The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY Joanne Greenberg

Jurgen had come to Leonard on the yard and told him there was a visitor. “I don’t think it s a relative, he said, and he looked at Leonard oddly. Leonard got up and followed, happy for the change in routine. Media had tapered off; if it was a woman, he might be able to touch her for money. He needed money. With the same odd look, Jurgen let him wash up before he went in. The visitors’ room was large and bare, divided by a Plexiglas barricade. There was one person there, his visitor, the oldest, ugliest woman he had ever seen, skeletal, lipless, and wrinkled. Her fingers were working, working over her face and body, touching it, moving, picking, bunching at the ragged dress she wore. He was glad for once he couldn’t see clearly. A former visitor had plastered her side of the Plexiglas partition with kisses and the mess hadn’t been cleaned off yet. He sat down and looked at her from a lowered head. It was what he did with the press.

The woman watched him and then, to his horror, opened her mouth and gave a piercing cry. On both sides of the barrier the guards turned, but things like that happened here and they turned back. Lady, Leonard said, “I don’t know you. There’s been a mistake.” She unnerved him.

She gave a cough, trying with physical wrenchings and swallowings to suppress the weeping. She gulped air, and forced back another cry. He was transfixed like a bystander at a fatal wreck. “I need you"’ she said. “I and the others—all the others—need you"’ and her hands, like spiders, ran up and down up and down her face, hair, body.

Leonard was revolted and fascinated in his revulsion. "What is it? Who are you?”

“Gehenna,” she said.

“Well, Mrs. Gehenna.”

Her laughter was more horrifying than her cry. It was a shriek. For the first time in his experience, Leonard saw the guards shiver. On both sides of the barrier they retreated behind the doors and watched through the glass. The woman took another breath. “There’s no time for screaming,” she said. “It’s too late to laugh or scream. Listen. Gehenna is not who I am, although,” and a laugh like a hiccup escaped, “Gehenna is where I’m from. It’s the other side, and the souls of the punished seethe and fire falls from the sky and nests in our hair. Listen. One day a week, from Sabbath eve to sundown Sabbath day, the law relents, and we are free of it, and Hell rejoices more than Heaven.”

“What is all this—” Leonard said. The woman must be mad.

“Listen. On Sabbath eve the fire stops, the lake of flame dries up, and we are free and we can go into the world. Listen—What do you imagine we do, hung upside down the six-days-forever? How do we endure, sheaved like bats in an attic where rags of flame burn us as they light on our fur?” Leonard was silent. She leaned forward and whispered through the speaking holes in the Plexiglas. “We tell stories. In the first millennium we tell our own lives, all the proofs, justifications, over and over. We cry the unfairness of our damnation, we revisit the woundings that we bore and those we gave others again and again and again.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Listen! Listen! Why do you think God made man? It was the story He loved. In Gehenna, the instruments of music incinerate or freeze and the notes burn in the mouths of the players. Fine art goes to stinking smoke; sculptors’ marble burns to lime. Only the story—Listen! We say ‘Listen,’ and we tell stories.”

“I’m going back on the yard,” Leonard said and got up. “I think you’re crazy.”

“I can get you out of here,” the woman said.

Leonard stopped. At the level at which he stood, the Plexiglas was less stained and scratched. He saw her face. Then, he believed what she said. There were no scars on the flesh, only fresh burns, made from a point so close they looked like powderburns, made and remade endlessly. “How can you get me out?”

Her voice was gritty. “You’re serving fifteen years, parole in seven and a half. Aggravated robbery.”

“It wasn’t the money,” Leonard said. “You wouldnt understand. It was a statement against a repressive society, against a society that values property rights above human rights.”

“Listen. There’s no time for that, for all the reasons and the justifications. I have only this small sabbath, a sabbath you waste, a sabbath of no value to you.

You have 2,737 days to serve, and you’ve served 364, so that including leap years you have 2,375. For every day of those days, I can offer you what you yearn for— unconsciousness, nothingness, or dreams—long, lovely dreams. While you are away, you’ll function here in this world and you won’t incur the risks or dangers of this place. Listen! You can be conscious for just the time it takes to give to us . . . what we need. It will happen at a time before the prison wakes up in the morning. Then you will decide which of your memories you will give us. It will be your part of what we need, use, desire ...”

