Riverine

by Angela Palm

  We sat there with wet eyes and stunned expressions, holding each other’s gazes. I hadn’t expected there to be no good reason. Not that any reason was good. But I thought for certain there would be an explanation for what he’d done. There wasn’t. Drugs themselves had not triggered his actions. There was no mental illness. There was nothing. It didn’t align with my memory of him or with the narrative I’d constructed over the years.

  Corey wasn’t off, at least I don’t think so. The psychiatrists assigned to screen him before the trial that never happened didn’t think so. In my view, this was a good thing. It meant that the crime was an isolated incident, unfortunate and horrid, yes, but he wasn’t a sick person. In some ways, he was made by where we were from and who he was from, from circumstances and repeated slips through cracks with no one to pick him back up. He was from the wrong part of town in a town where status mattered and where people of authority had little else to occupy their time. He’d been exposed to criminal life very early, and it had pulled him into its current. But he had also made bad choices. And by his word, he’d never valued his own future enough to make better ones.

  “We’re not much different,” I said, after thinking this through a bit. “None of us. People are mostly water and thoughts.”

  People, especially young ones, are malleable. Like wet sediment. Guided by whatever kind of banks have lined their river, by what has held them. By what has let the liquid drain out. They try to dredge the bottom, straighten the path, widen the mouth. But the water must go somewhere.

  “Thank you for sending me that picture of us,” he said, changing the subject to something lighter. In it, we were laughing, sitting in the grass, the river a few hundred yards behind us. “I’d forgotten there were good parts to my childhood.”

  I’d gone back to see our houses before the visit. To check on our windows. It was something I did from time to time, a ritual to remember him by. I didn’t want to tell him how small the place was that had warped us somehow, sending us in opposite directions, away from each other when we had always wanted to be together. I didn’t want to tell him how escapable it was. How leaving didn’t require extremes.

  Rule 4. On a six-hour contact visit in prison, you may use the bathroom once. If the offender uses the bathroom, the visit is terminated.

  Corey told me he had had nothing to drink since dinner the day before. “Dehydrating. Don’t want to lose time with you.”

  After the burrito incident, we allowed ourselves one sip of pop each. We wiped our fingers clean as well as we could. I was happy to see him, despite the more challenging parts of our conversation, and it showed—I couldn’t stop smiling. He was a lost puzzle piece finally found, the picture complete, though distorted. We posed for a photograph and smiled. I tried to make every minute count, not knowing how long it would be until I saw him again. I tried to put us both back together again, as least for the present moment.

  Corey turned my right hand over—flat, open, and palm up—examining the way I was made as if he were a scientist and my skin might consist of a newly discovered element. “Can I read your palm?” This was one of the many things he had studied during his time in prison. Sixteen years down. Forever to go.

  In recent conversations, via letters in the mail, we’d been considering dust and origins, the vastness of the universe compared with our tiny stakes in it. We’d been considering the stars we used to be. One thing we’d always shared: the sky. At least there was that. He wrote to me to make sure I knew when to see the super moon, the blood moon, when Saturn would be visible. There was a slim chance that we could share the sky again; the earth, too. Life sentences sometimes got overturned, but Indiana was notoriously “tough on crime,” and his crime was one of the worst. The public would always consider him to be a threat. He had changed, but he would always be fragile. He had endured too much, including his own rock bottom, but I knew the world would still be better with him in it. My world was better with him in it. I had seen inside him. I knew him better than anyone else. Save for a blighted past, he was nearly whole now, as whole or good in the present as any of us could say we were. He deserved another chance, I thought. I promised to pick him up at the gates if he ever got out. I’d buy him a telescope and we’d stay worlds away from the past. We’d never drive by the river. Not even to look at our windows.

  He was stoic, contemplative, as he prepared his assessment of my heart line. My fingers rested gently against his wrist in a tragic repose, an inert come hither. I wondered if he heard my blood rushing, or if he noticed that I was nearly breathless, but he leaned in closer, his hulking hands and shoulders striking soft poses that suggested a gentle giant of a man. A man who had learned to show great control over his capable body and his undernurtured emotions. A man who had both softened and hardened under the effects of time and punishment, who could not bring himself to kill even a fly or an ant now. A man, somehow, full of love.

  My heart line resembled an aerial cartography of the river where we grew up, whooshing in one direction with various inlets and outjuttings. Corey began near the left side of my palm, running one thick finger along its rugged yet determined trajectory. “One love begins here, young and stupid but real enough,” he said expertly, the corners of his mouth upturned. His finger reached a tangled breakage. “Here, midway, there’s a branch that flows into the main line, only it’s weaker and fades.”

  I nodded my encouragement at him. There was no need to name names. Instead, this was the way we would talk about deprivation and absence and regret. About entire years of nothingness. About other people we had known. This scar, a woman who wasn’t me. This pale remembering, a boy who wasn’t him. Here, a crescent-shaped shadow, the nick of a knife, that marked the night that we couldn’t quite broach head-on in conversation.

