John Woman

21

After photographs and fingerprints John was put into a holding cell in Maricopa County Jail. There he had seven cellmates: two white, the others various shades of brown.

Two of the darker men, a maybe-Mexican and a man the color of John’s father, wore fancy but disheveled suits and seemed to be sick. They sat side by side on the floor next to a small cot lolled upon by a very large dark brown man.

A friendly American Indian asked, “What they got you on, brother?”

“Suspicion of murder,” John said. “In New York.”

“Andrew.”

“John.”

Andrew looked to be somewhere in his forties with ruddy red-brown skin that had been much in the sun. His dark eyes seemed to be searching for something — on the floor, in John’s eyes, outside the cell bars.

“I took three sheep from a dude,” he said, “but they called it armed robbery just because I had a knife.”

“You had the knife in your hand?”

Andrew smiled and offered John his hand.

Andrew said, “No. It was in a sheath on my belt. I always carry a knife like that. Not a weapon, it’s a tool.”

Christopher Minor, one of the white prisoners, was introduced by Andrew to John. Minor was in his twenties with long brown hair that was severely matted. Minor was a known drug smuggler. His crime was that there were traces of marijuana in the trunk of his car; that and one drop of blood.

“Fuckin’ cops said that they’re gonna test that DNA against ever’ open case of assault and murder in Arizona,” Christopher said. “I told ’em okay but the first blood they should test is mine.”

With that the young white man laughed and laughed as if the best joke ever told had just escaped his lips.

“So you Hopi?” John asked his new friend Andrew.

“Navajo,” the nonviolent thief replied. “Largest reservation in the U.S. What you do?”

“I’m a history professor. At least I used to be. I guess after my arrest they’ll be letting me go.”

“How does a college teacher get mixed up with murder? Was it a woman?”

“Suspicion of murder,” John corrected. “It happened seventeen years ago.”

“Seventeen? You don’t look no more than twenty-five.”

“I was sixteen when the crime they say happened.”

“‘Crime they say,’” Andrew quoted. “You sound more like a jailbird than a teacher, unless you teach law.”

“John Woman,” a voice from outside the cell called.

“That’s me,” John said, rising from the floor where he and Andrew leaned against the flattened, crisscrossed bars of the holding cell.

“Come with me.”

Three jailhouse guards brought John to a small room where they made him put his hands behind his back. After his wrists were cuffed one of the men led John to a subterranean hallway lined with lime green metal doors. Using a key from a huge ring hanging from his belt the black-uniformed, pimply-faced young white man unlocked a door halfway toward the end of the dead-end corridor.

“Get in.”

“What about these manacles?”

“When the door is locked turn your back to it. I’ll open the slot to take them off.”

The cell was a fraction the size of the one he’d come from. There was a cot, a tiny sink, and an aluminum commode. The ceiling was low and the walls pale gray.

The guard took off the handcuffs and then slammed the slot closed leaving John alone, missing the society of his cellmates.

The cell was virtually soundproof. No phone, computer, TV, radio or sounds through the wall. There wasn’t even paper and pencil to jot or doodle with. John had never imagined a life bereft of pencils and paper or even a knob on the door.

Sitting on the cot John tried to remember what life had been before he came to that cell. His last lecture was interrupted, now lost. His mother was gone — again. There were no lovers, children or friends who would seek him out.

This solitary jail cell, John suddenly realized, was the distilled metaphor of his life, like a living art installation. This was the shell he carried like a hermit crab taking on a discarded tin can for a home.

The first time he’d ever been in a true colony of his kind was in the holding cell. There he could admit his crime if he wanted, say the name Chapman Lorraine. He could be Cornelius Jones, son of Herman and Lucia, heir to hard-bitten mobsters and deep libraries.

He lay down on the cot and masturbated as he used to do in the secret closet of the projectionist’s booth. The orgasm was powerful and he cried out behind it. For a moment he was embarrassed but then he remembered that no sound penetrated his shell. He masturbated again, experiencing an even more intense climax. After this he turned on his side and sleep fell like a chain-link blanket.

Sometime later, he had no idea how long, John awoke with the glare of the paneled ceiling light in his eyes. On the floor at the bottom of the metal door was a cardboard tray arranged with a sandwich of white bread and processed American cheese, a flimsy plastic tub of green Jell-O and six wilted leaves of lettuce. No fork or spoon, no napkin. John ate then masturbated then slept.

“Hey... you... Woman,” someone said.

John awoke with the paneled ceiling light in his eyes.

“What?”

“If you want breakfast then pass me your tray.”

The cardboard food tray was on the floor beside the cot. He took it to the door where an open square panel revealed the man talking to him.

There was a smaller slot at the floor.

He could see a young black man peering through the square panel.

John tried to push the tray across to him but the face backed away.

“Through the bottom,” the guard said. “You have to pass it under the bottom. That’s the rules.”

John went down on a knee and slid the tray out. Immediately a new tray was passed in. On this cardboard platter there was a slug-like, white-flour burrito.

“Breakfast is the best in here,” the guard said. “Scrambled eggs and turkey bacon. Not too dry or nuthin’.”

“What time is it?”

“A little after eight... in the morning.”

“Do the lights ever go out?”

“No. Never.”

“What are they going to do with me?”

“They want you for extradition to New York.”

“How long does that usually take?”

“There was this guy in here one time that fought for nine months before Wyoming got him on manslaughter. If the crime’s not too bad sometimes they give up but they want you for murder. On murder they can’t give in. Politicians afraid that their voters might hear.”

“So I just sit here?”

“At least they took you outta the holdin’ cell. Sometimes it can get pretty rough in there. Some niggahs just don’t know how to ack.”

John had no reply to the guard’s wisdom and so instead took a bite out of his burrito.

“My name’s Marle Josephson,” the guard allowed. “I’m gettin’ ready to take the test for Phoenix PD.”

“Oh?”

“You a college professor, right?”

“Yes I am, at least I was.”

“Maybe you could help me with the test.”

“I don’t know anything about civil service exams. I mean, all you have to do is memorize the facts they give you and hope that the psych portion doesn’t make you seem too crazy.”

“How can I fool that?”

“Got me.”

“So what good are you?” Marle Josephson asked.

John took the question seriously.

“What’s a name like Woman anyway? I never heard’a nobody called that.”

“Josephson!” a bodiless voice boomed.

“Yes sir, Captain Anton.”

“Stop talking to the prisoner and get back to work.”

The upper and lower slats slammed shut and John was left again to his adopted shell.

22

John had been in the cell for seven more meals when Marle Josephson opened the upper slot and said, “John Woman.” It wasn’t another meal because he’d just finished lunch: an exceptionally dry, overcooked skinless chicken breast and a paper tub of mustard. If he dipped the fowl in the condiment, taking only small bites, it was possible to chew the jerky-like flesh. There was something very satisfying about all that chewing. He felt full and sated.

“Marle,” John said.

“Stand at the line with your back to the door and hold your hands toward me.”

Marching through the subterranean catacombs of the deceptively large jailhouse John and his guard passed other uniformed men; some in guard-black and others in bright yellow, orange and red prisoner coveralls.

“How come you have me in cuffs, Mr. Josephson? None of the other prisoners are wearing them.” John thought that calling Marle mister might get the silent sentinel to speak, but it didn’t.

They came to a blue metal door.

“Prisoner for interrogation room nine-A,” Marle said to the door as if it were a living sentry.

Various metallic pings, rattles and clanks emanated from the sturdy portal making John postulate the words a sentient door like this might speak.

The door swung inward.

“Go on,” Marle said.

John and Marle walked through between two uniformed guards down an aisle of wooden doors with proper knobs. Each portal had an identifying number painted on it, in red. They stopped at 9-A.

Marle knocked three times.

“Come in,” a woman said.

Marle had a key for this door too.

The room was as bare as John’s cell but the light was warmer. The walls were painted institutional green. The only furniture was a dark brown wooden table attended on opposite sides by folding metal chairs.

A woman was seated in one of these chairs. She rose when John and Marle entered. Wearing a conservative dark green pantsuit she had dyed her hair almost blond, was verging on fifty and had put on ten or twelve pounds. But despite all that John recognized Colette.

“You can take the cuffs off,” she said to Marle.

“That’s against protocol, ma’am.”

“Take them off and leave us.”

John was glad to see that he wasn’t the only one who could be cowed by the policewoman’s authority.

“Sit down,” Colette said after Marle was gone.

John stayed on his feet alternately rubbing his wrists. His fingers felt swollen and on fire with pins and needles.

“Sit,” she said and he obeyed.

Lowering into the seat across from him she took a moment to look at the prisoner.

“Do you know why you’re here?” she asked.

“Tell me.”

“The state of New York has determined that you are the prime suspect in the murder of Chapman Lorraine.”

John hunched his shoulders slightly and breathed in through his nostrils the air of relative freedom.

“Being the head investigator on the missing person case,” she continued, “I was deposed by the department after the body had been identified. I told them what I remembered and turned over my notes. Last week they tasked me to come here to identify you if I could.”