“Memory? Which of my memories?”

“Our own memories burn and sear. The bad ones are all those years of reasons endlessly repeated. Even the good ones get tainted in Gehenna. It’s to close those away, to drown them out, that we hang in anguish and cry other stories, take other days and dreams, see other roads, live in other houses. Listen, we say, and we wrap our burning flesh in your sensations, your evocations. Keep what you want; save what you want. Give me, us, the humiliating moments, the times of weakness, cowardice, the fights with friends, the abuse by the ones supposed to love you. For these incidents and the sensations connected with them, for every one, you can have a day of consciousness removed from here, from the hatred, the hostility, from the boredom and danger of this place.”

She was silent then, but her body thrummed with impatience, her hands picking, smoothing, finding the sparks of her burning world as though to extinguish them before they set her afire.

“Is this . . . job ... for me alone?”

She laughed. “Gehenna is all day and all night the six-day-forever, and the need never ends. There’s a lady in New Jersey who gives all the ugliness she’s ever known—a wretched childhood, a hideous rape—and she dreams herself off on a Hawaiian vacation with an ideal lover every time her husband’s family comes to visit. There is a man in a Cuban jail—compared to his, your days are days of heaven. We have children ...”

“Children?”

The old wrinkles drew up her mouth. He couldn’t tell if it was a laughter or a moan. “What makes you think children have lives they want to live completely, or that they have no memories with which to pay us? Their sensations are more intense, their memories less blunted. Small ones stand closer to the coiled snake sunning or the peony on its stem. I love their fresher passions, brighter than the later passions, for color, taste, bright red, sweet sugar—yes ...”

“Why did you choose me?”

“We listen—we can’t help listening. The world’s everyday sound is a vast roar, but there are voices now and then, that we can single out. Maybe one of us was passing and heard you curse. . . . Listen, time is short; will you or won’t you?”

Before him the body began to tremble and the fingers that had been picking by habit for seeds of fire, maggots of fire, went wild over the face and body, trembling and jittering.

“You’re willing to offer me ...”

“Anesthesia against present pain.”

“And my body will function here ...”

“Better than you could function. There’d be no emotion to get in the way.”

“Let me think about it. ”

“That is one thing we can’t give. Look at the day—the clock is ticking—there are shadows now that weren’t here fifteen minutes ago, and no time. You have no time. Ringnose wants his money and if he doesn’t get it, he may kill you.”

Leonard gaped at her. It was her knowledge more than her physical presence that made him believe she had power that had not arisen from his need, boredom, or jailhouse fever. He had been stymied by his debt to Ringnose. When he had first come on the tier, the big man had offered him some hash and, being new and frightened, Leonard had taken it, terrified of Ringnose’s menace. Now, Leonard owed him for it; money, services, what? He had been hoping for something to change this. He had written to his parents begging for money, but they were too frightened to break the law by trying to smuggle it in to him. He kept hoping that something might happen, someone from the movement whose media had praised him as a hero “making our rotting institutions pay as they go.” “You didn’t set me up with Ringnose, did you?” he asked her.

“Time—there’s no time for that. Listen, you can hear water dropping from the leaky spigot. Each drop is a second, each second rides the world from east to west and drops off, gone. Give us a memory and we will give you a day off—nothingness, escape, Ringnose paid.”

“Any memory?”

“Any memory strong enough, any incident you can see in your mind, feel in your head or your vitals, conjure in vision, know. Sort among the sensations, the horrors, the joys if you want to lose those, too. There are plenty you will want to let go of. ”

Leonard thought he had had enough bad experiences to supply years of blanking out. “When do I start?”

The Spirit’s arms shot up in exultation and her eyes shone. “Tonight. Get us one. I’ll come to you tomorrow, at dawn, into your mind, evoke it, take it, and the day will be rubbed out, erased.”

He lay in his bunk that evening, suddenly conscious that for the first time since his imprisonment, he was interested, even fascinated by what he was doing. It felt good to care about something, to choose, to have means.

His name had been Leonard Futterman; he had changed it to Len Future when he was a college freshman. He had wanted a life without past entanglements, nothing to render unclear the loyalty he felt for the group he was joining, a revolutionary group that wanted a new world. His parents had marveled at his energy. They did not know how far it had gone until his arrest. The jittery movements of the Spirit had reminded him slightly of his parents’ terror as they faced him in jail and heard his arguments and the fury he brought to the positions he took. By then he had come to despise their timidity and weakness. Memory. Incident. Choose.

