Hocus Pocus

32

What an afternoon!

Only 3 hours before, I had been so at peace in my bell tower. Now I was inside a maximum-security prison, with a masked and gloved Japanese national who insisted that the United States was his Vietnam!

What is more, he had been in the middle of student antiwar protests over here when the Vietnam War was going on. His corporation had sent him to the Harvard Business School to study the minds of the movers and shakers who were screwing up our economy for their own immediate benefit, taking money earmarked for research and development and new machinery and so on, and putting it into monumental retirement plans and year-end bonuses for themselves.

During our interview, he used all the antiwar rhetoric he had heard at Harvard in the ‘60s to denounce his own country’s overseas disaster. We were a quagmire. There was no light at the end of the tunnel over here, and on and on.

Until that moment, I had not given a thought to the mental state of members of the ever-growing army of Japanese nationals in this country, who had to make a financial go of all the properties their corporations had bought out from under us. And it really must have felt to most of them like a war overseas about Heaven knows what, and especially since, as was my case in Vietnam, they were color-coded in contrast with the majority of the native population.

On the subject of color-coding: You might have expected that a lot of black people would be shot after the prison break, even though they weren’t escaped convicts. The state of mind of Whites in this valley, certainly, was that any Black male had to be an escapee.

Shoot first, and ask questions afterward. I sure used to do that.

But the only person who wasn’t an escapee who got shot just for being black was a nephew of the Mayor of Troy. And he was only winged. He lost the use of his right hand, but that has since been repaired by the miracle of microsurgery.

He was left-handed anyway.

He was winged when he was where he wasn’t supposed to be, where nobody of any race was supposed to be. He was camping in the National Forest, which is against the law. He didn’t even know there had been a prison break.

And then: Bang!

And here I am capitalizing “Black” and “White” sometimes, and then not capitalizing them, and not feeling right about how the words look either way. That could be because sometimes race seems to matter a tremendous lot, and other times race seems to matter a little less than that. And I keep wanting to say “so-called Black” or “so-called black.” My guess is that well over half the inmates at Athena, and now in this prison here, had white or White ancestors. Many appear to be mostly white, but they get no credit for that.

Imagine what that must feel like.

I myself have claimed a black ancestor, since this is a prison for Blacks only, and I don’t want to be transferred out of here. I need this library. You can imagine what sorts of libraries they must have on the aircraft carriers and missile cruisers which have been converted into prison ships.

This is home.

My lawyer says I am smart not to want to be’transferred, but for other reasons. A transfer might put me back in the news again, and raise a popular clamor for my punishment.

As matters stand now, I am forgotten by the general public, and so, for that matter, is the prison break. The break was big news on TV for only about 10 days.

And then it was displaced as a headliner by a lone White girl. She was the daughter of a gun nut in rural northern California. She wiped out the Prom Committee of her high school with a Chinese handgrenade from World War II.

Her father had one of the World’s most complete collections of handgrenades.

Now his collection isn’t as complete as it used to be, unless, of course, he had more than 1 Chinese handgrenade from the Finale Rack.

Warden Matsumoto became chattier and chattier during my job interview. Before he was sent to Athena, he said, he ran a hospital-for-profit his corporation had bought in Louisville. He loved the Kentucky Derby. But he hated his job.

I told him I used to go to the horse races in Saigon every chance I got.

He said, “I only wish our Chairman of the Board back in Tokyo could have spent just one hour with me in our emergency room, turning away dying people because they could not afford our services.”

“You had a body count in Vietnam, I believe?” he said.

It was true. We were ordered to count how many people we killed so that higher headquarters, all the way back to Washington, D.C., could estimate how much closer, even if it was only a teeny-weeny bit closer, all our efforts were bringing us to victory. There wasn’t any other way to keep score.

“So now we count dollars the way you used to count bodies,” he said. “What does that bring us closer to? What does it mean? We should do with those dollars what you did with the bodies. Bury and forget them! You were luckier with your bodies than we are with all our dollars.”

