Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

27

EIGHT-FIFTEEN IN THE MORNING. The snow had stopped, and I was on my way across the yard from breakfast toward my cell-block, hoping to catch a few more hours sleep, when a voice called me. “Kunt!” “Kiint,” I said wearily, turning. “With an um-”

It was Stoon. I stopped, paralyzed. He’s recognized me last night after all, the dream was over, it was all coming to an end. And just when I’d met Marian, whom I realized in this first instant of loss that I needed terrifically, I needed her the way I needed lungs. How can you come right out and say you’re in love with a woman you’ve known for seven hours? By having her taken away from you in the eighth, that’s how.

“Warden wants to see you, Kunt,” Stoon said. He made a thumb waggle over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

I went. Despair, doom. And how could I keep from implicating the others? Phil and Jerry and Billy and Bob and Max and Eddie and Joe. Once I admitted how I was getting out of the prison, they would be in as much trouble as I was, no matter how much I tried to protect them.

So I wouldn’t tell, that’s all. I would clam up, I would button my lip, I would keep my trap shut. You ain’t gettin nuttin outa me, copper.

Stoon, about to enter the administration building ahead of me, turned his head and said, “What?”

Had I said that aloud? Good God. “Frog in my throat,” I explained.

“Tell him to shut up,” Stoon said, and entered the building.

We walked down the corridor together, and at a given point I turned left and walked into Stobn’s elbow. “Oof,” I said, and he said, “Watch it, Kunt. What’s the matter with you?”

I pointed down the side corridor toward the warden's office. “Aren’t we-?”

“Just come with me,” he said.

So I went with him, on down the main corridor to a staircase, and then up two flights. I had no idea what was going on. All I could think about was that Stoon had recognized me at the party last night, that I had lost Marian just as soon as I had found her, and that I must keep silent about the tunnel and the others. I must.

The administration building was three stories high, so once we’d climbed the second flight we were on the top floor. Nevertheless we went up one more flight, narrower and darker than the first two, and bewilderment was beginning to take precedence in my mind over terror and despair when Stoon pushed a metal fire door open at the top of the stairs and the two of us stepped out onto the roof.

Warden Gadmore was there, with his topcoat on, his hands jammed down into his coat pockets. There was a cold damp wind up here, but it wasn’t the only reason I was shivering.

The warden gave me a discontented look, saying to Stoon, “Well, you found him all right.’’

“Yes, sir.”

The warden considered me for a moment, while I tried to figure out why we were going to talk about my unauthorized absence from the prison on the administration building’s roof. I noticed that his hair looked thinner and skimpier in the wind, that frills of it whisked around his circular bald spot, and that he was looking decidedly less sympathetic than when I’d first seen him.

“Well, Kunt,” the warden said, sans umlaut, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

“Nothing sir,” I said.

He looked out over the roof. “Are you proud of yourself, Kunt?”

“Proud of myself?” It seemed a strange phrase under the circumstances. Also looking out over the flat roof, trying to work out exactly what the man meant when he asked that question, I noticed for the first time that lines seemed to have been drawn in the snow. Scuffed in the snow, someone moving back and forth, creating lines and angles by dragging his feet through the inch or so of snow on the roof. Lines and angles making some sort -of design, like letters, like . . .

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said.

The warden looked back at me. “Did you really think,” he asked me, “you could get away with it?”

The lines nearest me, in the snow on the roof, said PRISONER. The next row of lines, out there across the roof, black lines in the white snow, said, BEING HELD. And the farthest row of lines said, HELP I AM. “I,” I said, and shook my head.

“You aren’t going to deny this, are you?”

In imagination I suddenly visualized the way this must look from the air, to anybody in an airplane passing by. Giant letters in the roof of the building, requesting help of the passing world because, after all, the writer was being held prisoner.

It was not because of the party! Stoon had not recognized me! I had not lost Marian!

I was grinning from ear to ear.

“You find this amusing, Kunt?”

Relief made me reckless. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I think it’s pretty funny. Can you imagine somebody going by in an airplane, he looks down-”

“That’s enough,” the warden said. He was beginning to be angry.

“Whoever did that,” I said, still smiling broadly, “has a sense of humor I really like.”

“You did it, Kunt,” he said. “Don’t waste my time with denials.”

I didn’t care about anything. I hadn’t been found out, that was all that mattered. “I’ll tell you two things, warden,” I said, “and they’re both true. One, I didn’t do that sign there or the one in the license plates. And two, my name isn’t Kunt. It’s Kunt, with an umlaut, and it always has been.”

“We’re not talking about your name, we’re-”

“Well, we goddam well ought to,” I said. He stared at me in astonishment, Stoon shifted from foot to foot behind me in outrage and disapproval, and I roared on. “My name is Kunt,” I said. “It’s not that hard to pronounce, if you’d just make the effort. How would you like it if I called you Warden Gadabout?”

“What?”

“I may be a prisoner, but I still have my name, and a man’s name is-”

“You certainly are a prisoner,” the warden snapped. “I’d begun to think you’d forgotten that. Stoon, you will place Mister Koont in a cell in the restricted area.”

Solitary. A little late, I closed my mouth.

“Yes, sir,” said Stoon. “Come along, Kunt.” He pronounced it wrong.