Grandfather Herrman had left a small glass factory in Germany to emigrate to South America in 1932, a year after his father’s birth. Leonard remembered his grandparents as nervous and furtive, eternal strangers. He had sometimes marveled as he thought of the old people, how pale and frightened they must have been among the colorful, loud inhabitants of Brazil. They had spent three years there and had come to the United States and were foreign here as well. They had been shamed, Leonard learned, in some mysterious way. Memory: Grandfather on porch, Brooklyn, 1963, crying for his dead wife. It had made Leonard embarrassed even then because it seemed so babyish. That memory was well let go. He wondered if he could recreate it fully enough. He put himself on the porch. He remembered how its gray painted railing was chipped here and there and in the chips showed its hundred undercoats in thirty colors. He heard the sound of the old man’s sobs—“Oh, God, oh, God, what will I do?”—shrill as a woman’s in the hot, still afternoon. In the bunk beneath him, Milburn Waycross, huge and angry, muttered hate in his evening routine, shot his urges across the back wall of the cell, and withdrew into sleep. Tomorrow, Milburn Waycross and Ringnose and the food and the waiting and the stink and the noise would be gone. If the memory was complete enough, all he needed to do was evoke it and she—they could have it and give it to the fire that sent them burning away on its wind. Remember.

He woke as usual before the buzz-clang wake-up. For the first time since his imprisonment, he felt expectation, even excitement. Would she come walking through the walls? As he lay waiting, her urgent voice whispered in his head, “Memory! Memory!” and then Leonard let her have what he had prepared, the porch, the look of his grandfather in detail, the sense of shame and anger, the time of the year, the smell of the painted wood, oily in the heat of his hand. He seemed to slip back into a doze and again the voice cried, “Memory! Memory!” Mrs. Farney, his third-grade teacher—Fly-Face Farney, who pulled and pulled him to the principal’s office, who never let any of them walk but always pulled, pushed, tugged at them, and whose rasping “children” was the stuff of nightmare. The essence of her bloomed in his mind and he gave the days, two separate ones, and dozed again and woke, and again, and again.

It occurred to Leonard that he might be being cheated. He felt he had awakened, given a memory, and slipped back to sleep for a moment, and then given another. When the voice came again, he said, “How can I be sure days are passing?”

She said, “You yourself will leave proof.” Every time he woke thereafter, a different color rubber band was around his wrist, or a thread or a shoelace. Then he turned, stretched, sought memory, found it, gave it, and again, and again. Sometimes the memory was fragmentary and her voice, or another voice, would scream out of the place in fire, “Give it, remember!” and he would try harder or give another. On the sabbath, the voices were still, and Leonard used his rest to dream away the time in fantasy while his body went to his work and served his sentence.

In forty days Leonard had decimated most of his childhood. At first he had imagined he had endless memories to give—his playmates, teachers, Mrs. Teel, Paulie Malone. There was the day he wet his pants because he had played too long at recess and misjudged the time. There were school trips and days home sick and the way the afternoon light lay long knives of shadow across his bed. He had thought all that would fill years. Once, waking, it occurred to him that dreams were memories, too, and for a while he lived off his store of childhood dreams and adolescent sex fantasies, those which were complete enough for her to take.

It was now winter and his wakings to the drip of melting icicles from fifth tier’s overhang or the feathery fall of snow past the window made him know that Gehenna was keeping its part of the bargain. He had moments of anxiety about his part of it. Eighty days had gone from 2,375. He had 2,295 left. Did he have as many memories? Did he have a thousand? A hundred more?

His wakings came to be edged with anxiety. Then he discovered he could get better access to his memory if he gave himself simple nouns: pine tree, apple, street. He could remember specific things connected with those. He had sixty more days, but on the sixty-first he hit the blank wall of his bankrupt past. It happened with the word caramel corn. He was remembering a carnival he had gone to, a day for which he had waited, he and ... he and . . . silence. Nothing. The day had been shared by someone, someone eager, happy, waiting. He and someone had gone in the car, laughing and joking, had ridden the rides, eaten the caramel corn. The memory with the loss of that someone lay deflated, spent. Although he got the day, childhood intensity of hot sun and the cooking-sugar smell of the caramel and the oily smell of the popping corn, carnival music, and the colors all around them, he had seen the end. The memories were not to be shared, but given, and when there were no more, he would hit the wall, blank, total, with no face or scenes he knew. There would, when it was all over, be no evocation of anything, no memory at all.