With his eyes alone John asked her the question.

“It is my determination that you are the young man I interviewed.”

“I loved you.”

Back in his cell for a dozen meals or more John had learned to curb his masturbation regimen. Too often and the skin of his penis got chafed, the orgasms less satisfying.

He didn’t think about the regimen of history. Instead his thoughts were of food and women and too much wine. He longed for the holding cell with its hungover businessmen; tangle-haired Christopher Minor; and especially Andrew, the peace-loving, knife-wielding Navajo.

“John Woman,” Marle Josephson announced through the square hole in the door. It had been more than four days since he’d been visited by Colette.

“Hey, brother,” the guard said to John as they navigated the underground holding area for the criminal class of Arizona. “I don’t mean to be cold or nuthin’ but my boss, Captain Anton, been watchin’ me like a mothahfuckah so I’m tryin’ not to talk too much to the prisoners.”

“Okay,” John said wondering what Colette would be wearing.

“I been studyin’ for that exam like you said.”

“How’s that going?”

“Not too good.”

They passed Andrew just then. He was in a cell with its door open. The Navajo sheep thief was clad in a lemon yellow jumpsuit, squatting in a corner, his hands wrapped around his knees, his eyes searching out beyond the jail.

“How come I don’t have a prisoner’s uniform?” John asked.

“Only people convicted of stuff get them,” Marle said. “You aren’t guilty of a crime in Arizona. Are you gonna talk to me about the test?”

“What’s the problem?”

“I read the material and I understand it too... But just a hour later I don’t remember a damn thing.”

“That’s due to computers,” John said.

“I don’t even own a computer.”

“Even so people are so used to putting something into a screen then calling it back that they think the human brain works the same way.”

“What you talkin’ ‘bout, Woman?”

“Reading is rereading.”

“Huh?”

“Read the exam booklet from front to back three times before taking the practice test,” Professor Woman advised. “Then you’ll find that you know more. Not everything but more. Then, when you see what you got wrong and right, you read it again. That’s where the true learning will happen.”

“Really? I got to read it four times?”

“Maybe even five or six but that’s nothing because you’ll be a cop for twenty years.”

Marle led John to the same room as before.

The guard knocked again. A woman’s voice said come in again. But this time it was a Caucasian with red lips and long brunette ringlets cascading down the sides of her made-up face.

Without her having to ask, Marle unlocked the handcuffs and left the room.

The new woman wore perfume whereas Colette had not worn any. John liked the scent.

“Professor Woman,” the brunette said. “Pleased to meet you.”

She held out a hand. John shook but couldn’t feel it because he was once again numb from too-tight handcuffs.

“My name is Nina Forché,” she said. “I’m your lawyer. Please sit down.”

Forché was wearing a scarlet dress and a blue sapphire pendant. Her fingernails had been painted peach by a professional and her tan came from long hours on a pleasant beach somewhere. She was past thirty but forty was still some years off.

“I’m here to discuss our strategy at the hearing,” she began.

“I don’t remember engaging a lawyer.”

“I was retained by William Pepperdine.”

“Are you on the Path?”

Forché gave John quick smile moving her head and shoulders with a noncommittal shrug.

“How did I get here, Ms. Forché?”

“You mean what brought you to the attention of the NYPD?”

“Yeah.”

“An informant told them that Cornelius Jones’s mother was living with her son in faculty housing at NUSW.”

“Who?”

“Those records are sealed,” she said. “We may never know because that testimony would have no bearing on the murder trial, if such a trial were to happen.”

“If?” John felt sluggish, like some woodland creature coming awake after a long hibernation.

“If we’re smart I don’t believe this extradition request will hold.”

“Why not?”

“They have no proof that you are this Cornelius Jones.”

“None?”

“There are no fingerprints on file,” Forché said. “No DNA evidence, no eyewitness, not even anyone who has ever seen you with the victim. There are no childhood photographs except one in an elementary school third grade annual. There aren’t even any relatives that could offer a close enough DNA comparison.”

“What about France Bickman?” he asked.

“The ticket-taker? He’s of no concern to us.”

“That detective,” John said. “She said that she recognized me.”

“First of all she interviewed a teenage boy,” the lawyer argued. “Secondly, her records say that the entire interview was less than ten minutes. An eyewitness account of a brief conversation with an adolescent seventeen years ago is not enough for an extradition. They must prove your identity with something more than a detective’s say-so.”

“What about the woman living in my house?”

“There is no one living in your apartment and the school has refused New York’s request to search the premises. When we get in to see the judge he will ask you if you are Cornelius Jones and you will say, ‘No, your honor, I am not.’”

“No, your honor, I am not,” John parroted. “No, your honor. Yes, I understand.”

Nina Forché smiled at her student.

23

In the dream John was standing on a long line behind a large, broad-shouldered man. It felt as if he had been waiting forever. His feet hurt and, for some reason, his fingers were numb. The sun bore down and there was nothing to read. He had an iPod but the battery was low. The woman behind him was chattering on a cell phone. He thought about asking her if he could borrow it to call his mother but when he turned to ask she looked away. He tapped the shoulder of the large man in front of him. Maybe he had a phone.

When the brute turned around John recognized Chapman Lorraine, a bully from the elementary school. He hadn’t seen Chapman in many years and the towering giant didn’t seem to recognize him so John came up with a plan.

He said, “Your sister passed up word that she’s at the end of the line and wants you to come get her.”

“My sister?” Chapman said.

“Don’t worry,” Cornelius assured him, “I’ll keep your place in line.”

“Thanks,” Lorraine said, giving John a big smile and even shaking his hand.

As soon as Chapman was gone the line began to move. At first it was a few slow steps. Then they began to pick up speed. A while later they were trotting like soldiers doing double time in a military review.

Before he knew it John was at the front of the line standing before a huge blue door. He glanced behind. Chapman Lorraine was running, screaming something from far back down the line.

“Open please,” John said to the door.

He looked back again; the schoolyard bully was getting closer.

Panicked he turned to the door prepared to pound on it but it was already open. He walked across the threshold and the lofty azure door slammed shut behind him.

Walking down a long corridor on a floor paved with gilded tiles and flanked by bright white walls, John passed many doors, but he knew instinctively that these were not for him.

After some while he came to a bloodred door that glistened as if threatening to revert back into bodily fluid. This was his destination.

“Come in,” a man said though John had not knocked.

On the other side of the bloodred door sat Herman Jones — perched on a bench made from glass.

John was delighted to see his father and immediately took a seat at his side.

“Your fairy godmother tasked me to grant you a wish,” Herman said.

Cornelius thought of the fudge-colored woman, feeling the elation of her existence in his life.

“Are you really my father?”

“Is the answer to that question your wish?”

Dreamer John nodded.

“Yes and no,” Herman said. “I was your father but that was long ago. Since then you have become your own man. Now tell me, why are you here?”

“I was on a line that felt like it went on forever,” John said.

“This is the end of the line,” Herman said sadly.

“John Woman,” Marle Josephson intoned.

John woke up with the paneled ceiling light in his eyes.

“I did what you said,” Marle told John as they marched along.

“And how did it go?”

“Great. I finished the practice test and did okay. Then I read the study book again and saw what I needed. How did you know that would happen?”

“My father taught me.”

“He must’a been a smart guy.”

“Marle?”

“Yeah, John?”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Captain Anton got it in his head that he didn’t like you. I think it was because they made him keep you in solitary. It’s not like that’s any great privilege or anything but he was mad that he couldn’t put you where he wanted.”

A few moments went by. John looked around for Andrew the Navajo but did not see him.

“What does that have to do with where you’re taking me?” John asked.

“Anton been holdin’ up your paperwork but then that lawyer, that Nina Forché chick, said you had the right to see the people applied to visit. Anton’s madder’n a motherfucker but ain’t nuthin’ he could do about it.”

“So who is it that wants to see me?”

“I don’t know. I’m just supposed to bring you to the room and wait. Easy for me.”

When the door came open he saw Senta Ray seated in one of the metal folding chairs. She was wearing a fluffy white sweater and tight, faded blue jeans. Her lipstick was redder than what she wore to her Post Office job and when she rose to meet him she stood taller because of her fancy white high heels.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.” John kissed her on the cheek.

Senta smiled at this chaste greeting and asked, “Are they watching us?”

“I don’t know.”

“You wanna fuck and give ’em somethin’ to see?”

“Maybe not right yet.”

“Okay.” Senta’s mood was light and engaging. This was an act of pure kindness, designed to make him feel better.

They settled across the table from each other. Senta leaned forward taking his hands in hers.

“Lou read it in the Phoenix Herald that you’d been arrested for some murder that happened when you were a kid,” she said. “He told me week before last and I came down the next day but they made me wait until now.”

“I don’t think the warden likes me.” John smiled and squeezed her hands.

“I missed you,” she said. “I really did.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come by for so long. I just got involved in lots of stuff.”

