Derailed

ATTICA

Fat Tommy was right.

They’d sent me notification in the mail.

“Dear Mr. Widdoes: This is to inform you that State budget constraints will no longer allow for an adult education program in State prisons. Classes will end on the first of next month. A formal notice of termination will follow.”

This meant I had two classes left.

Just two.

The COs kept their distance from me now, as if I had a communicable disease. Was it possible state layoffs were contagious? When I slipped into the COs lounge for coffee, they gave me a wide berth — wider even than before, when it was simply my job that had rubbed them the wrong way. Now it was my lack of one.

I sipped my coffee alone, over in the corner of the room known as the museum.

The museum had been so dubbed by a long-ago correction officer whose name no one remembered. It was a loosely arranged collection of prison-confiscated weapons. Bangers, shanks, gats, and burners — what the cons call knives. Forged from bedsprings, hollowed-out pens, smuggled-in screwdrivers — whatever the prisoners can get their hands on. But there were also crude guns — ingenious things put together with odds and ends from the machine shop, capable of putting a reasonable facsimile of a bullet into a man at close range.

It was constantly being added to. After each clear-out there’d be one or two more donations.

I stared at these crude instruments of death until the silence at my presence there grew intolerable, or until it was time for class.

Whichever came first.

The writer had kept it up with monotonous and painful regularity.

Every class I found another installment sitting there on my desk.

My own story slowly being fed back to me, chapter by painful chapter. It was a torturously slow indictment of Charles Schine. I was convinced that torture was exactly what the writer had in mind.

There were other things, too. Another note appeared at the end of chapter 20.

“Time we got together, don’t you think?”

Written in brown ink, except it wasn’t brown ink. It was written in blood. It was meant to scare me.

And I thought, Yes, it is time we got together. Even if I felt my palms grow sweaty and my collar tighten like a noose.

The writer wasn’t in my classroom. I knew that.

The delivery boy was.

A few classes after I received the last note, I dismissed the class and someone stayed behind.

When I looked up, he was sitting there and smiling at me.

Malik El Mahid. His Muslim name.

Twenty-five or so. Black, squat, and tattooed.

“Yes?” I said, even though I knew what was coming now.

“Like the story so far?” he said, still smiling. Repeating the first words the writer had scrawled to me.

“You,” I said. “You’ve been leaving it for me.”

“Thas right, dawg.”

“Who?”

“Who what? ”

“Who’s giving the chapters to you?”

“You sayin’ I ain’t the writer?”

“Yes. I’m saying you didn’t write it.”

“Fuckin’ right. I didn’t read none of it either.”

“Who?”

“You know who, dawg.”

Yes.

“He wants to see you now, ’kay?”

He wants to see you now.

“All right,” I said as calmly as I could.

But as I gathered the papers on my desk, I noticed my hand was trembling. The papers were clearly fluttering right there in full view of Malik, and even though I willed my hand to stop shaking, I couldn’t get it to listen.

“Next week,” Malik said. “All right?”

I said yes. Next week was fine.

But I have to get back to the story now.

I have to explain what happened.