The Blade Itself

9

Overhead, the El rattled along the circular tracks that gave the Loop its name. A grim rain darkened the faces of crumbling parking decks as Danny stepped out of the Harold Washington Library. Green-tarnished gargoyles loomed eight stories above him, eerie personifications of the confusion he felt. Of the many thoughts jostling for his attention, one overwhelmed the others.

Coming here had been a stupid idea.

What on earth had motivated him to leave work early, drive downtown, pay the rapacious parking fees, and spend three hours researching prison? What would you call that? Shame? Guilt? Idiocy?

People always talked about the value of firsthand knowledge, and they were right. No book could convey the lonely terror of waking in an eight-foot cell, the way living so intimately with fear marked you. No amount of sunshine and fresh air ever truly wiped away the stain on your soul. Almost ten years since his last fall, but some mornings he still mistook the buzzing alarm clock for cell count, and he still spent midnight moments reconstructing himself after a dream casually obliterated his life. No doubt about it, firsthand knowledge was a bitch.

But there was a special awfulness to secondhand knowledge, too. Sharing a table with a bum dozing on a pillow of unopened books, Danny had read scholarly prose that set his demons howling. The information from the Bureau of Justice alone was staggering. America imprisoned more people than any other nation – even Russia, for chrissake – with close to two million inmates. Many states spent more money on jails than schools. Amnesty International had actually condemned the American prison system.

And the devil was in the details. Seventy percent of inmates were illiterate, 200, 000 mentally ill. If you were a black man, you were born with a one-in-four shot of serving time at some point, and you could count on serving longer. Insult to injury, in many places former felons lost certain constitutional rights; the result was that in some Southern states, as much as 30 percent of the entire African-American population had permanently lost the right to vote.

At least Evan’s not black. Lucky him.

Danny turned his head upward, the rain soft on his face. He had a pretty good understanding of the machinery under his own hood, but he had no idea what had driven him here today. Was it guilt? Over what? Walking out, all those years ago? He replayed the look on Evan’s face, that sense that something dark had been freed within him, the vicious kicks. No. He had no guilt for bailing out of that madness. He wished to Christ it hadn’t happened, wished that he’d never seen the man’s blood pooling on the floor, wished that he’d never heard the sounds a person made in that kind of pain. For that he felt guilt, no question. Simply for being there, being a part of it. But that wasn’t what had brought him here today.

He leaned back against the wet brick. Taxis glided down State, floating on reflections of their taillights. Rain had driven the homeless out of the park next door, and they huddled together in doorways and under the El, smoking and staring. Across the street, Columbia students with backpacks and sandals sprinted through the rain, their laughter painfully young. Life went on.

There it was.

Life went on. Unless you found yourself in manacles one bright morning, aboard a school bus that had grilles welded over the windows and a police escort. A bus that took you past people heading for work or breakfast or home, normal people for whom you had ceased to exist. Because more than anything else, prison was exile. Both first-and secondhand knowledge told him that. Prison was waiting, routine. All the while slowly succumbing to a world where violence was the only noteworthy break in the endless march of identical days.

They’d come from the same place, but the moment Evan had pulled the trigger in the pawnshop, their paths had irrevocably split. Thinking of that brought on the old mixed-up feeling Danny knew so well. All these years later, and he still couldn’t say for certain if the owner would have shot him that night. He didn’t think so – the guy was too practiced in the way he brought the gun out, the way he handled himself. And either way, it didn’t make it okay to brutalize him, to beat the woman and try to kill her. But in his midnight hours, would he always wonder whether Evan had saved his life?

Probably. And maybe that was part of what had driven him here. But standing under darkening skies, he realized there was more to it than guilt.

There was also fear.

In all the times he’d imagined seeing Evan, he’d pictured the Evan from the pawnshop, the one whose temper seared and burned and left him all too ready to pull the trigger. The one who’d gone crazy, lost his head and his humanity. But for all of that, in his calm moments, a buddy. A partner. A childhood friend who had always had his back.

But that’s not the way it worked. In all those fantasies, Danny had forgotten that time would have passed for both of them. He wasn’t dealing with the same man. The real Evan had lived a maximum-security nightmare for seven endless years. Had come out of it twice as muscled and half as talkative. Had adapted to a world built to hide the most dangerous of men.

Danny turned up his collar and hurried across the rainy street.

What would that do to someone?