“Don’t I know it,” Senta said looking around the room. “I missed you but just the little bit we had together changed my life so much that I could never be mad.”

“Changed your life how?” John appreciated Senta’s smile and touch but what he needed was something to think about, something outside the confines of his imprisonment.

“The things you said.”

“What things?”

“The last time I saw you you said that history is a tool like a hammer or a saw.”

“I said that?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“I guess we got pretty drunk most nights.”

“Yeah. And you were just talkin’. I mean you probably talked like that all the time at school but what you said was new to me. It stuck. I thought about it for weeks and weeks. It seemed so important but I couldn’t tell how. I was going to ask you but you never came back. And that was better because the question stayed in my mind; I couldn’t let it go.

“Finally I got it down to one word — history. You had told me that there was the history we read about in books and then our own stories — what we lived through ourselves. I didn’t know what that meant exactly but I kept on thinking about it. Thinking and thinking... and finally it hit me. I went to the shelf in the hallway closet and took down the old box of photographs. Must’a been a thousand pictures but there was only three of Nesta.”

“Who?” John asked.

“My baby girl,” Senta said. “Nesta. She was only a week old when I gave her up. I’d just turned fifteen and my parents made me because they were afraid I’d leave my beautiful baby with them.

“When I saw her picture I knew I’d been heartbroken my whole life about Nesta. I remembered what you said: ‘The man swings the hammer but it’s the hammer that makes the man.’ Givin’ Nesta away made the rest of my life what it was.

“I hired me a detective and he found my child working in a plastics factory outside Ojai, California.

“I got a lot of money in the bank. Savin’ makes me feel safe. This one customer of mine who’s a bookkeeper calls me his parsimonious prostitute. I brought Nesta home to me. Her name had been changed to Rachel Dawson but she lets me call her Nesta. We’re gonna build a house, a new home that’ll be everything we lost. That was because of you, John. You gave me something to think about and the way to think about it. It’s kind of like you gave me the bricks to build our house.”

“You would have probably decided to look for your daughter one day anyway,” John argued mildly.

“I never would have until you made me look in that closet. I came here because I wanted you to know if you asked me out on a date that I would definitely go.”

“That’s a wonderful gift.”

“Do you want me to tell you about our house?”

“Sure.”

Senta described the floor plan and the memories that each room would contain. The composition of the building would be what had been missing from their lives.

There was a music room and library; bedrooms on different floors with a spiral ladder that connected them. And for when Nesta decided to go out on her own there was a cottage in the backyard that she could come back to whenever she wanted.

“What does that all sound like?” Senta said when she’d finished.

John lifted her hands to kiss them. A moment later a black-suited guard appeared at a doorway behind her.

“Is it time?” Senta asked the guard.

“Yes,” the man said.

“Next time will be about you,” she promised.

John kissed her again and she departed.

After Senta left, John expected Marle to come and bring him back to his cell.

But when Marle did not return John understood that there was more company to come; though he couldn’t imagine a better visitor than Senta.

When the outer door opened again, the guard ushered in Ron Underhill.

“Thirty-five minutes,” the guard told Ron. “Or you can knock.”

Ron nodded and the sentry left.

John stood to meet his surprise guest.

The university gardener sported a black suit that fit his slender frame quite well. He wore a white dress shirt with buttoned cuffs that came down half an inch beyond the jacket sleeves, and an orange tie with three blue diamonds stitched down the center. His shoes were black with a dull shine. John thought that Underhill had this ensemble for funerals.

The men shook hands.

“How are you, Professor Woman?” the gardener asked.

“Locked up.”

“They treating you okay?” The look on the older man’s face seemed to add weight to the question, as if he might do something if the answer was not positive.

“Can’t complain. The food’s bad but it’s the best they can do I’m sure.”

“Why don’t we have a sit-down?” Ron suggested.

The gardener’s body was slight, like that of the coyote that stalked John after the accident. His hands were large and powerful. He was what people call a white man though his skin was a ruddy amber color from day after day under the desert sun.

Not knowing quite what to say John stated simply, “Well... here we are.”

“Yes indeed. You never know where you’ll end up in this life,” Underhill opined. “Every day we think we know what’s waiting for us but it’s always something else.”

There came another lull in the conversation.

“I’m a little surprised to see you here, Mr. Underhill,” John said at last. “I mean I hardly know you and no one else from the school has come. Mr. Pepperdine paid for my lawyer but that’s all the contact I’ve had with NUSW.”

“That Willie’s a good poker player.”

“You know him?”

“He likes hydrangeas and I cultivate some in the biology department’s greenhouse. We play poker there for pennies sometimes. He always walks away with a dollar or more of my money. That’s how the rich stay rich, I guess.”

“Thank you for coming. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“I like the way you talk, Professor Woman. You play with ideas that most people treat with devotion. At first you sound almost sacrilegious but then it’s clear as day that you care. I believe that when you wake up in the morning you’re wondering where the day will go. So when I heard that they’d put you in jail I decided to come out here and tell you I believe in you and to keep your confidence up.”

“But what if I’m guilty?” John smiled.

The gardener returned the grin. “You see? You always twist things around in a light way. Here I am trying to comfort you and there you are making me laugh.”

“Thank you, Ron, but you didn’t answer my question.”

“If you killed a man that doesn’t mean you’re a murderer. If you murdered a man it doesn’t mean you didn’t have good reason. I like you, Professor Woman. I came out to Phoenix to look you in the eye and tell you so.”

Underhill’s smile held both power and conviction. There was certainty in this man. John was reminded of one of his father’s frequent admonishments: the hierarchy of history rarely documents its greatest heroes — they are too busy doing to waste time on legacy.

“I wish I had some cards,” John said, “and some pennies to lose.”

“That’s all right. I know you got another visitor. She was very kind to insist I went first.”

Ron Underhill stood up easily, exhibiting the graceful posture of a much younger man.

“See ya,” he said giving a friendly salute. Then he walked to the door and knocked, it opened and the gardener passed through.

In the few minutes while John waited for the next visitor, he thought about the almost magical feeling he experienced considering where the visitors’ door led. He’d been locked up for only a short while but he was already feeling keen nostalgia for freedom: unlocked doors and unmonitored locomotion down empty streets; good food on china plates; and a telephone with pencil and paper close at hand.

The door opened once more and Carlinda Elmsford walked through followed by the guard.

“I’ll be watching,” he warned her.

He’d merely given Ron Underhill a time limit. But the multiracial student was another matter.

John did not remember climbing out of his chair.

Carlinda’s eyes fell upon him registering mild shock.

She approached him but stopped a finger’s span beyond reach.

“You haven’t shaved,” she said. She had on jeans and a frilly pink blouse. Her auburn hair was pulled back and she wore no makeup.

“No razors in here.”

John took a step forward and she a step back.

“You don’t want me to touch you?” he asked.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Why’s that?”

“Can we sit down?”

John chose a chair. Before sitting Carlinda took something from her right-front pants pocket and placed it on the table. It was a small spiral-bound notepad with a short pencil threaded through the plastic wire coil.

“Thank you,” John said. “That was very thoughtful. How’d you know I’d want this?”

“One time my father was arrested for hitting my mom. He had to spend sixty days in the county jail. The only thing he wanted was pencil and paper. He wrote her letters and she took him back.”

“You’ve never talked much about your parents.”

Carlinda glowered in response. It was as if she resented his saying anything to suggest they were connected. But there she was, visiting him in jail. Didn’t that speak volumes about their relationship?

“I told Arnold about us,” she said concentrating on the tabletop.

“Why?”

“One day when we were eating in the cafeteria he told me he’d always loved me, even when I wasn’t with him. He said we were soul mates and I realized it was true. Soul mates don’t keep secrets from to each other...”

“What did he say, I mean, when you told him about us?”

“He was mad that you lied to him.”

“Wasn’t he angry that you lied?” John asked.

“I never did. I just refused to talk to him about it.”

“How did he take it when you did tell him?”

“It drives him crazy I was seeing you both at the same time. He’s been studying New York statutes trying to see if there’s any chance they’d execute you.”

“That’s severe.”

“He’s always asking me about you.”

“Asking what?”

“What we did in the bed together. How big your penis is. Whenever we do anything new he wants to know if I learned it from you.”

“And what do you say when he asks all that?”

“I tell him the truth.”

“But why would you want to hurt him like that?”

“He likes it.”

“He likes being hurt?”

“I can tell by the way he makes love to me. He was never so passionate before. He never wanted to experiment at all. But now he’s after me all the time. Almost every night I wake up to him kissing me.”

There was not much feeling in Carlinda’s words but John could glean her passion by the slight sneer on her lips.

“And so you and I are through?”

“Yes.”

“What if I told you I loved you, needed you?”

Carlinda sat up straighter. There was actual fear in her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said softly. “We had what we had but that’s over. Even if it wasn’t what could we do about it?”

She sighed audibly. Her shoulders relaxed.

“Thanks for the notepad,” John said. “But tell me, why did you come?”

