by Deeanne Gist
Unknown days have passed. I am sitting on my cot, thinking about dust. The dust from the horses running after Striker’s execution settled over my cell. I have taken care to disturb it as little as possible. I like how it looks, mantled over the stone.
Slowly, my footprints mar the floor. I can’t help it. I have to get up to use the toilet, to take the food trays.
The footprints look like reptile prints—like a prehistoric monster has been walking my floor, striding with mincing feet toward my cot.
I crouch on my cot and hold the blanket over me. I pretend the monster is coming for me. Is he coming? Is he not?
There are some things I can never discuss. One is the bad thing I did after I was released from the mental hospital when I was eighteen. I wouldn’t want the idea of this thing to be in the world. Ideas are powerful things; we should take more care with them. I know there are some who would disagree—those who think ideas are like food they can taste and then spit out if they don’t like it. But ideas are stronger than that. You can get a taste of an idea inside you, and the next thing you know, it won’t leave. Until you do something about it.
As soulless as I am, I do not want others to do what I have done. Some ideas need to stay silent inside me, like the letters inside some words.
I am not afraid to tell about the second bad thing, the one that got me sent from general population to this dungeon. I can tell it because I know what I did and why I did it. You can read about it in the court trial transcripts.
“Warden, what did you find the day of March fourth?”
“I found a body at the bottom of stairwell 4A.”
“Tell me about that stairwell.”
“It serves the library.”
“Okay. Tell me more.”
“I was called at 0900.”
“Please elaborate.”
“A trusty had found a body.”
“Warden. Please be more forthcoming.”
“The body was of an inmate. Number 114657.”
“And?”
“He had been bludgeoned about the head—no, that is not accurate. His head had been crushed against the steps.”
“And what was the cause of death?”
“Profound brain injury.”
I can see the spots even now.
“Warden, tell me. Did you eventually identify a suspect?”
“Yes.”
“And how?”
“The suspect was sitting next to the corpse—crying.”
“Please point him out to the court.”
The warden points to me.
“Crying, you say.”
“Yes. Well, weeping. Silently.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing at that time. He doesn’t talk.”
“Doesn’t talk because he can’t or doesn’t talk because he won’t?”
Here the court record shows a long pause.
“I can’t say.”
“Warden, that’s not correct, and you know it. I understand there is a time on the record when the defendant is known to have spoken. There is, in fact, a recording.”
“Yes. To my knowledge.”
“So he can talk.”
“Sir, it is not up to me to judge what someone can do.”
I remember how the warden found me there, crying on the stairs, absently wiping blood all over my face as I wept. The warden had looked down with a sad expression and slowly pulled his service pistol from the holster. I could tell what he was thinking: It was him and me alone on the stairs and no one to say what went down.
“Okay. Fine. But your investigation determined he was the culprit.”
“Yes. From the blood and brain matter on his hands.”
“In other words, he was red-handed.”
My attorney calls out with a tired voice: “Objection.”
This time there were no high-powered attorneys or crowds in the courtroom. There was no fizzle or pop of cameras. No newspaper covered the story; one prison inmate killing another is not newsworthy. There was no one like the lady to explain how I was supposedly a product of my past. There was just me, my court-appointed attorney, the district attorney, the judge, and a group of tired jurors in the prison courtroom who wanted to go home.
The only mystery for them was why I had done it. Had he said something to me? Raped or hurt me? No one knew. There were just the two of us, and one was dead, and one of us would not speak.
Only the warden knew.
I wanted to ask him later, Why didn’t you shoot me, warden? You could have raised your service pistol and ended me with a spray of blood and bone. I lifted my head for you—you could see I wasn’t going to fight it. You could have filed a report that said self-defense. You didn’t even need to file a report. You could have just tumbled me off to the oven and been done with me. No one would have cared. Many would say it would have been a blessing not just for me but the family of my victim.
The warden had just looked down at the dead man next to me, at his bashed head and leaking soft wet brains over the stone steps. He saw the inmate number on the prison shirt. He recognized the heavy face and narrow rabbit teeth. He knew this inmate from the library, watching that day. He knew who the inmate was and what kind of man he was—a man like Risk.
The warden knew what my life was like outside the library. The question for him was not why I had killed this man. It was why I had waited so long.
Even if the outside saw another nameless number, even if the mattresses of my life said just another, the warden saw something different. He saw what had been done to me. He saw me. And in that moment, I mattered. He holstered his pistol and he reached down and he took my bloody hand. He raised me up. He said he would take me someplace safe, someplace no one would ever hurt me again.
My attorney tried to point out that I had been good for many years—a model inmate, he said, spending all his time in the library. Even that didn’t matter when they found me sitting next to another nameless number, crying with his brains on my hands.
