Undone

by John Colapinto

  Assigned a room on the second floor, he tapped his way upstairs, then down a hall to his right, past several doors at whose numbers he peered closely, until he came to room six. The door was open. He stepped inside. Squinting, he made out two sets of bunk beds on either wall. There was no phone, no television set, no bookshelves.

  There was, however, a man sitting on one of the beds. He identified himself as Chris and said that he had been released from Beckford Correctional two days earlier. He said that he’d heard Jasper was coming.

  “You were on the Tovah,” he said. “So you’re famous.”

  Chris explained that he too was a sex offender—”All the guys are, in here; they keep us together”—and that he worked as a janitor at a fast-food place across town. He asked Jasper what job he would be doing. Jasper said that he did not know yet. Chris said that, so far, the center didn’t seem too bad. “We gotta do group every evening at seven,” he said. “It’s okay. The facilitator does most of the talking.” He added that their roommates were okay. One of them had done time for trading child porn on the Internet but hadn’t actually “messed with any kids.” Their other roommate had raped a girlfriend. “He’s kind of an asshole,” Chris said. “Hip-hop wigger.”

  Jasper sat and propped his cane against the bed, took off his dark glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “You blind or something?” Chris asked.

  Jasper explained that he was indeed legally blind, but he could see blurry shapes and could read if he had good light and held the page close to his face.

  “Bummer,” Chris said. “But I guess that’s better than, like, totally blind.” He stood. “Well, I’ve got to get to work. My shift starts at noon.” Jasper now could make out that he was a tall, pear-shaped man. He went out.

  So this now was his life: a room shared with three other sex offenders in a halfway house in a remote and bleak section of the city. No family. No money, except for the three thousand dollars he had made in prison gluing ornate nameplates into Bibles. But, then, did he need more? Not for any reason he could think of. In any case, he would not resume his writing career. He had not written a word in five years and had no urge to.

  He ate, slept, went to group therapy. The sessions included the twenty other inmates in the center and were run by a psychologist named Dr. Jax, who encouraged each man to say something about what he had learned that day. He was constantly urging the participants to “call others out on their bullshit,” insisting that this was the only effective method for making sex offenders face their illness and get around their practiced manipulations. Once, when Jasper spoke about his guilt over what he had done—his inability to understand his actions, his grief over the loss of his family and the impossibility of his ever forgiving himself for the lives he had destroyed—he was viciously verbally assaulted by an inmate who insisted that all such statements of guilt and remorse were a sham and a dodge, that Jasper in fact still harbored deep desires for his daughter, desires that he would act upon in an instant, given the chance. In his shame and disgrace, Jasper agreed, although he wondered if this was really true. The mere thought of Chloe caused him such anguish.

  Three weeks passed. Then one morning Officer Dunwoody handed Jasper a map and a transit card and told him how to take the city bus to his place of employment, a large, windowless building on the city’s far western fringe. There, Jasper sat in a tiny cubicle hardly wider than his shoulders and answered phones for a tech support line. He wore a hands-free headset and worked from a memorized script, directing callers to technicians depending on what model of computer the caller owned, what kinds of problems they were having with what kinds of devices. Equipped with a special large-print keyboard, he pushed buttons that directed the callers to the correct tech representative, in India, Pakistan or Malaysia.

  After a month, he earned the privilege of making an unsupervised day trip from Turning Points. There was one place only where he dreamed of going: Beckford General Hospital, where Pauline remained in the intensive care unit, where Jasper had successfully appealed to have her treated, using funds freed up from the escrow account awarded to her after his incarceration. The hospital lay five miles east of the rehabilitation center, in the city’s downtown core. Jasper caught a bus, then cut a careful swath with his tapping cane through the streaming, bumping, lurching crowds, across a broad avenue, to the hospital. He ascended the familiar stone stairs to the entrance, found his way across the vast lobby to the elevator bank and rode up to the third floor. There, he tapped his way to the nursing station, where he was greeted by a voice he recognized—that of a kindly middle-aged nurse with whom he used to chat, all those years ago, when Pauline was first hospitalized after her stroke. “Friend or family?” she asked in a brusque, impersonal tone that revealed she did not recognize him.