“How so?” I said.

“All anybody can do with bodies is burn them or bury them,” he said. “There isn’t any nightmare afterwards, when you have to invest them and make them grow.”

“What a clever trap your Ruling Class set for us,” he went on. “First the atomic bomb. Now this.”

“Trap?” I echoed wonderingly.

“They looted your public and corporate treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops,” he said. “Then they had your Government borrow so heavily from us that we had no choice but to send over an Army of Occupation in business suits. Never before has the Ruling Class of a country found a way to stick other countries with all the responsibilities their wealth might imply, and still remain rich beyond the dreams of avarice! No wonder they thought the comatose Ronald Reagan was a great President!”

His point was well taken, it seems to me.

When Jason Wilder and all the rest of the Trustees were hostages in the stable, and I paid them a call, I got the distinct impression that they regarded Americans as foreigners. What nationality that made them is hard to say.

They were all White, and they were all Male, since Lowell Chung’s mother had died of tetanus. She died before the doctors could understand what was killing her. None of them had ever seen a case of tetanus before, because practically everybody in this country in the old days had been immunized.

Now that public health programs have pretty much fallen apart, and no foreigners are interested in running them, which is certainly understandable, quite a number of cases of tetanus, and especially among children, are turning up again.

So most doctors know what it looks like now. Mrs. Chung had the misfortune to be a pioneer.

The hostages told me about that. One of the first things I said to them was, “Where is Madam Chung?”

I thought I should reassure the Trustees after the execution of Lyle Hooper. His corpse had been shown to them as a warning, I suppose, against their making any plans for derring-do. That body was surely icing on the cake of terror, so to speak. The College President, after all, was dangling from spikes in the loft above.

One of the hostages said in a TV interview after he was liberated that he would never forget the sound of Tex Johnson’s head bouncing on the steps as Tex was dragged up to the loft feet first. He tried to imitate the sound. He said, “Bloomp, bloomp, bloomp,” the same sound a flat tire makes.

What a planet!

The hostages expressed pity for Tex, but none for Lyle Hooper, and none for all the other faculty members and Townies who were also dead. The locals were too insignificant for persons on their social level to think about. I don’t fault them for this. I think they were being human.

The Vietnam War couldn’t have gone on as long as it did, certainly, if it hadn’t been human nature to regard persons 1 didn’t know and didn’t care to know, even if they were in agony, as insignificant. A few human beings have struggled against this most natural of tendencies, and have expressed pity for unhappy strangers. But, as History shows, as History yells: “They have never been numerous!”

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

And the worst flaw is that we’re just plain dumb. Admit it!

You think Auschwitz was intelligent?

When I tried to tell the hostages a little about their captors, about their childhoods and mental illnesses, and their not caring if they lived or died, and what prison was like, and so on, Jason Wilder actually closed his eyes and covered his ears. He was being theatrical rather than practical. He didn’t cover his ears so well that he couldn’t hear me.

Others shook their heads and indicated in other ways that such information was not only tiresome but offensive. It was as though we were in a thunderstorm, and I had begun lecturing on the circulation of electrical charges in clouds, and the formation of raindrops, and the paths chosen by lightning strokes, and what thunder was, and on and on. All they wanted to know was when the storm would stop, so they could go on about their business.

What Warden Matsumoto had said about people like them was accurate. They had managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract, negotiable representations of money on paper, that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives.

They didn’t rage against the convicts. They were mad at the Government for not making sure that escapes from prison were impossible. The more they ran on like that, the clearer it became that it was their Government,

not mine or the convicts’ or the Townies’. Its first duty, moreover, was to protect them from the lower classes, not only in this country but everywhere.

Were people on Easy Street ever any different?

Think again about the crucifixions of Jesus and the 2 thieves, and the 6,000 slaves who followed the gladiator Spartacus.

Cough.

