterson Hance would not, could not, care a jot about this line of thinking, about this particular individual’s search for meaning. After all. To see a sibling die because of someone else’s desultory attitude toward fate, toward morality, toward life itself. Miranda knew about this. Yes.

  Ms. Hance, I won’t trouble you any further. Rest assured. If you rest at all, that is. Rest assured that this meaningless scrap will not be sent to the U.S. Postal Service, but instead to the refuse collection on Tuesday morning, when the scowling Opal trundles along the block with her disposable rubber gloves and her rolling bin. In it will go, Ms. Hance. You need not bother with it. You need not know how I am this day burning with a desire for absolution, how determined I am to collect some portion of it. It’s November, the holidays are looming, and I will not send you a scrawled ramble or a Christmas card or anything at all but only silent tidings from this concrete box. I send you only wishes. My sincerest silent wishes for comfort and for peace in this final season of the year.

  13

  Do Not Exploit Those over Whom One Has Evaluative Authority

  (Standard 3.08)

  I abhor the term “therapeutic incest.” It assumes a level of sordidness that might not exist, depending on the circumstances. It is, in fact, the term one might use, in a textbook, to diagnose what happened on November fifteenth, 1999, and in the months that followed, between M and me. But that would be a mischaracterization. The implication is all wrong.

  The term brings to mind perverted uncles. And something Clyde said when he visited me. I remember Riverside Park radiant with leaf color, just before wind swept the city and stripped it all away. I buzzed him up and he came in trailed by a scrawny girl with a ferret on her shoulder and a dog collar around her neck. Clyde encircled her with an arm and said proudly, “Francie, Frank. Frank, meet Francie.” He smiled. “Frank and Francie.”

  She peered at me from under a fringe of greenish-blond hair that framed a small, bone-white face. “Hiya,” she said, in a tiny childish voice. The ferret leapt off her shoulder and scampered down the hallway toward the living room.

  “Hup—there goes Luigi!” said Clyde.

  Its mangy tail disappeared around a corner. Francie grabbed my arm. “He won’t poop unless it’s shag. You have shag?”

  “No, but I do have an antisocial cat. Tell you what, it’s so nice out. Why don’t we take him for a stroll in the park?”

  Francie hurried to the living room, then reappeared with the ferret dangling over her wrist like an elongated fur purse. “Nice stuff you’ve got in there,” she said.

  “No, nothing of value in there,” I said, ushering them out. “Secondhand junk, most of it.”

  In the park, Luigi gamboled through the leaves that splattered the walkways with yellow and orange and red, and Francie trotted along after him, her stick legs in their zebra-striped spandex catching the afternoon light. She kept trying to get the ferret to fetch a ball. Clyde and I strolled behind them, watching.

  “We met at the TB vaccination van,” he said. “I saw her and I said hey, that girl’s cute.” He grinned at me. He appeared to be cultivating muttonchops.

  “Jesus, Clyde, she couldn’t be a day over sixteen.”

  “She said she’s twenty-two, Frank,” he said, “and I don’t think she’d lie to me.” He gave me a reproachful glance. “I mean, I saved her.”

  “How?”

  “This priest was giving her the whole free-Greyhound-ticket-back-to-Indiana, free-Burger-King-voucher bullshit. And I turned up at Port Authority just in tim
e to talk her off that bus.”

  I watched her skipping after the ferret, who plucked an onion ring from a cardboard container tossed in the gutter and shook it in his mouth. “That girl should be in algebra class.”

  “And every day after school she should come home to her drunk daddy? That’s a great idea.” He turned to me, dead serious. “She said they were planning to sell her to the Satanic underground. That’s why she ran. She tells stories that would blow your mind out if its socket.”

  I sighed. Once again, I’d reached that point with Clyde. The edge of reason.

  “Hey,” he said, abruptly brightening. “Whatever happened with you and that girl from Lincoln High?”

  “She terminated treatment. I haven’t had a session with her in a couple of months.”

  “That’s probably a good thing,” he said. “I was worried you had a little crush.”

  I laughed hollowly. “Right.” I heard the girl yelling: “No no no! Luigi, no!” Up ahead, she bounced from foot to foot at the base of a telephone pole, face toward the sky. The ferret shimmied above her, sliding nimbly out along the wire. It was two hours and four hot dogs before he was lured back into her arms.