That is the way murder is. It isn’t like TV. It isn’t like the books. It is holding a man’s head in your hands as his eyes flutter and die. It is watching the blood pour and the body twitch and thinking how easy it was. It is thinking: At least it is better this time, I made it quick. And: At least I didn’t look inside.
The warden was the last one called to testify. No mitigation, no worries. There was no jury weeping this time, no woman moaning in the back row, and it was for the better.
The warden passed me on his way off the stand. I didn’t look up at him. I was hiding behind my hands the entire trial, having been shaved of my hair by the prison doctors. But I felt the warden when he passed, and I knew the gift he had given me. It was the gift of privacy.
It took only an hour this time for the jury to decide. Death.
I was glad when the warden led me to the dungeon. I was glad when he opened this cell door himself and I stepped inside, knowing I would never leave again until the last journey. By that time I had realized others could see the monsters coiled under my skin, see the screaming fear. They could see the wet mattresses and splayed legs and all that has come before and could come again.
I couldn’t have that. Not anymore.
I knew that I would never again see the beautiful soft-tufted night birds outside the window, never again sit in the library with the slanting sun through the bars. And that was okay, because I brought those ideas with me, stored in my heart.
Even in the dungeon, I cover my head with my blanket. Whether heaven or whether hell, I will never escape who I am. The only answer now is to wait. We are all safer that way, just as the warden knows.
Since I came to the dungeon, time has lost all meaning. I cannot tell you exactly how long I have been down here. The lightbulb in the metal cage above me flickers on at what I think is morning, and it turns off at what I guess is night, but unless I were to mark the walls, I have no way of knowing how many years have passed. I could tell you about the books
I have read, and I could tell you of the times when the horses have run—with every execution, it seems—and of the random times when the little men come to visit, and of the dark times when these halls fill with pain. But I cannot tell you of time.
If I could talk, I could ask others, “What year is it? What day? What number?” But what would be the point of that? What would that number tell me?
Anyway, time is more than counting days. On the outside, people think clocks tell them the time. They set an alarm for work and wake up to a blinking light that says six a.m. They look to an office wall to tell them if it is time to go home. The truth is, clocks don’t tell time. Time is measured in meaning. I better get up for work or It’s time to feed the baby. Or That was the year I got cancer or That is the day we celebrate your birthday. Or Remember when our father died or Let’s remember to plant turnips this spring. It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe.
What about for men like me? For us, time doesn’t exist. The measurements of life—birth, death, loss, marriage, love, lust, happiness—have no meaning in this dungeon. Time passes here, but it doesn’t count. I could have a clock, but what would the dial tell me? Nothing.
When time no longer exists, you don’t care about getting up, you don’t think about birthdays, you don’t think back to people you lost. You float free in the universe, untethered to anyone or anything. Your heart is empty, and because your heart is empty, you have no time. You have no place in the universe.
At least I used to think this way. Only listening to the lady and the priest has made me feel a little different.
I think more about time now. Not for me but for the lady.
Time is running out for the lady, and she doesn’t even know it. I hear the pain in her walk, and I feel it float in tendrils through my bars. The lady is searching for time. She is searching for a way to tether herself to someone. Deep in her secret heart, in the pure place she protects, she is afraid she will always be alone—that she will go through life without being known. And she will not survive that.
The lady is afraid she will wake up one morning and learn the answer she asked herself about York: When do you know you want to die?
I wish I could talk to her. I would tell her, “Lady, it is not a slow awakening. And it is not a sudden revelation. No, it is when you wake up and realize you no longer have time.”
For the first time in my life, I want to help someone. I want the lady to find what I cannot know—the gift of time.
The lady and the priest are sitting on a picnic bench by the old rectory building right outside the prison. The old rectory house is faded white. The windows are shuttered with plywood. At one time the prison priest lived here. Now the prison uses it for storage, since the priest has a small apartment in the nearby town, a place with a little kitchen and a backyard and a battered gas stove.
The priest has imagined many times what it would be like to invite the lady over for dinner. He likes to cook. It is one of his few pleasures. He has not gotten up the courage to ask her. He thinks ruefully that he doesn’t know how to ask a lady out—he has never done it.
The lady has brought her lunch, and he has joined her. The lady eats a container of cold pasta salad from a nearby deli. She sees the food he has brought—homemade vegetable soup in a thermos, rich and fragrant with chunks of zucchini, the broth floating with herbs—and she is embarrassed by her sanitized lunch.
They are silent for a time, and the lady pushes around her cold salad. She puts down the plastic fork and opens a package of crackers. “Why did you leave the priesthood?” she asks.
He takes a deep breath of relief. He has been waiting for this question.
“I was resentful in my heart,” he says immediately.
Her face invites the story.
“After eight years of education and four years in discernment, I had no idea what I really wanted or how I had gotten there.” He tells her he felt a failure already, a promising boy from a respected church family. But there was something in him that was off-putting, a lack of confidence that his superiors warned him about more than once. “It’s not that you lack humility,” an instructor at the seminary had told him. “It’s that you lack insight.”
