The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Leave the questions to us,” said the man at the desk, not unkindly. “Your father is Floyd Marra?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need a glass of water? Get him a glass of water, Graham.” One of the guards went into the next room and came back with a paper cone filled with water and handed it to me. The man at the desk pursed his lips and watched me intently as I drank.

  “You’re a smart guy, a high-school graduate,” he said.

  I nodded and put the paper cone on the desk between us. He reached over and crumpled it into a ball and tossed it under the desk.

  “You’re going to work for us.”

  “What?” I still meant to ask why, but he had me confused. A part of me was still in the hole. Maybe some part would be always.

  “You want a cigarette?” he said. The guard called Graham was smoking. I did want one, so I nodded. “Give him a cigarette, Graham. There you go.”

  I smoked, and trembled, and watched the man smile.

  “We’re putting you in with him. You’re going to be our ears, Nick. There’s stuff we need to know.”

  I haven’t seen my father since I was six years old, I wanted to say. I can’t remember him. “What stuff?” I said.

  “You don’t need to know that now. Just get acquainted, get going on the heart-to-hearts. We’ll be in touch. Graham here runs your block. He’ll be your regular contact. He’ll let me know when you’re getting somewhere.”

  I looked at Graham. Just a guard, a prison heavy. Unlike the man at the desk.

  “Your father’s near the ceiling, lefthand, beside the upper bunk. You won’t have anyone in the cell with you.”

  “Everybody’s going to think you’re hot shit, a real killer,” said Graham, his first words. The other guard nodded.

  “Yes, well,” said the man at the desk. “So there shouldn’t be any problem. And Nick?”

  “Yes?” I’d already covered my new clothes with sweat, though it wasn’t hot.

  “Don’t blow this for us. I trust you understand your options. Here, stub out the coffin nail. You’re not looking so good.”

  I lay in the lower bunk trying not to look at the wall, trying not to make out differences in the double layer of voices, those from inside my cell, from the wall, and those of the other living prisoners that echoed in the corridor beyond. Only when the lights on the block went out did I open my eyes—I was willing myself back into the claustrophobic safety of the hole. But I couldn’t sleep.

  I crawled into the upper bunk.

  “Floyd?” I said.

  In the scant light from the corridor I could see the eyes of the wall turn to me. The bodies could have been sculpture, varnished stone, but the shifting eyes and twitching mouths were alive, more alive than I wanted them to be. The surface was layered with defacements and graffiti, not the massive spray-paint boasts of the exterior but scratched-in messages, complex engravings. And then there were the smearings, shit or food, I didn’t want to know.

  “—horseshoe crab, that’s a hell of a thing—”

  “—the hardest nut in the case—”

  “—ran the table, I couldn’t miss, man. Guy says John’s gonna beat that nigger and I say—”

  The ones that cared to have an audience piped up. There were four talkers in the upper part of the wall of my cell. I’d soon get to know them all. Billy Lancing was a black man who talked about his career as a pool hustler, lucid monologues reflecting on his own cleverness and puzzling bitterly over his downfall. Ivan Detbar, who plotted breaks and worried prison hierarchies as though he were not an immobile irrelevant presence in the wall. And John Jones—that was Billy’s name for him—who was insane.

  The one I noticed now was the one who said, “I’m Floyd.”

  A muscle in my chest punched upwards against my windpipe like a fist. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. Would meeting my father trigger the buried memories? The emotion I felt was virtual emotion. I didn’t know this man. I should.

  I was trembling all over.

  He was missing an eye. From the crushed rim of the socket it looked like it had been pried out of the hardened flesh of the wall, not lost before. And his arms, crossed over his stomach, were scored with tiny marks, as though someone had used him to count their time in the cell. But his one eye lived, examined mine, blinked sadly. “I’m Floyd,” he said again.

  “My name is Nick,” I said, wondering if he’d recognize it, and perhaps ask my last name. He couldn’t possibly recognize me. After my week in the hole I looked as far from my six-year-old self as I ever would.