  In the final scene of Badlands, Kit and Holly fly in an airplane, handcuffed, above the clouds. We get only a summary of the aftermath: the details of Kit’s sentence, and a report of whom Holly married instead.

  I spread out my fingers as he held my wrist in place. “What else?”

  He focused again as I glanced at the clock. One hour left. We sipped enough pop to keep our mouths wet but not enough to make us have to pee. We would sit there until we were forced to part.

  “It picks up where it started from. The first line comes back to stay.” His finger found its way to the line’s farthest point, rounding the side of my hand. “What’s down here?” he asked of the fleshy mess of lines there.

  This was how we would talk about plenty and fortitude. This was how we would count the babies we would have had. One, two, three hashes across my right ring finger. A map of our garden in bloom between thumb and forefinger. This horizontal stroke, a clothesline like the one his mother used to have, where I would hang his jeans to dry on Saturday mornings. Everything had a different meaning now. Everything was dust. Everything was written on our hands.

  “The parallel universe is there,” I said. Look back and you’ll see another future.

  “Back to Stardust.”

  When I started to cry, he risked everything—his visits, his good behavior, going back to solitary, being cuffed right there in front of me, who knows what all—to reach across the table to touch my face. He cupped my cheek for a moment and wiped away the tear that crested my cheek with his thumb, then put it to his mouth. We sat there, staring at each other, waiting for the guards to remove us. And though they had watched him dare to touch me, they did nothing.

  . . .

  I read that a person sucked into a black hole would split in two—one self falling forever into nothing, the other a collapsed star. I left my falling self with Corey and watched it haunt the cornfields from the sky as I was leaving. A reverse explosion was alive inside my lungs. In the diorama of my airplane window, I watched the shadow of a cloud eclipse the flat, rural squares where he was incarcerated. From the sky, it wasn’t that far from where we were born. I looked down and wondered whether he was sleeping, crying, daydreaming. Two peo
ple divide more readily than one does. I pressed my finger against the glass so I didn’t have to witness myself leaving him behind.

  No one understands black holes, those metaphors for anything—space junk incinerators, world generators, secret keepers of galaxies. There is something freeing about leaving the ground in an airplane, something that thwarts every impossibility on land. “The view never gets old,” Mike always says of flying. Sometimes I look at his many airspace charts, which, unlike maps of the land, are constantly changing and becoming outdated. Maps of airspace are gibberish to me, and I find that comforting. Flight ought to remain foreign, not quite real. Like magic. When I was almost asleep in the clouds, I remembered that everything on Earth is made of Stardust. Me, the plane. The seven-dollar glass of wine. It’s what Corey would say to me in every letter—from stars to stars again. His own early life until his death. That’s how long he would remember me, how long he would love me. How long he would be in prison.

  LIFE ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN

  In 1959, Brion Gysin developed a writing method called cut-ups after accidentally cutting through layers of newspaper. When he positioned his own writing next to the newspaper, he discovered that together the cuttings created interesting combinations of words and image. He then intentionally cut up various texts and arranged them at random. Gysin taught William S. Burroughs the method and together they developed it further at the Beat Hotel in Paris. Burroughs claimed that all writing was cut-ups. “A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation,” he says. A life, a marriage, can take the same shape.

  When I returned home to Vermont, which was beginning to feel like my real home even if it lacked the more familiar landscape and grit of the Midwest, I tried to relay to Mike details of my visit to see Corey in prison: “It was emotional but natural. I can’t explain.”

  I didn’t mention that I’d been so nervous that my hands shook when I walked through the metal detector. Or that before walking down the corridor of barbed-wire fencing to get to the visiting area, I’d slipped on the wet floor and fallen. I described the food instead. “They had Tony’s pizza in the vending machine. Pepperoni. I forgot how much I like junk food.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Hours.” Forever. Not long enough. Not at all, compared with sixteen years, or time itself.

  Mike just looked at me. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know.” My cheeks still hurt from having laughed so much during the visit. My eyes burned from crying afterward. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over this.” But I didn’t know what to do with that information. “I can’t lose him again. That’s all I know.” But what did that mean? How would a close relationship with a prisoner housed fifteen hundred miles away fit into my life?

  “I climbed a tree while you were gone,” Mike said over the children’s heads. “Hurt my back.”

  I’d never known him to do such a thing—spontaneous and blatantly youthful. To do something I would do. “Are you trying to get my attention?” I asked. Mike was almost forty. In eight years together, I’d never seen him do anything like that.

  “I just wanted to climb a tree.”

  I understood that. But I also knew he was afraid of heights. Maybe we were both facing our fears.

  The prison was a separate world from home, from anywhere, and I was a different person in it. A different person after it. Returning to my condo in Vermont was a process of acclimation. It felt too large, full of possessions I didn’t really need. I didn’t know what all I would feel after seeing Corey again. Some reactions were expected, but others surprised me. It was reassuring that he was still, in part, the person I remembered. I hadn’t fabricated memories of him—we had shared important experiences together. He had been good to me. He had not forgotten me as I had not forgotten him. But although he was so readily someone I wanted in my life, there was no changing the circumstances. I wasn’t used to that kind of futility. In life, when I wanted something to change, I took action. I couldn’t think up an out for him using smarts; no amount of education would help me help him. I had to keep reminding myself of why he was there. When I was overcome with the lack of him, I subverted my inclination toward sentimentality by repeating his sentence to myself: life, no parole. Felony murder. These were grave realities and justice was still paramount.