  Jasper identified himself and the woman inhaled sharply. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ulrickson,” she said. “I didn’t—that is, it has been so long …”

  She bustled out from behind the pentangle-shaped desk and took his arm. “We were all very sorry to hear about your troubles,” she murmured in an undertone as she led him down the hall. “But I’m very glad to see that you haven’t forgotten your wife.” At the end of the corridor, she turned left and guided him through a doorway into a private room. “Here she is,” the nurse said, bringing him over to her bedside. “Take as long as you like.” Her footsteps retreated down the hall.

  Jasper leaned over the bed and brought his face close enough to make out Pauline’s features. Her closed eyelids were motionless, her skin waxy and pale but with a faint glow of life. A smell, not unpleasant, arose from her, as of lightly heated milk. He propped his cane against the side of the bed and groped for one of her hands. It was warm. He wept, sobbing softly, a strange mixture of grief and joy. Joy to be reunited with her. Grief at his awareness of the state to which he had brought her. Finally, he was able to say, in a low rumble, “Pauline. It’s me.” There was no reaction. He said her name several more times. Her eyelids remained as motionless as those of a stone saint carved on a sarcophagus. Nevertheless, he continued to speak to her, telling her of his release from prison, of his determination to visit her every day, of his conviction that she would one day wake up, and that he would never, ever abandon her.

  He heard approaching footsteps. He straightened and wiped at his eyes. A figure stepped into the bright gap of the door.

  “Mr. Ulrickson,” said Dr. Carlucci’s voice.

  Jasper did not think he was imagining the slight hitch in the doctor’s speech, that millisecond pause at the shock of how much he had changed. Or was that delay, that hiccup, the result of the awkwardness of addressing a man convicted of Jasper’s unthinkable crimes? In any case, the doctor stepped forward, as if from a surrounding nimbus of gray smoke, into Jasper’s range of focus, his dark, intense eyes and the pontoons of curly hair above his ears taking shape. He offered his hand. Jasper took it. Carlucci said, “I was sorry to hear about”—that pause again—”about your difficulties.”

  Jasper silently bowed his head.

  Carlucci shifted into brisk professional mode, explaining that scans showed normal brain activity in Pauline’s prefrontal cortex, suggesting cognition and awareness. “But she remains unresponsive, for reasons we don’t understand. In some respects, she resembles victims of severe shock rendered blind, deaf or dumb through psychological trauma. At times, she seems to respond to verbal stimuli with movements of her eyes beneath the closed lids, but these minute twitches and tics could be haphazard, random reflexes. In any case, it certainly does no harm to talk to her—and it may even do some good.

  “I wish I had better news,” Dr. Carlucci added. “But there is always hope.” He paused as if expecting Jasper to say something. But what was there to say? “I’ll leave you now,” the doctor said finally. “Please feel free to get the nurses to page me, if any questions arise. Stay as long as you like. And it’s good to see you.”

  4

  The visit made Jasper the happi
est he had been in years. He returned to the hospital every day after work, at 5 p.m., sitting with Pauline for a half hour before taking the bus back to Turning Points for dinner, then group. On Saturdays and Sundays, he spent all day at the hospital and often crossed paths with Deepti, who visited with Pauline each Sunday after church. It was on one of those Sunday visits that she said she had something for him—items she had salvaged from 10 Cherry Tree Lane before the house went on the auction block. “Just some small mementos that I think you might like to have,” she said. “Nothing of great value.” She promised to drop them at the rehabilitation center.

  On a morning shortly after that, he was in his room, trying to write a letter to his sister, when he was buzzed from the front desk. He went downstairs and found Deepti in the lobby. When he drew close, he was able to make out a box sitting on the counter in front of Dunwoody, who was lifting out items and studying them. “The souvenirs I mentioned,” said Deepti. “From the house.”