“Are you going to tell what you know about those broadsides now that... you know?”

“If that’s what you’re worried about why not tell me you love me, that you’ll wait for me?”

“Because it wouldn’t be right.”

“No,” John said. “I won’t tell. I probably would if it was just you but I don’t want to hurt the others. I’d do it if it was only you but I’m faithful to my friends.”

Again he suppressed a smile. The delicate wording of his assurance would allow Carlinda to believe she had bested him in their affair while at the same time feeling safe because of John’s fealty to others.

“I don’t mean to hurt you,” she lied. “It’s just my connection to Arnold is all.”

“I think you should leave now,” John told her, though he would have been happy to spend the afternoon playing their game.

24

Carlinda’s visit had lightened John’s spirit. She was the blue door in his dream. Through her lay a new world where he didn’t have to quote Hegel and Doc Ben, Herodotus and the unnamed scribes of ancient China’s successive empires.

She was the heart of his rebellious lectures, the revelation of his ridiculous name. She did not love him, was not there for love. Carlinda Elmsford was the perfect woman for the man who had given everything to Lucia Napoli and Herman Jones. She was his pack-mate baying side by side with him at the full moon with fresh blood on their snouts and tongues. She was warmth in the cold, the yipping intelligence as they moved with their gang hunting down prey.

By moonlight he had licked her bloody wounds and now she was gone.

Sitting in the metal chair he wondered why no one had come to retrieve him. Marle should have opened the blue door, chained him and then guided him back to his hole.

The suit that Willie Pepperdine wore was the red-brown color of ancient brick. His shirt was white and his tie scarlet. No guard accompanied him. The door he’d come through merely closed.

John stood to shake the moneyman’s outstretched hand.

“You look very relaxed for someone who’s been in solitary confinement the last two weeks,” Willie said.

“Gives me time to think,” John replied.

“Sit,” was Willie’s riposte.

“How did you know I was in solitary?”

“The same way I knew you’d probably murdered Chapman Lorraine and that you were born Cornelius Jones.”

“The Platinum Path?”

“How do you think Carlinda, Tamala and their friends could dig up so much dirt on your fellow faculty members?” Willie asked.

John waited a moment gazing into the too-perfect face of Pepperdine.

“You’re responsible for the notes on my table,” John said.

Willie nodded.

“And all the professors you accept you investigate first to make sure that you have something over them,” John continued.

“Not all of them,” Willie admitted. “All you need is something on about a third of the faculty. But you were a special case, John.”

“Special how?”

“At any given moment we have between ten and twenty candidates who might be admissible to the Path. Special testing and certain public and private records bring them to our attention, mostly. One day we might approach them to work for us directly or for one of our subbranches.

“These are, or might one day be, our rank and file. But you, my friend, you we are grooming for a much higher purpose.”

“Grooming?”

“Yeah. Those in the upper echelon of the Path see you as material for a senior position. You’re a freethinker in a world weighed down by the chains of history. A man like you could be a leader.”

“Leading where?”

“To change the course of history,” Pepperdine announced. “The human world is on a path toward self-destruction. The leaders are filled with inner conflicts and greed. They pretend to be sophisticated and then tear at each other like rabid dogs. No matter the religion, political theory or lineage — the entire world teeters on the edge of annihilation.

“It is our intention, our destiny, to avert this eventuality. In order to do that we need people like you.”

John thought about being an element in the transformation of humanity.

“I’m just living my life, Willie. That has nothing to do with you, no matter what you think.”

Saying this John stood. He almost turned away but thought of a question.

“How did you know about Lorraine?”

“We bought the Arbuckle when you joined the university.”

“But you waited until now to let people know?”

“There was no rush. He was dead. And you weren’t ready to be tested back then.”

“What test?”

“The one you’re taking right now.”

25

I am not now nor have I ever been Cornelius Jones, your honor, he scribbled on the pad Carlinda had given him.

No.

No, your honor, that is not my name.

Maybe.

I was born John Woman and I will die the same.

After penning twenty-three possible responses to the query, Are you the Cornelius Jones named in the state of New York’s extradition request? John decided that he’d wait until the judge had spoken, answering the question when it was freshly worded. Maybe his lawyer would answer for him.

The rest of the night John worked on writing a letter to his mother. He could fit only four or five words to a line on the small sheets. He used his fingernails to bare enough graphite lead to keep on writing. At the end he was manipulating the stub with his fingertips.

He told his mother he loved her, forgave her, and that his father loved her too; she had to do whatever she did because she was an emotional being and what better kind of mother could a son hope for?

He wrote a lot more, careful not to name Filo Manetti in case the judge or Captain Anton made Marle search his cell for evidence. He told her not to worry about him, and that he finally felt free of troubles he’d brought upon himself.

“John Woman,” Marle Josephson said just as John signed your son at the end of his eleven-page epistle.

They passed down many corridors, through seven locked doors, up three flights of stairs and then out into an alley where the marshals’ van waited.

“Good luck, John,” Marle said as he threaded a chain through the prisoner’s handcuffs securing him to a stainless steel eye attached to the floor in the backseat of the van. “See you tonight.”

The two marshals did not speak. One was white, the other black; both were men. They brought John to a room so small that it could contain only the chair he was chained to.

This was a new restriction. He could not move from the chair and, even if he could, the room was not large enough to take a single step. Tremors ran between the wrists and elbows of both his arms. This jittering frightened him. It felt as if there was some creature trying to claw its way out of his body.

To distract himself from his anxiety John slowly reconstructed Cicero’s description of the death of Caesar. His Latin was still strong. Herman had been a good teacher.

His father cried at the recitation of the last moments of the great general and tyrant written by a man who both loved and hated the self-appointed dictator.

“It was a necessary tragedy,” Herman told his son, “like every life lived.”

An hour later the cell door opened and the black and white marshals returned. John was led into the adjoining courtroom.

The judge was a white man who seemed short even though he was sitting at the high bench. He had a bristly brown-and-white mustache and, of course, black robes. John was brought to a seat at a desk where Nina Forché waited. She was wearing a red jacket. The gallery was packed with sixty or so spectators. Theron James and Colin Luckfeld were there in the row just behind the defendant’s bench. Willie Pepperdine sat behind them. Arnold Ott stood at the back of the room, staring at John through the dark rectangles of his glasses.

John looked for Carlinda but didn’t see her.

“Please be seated,” said a man in a gray suit standing next to the judge’s high bench.

When Nina touched John’s arm he settled in the hard ash chair provided.

At the plaintiff’s bench, across the aisle from John and Nina, sat Colette and a man wearing a maroon suit.

“Professor John Woman,” the judge rumbled.

John was trying to catch Colette’s eye.

“Professor John Woman.”

“Are you speaking to me?” John asked after failing to catch the detective’s eye.

The judge said, “This is my courtroom, young man. I ask the questions.”

“It might be your courtroom but that’s not my name.”

“Please stand.”

John complied.

“What is your name?” the judge asked.

“Cornelius Jones, son of Herman Jones and Lucia Napoli-Jones.”

“The same Cornelius Jones that the state of New York is petitioning to extradite?”

“The very same.”

“Do you dispute New York’s request to extradite you?”

“No, sir, I do not.”

26

John was transferred into the custody of Lieutenant Colette Van Dyne and her partner, Sergeant Leo Abruzzi.

When Marshal Tomas Christo handed over the keys to John’s chains the prisoner said, “If you go back to the jail please tell Marle Josephson I’m sorry I didn’t make it back there and that I’m confident he’ll do well on his exam.”

“Why didn’t you fight extradition?” Colette asked John after the M80 airbus had taken off from Sky Harbor International Airport. He occupied seat 27a, Colette’s was 27b. The aisle seat was vacant.

“Where’s your partner?”

“Up toward the middle of the plane, in the exit row,” she said. “He’s kinda big and that’ll be more comfortable for him.”

“I thought you two were supposed to flank me,” John said. “Isn’t that protocol?”

“What do you know about protocol?”

“I read a great deal and my memory is pretty good.”

“I asked him to move because I thought I’d do better interrogating you alone.”

“Oh.”

“Why didn’t you fight the extradition?” she asked again. “You had every chance of beating it.”

“I was lying to myself.”

“What does that mean?”

“It was time for me to come home.”

John noticed that they were speaking in the same hushed tones they used in the police pied-à-terre years before.

“How do you feel about me now?” he asked. He would have touched her but his wrists and ankles were chained together preventing him from raising his hands more than a few inches above his lap.

“I don’t feel anything about you.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I was the senior officer on the Lorraine case.”

“That’s not it,” he said using his most professorial tone. “You could have passed your notes on, let a junior cop come out here.”

“Did you waive extradition because of me?”

“Not you sitting here but it was time to come home and you’re part of home.”

“There’s nothing between us,” she said.

John smiled at the attempt.

“I think about you,” he confessed. “You taught me about physical love. Sex, sure, but love too. A man’s first love never leaves him.”