It was too late to stop. The few moments of waking, stretching, formulating his memory were horrible to him, unbearable to smell and see. His cell was small, two bunks, one very low toilet, the high sink over it—a man had to wash sometimes with the stink of a stopped up commode directly under him. The walls were full of graffiti so that the eye was caught by the ugly screed of words scratched in the thousand angers of a thousand cons. He was buying his way out of it with something that had, only one hundred forty-one days ago, seemed less valuable than the smallest coin made. Remember. It caught. They were at the beach, his aunt and uncle, mother and father of . . . the wall again. He remembered his aunt who, for the beach, always wore a kerchief, a white one with red dots. . . . He realized he was working hard, trying to squeeze detail out of a resisting past without giving too much. Memories could be divided, saved, husbanded. The day at the beach, though, was it one or a distillation of many such days? In either case it must be rationed, given in segments like an orange, because like an orange, part by part, his mind was being eaten. The wall told him so. There had once been someone connected with him for whom there was now no evocation of any kind.

On day 150 (2,225 days remaining), Leonard awoke and begged for a rest. The Spirit howled from hell: “Do you know how to lie in fire, to freeze in the shame of your pleasant past?”

“I don’t have anything more to give—”

“Then live the rest of your sentence.”

“No, please ... I can’t do that.”

“Try harder. We fixed it with Ringnose and no one bothers you now. We have done well by you.”

“You’re eating me alive.”

“Listen! You have relatives, friends, you went to school, camp, you are middle class. Never in human history have people had more novelty of experience, trips, visits, outings, vacations. It is novelty on which memory is based. Listen!” “Give me time to go to the library, to get some books, pictures ...”

“Give it—give it!” she cried.

Some time later he woke and found himself holding his high school and college yearbooks. He opened them greedily, no longer caring to separate the pleasant from the unpleasant, the whole from the fragmented. He knew he would give all he had, wherever 2,225 memories were stored. He started with The Cougar, his high school yearbook.

The teams; there were the coaches, the clubs, the green springtimes and the blue-wind autumns. He had once thought he might save the best of these, a simple memory of Willie Madigan, Joe Sperber, Clem Jones, and himself, walking across the far end of the track after school. It was the day they had all decided to quit football. Willie and Clem were first string, Joe and Leonard were third, where no one cared. They were, that day, amazed and proud of Willie and of their friendship. They had made a decision, the first that pitted them against the adult world of expectation. It was a heady moment. The trees across the road were bare, the wind almost cold and whipping the school flags so that their sound was like applause. They were dressed for the cold—Willie was in his letterman’s blue and white, he himself was in a trainman’s coat he had gotten secondhand and wore like a dare. Such were their bodies then that they could have gone coatless and not really minded. They felt this somehow to be their strength. They gave none of the credit to their youth. Invincible, they were making the choice to step down. For Willie and Clem this had not been possible until they knew they were capable of first-string play. Caught in that memory, Leonard paused a moment in a pain almost great enough to stop it, and then he let it go, evoked it, and it was taken and he slept again.

He used up the high school yearbook in thirty days. He could read it from cover to cover and evoke nothing, no one. Junior high had gone months ago. Grade school was a fitful flicker like lightning at the horizon reflecting itself against clouds—seen and gone before it could be caught.

College. Relatively few of the cons had gone to college and there was a certain envy, felt and sometimes expressed by them. One of the blacks Leonard had bunked with had said: “You jivin’, everybody be the same, you be robbin’ banks for the poor. That’s after you done got all you can get. ”

Leonard had answered, “Everyone gets what he can,” but he had stopped defending himself and then he had stopped trying to alter his speech to be more like theirs.