  “Ever see a horseshit crap, Nick?” said John Jones.

  “Shut up, Jones,” said Billy Lancing.

  “How’d you know my name?” said my father.

  “I’m Nick Marra,” I said.

  “How’d you know my name?” he said again.

  “You’re a famous fuck,” said Ivan Detbar. “Word is going around. ‘Floyd is the man around here.’ All the young guys want to see if they can take you.”

  “Horseshoe crab, horseradish fish,” said John Jones. “That’s a hell of a thing. You ever see—”

  “Shut up.”

  “You’re Floyd Marra,” I said.

  “I’m Floyd.”

  I turned away, momentarily overcome. My father’s plight overwhelmed mine. The starkness of this punishment suddenly was real to me, in a way it hadn’t been in the hole. This view out over the bunk and through the bars, into the corridor, was the only view my father had seen since his hardening.

  “I’m Nick Marra,” I said. “Your son.”

  “I don’t have a son.”

  I tried to establish our relationship. He agreed that he’d known a woman named Doris Thayer. That was my mother’s name. His pocked mouth tightened and he said, “Tell me about Doris. Remind me of that.”

  I told him about Doris. He listened intently—or I thought he was listening intently. Whenever I paused, he asked a question to keep me on the subject. At the end he said only, “I remember the woman you mean.” I waited, then he added, “I remember a few different women, you know. Some more trouble than they’re worth. Doris I wouldn’t mind seeing again.”

  Awkwardly, I said, “Do you remember a boy?”

  “Cheesedog crab,” said Jones. “That’s a good one. They’ll nip at you from under the surf—”

  “You fucking loony.”

  “A boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, there was a boy—” All at once my father began a rambling whispered reminiscence, about his father, and about himself as a boy in the Italian ghetto. I leaned back on the bunk and looked away from the wall, towards the bars and the trickle of light from the hallway as he told me of merciless beatings, mysterious nighttime uprootings from one home to another, and abandonment.

  Around us the other voices from the wall babbled on, as constant as television. I was already learning to tune them out like some natural background, crickets, surf pounding. Now even my father’s voice wove into the curtain around my exhausted senses. I fell asleep to the sound of his voice.

  The next morning I joined the prison community. The two-tiered cafeteria called Mess Nine was a churning, teeming place, impossible not to see as a hive. Like the offices, it was on the interior, away from the living wall. I escaped notice until I took my full tray out towards the tables.

  “Hey, lonely boy.”

  “He’s not lonely, he’s a psycho. Aren’t you, man?”

  “They’re afraid of this skinny little guy, he’s got to be psycho.”

  “Who you kill?”

  I went and set my tray on an empty corner of a table and sat down, but it didn’t stop. The inmate who’d latched on first (“lonely boy”) followed and sat behind me.

  “He needs his privacy, can’t you see?” said someone else. “Let him eat and go back to his psycho cell.”

  “He can’t socialize.”

  “I’ll socialize him.”

  “He wants to fuck the wall.�
�

  “He was up late fucking the wall last night for sure. Little hung over, lonely boy?”

  Fuck the wall, I came to know, was an all-purpose phrase, in constant use either as insult or as an expression of rebellion, of yearning, of ironic futility. The standing assumption was that the dry, corroded mouths would gnaw a man’s penis to bloody shreds in a minute. Stories circulated of those who’d tried, of the gangs who’d forced it on a despised victim, of the willing brick somewhere in the wall who encouraged it, got it round the clock and asked for more.

  I survived the meal in silence. Better for the moment to truck on my reputation as a dangerous enigma than expose it with feeble protests. The fact of my unfair treatment wouldn’t inspire any more sympathy from the softer criminals than it had from Jimmy Shand, the brick in the hole. I shrugged away comments, the thrown bits of rolled-up bread, and a hand on my knee, and did more or less as they predicted by retreating to my cell. The television room, the gym, the other common spaces were challenges to be met some other day.