“Are you going to talk about that at your trial?”

“No,” he said, thinking that this was very much like Carlinda’s worry, “never.”

“It was just a fling anyway,” she said, tossing her hair as she used to do. “I mean I was wrong because you were underage but you were so sweet...”

John swiveled his head to see her profile as she talked.

“... You were doing your father’s job and going to school,” Colette went on. “You didn’t have a mother around to look after you...”

She turned to look at him.

“... I guess I loved you a little.”

“Yeah,” he said feeling like that sixteen-year-old boy again, the boy who cried because he needed her so much.

“But I knew we couldn’t stay together.”

“Why not?” young Cornelius Jones asked.

“You were just a boy and I was with Harry... we were engaged.”

John winced.

“What happened with Lorraine?” she asked.

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“The judge and the prosecutor are going to ask. Your defense attorney too.”

“The last thing you told me was that you were going to a fertility clinic. Did you have a baby?”

Colette’s expression changed from caring to something nervous, vulnerable.

“Yes,” she said.

“Boy?”

“Christian.” The name called up a smile to her lips. “He’s just now seventeen.”

“You remember the day we met? You were with your partner. What was his name?”

“Tom Pena.”

“Yeah. I was scared and you were beautiful.”

“Did I tell you I was pregnant with Chris?”

“Just that you went to the fertility clinic. It was the day you helped me get dad out of the hospital.”

“I didn’t even think you paid attention to me back then. I mean all you wanted was sex all the time.”

“You too.”

“Why didn’t you fight the extradition? You could have beat it.”

“My mother found out where I was and came to live with me. While she was there I was her son and your lover, my father’s student and caretaker. It was like I had turned it all off but everything was still there inside me.”

She put a hand on his arm, saying, “When they ask you if you killed Lorraine say no.”

“I understand,” he said.

“I thought I had rid myself of you, CC. I thought when I broke it off that I could be with Harry.”

“Don’t you love him?”

“Yes. Of course I do. But I never forgot you. There was something so sweet about the way you surrendered but you were, still are, the strongest man I ever met.”

“Do you have a picture of Christian?”

Colette gave him a look both contemplative and worried. She took a cell phone from her purse, turned it on and flipped around until she’d found something.

It was the photograph of a teenage boy from the waist up. His caramel-colored face resisting the camera, a space between his front teeth, a skateboard hugged to his chest. He smiled, being forbearing about yet another photograph.

“He looks a lot like my father,” John said, “only with our skin.”

“His father doesn’t know. The doctor told me the test showed that Harry was unable to have kids. He gave me the report to show him but I never did.

“I’ve never forgotten you, CC. I see you every morning.”

27

Thinking about his son John lost track of the rest of the journey. Colette spoke to him in the same hushed tones. He answered her but his mind was orbiting the idea of an heir. Before now, Cornelius and then John had been an only son lamenting the loss of his parents. But now there was a child of his own blood that came from Naples, Italy, and backwoods Mississippi to the Lower East Side via Jimmy Grimaldi.

For the first time the death of Chapman Lorraine took on meaning other than guilt. The landlord’s death brought Cornelius and Colette together. His blood consecrated the life of his son Christian.

At Kennedy Airport Colette and Sergeant Christo turned John over to court officers who were tasked with transferring him to Rikers Island.

Colette whispered, “Be strong in there, CC. I’ll make sure they look after you.”

He was moved from airport to van, van to prison intake. At Rikers he was photographed and fingerprinted, searched for weapons, provided with a dark yellow uniform and then brought to one of the smaller holding cells.

“Lieutenant Van Dyne don’t want your hair messed,” one guard said. “She says she don’t want the judge to feel sorry for your sorry ass.”

John’s cellmates were three men — one white, another black and a small umber-colored man who looked to be Puerto Rican.

The big black man had a smile that was both friendly and hungry.

Blocking John’s view of the other two inmates he asked, “What’s your name?”

“John... um, Cornelius.”

“Hello, John Cornelius. My name is Andre.” The big man held out a hand. When John reached out, Andre gripped hard and pulled him close.

“There’s a set of rules we live by in here, JC.” Andre’s breath was hot on the side of the ex-professor’s face. “You’re gonna be my friend and I will protect you from these other motherfuckers here. And you see over there?” Andre gestured toward an empty corner of the cell.

“That’s gonna be our private place,” the big man continued. “Whenever we’re over there you will do whatever I tell you to do. When we’re over there we will be alone, just you and me. Nobody’s gonna hear you and ain’t nobody gonna come.”

John glanced over at the other two men. The white man turned his head away. The shorter, broad-shouldered Puerto Rican watched dispassionately as if Andre and John were two competing creatures in the wild.

Andre took John’s chin with powerful fingers applying pressure until the young man’s eyes were again on him.

“Don’t look at them.” He shoved John toward the private corner. “They ain’t gonna help you. They cain’t. Now lemme see some dick.”

John wondered at what moment he would take Andre’s life. He might get beaten, even raped before the chance offered itself but the time would come... soon.

“I ain’t got all day, John Cornelius.”

“Hey, Andre,” a voice with a Spanish lilt said. “Leave him alone, man. He my homey.”

“This ain’t none’a your business, Velázquez,” Andre complained.

The much shorter Puerto Rican stood up from his cot. “I said leave him alone. I ain’t tellin’ you again.”

“Not till I get me some. You can have him then.”

“I will break your head open like a melon.”

Andre hesitated a second, two... then pushed John away. He went to the cot that the Puerto Rican had vacated and sat down heavily.

“Get your ass up from there,” Velázquez told the giant. “That’s my bed.”

Again Andre hesitated. Again he did as he was told.

“Come on, man,” Velázquez said to John. “Let’s have a seat.”

“They got me in here on murder,” the man identifying himself as Jose Velázquez said to John Woman/Cornelius Jones. “The cops say I killed this Cuban who didn’t pay his debt but I didn’t do it.”

The two were sitting side by side on one of three cots provided for the four men. Andre was grumbling to himself trying to come up with the courage to go against Jose. The white man was leaning against the cell wall looking at nothing in particular.

“They have me for a murder that happened when I was sixteen,” John said. “I did it.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be sayin’ that,” Jose suggested.

“I don’t care. I plan to confess.”

John’s savior frowned, creating creases radiating from his eyes. He said, “You shouldn’t be so serious, John. You got to remember that it’s just a game, bro. Just a game. You don’t wanna make them think you think they doin’ justice. If it was justice they’d be down here tryin’ to figure out how a kid ended up doin’ a man’s job and how that fat fuck got his ass up there to get killed. They don’t care. They want you like Andre does, on a dinner plate with your ass up in the air.”

“How do you know about my case?” John asked.

“They give us newspapers. You was in the headlines a whole week and then again when you let ’em extradite your ass.”

“That’s why you were going to fight Andre?”

“I wasn’t gonna fight him.”

“No?”

“Uh-uh.”

Jose gestured at the white man who had a receding brown-and-gray hairline. Propelling himself from the wall with his shoulder blades the lanky white man sauntered the few steps to the Puerto Rican’s cot.

“Frank Beam, meet history professor John Woman,” Jose said.

John stood and shook Beam’s hand.

“Frank here is what they call a living embodiment of death,” Jose continued. “He’s killed more people than Felix Trinidad have knocked out. Andre knows that Frank got my back. That’s why he backed down.”

Frank nodded and went back to his personal patch of cell wall.

“It ain’t what it seems,” Jose said to John. “Here we believe what they taught us in school even though we know it ain’t true. Don’t you give it up to them, bro. They ain’t worth it.”

28

Jose told John to take Andre’s cot. The big man complained then backed down when Frank Beam said, “Shut your fat yap.”

John considered Jose’s advice from many different angles. He knew that he was guilty. It was that last blow from the heavy wrench across the top of Chapman Lorraine’s skull. He didn’t have to kill him but he didn’t know how to stop.

The counsel Jose offered caused a resurgence of historical thinking: one had to try and maintain objectivity even though that was impossible — this impossibility was what made life meaningful. Maybe, on some basic human level, he was innocent because he couldn’t stop himself.

John dreamt about the desert. He was a coyote that died at twilight; his soul left at that shadowy time to wander the endless wasteland. Heart and body, blood and senses were canine but his mind was still that of a historian. The barren land, even in semidarkness, revealed striations in rock, bones jutting from the ground and out from the walls of great canyons. History was all that remained, measured by discrete moments rendered in stone — each one bearing the same weight, drained of passion, purpose and personality. The coyote, John Woman, with a rolling gait, moved along the edge of eternal dusk, never to see the sunrise and never to sleep.

“Cornelius Jones,” a man’s voice intoned.

John opened his eyes and sat up. Across from him Andre squatted on the floor staring wide-eyed at nothing. A large gash was open down his left cheek revealing the whitish muscle tissue of flesh under black skin.

“Yeah,” John called out.

“Come with me.”