College was where Leonard felt he had come into his own. It was the time of his greatest excitement and awakening. His activities didn’t appear in the yearbook, the arguments, the commitments, the people. Nowhere were there pictures of Anthony Lorenzo, of all the talking and the listening that had formed his political awareness, of Barbara and Teri, Don Miller, Ken Seybright. Still, the scenes of the campus, the dorms, and student center brought back many of the memories of their meetings, bull-sessions, the organizing and defining by themselves as a serious political group and by the other students as radicals. Leonard had liked the term radical. He enjoyed being unique, separated. Lorenzo was a brilliant leader, a patriot in a way that didn’t make Leonard want to gag at the word. He was Len, now, Len Future, and he and Lorenzo and Seybright and Barb and Teri were going to do what the books only talked about. They would shatter and remake, explode and rebuild. They held protests and marches and when they turned around they saw others marching with them. They began to think of more direct forms of action.

In the beginning Leonard had thought he would keep those memories as his own, but now he told himself it would be foolish and romantic to save what had no practical use and what was an unnecessary possession, a mental photo album as trite and bourgeois as the yearbooks he now held. He spent the next wakings on his later days, the robberies.

How Gehenna loved the robberies. There were other voices now, a gabble of them, and when the memory was interesting or special they moaned like lovers. For the slack or incomplete memories, they urged and pulled. “The day, what was it like?”

“It was the night we planned the second bank job,” Leonard said. He had a sudden spasm of guilt about giving up the names and faces, invoking them in his mind-voice. They had sworn secrecy. . . .

“Memory! Memory—” They gibbered like bats.

He hesitated. Miller was doing time here, too, but in another building, and they seldom met. Lorenzo had copped a plea, Seybright had escaped, and as far as Leonard knew was still free. The loyalty they had sworn ... He dove into the memory.

It was a summer night, hot and muggy. They had all felt powerful, in command. Action against property was righteous, Lorenzo had said. Leonard’s part had been to map the bank, detail the exits, and later watch how it opened.

“Give us all of it!”

He tried to give the details he knew they craved. Lorenzo’s apartment, dank but cool. They drank beer, having sworn off drugs until after the job. Leonard had laid out the bank’s floor plan. They were all on a high, a quiet high, like rafting on fast water. . . . That made him remember rafting, another memory, another day’s respite, and he slept and woke and gave them the water, sun-glinted as he came toward the rapids, the mile-long sinews contracting and stretching against his boat. I remember . . . and then he slept.

“About the robbery ...” she said. The robbery itself had been a comedown because they had been off stride that day; he knew it waking up, but couldn’t remember specifically enough, and the job had only one strong memory, the moment of their being in the bank, of his dropping the attache case and having to pick it up. He tried to tell her—them—in his mind-voice that it should have been funny, clumsiness when grace was called for—a robbery was, after all, a public appearance—and how he had almost said “oops,” but it wasn’t funny. The onlookers had been terrified; thwarting him might result in his firing his gun and a red-splattered—“Oh, God!” a woman had cried, and fainted. A new voice demanded that minute and Leonard tried, picturing humor gone cold, the smell of the air just at that moment, hot day, cold sweat, and how they were off rhythm so that no one had thought to plan who went through the door first so there was a scramble and Lorenzo nearly fell.

“Feelings, what were your feelings?”

He knew what they wanted by now, shame, rage, triumph, joy. He had had none of those. “You try for nothingness, no emotion. There’s too much else to think of.” He remembered the belly-clutch of fear just then. The door. Then he remembered seeing how ordinary the street looked, how out on that ordinary street they had gone back to their plan to split up. He gave them bright sun, dislocation, fear, relief within seconds. They took that moment.

On the 210th day, Leonard suffered a kind of breakdown. He woke up and there was nothing. He felt no sensation, saw no picture in his mind—none. They came: “Remember. Remember!”

“I have nothing. ” There was a cry from hell—anguish and rage, the cry of the addicted. Leonard felt their terror and then his own. “I’m dried up. I can’t. . .” and then there was only the prison day, bearing down.

For the first time in seven months, Leonard rose resident in his body, heard the wake-up coughs and hawks of the men on the tier, men pissing, groaning, cursing.