My body, as I understand it, is attempting to contain the TB germs inside me in little shells it builds around them. The shells are calcium, the most common element in the walls of many prisons, including Athena. This place is ringed by barbed wire. So was Auschwitz.

If I die of TB, it will be because my body could not build prisons fast enough and strong enough.

Is there a lesson there? Not a cheerful one.

If the Trustees were bad, the convicts were worse. I would be the last person to say otherwise. They were devastators of their own communities with gunfights and robberies and rapes, and the merchandising of brain-busting chemicals and on and on.

But at least they saw what they were doing, whereas people like the Trustees had a lot in common with B-52 bombardiers way up in the stratosphere. They seldom saw the devastation they caused as they moved the huge portion of this country’s wealth they controlled from here to there.

Unlike my Socialist grandfather Ben Wills, who was a nobody, I have no reforms to propose. I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

Warden Matsumoto was an odd duck. Many of his quirks were no doubt a consequence of his having had an atomic bomb dropped on him in childhood. The buildings and trees and bridges and so on which had seemed so substantial vanished like fantasies.

As I’ve said, Hiroshima was suddenly a blank table-land with little dust devils spinning here and there.

After the flash, little Hiroshi Matsumoto was the only real thing on the table. He began a long, long walk in search of anything else that was also real. When he reached the edge of the city, he found himself among structures and creatures both real and fantastic, living people with their skins hanging on their exposed muscles and bones like draperies, and so on.

These images about the bombing are all his, by the way. But I wouldn’t hear them from him until I had been teaching at the prison and living next door to him by the lake for 2 long years.

Whatever else being atom-bombed had done to him, it had not destroyed his conscience. He had hated turning away poor people from the emergency room at the hospital-for-profit he ran in Louisville. After he took over the prison-for-profit at Athena, he thought there ought to be some sort of educational program there, even though his corporation’s contract with New York State required him to keep the prisoners from escaping and nothing more.

He worked for Sony. He never worked for anybody but Sony.

“New York State,” he said, “does not believe that education can rehabilitate the sort of criminal who ends up at Athena or Attica or Sing Sing.” Attica and Sing Sing were for Hispanics and Whites respectively, who, like the inmates at Athena, had been convicted of at least 1 murder and 2 other violent crimes. The other 2 were likely to be murders, too.

“I don’t believe it, either,” he said. “I do know this, though: 10 percent of the people inside these walls still have minds, but there is nothing for those minds to play with. So this place is twice as painful for them as it is for the rest. A good teacher just might be able to give their minds new toys, Math or Astronomy or History, or who knows what, which would make the passage of time just a little bit more bearable. What do you think?”

“You’re the boss,” I said.

He really was the boss, too. He had made such a financial success of Athena that his corporate superiors allowed him to be completely autonomous. They had contracted with the State to take care of prisoners for only 2 thirds as much money per capita as the State had spent when it owned the place. That was about as much as it would have cost to send a convict to medical school or Tarkington. By importing cheap, young, short-term, nonunion labor, and by getting supplies from the lowest bidders rather than from the Mafia and so on, Hiroshi Matsumoto had cut the per capita cost to less than half of what it used to be.

He didn’t miss a trick. When I went to work for him, he had just bought a state-of-the-art crematorium for the prison. Before that, a Mafia-owned crematorium on the outskirts of Rochester, in back of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, across the highway from the National Guard Armory, had had a monopoly on cremating Athena’s unclaimed bodies.

After the Japanese bought Athena, though, the Mob doubled their prices, using the AIDS epidemic as an excuse. They had to take extra precautions, they said. They wanted double even if the prison provided a doctor’s certificate guaranteeing that a body was AIDS-free, and the cause of death, as anybody could see, was some sort of knife or garrote or blunt instrument.

There wasn’t a Japanese manufacturer of crematoria, so Warden Matsumoto bought one from A. J. Topfund Sohn in Essen, Germany. This was the same outfit that had made the ovens for Auschwitz in its heyday.

