Derailed

ATTICA

Sorry, I have to interrupt here.

I think I should come clean.

Three things happened.

On Wednesday, a man rang our doorbell to see the house. He’d gotten the listing from a real estate agent, he said.

My wife answered the door and told him the house wasn’t for sale. It must be some kind of mistake.

Your husband’s a teacher, isn’t he? he said.

Yes, she said. But it was still some sort of mistake. The house wasn’t for sale.

The man apologized and left.

He didn’t look like a man who was in the market for a house, she told me later.

Well, what did he look like? I asked her.

Like one of your students, she said.

A high school kid? I said.

No. Like one of your other students.

Then the second thing happened.

A CO called Fat Tommy informed me in the lounge that I was going to be ass out soon.

What did that mean? I asked him.

It means you’re going to be ass out soon, he said.

Fat Tommy was over three hundred pounds and had been known to sit on unruly prisoners who’d been shackled face-down on the floors of their cells.

Why? I asked him.

Cutbacks. I guess somebody finally realized they’ve got better things to do with our taxes than teach coons to read.

I asked him if he knew when.

Nah, he said. But I wouldn’t start teaching them War and Peace.

When Fat Tommy laughed, his three chins jiggled.

Then the third thing happened.

The writer penned a note on the bottom of chapter 10. At first I thought it was just part of the story, something Charles said to Lucinda or even to himself. But it wasn’t. It was to me — a kind of editorial aside.

“Like the story so far?”

That’s what he wrote.

The answer, by the way, was no.

I didn’t.

For one thing, the story lacked suspense.

It was missing the one crucial ingredient needed to make it suspenseful.

Surprise.

Because suspense depends on not knowing what’s going to happen.

But I did know what was going to happen.

I knew, for example, what would be on the other side of the door of room 1207. I knew what was going to come in when they opened that door. I knew what that man was going to do to Lucinda over and over for the next four hours.

I remembered it all from a previous life.

In this previous life, I woke up every morning wondering why I preferred to remain sleeping.

I showered and dressed and tried not to look at a blood meter sitting on the kitchen counter. I took the 8:43 to Penn Station, with the exception of one morning in November when I didn’t. The morning my daughter made me late and I took the 9:05. The morning that I looked up from my paper and was asked for a ticket I didn’t have.

This was my story.

I’ll take over from here.