He was taken to a conference room that could have been in any corporate office. There were three people sitting at the far end of the walnut conference table: two men and Nina Forché. The men wore business suits, one blue, the other gray. Nina had on a dress-suit in a palette of coral hues ranging from goldenrod to lush raspberry.

Nina stood when John entered.

“Take those restraints off him,” she said to his guard.

John’s keeper, a tall slender white man who gave the impression of great physical strength, looked at the black man in the blue suit.

“It’s okay, Hawkins,” Blue Suit said. “Mr. Jones has been granted bail.”

“Yes, Underwarden Reese,” Hawkins said.

When the restraints were removed John took a deep breath and realized that he was trembling.

“Mr. Jones,” Underwarden Reese said.

“I changed my name to Woman. I’d appreciate you using that.”

“You have been granted bail,” the prison official said. “This allows you freedom in New York City. You can travel in any of the boroughs but not beyond.”

“How much do I have to pay?”

“That’s already been taken care of, John,” Nina Forché said softly.

“Willie?”

“No.”

“Then by whom?”

“An unknown benefactor.”

“Oh... kay.”

“You will be expected to respond promptly if the court or any prison official calls,” Reese stated.

“I don’t have my phone.”

“I have one for you,” Nina said. “The number has been distributed among those who might need to call.”

“Okay.”

“There are some papers for you to sign.” Underwarden Reese indicated a chair for John to sit in.

In the backseat of a brand-new Tesla sedan John sat next to his lawyer. He wore a black suit that Forché had somehow gotten from NUSW faculty housing.

“How much?” he asked.

“One point three million. No bail bondsman would underwrite it so it had to be in cash.”

“Who would do that for me?”

“You’ll find out, I’m sure.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“To the address that the court has been given for you,” she said.

“Also provided by my mysterious benefactor?”

“Yes. Now, John, we have to discuss your defense. You surprised me by admitting your identity in Phoenix. I thought we had an agreement.”

“I told you I understood what you were saying,” John replied, “not that I would go along.”

“What will be your plea?”

“Guilty.”

“What reason will you give for the killing?”

“I’ve given that a lot of thought,” he said. “The only reason I can give is juvenile depravity.”

“And what about the circumstances?”

“What is it that the Platinum Path wants — exactly?”

“Whatever it is you have to offer.”

“I don’t understand.” John was surprised that she engaged with the question.

“Path members, especially in the upper echelon, see the world differently. They are difficult to predict.”

“Have you ever killed anybody, Ms. Forché?”

“My training will not allow me to answer that question.”

“I have. I crushed a man’s skull under the weight of a heavy metal wrench.”

Forché gazed at her client but said nothing.

“Thank you for all you’ve done,” he told the lawyer. “It feels really good to be free if only for a few days.”

The car came to a stop at the corner of Mott and Grand in what used to be Little Italy.

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

Handing him a key ring that held a worn brass key she said, “I was told that you’d know where you are and where you should go.”

“None of this makes any sense,” John said aloud, not necessarily to his lawyer.

Climbing up to the third floor of the prewar apartment building John worked the familiar key in the very same door he’d been passing through since he was a child.

When he crossed the threshold, she said, “Hi, baby, I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Mom.”

Sitting at the small table in the same window that he’d stared out of as a boy, excited by his mother’s stories of love and lust and life, he felt... unmoored, as he had in a childhood of wandering between Herman’s truth and Lucia’s reality.

“Filo kept the place all these years,” she said after kissing her son then making him sit. “He kept my old things and had a woman clean once a month. He told me if I ever wanted to leave him my life would be waiting for me just the way I left it. He made your bail.”

“I’d like to meet him, to thank him.”

“Soon,” she said. “He wanted me to tell you that if you needed to run he’d understand.”

“And lose a million dollars?”

“You’d be free,” Lucia said with pride.

“Thank him for me, mom, but I’m going to trial.”

“You’ve become a real man, CC. I saw that in Arizona. A real man.”

“Where did you go?”

“Filo called me. The police were coming to arrest you. He said that if I was there it would cause you more trouble than if I wasn’t. So I left.”

John tried to call up a feeling about this most recent abandonment but could not.

“Anything else I need to know?” he asked.

“I’ve done all the shopping and cooking. There’s meat lasagna in the icebox. My number is Scotch-taped to the phone and there’s also a number for a friend of Filo’s if you have any serious trouble.”

“You aren’t going to stay with me?”

“I have to lay low, honey,” she said. “The police know Filo ran with me. I’m not wanted for anything but they might try and set me up or something. The name I use in New York is Rita Wentworth but the cops could have a picture.”

“You know, mom, I spent my whole adult life trying to imagine that I’m somebody else, that the boy who used to sit in this chair was a dream. But now it feels like I could take the Q to Brooklyn and dad would be there reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

“I miss him too, baby,” she said. “If I could take it all back I would do it in a heartbeat.”

“You would?” the child asked.

“Don’t you know it.”

29

Lucia’s black dress hung a bit looser with a longer hem, but it was much like her clothing in the old days of CC’s memories. She was carrying a calico bag, standing at the front door.

“Can I do anything else before I go, honey?”

“Are you a member of the Path, mama?” The last word stuck in his throat.

Lucia Napoli-Jones’s face took on a serious cast that neither CC nor John had seen before.

“No, baby, no. I know who they are and they know me because they know you.”

“What do they want from me? I mean, why set me up to get arrested and tried for murder if they want me to work with them?”

“I don’t know. But I believe they see you as a leader, like a second coming.”

They stood for a moment in silence, then Lucia turned away and went out the door.

As it had been almost twenty years before, there were no books in his mother’s home; just a white leather Bible the spine of which was still unbroken.

After a plate of meatballs and angel-hair pasta John decided to go out walking around Soho, streets he hadn’t stepped foot in since the millennium. On Prince a little east of Broadway he found a bookstore.

After an hour or so looking around the fiction aisles he decided on Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel García Márquez, because they didn’t have The Autumn of the Patriarch. There had been a fat envelope on the kitchen table containing twenty-five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. He used one of these to purchase the paperback.

“Hi,” a young woman said.

He was seated at the window of the large Starbucks next to Cooper Union, reading his book. Her face contained equal parts Occident and Orient (as Herman Jones might have said). Slight and not quite pretty she lowered herself into the chair across from him.

“Hello.” John closed the book.

“You want a date?”

John looked her directly in the eye. She cocked her head and gave him half a smile.

“How much?” John asked.

“Seventy-five for hand, a hundred to kiss, and two fifty for it all.”

“You know I, I used to be invisible. Nobody saw me coming or going, or if anyone did notice I was already gone.”

“I see you,” she said. “I like that suit.”

John reached into a pocket he knew contained exactly two hundred dollars. Palming the cash he reached out placing the money in her hand.

“Two hundred,” he said. “Maybe if you see me around here sometime again you’ll give me another smile.”

John got to his feet and left her there at the table.

Back at the Mott Street apartment he went through the bags sent from his Arizona home. He found the beaded belt with its belt-buckle knife and resolved to wear it every day. The young woman might have been just a working girl but he could no longer trust in his anonymity.

The next afternoon John took a taxi downtown to the dstrict attorney’s office. Matthew Lars, Assistant DA, sat across a conference table deposing him while Nina Forché sat by his side.

“So, Mr. Woman,” said ADA Lars. He was a broad-faced white man with white-blond hair. “In your own words tell me what happened that night.”

John almost asked what other than his own words did he have to say anything, but he remembered that he was no longer a professor and ADA Lars was certainly no student.

He described the events of that night, even Dirty Nymphs and masturbating on the mattress that had been sealed in the wall with the makeshift coffin.

“And so you’re claiming that it was self-defense for the first two blows?” Lars asked.

“I was scared and he was hurting my arm.”

“But you didn’t have to hit him the third time.”

“No. I was still scared but he had fallen down to his knees.”

“He was a child,” Forché said. “He was afraid. It could very well be that he didn’t think that his attacker was helpless until after he had time to consider it later. His feelings of guilt might have made him believe it was murder.”

“But he hid the body,” Lars replied, “like a professional hit man.”

“He was a smart kid,” Nina rejoined.

“Why was Lorraine at the projectionist’s room?” Lars asked.

“I don’t know,” John said.

“Did you call him?”

“No.”

“Then why would he show up there? Did he do that sometimes?”

“Never.”

“And why did you have that heavy wrench close at hand?”

“I used it to move the projectors up and down.”

“And you murdered him.”

“With the third blow... yes.”

Tall and wide, possibly forty-five years old, Matthew Lars smoothed his pale hair with big slug-like blunt fingers. He seemed frustrated by John’s confession.

John wanted to ask, “What more can I say? I’m telling you everything.” But he did not voice his confusion.

“I can offer second-degree manslaughter,” Lars said to Forché. “That’s the best I can do. Fifteen to twenty.”

“There are extenuating circumstances,” she said.

“There’s also the concealment of a body and flight.”

“He didn’t know he was being sought.”