The postwar Topf models all had state-of-the-art smoke scrubbers on their smokestacks, so people in Scipio, unlike the people living near Auschwitz, never knew that they had a busy corpse carbonizer in the neighborhood.

We could have been gassing and incinerating convicts over there around the clock, and who would know?

Who would care?

A while back I mentioned that Lowell Chung’s mother died of tetanus. I want to say before I forget that tetanus might have a real future in astronautics, since it becomes an extremely rugged spore when life becomes intolerable.

I haven’t nominated AIDS viruses as promising intergalactic rock jockeys, since, at their present state of development, they can’t survive for long outside a living human body.

Concerted efforts to kill them with new poisons, though, if only partially successful, could change all that.

The Mafia crematorium behind the Meadowdale Cinema Complex has all this valley’s prison business again. Some of the convicts who stayed in or near Athena after the great escape, rather than attack Scipio across the ice, felt that at least they could bust up the A. J. Topf und Sohn crematorium.

The Meadowdale Cinema Complex itself has gone belly up, since so few people can afford to own an automobile anymore.

Same thing with the shopping malls.

One thing interesting to me, although I don’t know quite what to make of it, is that the Mafia never sells anything to foreigners. While everybody else who has inherited or built a real business can’t wait to sell out and take early retirement, the Mafia holds on to everything. Thus does the paving business, for example, remain a strictly American enterprise.

Same thing with wholesale meat and napkins and tablecloths for restaurants.

I told the Warden right up front that I had been canned by Tarkington. I explained that the charges against me for sexual irregularities were a smokescreen. The Trustees were really angry about my having wobbled the students’ faith in the intelligence and decency of their country’s leadership by telling them the truth about the Vietnam War.

“Nobody on this side of the lake believes there is such a thing in this miserable country,” he said.

“Such a thing as what, sir?” I said.

And he said, “Leadership.” As for my sexual irregularities, he said, they seemed to be uniformly heterosexual, and there were no women on his side of the lake. He himself was a bachelor, and members of his staff were not allowed to bring their wives with them, if they had them. “So over here,” he said, “you would truly be Don Juan in Hell. Do you think that you could stand that?”

I said I could, so he offered me a job on a trial basis. I would start work as soon as possible, offering general education mostly on the primary-school level, not all that different from what I had done at Tarkington. An immediate problem was housing. His staff lived in barracks in the shadows of the prison walls, and he himself had a renovated house down by the water and was the only inhabitant of the ghost town, a ghost hamlet, actually, after which the prison was named: Athena.

If I didn’t work out for some reason, he said, he would still need a teacher on the property, who would surely not want to live in the barracks. So he was having another old house in the ghost town made livable, right next to his own. But it wouldn’t be ready for occupancy until August. “Do you think the college will let you stay where you are until then, and meanwhile you could commute to work from over there? You have a car?”

“A Mercedes,” I said.

“Excellent!” he said. “That will give you something in common with the inmates right away.”

“How so?” I said.

“They’re practically all former Mercedes owners,” he said. This was only a slight exaggeration. He told the truth when he said, “We have one man in here who bought his first Mercedes when he was 15 years old.” That was Alton Darwin, whose dying words on the skating rink after the prison break would be, “See the Nigger fly the airplane.”

So the college did let us stay in the Scipio house over the summer. There was no summer session at Tarkington. Who would have come to one? And I commuted to the prison every day.

In the old days, before the Japanese took over Athena, the whole staff was commuters from Scipio and Rochester. They were unionized, and it was their unceasing demands for more and more pay and fringe benefits, including compensation for their travel to and from work, that made the State decide to sell the whole shebang to the Japanese.

My salary was what I had been paid by Tarkington. I could keep our Blue Cross—Blue Shield, since the corporation that owned the prison also owned Blue Cross— Blue Shield. No problem!

Cough.

That is another thing the prison break cost me: our Blue Cross—Blue Shield.