  “Shoecat cheese!” said John Jones. “Beefshoe crab!”

  “Quiet you goddamn nut!”

  “If you’d seen it you wouldn’t laugh,” said Jones ominously.

  They were expecting me in the upper bunk. My father had been listening to Billy Lancing tell an extended story about a hustle gone bad in western Kansas, while they both fended off Jones.

  “Nick Marra,” said my father.

  I was pleased, thinking he recognized me now. But he only said, “How’d you get sent up, Marra?” and I understood that he didn’t remember his own last name.

  “Robbery,” I said. I still responded automatically with the minimum. My crime didn’t get more impressive with the addition of details.

  “You’re in a rush?” said Floyd.

  “What?”

  “You haven’t got all day? You’re going somewhere? Tell your story, kid.”

  We talked. He drew the tale of my crime and arrest out of me. He and Billy Lancing laughed when I got to the collision with the police cruiser, and Floyd said, “Fucking cop was probably jerking off with the other hand.”

  “He’ll be telling it that way from now on,” said Billy. “Won’t you, Nick?”

  “What?”

  “Too good not to tell it like that,” agreed Floyd.

  And then, before I could tell him again that he was my father, he began to talk about his own crimes, and his punishments, before he was hardened. “—hadn’t been sent upstairs to get the money he forgot, I woulda been killed in that crossfire like he was. ’Course my reward for living was the judge gave me all the years they wanted to give him—”

  “Shit, you weren’t more than a boy,” said Billy.

  “That’s right,” said Floyd. “Like this one.”

  “They all look like boys to me,” said Billy. “Hey, man, tell him how you used to work for the prison godfather.”

  “Jesus, that’s a long time ago,” said Floyd, like he didn’t want to get into it. “Long time ago . . .”

  In fact he was just warming up.

  The stories carried me out of myself, though I didn’t exactly believe every word. I felt I’d been warned that embellishments were not only possible but likely. Floyd and Billy showed me that prison stories were myths, rendered in individual voices. What mattered were the universals, the telling.

  I’d been using my story to show a connection between myself and Floyd, but the bricks weren’t interested in connections. Billy and Floyd might have been accomplices in the job that got them sent up or they might never have met; either way they were now lodged catty-comer to one another forever, and the stories they told wouldn’t change it, wouldn’t change anything. The stories could only entertain, and get them attention from the living prisoners. Or fail to.

  So I let go of trying to make Floyd admit that he was my father, for the moment. It was enough to try to understand it myself.

  On the way back from dinner Lonely Boy and two others followed me back to my cell. The hall was eerily empty, every adjoining cell abandoned. I learned later that such moments were no accident, but well orchestrated. The three men twisted my arms back, pushed me into the toilet stall, out of sight of the wall, and pulled down my pants.

  I will not describe them or give them names.

  What they did to me took a long time.

  Lonely Boy stroked the nape of my neck all through the ordeal. What they did was seldom tender, but he never stopped stroking the small hairs of my neck and talking to me. His words were all contradictions, and I soon stopped listening to them. The sound was the point anyway, a kind of cooing interspersed with jagged accusations. Rhythm and counterpoint; Lonely Boy was teaching me about my helplessness, and the music of his words was a hook to help me remember. “Little special boy, special one. Why are you the special one? What did they choose you for? They pick you out for me? They send me a lonely one? You supposed be a spy here, you want to in-fil-trate? How are you gonna spend your lonely days? You gonna think of me? I know I been thinking of you. This whole place is thinking of you. They’ll kill you if I don’t watch out for you. I’m your pro-tec-tor now—”

  When I finally was alone I crawled into the lower bed and turned away from the wall. But I heard Ivan Detbar’s voice from above. He made sure he was heard.

  “You don’t have to go looking to find the top dog on the floor. The top dog finds you, that’s what makes him what he is. He finds you and he’s not afraid.”