  Instead of a levelheaded outpouring from that thought, I imagined his silhouette filling up my kitchen door frame or relaxing on my couch. I carried his ghost with me as if it were a worn doll, positioning him among the furniture of my life, willing him into existence all around me. My intense, decades-long physical attraction to Corey was powerful and singular. I woke in dreams of him, half-real moments of consciousness. I stayed up late watching prison-related television and documentaries: Russia’s Toughest Prisons, MSNBC’s Lockup, Orange Is the New Black. I set up a Google alert for Corey’s facility. There had been two murders there in the past year—fatal stabbings. “I’m always careful,” he had promised. “I avoid conflict as much as I can.” But I knew that when he’d been stabbed—nearly killed ten years earlier—he hadn’t told his mother because he didn’t want her to worry.

  In the months after our visit, I talked about Corey to near strangers, peddling the photo of us from our visit to anyone who would look at it, as if sharing it with the right person might present a magical key—one that would bring him home or make sense of it all. When I talked about Corey to Mike, it was to share something Corey had told me that added to whatever conversation we were having. By bringing him into the conversation even when he wasn’t there, I was able to meld the two worlds together, which made it more bearable for me. It was a surprise to Mike to learn that they were similar in some ways. They would both tell me the same things about the same TV shows, for example. Or if I was sick, they would both remind me that my stubbornness had never served me well and insist that I see a doctor. Corey was comforted by the fact that Mike was the kind of husband Corey never got to be. Mike was glad that through Corey I had made peace with the past. They shared the same opinion about me: I could be a real handful, but I was worth the effort in the end. I hoped they were right.

  Essays often veer away from their centers. A braided essay can read like the inside of a mind: digressions and associations crop up as they naturally occur in the writer’s thoughts. Wandering away from the subject isn’t a changing of the subject per se, but a chance for readers to compare notes with their own ideas. It’s an invitation to readers to test what they have read against their own experience. It is in this associative space that the text can transform readers. In this space, readers become more than what they were before they began reading. It is an opportunity for expansion, for degrees of change.

  Author and teacher Judith Kitchen advised writers to court these digressions: “Let your conversation get away from you. Let a new story take over…. Something may happen along the way, something to alert you to its relevance.” The writer, she said, must trust herself to identify the connective tissue within the digression.

  I embrace this form, this thinking. I embrace complication, trusting that the meaning will emerge with time. I would argue that this advice is not just for writers. Digressions span the life cycle of any marriage, whose shape, in my experience, resembles that of the braided essay. However, the marital adage of “growing together to stay together” implies parallelism. Two people, side by side, taking even steps along an unknowable path without divergence.

  A math lesson: without the aid of technical instruments, it is impossible to construct parallel lines that do not collide at some point in the future or incrementally veer away from one another.

  Perhaps a better metaphor for marriage is the patchwork quilt: the ability to add on in all directions. As individuals, people are always changing, attaching new material. But does a traditional American marriage accommodate such change? I read once that people’s personalities are
much more varied and inconsistent than they tend to admit. This is because our culture dictates that we must be consistent in order to be perceived as sane. In order to be taken seriously, we perform only certain aspects of the selves we “live” inside our heads. Most of us, then, are much more dynamic internally than we appear outwardly.

  Some failed marriages illustrate this phenomenon. Often I’ll hear that people divorced because they “didn’t know each other” anymore. They grew into different people who were no longer compatible. I don’t think this is an indication of a mismatched couple, but rather a failure of the expectations of marriage. In a traditional sense, marriage isn’t designed to accommodate the natural change a person experiences in a lifetime. It isn’t designed for the partners to court separate digressions, when the meaning and duration of the digressions cannot be known. It isn’t designed to embrace the romance of mystery. For those of us who thrive on the romance of mystery, on courting digressions, this is problematic. Keeping up with the minutiae of a partner’s digressions, let alone one’s own personal changes, is complicated work.

  Mike has been an excellent life partner. He made me a mother. He is an ideal companion, steady and grounded where I am unpredictable and haphazard. He is selfless: he paid for my failed attempt at law school, a digression I followed to an expensive halt. The list goes on. But he can’t provide everything for a person who is always changing. Someday he very well may become a person who does not want to do so. No one person can provide everything to another person, not even a parent to a child. No one should have to, or be expected to. I welcome the digression that Corey offers in my life, the comfort I associate with him. With Mike, I have a solid foundation, a home, two children, a like-minded companion. With Corey, I have a long history and an intimacy that transcends passion and experience. My empathy for him shaped my life; we’re linked in ways neither of us can fully explain. Mike has never known me the way that Corey does, but Corey has never seen me as a mother. He hasn’t shared a home or a family with me or been with me through illnesses, deaths, or financial despair. The two people have their own separate squares on the patch quilt of my life.