  “I’ve got to inspect everything before I hand it over to you,” Dunwoody said. “These are all fine,” he added, waving at the items he had already pulled out and put on the counter.

  Jasper picked one up and raised it to his face. It was a framed photograph of his parents that had hung on his office wall. For a moment he was looking into his father’s mild, gently smiling face, his mother’s head, with its tousled mane of white-blond hair and her sun-toughened skin, resting on his shoulder. He put it down and groped for another object. He knew, the second his fingers closed around the smooth, glassy surface, that it was one of the glazed pottery sculptures Maddy had made in preschool—a dog—which Jasper once kept on his desk.

  Dunwoody extracted a photograph of Chloe that had sat on Jasper’s office bookshelf. It showed her at age fifteen, standing, in cutoff jean shorts and a halter top, on a dock in New Halcyon. “Confiscating this,” Dunwoody said, placing the picture face down on the shelf behind him. He flipped through a drawing tablet filled with Maddy’s crayon scribbling and placed it with the other approved objects. He inspected a box of carved chessmen. “These are fine,” he said. He placed all the items back in the box. “You’re good,” he added.

  Jasper thanked Deepti, but when he returned to his room with the box held awkwardly under one arm, he could not bring himself to unpack the objects. They stabbed at his heart too painfully. He stowed the box under the desk attached to his bed and told himself that there might, one day, be a time when he would feel strong enough to put the objects on display. But not now.

  He did make progress. In group therapy, he began to understand how markedly he differed from his fellow inmates, who described daily struggles with the demons of their criminal lusts. Jasper felt no such struggle. When he thought about Chloe, it was with remorse, regret and guilt, even tenderness—but not the tenderness of erotic desire. Somehow, that single episode of horrendous violation, committed under the combined impetus of his grief and guilt over Pauline’s hospitalization, Dr. Geld’s therapeutic revelations, and the loosening effects of the alcohol, had purged Jasper of his twisted lust for Chloe, quenched it as thoroughly as a bucket of water dumped over a robustly burning campfire, turning it to cold ash. When he said this in group, he expected, as before, to be shouted down by the others and Dr. Jax. Instead, they agreed that he was, somehow, “different.” Jasper’s crime, they unanimously agreed, was “situational”—the result not of an inherent sexual sickness, but of the special circumstances he had found himself in. “None of which is to excuse your behavior,” Dr. Jax told him. “And none of which is to say that you could not again find yourself in the kind of compromising situation that would make you vulnerable to acting out. But on the whole, I do not see you as a repeat offender.”

  Jasper began to hate himself less, and began to see a more defined, less dire, future for himself. He could never regain what he had lost, but he could, upon his discharge from Turning Points, find an apartment or room close to Pauline and see her every day. Perhaps he might even see Maddy again—after she turned eighteen; until then, he would dedicate his life to becoming the kind of person she would wish to know. And who knew? Perhaps even a rapprochement with Chloe was not too much to hope for?

  It was in this mood of fledgling optimism that, one morning in early March, two weeks before his scheduled release from Turning Points, he remembered the box of souvenirs that Deepti had brought to him. He was suddenly eager to touch those enchanted objects, to look at those tokens of his former happiness. He groped under his desk, located the box, pulled it out and, sitting on the edge of his bed, opened it. On top was that photograph of his parents. He set it on his desk. He lifted out Maddy’s dog sculpture and put it on the desk too.

  He took from the box Maddy’s drawing tablet and lovingly opened the cover. He tilted the page to the light from the window and moved his face to within an inch of the fragrant newsprint. Printed in crayon, in Maddy’s wobbling, childish hand, were the letters of the alphabet, from A to M. He smiled, recalling her obsession with letters that long-ago summer. He moved his eye down the page. Beneath the alphabet, she had printed, in block capitals, CHLOE. The printing had a childish wobble and tilt, and the E was backward and had several extra crossbars in the middle, like a ladder. But the name was perfectly legible. Jasper was puzzled. At four years old, Maddy had been too young to read or write—and he had not known her to have progressed from scribbling single letters to spelling out actual words or names. Chloe herself must have told Maddy how to write the name—spelling it out for her.