“He called Lieutenant Van Dyne from Florida. He taunted her.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“You want to leave it up to the jury? In court it’ll be a murder charge.”

“Let me speak to my client.”

“I’ll take whatever he’s offering,” John told Nina once they were alone.

“We might win this in court,” she argued.

“I killed him and I’m guilty,” John said. “I will not allow my chance at repentance to become legal sophistry.”

“Prison is no picnic, John.”

“Neither is a lifetime of guilt.”

John accepted Lars’s offer.

“We will go in front of a judge tomorrow,” the prosecutor told the lawyer and accused.

“That’s a record,” Nina said.

“Judge Halloran would like to clear his docket. His daughter is getting married in California next week and with a confession this case is open-and-shut.”

“What time should we be there?” Forché asked.

“Early. Eight in the morning. If Professor Woman is lucky he’ll be on his way to prison before dinnertime.”

30

John started awake early the next morning. Bright blue digits on a clock next to the bed read 3:03. He could recall no dream, just a sudden shock of fear. After a minute or so he remembered the appointment with the judge later that morning. The image of Andre with the side of his face cut open came to mind. This was to be John’s future. He would be raped, slashed, beaten and locked away. He’d have to resist becoming either a victim or a predator in the process.

This constant flutter of fear is what woke him: a pulsating moth, the size of a kitten, trying to break free from the cage of ribs.

He’d admitted his guilt to ADA Lars because he wanted to answer for his crime. But now he worried that if he went to prison he might do it all over again, and again. He knew he was a killer when Pete Tackie barged in, when Andre declared John’s body and soul his property, like Columbus in the New World or Hitler and his endless annexations. He would, like any true patriot, kill the would-be conqueror trying to colonize him.

Naked, he climbed out of bed and walked down the short hall to the kitchen. Lucia had left him a jar of chunky peanut butter, cherry preserves and cinnamon-swirl raisin bread — his favorites when he was a child. He bit into the sandwich thinking about twenty-four-hour lockdown; the smell of disinfectants; and the gaping, almost bloodless, six-inch wound down the side of Andre’s face.

John realized in the early morning, standing naked in his mother’s kitchen, that going to prison was tantamount to sealing himself in the wall with Chapman Lorraine. Maybe he should run. There was still time. Filo Manetti told Lucia that he didn’t care about the bail money. John had the gangster’s friend’s number. He could leave the country. He spoke Spanish and French; he’d been to Martinique.

Maybe Cuba.

John went to the red wall phone he’d used as a child to tell his father good night those evenings he stayed with Lucia.

He put his hand on the receiver. That’s when the phone rang.

His recoil from the strident sound was so violent that John felt a muscle tear in his right shoulder blade. He gasped and choked — a convict caught in the middle of an ill-considered escape attempt.

The phone kept ringing, wave after wave of clanging alarm. Danger! Danger! There was no voice mail service and the caller would not give up.

Before answering John counted seventeen rings but there had been more.

“Hello?”

“John?” a familiar voice asked softly.

“Who is this?”

“Am I speaking with John Woman?”

“Yes. Now who is this?”

“Service Tellman.”

John came suddenly to consciousness. The convulsive fear, the retreat to his mother’s kitchen, even the making of his favorite childhood sandwich — all this occurred in the stupor at the tag end of a fearful sleep. But now his awareness was crystalline.

“Service Tellman is dead,” John said, the option of flight still bright in his mind.

“That’s what the world thinks.”

“And you’re saying he’s not?”

“I’m not.”

“Playing possum?”

The phantom chuckled in John’s ear.

“Only the dead are beyond reproach,” he said.

“Oh,” the once and future professor mused. “So you’re saying that you martyred yourself and yet survived; the cake-and-eat-it-too school of philosophy.”

“People need something to aspire to and, as Lear tells us, there is a stench to all things mortal.”

“Sainthood?”

“Human potential, as you know, far outstrips human nature,” the caller said by way of agreement.

“I’ve never heard it said quite like that,” John replied. “But you’re right of course. Parishioners close their eyes and imagine standing side by side with the Deity. But when the prayer is done they find themselves barefoot in pig shit up to their knees.”

“You’re one of the few professors at NUSW who were truly aware that the acquisition of knowledge, the process of learning, is an end in itself.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m calling to offer you membership in the upper echelon of the Platinum Path.”

“No.”

“You refuse?”

“I don’t believe that you are who you say. How can I accept an offer that cannot be made?”

“Why would I lie?”

“Maybe you’re an old friend of Chapman Lorraine.”

“And Lucia Napoli? Filo Manetti?”

“Your voice is familiar. Do I know you?”

“There’s already a question on the table, Mr. Woman. Or would you prefer to be called Professor?”

“You’re serious?”

“I am Service Tellman,” the voice said, “leader and founder of the Platinum Path, calling to invite you into our ranks.”

“I thought you had to be rich and famous or powerful to be considered for that berth.”

“Fame has never been a criterion. And you are powerful.”

Imagining these last words coming from his father John said, “Thank you.”

“Then you accept membership?”

“Even if you were qualified to offer it, I’m going to jail.”

“We have members everywhere,” the man calling himself Service Tellman said, “even in prison. Jose Velázquez is a foot soldier on the Path.”

Before, when he first got up, John was still mostly asleep. Then, when he heard the dead man’s name spoken in a voice so tantalizingly familiar, he came to consciousness — a man awake in a world he knew. But when that voice uttered a name that no one outside Rikers should have known, John’s mind opened wide. Abruptly a world he couldn’t imagine came fully into being, like Athena emerging from Zeus’s brow or the atomic bomb exploding over Nagasaki.

“Is this a trick?” Cornelius Jones asked.

“We would like to think that we’re the biggest trick ever pulled,” the voice said. “We’re attempting to rejigger destiny by changing the direction of the soul. We have men and women all over the world. There are professors and billionaires, movie stars and gardeners in our ranks.”

“Ron Underhill,” John stated.

“Yes.”

“You’re running a worldwide conspiracy while watering the cacti of the southwest?”

“We have a clear vision of a world that is not tainted by nationalisms, gods or the lies of history.”

“History,” John repeated the word. “That’s me.”

“That’s you.”

“And so all of this has been you? My capture, my lawyer, Jose Velázquez in my cell. Even the letters left on my kitchen table.”

“We want you with us, John. If we sit back and leave the world to its own devices — its capitalisms and Holocausts — there won’t be a civilization left. As you said in the first lecture at NUSW: there can be no future without a history and there is no history except for what you can imagine and do fear.”

“I’m not some savior,” John said. “I play with ideas — that’s all.”

“The play’s the thing.”

“I appreciate what you claim is your mission, Mr. Tellman, Ron. I mean I often think what’s wrong with the world is its honesty about desire. Lies and misdirections might indeed make a better tomorrow except that truth cannot be denied. And the truth is — we’re a deeply flawed species.”

“Even DNA can be altered,” the gardener said. “We can remake the history of our genes just as well as we can deconstruct our supposed pasts.”

“Service,” John mused. “Is that the name you were born with?”

“Will you join us, John?”

“No. At least not yet. I’m here in my mother’s old apartment saying good-bye to myself.”

“You will have to make up your mind sooner or later. One must plan for the future. In some cases, yours for instance, that future is synonymous with the world’s.”

31

His fears gone, John took Service Tellman’s words as a great gift for a man in his profession. The simple idea that a cult leader could make himself into a living martyr embodied everything John taught in his classes. To disappear in plain sight and still remain a force was a trick rarely used in a world of absolute rulers, capitalisms and other megalomanias.

John showered and shaved rather than planning his escape. He made coffee, read an old newspaper, then used the smart phone his lawyer gave him to look up Service Tellman and the Platinum Path on its browser.

There were many photographs of the organization’s founder usually in pedestrian poses — as he was coming out of some official door or smiling and turning toward someone at his side. The man in the pictures looked something like Ron Underhill but he had a short beard and a face different enough that one might not recognize him. A razor, a little plastic surgery, tinted contact lenses and the daily blessing of the sun were enough for the chameleon-prophet to continue on his mission unhindered by identity or the stench of his breed.

It wasn’t until John was riding the Number 6 train downtown that he considered running again. The subway car was crowded with well over a hundred passengers.

A young Asian woman in a bright green dress was standing next to him, clinging to the same chrome pole between the center doors of the subway car.

“Nice day,” John said. He was wearing the same soft-milled black cotton jacket and loose coal gray trousers he had on when he met Carlinda Elmsford. His T-shirt that day was navy.

“Beautiful,” the young woman replied.

“The kind of morning that makes you think maybe you should empty out a credit card and buy a ticket for Rome.”

“I like Paris,” she said, giving him a conspiratorial smile.

“Too rainy for me.”

“You going to work?”

“No,” he said, more contemplative than sad.

“You look very familiar. Have we met?”

“I’ve been in the newspapers on and off lately. They found a dead man in a wall in the East Village. I used to work on the other side of that wall.”

The young woman’s eyes widened.