  “Shit,” said Billy Lancing.

  “That’s who you’ve got to take,” said Detbar. “You’ve got to get on him like thunder. There is no other way.”

  “Shit,” said Billy again. “First thing I learned in the joint is a virgin asshole’s nothing to die for. It doesn’t make the list.”

  Floyd wasn’t talking.

  Graham and another guard took me into an office the next day, an airless room on the interior.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay what?”

  “Are you doing what we told you?”

  “Talking? You didn’t tell me anything more than that.”

  “Don’t be smart. Your father trusts you?”

  “Everything’s great,” I said. “So why don’t you tell me what this is all about.” I didn’t bother to tell him that Floyd didn’t agree that he was my father, that we hadn’t even established that after almost three days of talk.

  I was feeling oddly jaunty, having grasped the depths of my situation. And I wasn’t all that impressed with Graham on his own. There wasn’t anything he could take away from me.

  I wanted more information, and I suspected I could get it.

  “There’s time for that,” said Graham.

  “I don’t think so. All this weird attention is going to get me killed. They think I’m a spy for you, or they don’t know what to think. I’m not going to be alive long enough for you to use me.”

  I wasn’t interested in telling him about the previous night. I knew enough to know that it wouldn’t improve anything for me. The problem was mine alone. I didn’t know whether I was ever going to confront Lonely Boy, but if I did, it would be on prison terms. My priority now was to understand what they wanted from me and my father.

  “You’re exaggerating the situation,” said Graham.

  “I’m not. Tell me what this is about or I’ll ask Floyd.” Graham considered me. I imagine I looked different than when they first dragged me out of the hole. I felt different.

  He made a decision. “You’ll be brought back here. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

  The other guard took me back to my cell.

  It was a few hours later that I was standing in front of the man who didn’t introduce himself the first time. He didn’t again. He just told me to sit down. Graham stood to one side.

  “Do you know the name Carl Allen Hemphill?” asked the man.

  “Carl,” I said, surprised.

  “Very good. Have you been speaking with your fa
ther about him?”

  “What? No.”

  “Did you know he was a prisoner here?”

  “No.” I’d heard he’d been a prisoner. But I didn’t know he’d been a prisoner in the prison built of human bricks. “He’s here now?” Somehow I was stupid enough to yearn for an old friend inside the prison, to imagine they were offering a reunion.

  “He’s dead.”

  I received it as a small, blunt impact somewhere in my stomach. It was muffled by the distance of years since I’d seen him, and by my situation, my despair. Sure he was dead, I thought. Around here everything is dead. But why tell me?

  “So?” I said.

  “Listen carefully, Nick. Do you remember the unsuccessful attempt on the President’s life?”

  “Sure.”

  “The assassin, the man that was killed—that was your friend.”

  “Bottmore,” I said, confused. “Wasn’t his name Richard Bottmore, or Bottomore, something like that—”

  “That wasn’t his real name. His real name was Carl Allen Hemphill.”

  “That’s crazy.” I’d barely begun to struggle with the notion of Carl’s having been here, his death. The assassination was too much, like being suddenly asked to consider the plight of the inhabitants of the moon. The point of this conversation, the answers I was seeking, seemed to whirl further and further out of my reach. “Why would he want to do that?”

  “We’d very much like the answer to that question, Nick.” He smiled at me as though he’d said enough, and thought I could take it from there. For a blind, hot second I wanted to kill him. Then he spoke again.

  “He did his time quietly. Library type, loner. Nothing that was any indication. He was released five months before the attempt.”

  “And?”

  “He had your cell.”

  “That’s what this is about?” It seemed upside down. Was he saying that my real connection with Floyd didn’t interest them, wasn’t the point?

  “Floyd hasn’t said anything?”

  “I told you no.”

  This time it was the man at the desk who lit a cigarette, and he didn’t offer me one. I waited while he finished lighting it and arranging it in his mouth.