  NINE A.M. ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15. A LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM squatted over Westchester, threatening icy rain or flurries. The usual collegial banter along the hallway of the Counseling Center, Corinne and Suze teasing me about my lack of weather-ready outerwear. In my office, I hung my too-thin jacket on the back of my chair. Absentmindedly glanced over the daily sched that had been left on my blotter.

  Scribbled into my 1:30 slot, as if written in blinking neon, like a signal, like a sign, like a siren screaming past me toward my future.

  M, it flashed. M, it flashed. M.

  What follows is a key event in my narrative. An irreversible step that launched me down a difficult path. But that path ultimately led to, as we say, a more coherent self.

  Before I begin, let me call to mind the words of the greatest mental-health worker of all time. Judge not, lest ye be judged, I believe that’s what he said.

  The morning sessions jumbled past in a blur, and though I could make an informed guess, I’m not really certain which of my clients haunted the chair opposite. I took my customary place in the cafeteria at noon, but couldn’t choke down my chef’s salad. Charlie and Corinne seemed to be discussing a new book by some celebrity shrink. They might have been speaking Hungarian.

  At a quarter to one I was back in my office, and I sat in my vinylette throne, my hands glued to its smooth cool arms as if nailed there, staring at the door, attempting to compose myself. At exactly one thirty: a knock on the door.

  She entered tentatively. I stood. The bandaged nose stunned me, of course. I felt my face go hot, and my nose throbbed in reflexive solidarity.

  “This is a true surprise.”

  “You painted the walls,” she said, looking around. “Minty.”

  “Admin’s choice, of course, not mine. Glad you like it, though. What’s with the bandage?”

  “Oh, stupid thing,” she said. “It’s not supposed to be easy here, right?” She perched on the edge of my desk.

  Her thighs were level with my eyes. Avert your gaze.

  “But my appeal is in the works, my family is pursuing every avenue. So who knows. Slim hopes are still hopes, I guess. In the meantime, I might as well get some free therapy, as long as I’m here. That’s what I thought.” She looked at me with a strange, sad smile. “I’ve tried so hard to remember more about you. From back then. Lincoln.”

  The radiator began to rattle and moan, as if agitated by her presence.

  “M.” I had to ask before another minute passed. “Did you do . . . what your file says?”

  “Oh,” she murmured. She stared up at the ceiling, then down at her hands. The radiator sputtered. “Yes. But not like it says.” I saw a tear drip from under one thick crescent of eyelash.

  She turned to face me. That gaze over the gauze, vertiginous. I was plummeting. “I believe you. I know about regrets,” I said. Suddenly we were so close together, I could feel her warm breath brushing my cheeks. She slid into a blurry zone, out of focus. My breathing was haphazard.

  She tasted like a warm pear.

  “This is not happening.” She backed away.

  Torrents of blood and battering heart, a rushing sound in my ears, creating not quite enough white noise to counteract the alarms in my brain. “You’re right.” Recouped my breath. “I’m really very sorry. It’s been this way since the ninth grade.” I retreated behind my desk. “I mean, I’ve just wanted to reach out to you, to help you.”

  She lowered herself into the client chair. She contemplated me for a long moment. Her face looked veiled, with the gauze.

  “But this is not what I need,” she said at last. “An appeal is what I need. They say I have a real shot. You could help me last in here till that.”

  “So the plan I proposed. It’s not in play?” The three feet between us seemed to open like a sheer canyon.

  Then she reached out a hand over the void. “I’m pursuing the appeal. But your plan has potential.” She laid her palm on my arm for just an instant, a connection, a benediction, one second of skin on skin that I still could feel a week later.

  14

  November 1999

  A mimeographed sheet was taped to the wall by the unit door:

  * * *

  The commissary is out of the following:

  Potato chips, Fritos, Cheezits, etc. Substitute Melba Toast, rye or cracked wheat.