  He turned the page and saw a drawing of what he took to be a horse, given its mane and long snout and the “bent-back” look of its hind legs. Beneath this, Maddy had written two more words—inexpertly formed, the spacing uncertain. Nevertheless, she had printed near the middle of the page the word NOT and near the bottom, YOURS. Again, he was mystified by her apparent ability to spell out words, but he again reasoned that Chloe or Deepti must have been dictating something to her—a full sentence, presumably—and become distracted, leaving the phrase incomplete. Or more likely Maddy, with her child’s short attention span, had grown bored and simply stopped writing.

  He turned to the next page, which contained random squiggles and lines. Near the bottom, he saw written, in that now-familiar printing: MADDYS ONA.

  “Huh,” he said aloud.

  What could this sentence have been part of? What could she have been trying to write? Or, rather, what could Chloe or Deepti, who must have dictated it, been trying to tell her? He puzzled over this for almost a minute but could make no sense of it—even as a sentence fragment, an incomplete thought. Perhaps he would bring the drawing pad with him to the hospital on Sunday and see if Deepti could recall what this was. It bothered him, obscurely, to think that the import of the phrase could be lost forever.

  He turned the page and was surprised to discover still more words, again in that blocky, childish, ill-spaced hand, with the Ps and Es backward, and the words running almost diagonally down the page: ACE; and a little lower, CAP; and below that, the almost-illegible word TOOK; and then near the bottom, as if it were an afterthought—it was in a different color of crayon, orange this time—the mysterious word fragment ONA again.

  “What on earth …?” he mumbled.

  Chris came into the room. He stopped and stared at Jasper, who was squinting hard at the page. He held the pad so close to his face that his nose almost touched the paper. “Dude,” Chris said, “what’s up? Looks like you’re eating that thing.”

  “I’m trying to read something,” Jasper said. “But I can’t see it properly. Tell me. What does this say?” He held the book out. “Just here,” Jasper said, pointing at the words at the top of the page.

  Chris bent over and looked. “It says, uh, ‘ace … cap … took.’” He straightened up. “What’s it mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jasper said. “What’s this last bit? Does that say ‘ona’?”

  Chris bent over again. He nodded. “Yup, that’s it. ‘Ona.’ N
o, wait,” he said. “No, sorry, that’s a D. It’s—well, it’s not a word. Just letters. D-N-A. Hey, is that like DNA?”

  Jasper stared at Chris’s blurry, indistinct outline. Then he pulled the book under his eyes. He brought his face close to the paper. “Yes,” he said. “DNA.”

  The page was shaking now in his hands and it took him a moment to steady himself. He reread all the words on that page, saying them aloud to himself in a whisper: “‘Ace … cap … took … DNA.’”

  “Dude,” Chris said, “you okay?”

  Jasper flipped back to the first page. His heart was hammering hard in his chest. “Help me here,” he said. “What does this word say?” He held the first page up to Chris.

  “Chloe,” Chris said.

  Jasper turned the page. “And this?”

  Chris squinted. “Not,” he read.

  “And here at the bottom?”

  “Yours,” Chris read.

  Jasper turned another page. “And what does this say?”

  “‘Maddy, uh, maddys ONA’—I mean, DNA,” Chris said. “What the hell is this?”

  Jasper spoke the words aloud, running them together and supplying what he gleaned must be the missing punctuation: “Chloe not yours. Maddy’s DNA.”

  “Dude,” Chris said admonishingly, “isn’t Chloe your daughter? I mean, didn’t Dr. Jax say you aren’t supposed to talk about her out of group?”

  Jasper lowered the tablet onto his knees. He could not breathe and his heart was convulsing wildly. He stared ahead of him into the indefinite gray, trying to calm himself.