He smelled the smells. The seven months he had escaped into memory had blunted his ability to protect himself from the onslaught of his senses. He dressed, fumbling, almost weeping, was walked to breakfast, recoiled in the ugly impacted hate and rage of the men around him, paranoid spew, fume of ungratified sex, their sounds their smells their hair-trigger touchiness or obtunded despair. Now and then men came to him and said things, things pertaining to the life his surrogate self shared with them. He answered as well as he could. Once or twice he saw puzzlement on their faces. It was masked quickly as everything was, and he yearned almost to tears for the salvation he was losing—why couldn’t he remember? There must be more. During the evening break he went to the library and looked at cookbooks for memories, at catalogues, at pictures, for any clue that would open the magic door again, door through which he had once walked so easily. The day passed. Another, another.

Leonard’s search became desperate because somehow he wasn’t able to adjust to prison life as he had before. The possibility of an alternative had destroyed his ability to tighten himself against the assaults of its boredom, danger, and ugliness. Three days. She came to the visitors’ room again.

If anything, she was skinnier, more withered, tighter. Her hands never stopped their pinching, picking, spidering in her ragged clothes.

“I’ve lost it,” he said. “There is no more.”

“Nonsense. Of course there’s more. Look around. You don’t want to be here— find something. Listen!”

“I'm played out. Done.”

Her eyes lit. “You need a vacation,” she said.

It was a car ad he had seen years before, a gracious old house among big trees. There was a wide veranda with a rocker on it. A sports car was in front of the house, and in it were scuba things and picnic baskets.

“Wonderful,” she said, “go there and rest. The house has everything you’ll need.”

“How long?”

“A week. We have Ringnose now, for what he’s worth, Luchese, Kent. Enjoy yourself. ”

All the days were sun-dappled. He lay in the meadow in front of the house or rocked and read magazines on the porch. Twice he took the car to the lake with the people who came by, owners of the gear and the picnic things. They were pretty laughing girls and clean-limbed young men, but they were ad people—they had no pasts, no futures, no hopes, no memories. They took him scuba-diving but the lake was silted and the company boring. He made love to the girls and forgot it immediately after doing it. He had vowed he would rest from memory, but a few times he tried it gingerly, like a neurology patient testing for the paralysis that might or might not still be there. There was no remembering and in the old brass bed, open-window cool in the moonlight, he heard rats scrabbling in the walls.

And the days there were unchanging. It never rained; there was no sense of movement through a season, no old flowers dying or new ones in bud.

“You’ve rested. Let’s begin. There’s more—of course there’s more.”

“Something has let go . . .’’he said, “I can feel it.”

“Only memories.”

“Don’t he. I felt it there, lazing in the sun, reading, riding, making love. I’ve sold you my soul, haven’t I?”

She laughed the screeching laugh that drove the guards behind the doors. “No one, not even you, gives up his soul.”

“What do I give up, besides those memories? I felt something stop and break away and flow away inside me.”

“Oh, that—that’s not serious—it’s not a vital need.”

“What is it?”

“If it’s gone, it would have been the ability to change, to recreate yourself. It’s more of a choice than a need, and you’ve never wanted change in yourself.” “I’m pledged to work for change. The movement ...”

“Your bunch wants everyone else to change—society.”

“How do people change?” Leonard asked.

For a moment she slowed and went quieter. “They start with changing their own stories, by retelling them with new shadings. Are there gentler moments in memory? Are there cruder? By stroke and stroke, memory by memory, over time they remodel their pasts and then themselves, their ideas of who they were, then are, and then, of who they will be.”

“And I have no past. I gave it all to you.”

“You hated it; it’s gone.”

“I’m walking streets without markers ...”

“Losing memories doesn’t mean losing your memory. Back then, didn’t you recognize a friend even when you had forgotten some of the things you did together? You still have the friend, you just don’t have the memory.”

“And changing ...”

“You’ll get old like everyone else, but you’ll no longer have to labor at rewriting your past or remodeling yourself. Give us memory, now, give it. Remember!”

“I can’t take prison. I can’t stand these days ...”

“Find the stories for us. They’re there—hundreds, thousands more. You don’t want them, you don’t use them. Give us—give us—and we’ll see you’re comfortable, sleeping, reading, rocking on the porch—”

He went back to his cell and lay on his bunk ransacking. Friends, all gone, foods, names, flowers. He got ten things on a list and another ten that might yield-flowerpot, a broken flowerpot. Where was it? When did it happen? He went to the screaming cafeteria, writing all the associations he had, desperately seeking—plaid shirt—madras shirt—whose? It was a kid in school, Prentice. There had to be more. The evening dragged. A washcloth—injuries. When? Where? Ten more memories, another ten. Remember the time I shut my finger in the car door and my dad was ... he slept.