  Kleenex, pocket pack. Substitute: Dinner napkins, family-size

  Cookies, Oreo, Chips Ahoy, fig sandwich type. Substitute: Melba toast, rye or cracked wheat

  Cigarettes, all brands except Virginia Slims. Substitute: Cigarettes, Virginia Slims

  Multivitamins, generic. Substitute: none

  * * *

  The ladies formed a crooked line by the sign. Waiting, shouting, shoving, their dollar bills and coins clutched in their hands.

  “Jojo signed me in, she signed me in second,” proclaimed Vera, who was trying to take her place at the head of the line.

  Cassie pushed her away. “Hell no. You go to the back.”

  “Friends can’t sign friends up,” said Jerrold Liverwell, who’d been charged with taking the ladies down to the commissary. He leaned against the door, thumbs hooked in his belt loops.

  “She did it last week. Last week it was allowed.”

  “This week ain’t last week,” said Liverwell. “That’s what you call the march of time.”

  Cassie bumped Vera with an expertly wielded hip. “Now get to the back of the line, gutter cunt.”

  Vera turned to Liverwell, her eyes wide. “You hear what she called me?”

  Liverwell grinned. “You’re an adult. Don’t come crying to me like I’m your daddy.”

  “You wish you was my daddy.”

  Liverwell narrowed his eyes. “You get to the back of the goddamn line or I’ll ticket your ass so fast—”

  Miranda watched all this through a kind of mist. All the time a voice murmured, worming through the spaces between every other thought: You could leave all this behind. You could.

  Her fracture had healed. And she felt a good deal safer. She’d taken the razor blade Chica had given her those long months and months ago and tucked it beneath the sole of her sneaker.

  Lu stepped into line behind her. “You look almost smiling, my crow. Something wrong?”

  Miranda shook her head. “Just thinking.”

  “Oh, thinking.” Lu winked at her. “Good to do.” She tugged on her arm. “Look who’s coming here. Your nose breaker.” Miranda turned around to see Dorcas Watkins joining the end of the line. Lu gazed at her thoughtfully. “This is a good moment,” she whispered to Miranda. “Watch now.”

  Liverwell called out, “Single file, ladies. IDs out to the left,” then unlocked the big unit door and swung it open, disappearing behind it. The line began to move. Lu clutched Miranda’s
arm and let the others pass them by until Dorcas, carefully counting her handful of money, had moved up next to them.

  Lu stuck out her long leg and tripped Dorcas in midstep. Change scattered across the floor as she tumbled to the ground, “Motherfuck—” she cried out. Before she could finish the word, Lu sashayed like a dancer, found Dorcas’s sizable shining forehead and, taking a tiny step back for momentum, kicked it, planting her foot like a soccer player making a penalty shot. Gave a little grunt as she did this. Dorcas’s face crumpled in pain.

  “No more selling crack to my crackhead friend, no more breaking noses,” said Lu, as she bent down to Dorcas’s face. She picked her head up by one round ear and whacked it against the floor.

  Miranda gaped. Lu looked up at her, motioned for her to contribute a kick. Miranda shook her head. “Big baby,” scolded Lu. Blood trickled from Dorcas’s nose. Miranda was a baby. No way she could kick anyone in the head, not even Dorcas Watkins, or slash someone with a razor blade, for that matter. She started to kneel down to help, but Lu grabbed her arm, stopping her, and called out to Liverwell, who was checking IDs as the ladies filed out the door. “Officer,” cried Lu. “Wait! Officer Liverwell, this girl is sick, she hit her head!”

  Liverwell looked up. “Shit.” He shouted down the hallway, toward the next locked door, where the ladies had pooled up, waiting for him. “Get back here,” he called. “Commissary visit is canceled, no commissary today.”

  A roar of outrage could be heard down the hall. Lu looked at Miranda and whispered, “You see, I told you I would fix this problem.”

  THE PRISON WAS COLD AT NIGHT, SO MERCILESSLY COLD. MIRANDA hugged herself into a ball, teeth chattering. Pulled all her clothes out of her shelves and arrayed them over herself, atop the bed-covers, in a mound. Lay on her side, knees to chin, watching the yellow box of light that stretched from her window trace its slow, inevitable path across her room.

  Since her last meeting with Frank Lundquist she couldn’t sleep. During the day, she’d turn over in her mind this idea of escape, but at night it terrified. Had she really kissed this deluded man? God help her.