“When I was ordained, I got the rewards of their lack of confidence,” he says. He was assigned to a dying Catholic church on the outskirts of the city. There would be no exciting work overseas for him, no dynamic action. His church had only a handful of parishioners left, almost all over the age of sixty.
“I pretended to myself that I wanted to make our little church into a force. Now I know I was only cherishing the resentment in my heart.”
The lady listens. A damp breeze off the river has picked up, the summer day unnaturally cool. The priest sees her shiver a bit in her cardigan. He pours the fragrant vegetable soup from the thermos into the cup and pushes it to her. “The church ladies suggested bingo nights and Christmas raffles and spaghetti suppers and missions to the city soup kitchen to feed the poor on Thanksgiving. I went along with all of it, but to tell the truth, I didn’t know why I was really there.”
“Who does?” The lady gently smiles, drinking the soup.
“If the devil waits for an open door, I had the whole house open, and it was catching a breeze,” he says, his eyes faraway as he opens a bag containing two homemade rolls. He butters one for her. “But it was not the devil that made me do it.”
He tells her it started when a fellow priest from a much larger, popular church reached out to him, inviting his congregation to join their effort to combat child sex trafficking. He would never forget the innocent and appalling words of one trembling church parishioner on their first night of doing outreach. “But where are the red lights?” the woman had asked.
The kids on the corners didn’t look victimized. They looked hard. And they were as repelled by his church ladies as they were by any zealot with a fistful of guilt and silver coins of regret. A child prostitute in his church, he had to admit, would live a life of cloying stigma. He saw the choices they were being offered through their eyes—momentary charity with a bounty of shame or prideful indifference.
That first night, the group walked the cold winter streets, handing out brochures for local programs. The next night, half as many of his devoted followers showed up, and the night after that, he was the only one to go. He understood the cold was too much, the streets too hard. It was easier to plan the winter raffle and the Thanksgiving soup kitchen trip.
That night he ended up walking those night streets alone, a warm jacket over his collar and clerical shirt.
Why did he go into the club? He didn’t know. He told himself he wanted to help. But he was confused. His entire life had been spent following his anointed path, like Hansel and Gretel following their trail of crumbs, and instead of finding happy ever after, he found a house built of candy and a hot oven of confusion.
The club was neat and clean. There was a faint smell of bleach. Some of the tables had solitary men sitting at them. A small stage was frocked with silver tinsel. A girl was on it. It took him a moment to realize she was naked. In this setting, her nakedness looked almost ordinary. He had always been chaste, but he was not innocent. The entire scene was devoid of sensuality. He felt as safe as in a library.
A server put down a napkin. Five dollars for a soda drink? Apparently, yes.
He sat for a while, feeling strangely relaxed. He had no idea what he was doing, but he was here. He sipped his soda.
Songs played. Girls rotated slowly throughout the room. One came over to his table. She was young and fresh-looking, with round cheeks and puppy fat on the sides of her waist.
“Want a table dance?” she asked.
He shook his head, not knowing what that was.
“Buy me a drink?”
“Sure.”
She sat down, and immediately, the server was there. The girl ordered a large Diet
Coke, and the priest was out ten dollars and could see the deal.
“How old are you?” he asked, looking at her bright skin.
“Sixteen.” She shrugged, sipping the soda. Seeing the alarm in his face, she quickly added, “But I have a license that says I’m of age. You aren’t a cop, are you?” She looked with innocence at his Roman collar.
“I’m a priest,” he told her, and felt thankful when she didn’t make the obligatory child molester joke.
She drank her soda and told him her story. How she had been living on the streets since she was fourteen, and how lucky she was to work in this club because it was a safe, good place and she made money and had her own apartment. She had plans—she was getting her GED. “I’m going to go to community college,” she boasted. How her most favorite book of all was Watership Down. Her story had the artlessness of truth, and in the end, it all turned out to be true. She was exactly who she said she was.
“I’m wasting time,” she said with a laugh after they had been chatting for a little while.
“How so?” he asked.
“Sitting here and not dancing,” she said, and he looked around and saw what she meant. “Do you want a table dance?” she asked hopefully. “Ten dollars for one song.”
“No, thanks.” He smiled. He got up to go.
“I’m hungry,” she said, and before he knew it, he was going to get some food from the jazz club across the street. Her pasta dish cost more than he’d paid for food over a day, but he bought it. He returned with the Styrofoam container and watched her eat. She didn’t offer to pay him back.
They became friends. There was no better way to put it. He was sure in his heart that he was not going back in order to do her harm.
The night came when he was in the club as her shift was ending. He offered her a ride. For the first time, he saw the fear and vulnerability in her eyes. With a start, he realized that she had been one of those hard kids on the corner. He could see her tabulate the odds of accepting his ride, not just physically but emotionally.