On the 250th day he woke in a dry, familiar desperation, went through a list of one hundred words seeking to evoke—there—nothing to give now. He tried another hundred, hoping for the eye-corner phantom that runs for safety before it can be seen and identified, a moment, a girl, a friend . . .

The past was bare, a twilit plain without the beauty of twilight, and unchanging.

To the screams of anguish he said, “It’s over.”

“Find it—find it!”

“I’m done.”

He rose into the prison morning. There he lay and counted the time remaining to him, the two thousand one hundred days before he could be accepted for parole. Each of those days would be a prison day, a day through which he would walk skin-stripped at the mercy of his senses, uninsulated. He would not be clever because vulnerable people aren’t clever and because of that he might be beaten, stabbed, made a victim again. He wanted to cry but the wake-up sounded, raw in his ears. Then the whole tier groaned, and rose in hate. It occurred to Leonard that simpler than what the Spirit had said about recasting life, every prisoner had a small place of refuge through the day. The refuge was memory. The man at the laundry basket piling and sorting clothes might be fishing on a once-seen lake, or simply cruising the main drag in Coffeeville on a Saturday night, with the car radio on and a girl in a tight sweater. Leonard, whose experiences had been more varied than most of the prisoners, had, by choice, given away the geography of his childhood and adolescence. There was nothing left to glow behind the hideous moment and make it bearable.

The days, taken raw, went hour by hour. He had begun to think of suicide. Then Rimper on tier three had a heart attack. Leonard put in for the job at the power plant and got it, there being no other con who wanted it.

The work was simple. He checked the gauges that monitored the lights, heat, and power. Years ago, the job had been vital and heavy with perks. Now, all the systems were on backup and auxiliary power and the job was only boring. Leonard wanted it because it let him be alone, free of having to fake the self he had been while his real self slept.

May. His parents came. They were, as always, cowed by the prison. They huddled and shrank. His mother brought bribe food, and spoke in whispers. “Are you all right?” He told them he was. They began to talk about family news: Aunt Essie had had a stroke. Cousin Brian was getting married. Births and Bar Mitzvahs. For none, not one, had Leonard a memory. He recognized his parents, but they had lost definition and it was hard to follow their simplest talk. “It takes me in the feet—you know me and my feet, all the years standing ...” And Leonard didn’t have a clue to what his father meant or to his mother’s sighed, “Betty’s upset, naturally. You’d think after all her troubles ...”

He sat and watched them suffer behind the Plexiglas. He had given away all the cousins and the aunts and the days, landmarks of his childhood, mountains, seashores, clouds, spiderwebs from which hung . . . wait . . . from which dew hung ... He saw it with perfect, pristine clarity, a memory without defensiveness or self-serving, a simple, stunning picture infused with childhood’s awe. The dew was suspended in such a way on that perfect web that each drop carried, weighing and trembling lightly on the suspension cables of the web, a little rainbow. He saw it again, how the light brimmed in the tiny prisms, and prism and drop and web hung in the spring morning where he stood close to the smell of the wet grass, because he was a little kid. Grass touched his knee, cold-green with the morning’s cold dew. Then there was a little breeze and the web trembled and the drop suddenly shuddered and the prism scattered rainbow and fell from the web like tears. “I remember,” he said. They thought he was speaking of Aunt Essie and nodded.

The ruined landscape had yielded up a survivor. Where there was one there might be others. One by one, they might creep from under the rubble. Hadn’t he been seeing someone home drunk one night in college? Didn’t he pretend to be drunker than he was so he might look up at the vast spread of stars and yes, yes, he had been wearing a ... it was a wool jacket, heavy, and a blue knit watch-cap and his friend—a shadow now—had still some part of him that had not been given away. Web and starry-night, warm-jacket shadow friend would be his to use, to remake himself, bit by bit, year by year. His friend was singing away in his ear. He couldn’t capture the tune and there was a destination he couldn’t place, but the memory, wind and cold and gin and being tired and the stars and the singing . . . dew in the web—Thank God. “Did you ever have long hair?” he asked his drawn, huddled mother; “Was it ever held with two curved combs at the sides of your head?”