“I’m headed down to the court now,” he said. “The judge has to decide whether or not to accept my confession and the sentence suggested by the ADA.”

“You did it?”

“Yes.”

“And you confessed?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Why did I do it?”

“No. Why confess? I read the articles. There was no witness or physical evidence. There’s no proof.”

“You’re a lawyer?”

“Executive assistant at Resterly and Lowe. I’m going to law school at night.”

“Born here?”

“Hong Kong. Why?”

“I think it’s the strong green of your dress. It’s a little more... um, forceful than most American-born women would wear.”

“But why confess?” she asked again. “It’s been such a long time.”

“I’ve tried for years to leave it behind me. But I couldn’t escape the guilt. If I confess and take my punishment I’ll have paid my debt and be able to move on.”

“You can’t change what’s done,” she said.

In superior courtroom 10a at 7:47, John was standing next to Nina Forché, across the aisle from ADA Lars and a young woman in a gray dress-suit.

I’d like to come visit you in prison, Hong Li had said when they departed the train at the Brooklyn City Hall stop.

“Why?” he asked as she handed him her card.

“My private phone and e-mail are at the bottom,” she said. “I’d like to find out if you feel that this was the right move after being locked up for a while.”

“All rise for the Honorable Judge Maxwell Halloran,” a uniformed guard bellowed.

Tall and grizzled the judge was light-brown like John. He had high shoulders and an unpleasant turn to his lips.

“Be seated,” the judge proclaimed as he lowered into his broad-backed chair. John felt as if he could see a shimmering aura of importance between him and the judge.

“John,” Nina said. “John, sit down.”

She pulled at his sleeve and he relented, still gaping at the magistrate.

Halloran was glowering at a single sheet of paper that he held up to his face. The room behind the defendant’s table was filled with people come to see the trial of the murderous child grown up to be a college professor. Reporters had assailed him outside the courthouse but two big men who said that they were with his team shouldered them aside and brought him to the courtroom.

“Mr. Lars,” Halloran uttered.

“Yes, your honor,” the ADA replied rising from his chair.

“Is this for real?” he asked waving the sheet of paper next to his head.

John was tickled by the dialect-inflected question. He didn’t wonder about the paper or its intelligence; only the character of his judge.

“Yes, your honor,” ADA Lars apologized.

“The source has been verified and vetted?”

“My assistant took the deposition yesterday afternoon at four p.m., west coast time.”

“And before that the defendant confessed and accepted your offer of second-degree manslaughter?”

“Yes, your honor.”

The judge looked angry but John couldn’t tell if this was his normal expression.

“Cornelius Jones,” Halloran cried.

“Stand up, John,” Nina said.

He did so.

“Yes, Judge?”

“Did you kill Chapman Lorraine?”

The words, yes, your honor were on his tongue but his teeth were clenched shut. Service Tellman was in his mind, Service and Hong Li. He’d followed the rules from Parsonsville to Lower Manhattan; he’d confessed and allowed the courts and police and prison guards and convicts to have their way with his freedom. That was all over. Lorraine was dead, John Woman was alive, and the judge, no matter how magnificent, was no more master over him than the convict Andre had been.

“Mr. Jones,” Halloran rumbled.

“Yes, your honor?”

“Did you bludgeon Chapman Lorraine to death?”

“No, your honor.”

“No?”

John did not answer this question, because he had already done so. He could feel the guilt rising up and out of his body like morning mist under an unrelenting summer sun.

“Mr. Lars,” Halloran said.

“Your honor.”

“Do you intend to pursue the state’s case against this man?”

“Not at this time.”

“You’re dropping the charges?”

“We are.”

“Mr. Jones.”

“Sir,” John said to the judge.

“There’s something wrong here. Something stinks.”

“Is that a question, sir?”

“Don’t you get smug with me, young man. This is my courtroom.”

John thought that the halls of justice belonged to everyone but he did not voice this opinion.

“I’m going to launch an inquiry into this sudden confession,” the judge vowed. “I will see you in my court soon again.”

“France Bickman,” Nina said to John in a small café around the corner from the courthouse.

“What about him?”

“He confessed to the murder of Chapman Lorraine.”

“He just said it was him and they believed it?”

“He had physical knowledge of the murder scene and a motive.”

“What motive?”

“He’d been embezzling money from the ticket and the concession stands for many years. When Lorraine confronted him he killed him and hid the body to keep from going to prison.”

“But I ran away,” John argued. “Isn’t that some kind of proof?”

“You left New York years after Lorraine disappeared. That makes a good argument you had no knowledge of the crime.”

John was thinking about his early morning conversation with the man calling himself Service Tellman. Somehow the Platinum Path had rejiggered the facts in his murder trial.

“Are they going to prosecute France?” John asked Nina.

“No. He’s too old and feeble to be removed from the nursing home.”

“What about the mattress?”

“The one in the wall?”

“Yes.”

“Water damage erased any traces of DNA; also Bickman told the police that you visited him. He said that you told him about the crime being reported over the Internet and he confessed to you. He thought you told the police you committed the murder to protect an old man, the good friend of your father.”

“How did the police even know about France?”

“He called Lieutenant Van Dyne.”

“And so I’m free?”

“Any defense attorney could get this case overturned under these circumstances. With his knowledge, motive and confession Bickman is a perfectly sensible alternative explanation of the crime. There will always be reasonable doubt.”

John called the young law student, Hong Li, but got her answering service.

“Hey,” he said into the cell phone. “This is the confessed man-slaughterer you met on the train this morning. I guess we’ll never find out what I would think of prison because the judge and the prosecutor proved to themselves that I might not have done it. And who am I to argue with law?”

They were waiting for him in his mother’s apartment when he returned later that afternoon. He’d been walking for hours trying to understand how the study of historical deconstruction had come to rule his life. From Herman Jones to Service Tellman he had been reinterpreted until there was no truth possible.

“Hi, honey,” Lucia said to her son. She was sitting in her favorite chair looking out the window.

The man sitting next to her stood up and held out a hand.

“Congratulations,” Willie Pepperdine said.

“What are you doing here?”

Lucia stood up and said, “This is Filo Manetti, honey — my husband. I told you — we got married six years ago.”

There was no more room for shock or surprise in John Woman’s heart. Everything made sense and nothing did.

“When did this all start?” John asked Filo/Willie.

“All what?” Lucia asked.

“Why don’t we have a seat in this magnificent window?” Willie suggested.

“I’ll go make us some tea,” Lucia said. “You boys get to know each other.”

When his mother was gone John, CC, returned to the chair where he used to sit for hours entranced by her beauty and words.

“We aren’t inhuman,” Willie said. “When I met and fell in love with your mother I was mobbed up. I decided to break away because of her. I mean the government was after me but that was par for the course. Pretty soon after we went out west I was approached by Service Tellman. He told me that I’d been on their radar for years. They liked the way I worked with my people and their families. You know I’ve always been more businessman than thug, so when I broke with my crew the Path offered me a position. Just like they’re doing with you now.”

“But that’s because of you, right?”

“Partially. Your mother asked me to try to find you after your father died and you didn’t return home. I was able to trace your father’s credit cards. You were Anthony Summers by then, about to enter Yale. I didn’t tell your mother, because it seemed like you wanted a new life and we were all safer if that life remained a secret.

“It wasn’t until a few years later that I told Service about you. He read the papers you wrote and was very impressed with your knowledge and sophistication. That’s when the Path started monitoring you.

“I had convinced your mother that you’d faded into New York somewhere. When you were in your second year at NUSW I told her about the cable TV show and said that we’d figure out how to get you guys together.”

“So it was you that had NUSW approach me,” John postulated.

“Actually it was Service himself. He was already dead, and this gave him more time to develop high-level membership. He shepherded you along from the time you were first offered the chance to apply for the position.”

“Like I was some kind of lab rat or something.”

Willie Pepperdine/Filo Manetti shrugged and gave a half smile.

“The Path is serious business, CC. Our goal is to actually change the course of human events so that people everywhere are on a road to salvation not destruction.

“Every year thousands of geniuses are born but almost all of them fall into poverty, mental illness, criminality, early death and other categories that waste their potential. We take in as many of these advanced beings as possible, giving them a chance to guide their myopic brothers and sisters.”

“So you and I are geniuses?”

“You are. If Service has his way you will be one of a triumvirate that will guide us after he’s gone.”

“He’s already gone.”

Ignoring these last words Willie said, “We approached France Bickman when our plans for you started, assured him that Oregon would never extradite a man in his nineties residing in a state-certified nursing home. I went to him myself. He truly loved your father. He told me that he owed him his life. I would like to have met the man.”

“He was a great man,” John said with pleasure. “He would put this whole conspiracy into perspective.”

“A conspiracy of freedom,” Willie Pepperdine declared.

“I made rose hip tea with scones and clotted cream I got from Dean and Deluca,” Lucia said, coming in from the kitchen.

“Freedom,” John mused. “The last man to offer me that was my father. Then he died and took all hope with him.”