Verge: Stories

CUSP

This bed smells of my skin. If I roll from my back to my belly, sweat cools near my spine. If I close my eyes, I am like an animal up here in the heat and wood, baking in the daylight, my eyelids heavy, my thoughts slow and thudding. I am waiting for dark, for the release, for breathing to animate me. This room and everything in it brings me closer to myself: nocturnal.

From the frame of my attic window, I have imagined the inside-out of this town. Its heat rising from dust and scrub, its mindless longing for rain, its heart beating with dumb insistence. Outside my room the world has expanded and contracted like the tight little fist of a child. Years have gone by. I used to wonder who would want to live here, like this, some dried-out town at the edge of the story line, the nightly news, never quite making it into the picture, its people crowding the geography somehow without evolution or design. There is a black-and-red sign over the door of the Texaco. It reads TEXAS, USA. No city. No need. That’s the whole deal, stuck up there on a piece of metal the size of a license plate. Like thought stopped for gas and died at the pump.

I remember the day I moved from my room downstairs up to the attic. It had been my brother’s. He’d gone to college, I’d hit puberty, the two motions crackling away from each other like electrical currents. The white canopy bed of a girl died that day, for I never went back. The day I moved into my brother’s attic room, I felt the wooden walls close in around me, as if a second body were there to hold me. The wood grain looked to me like dark, warm skin, comforting me.

Underneath the bed I found artifacts from my brother’s life. Empty bottles and broken glass, trash, foil, used rubbers and tissues, tiny vials and a stretch of surgical tubing. It was a year before I found any needles, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. He’d shown me his world when I was around ten, knowing I would love it as I loved every moment he let me be in his attic, adoring him, adoring the dark of the room, the broken rules, the thick unbearable silence, the smells I hadn’t names for, the dizzy swell of skin making sweat. But I did find everything. A loose board in the wall, a stash I only barely comprehended at the time. Wasn’t I meant to find it, to find it all? Wasn’t I meant to identify the smell as sex and move my body toward delivering itself? Wasn’t I meant to prove my worth, to carry on the weight of that room?

On my fourteenth birthday, I got a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from my brother. He was home from college for the summer. He gave it to me in secret, after dark, and we sat up in the attic window that connected our lives and drank it until I was bleary and swollen and unable to focus. At some point after midnight, we became overheated and half clothed. The heat works on you like that. You shed layers like the skin of a snake until the body can bear itself. My brother brought the whiskey to his face, took it, held it in his mouth like that with his eyes closed.

“Well,” he said, “it’s almost here, huh?”

“You mean that?” I asked, pointing out the window toward the future, toward the place out in the dark where they were building. It was a prison, or the idea of one, a place of curiosity and danger emerging in the town that was smothering us.

“Yeah, guess that will change things around here.”

“It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my sorry-ass little life.”

He looked at me, I think he toasted me, and he said, “You’ll get out soon enough. You’ll see. When you get out, it’s a whole new world, a new life.”

“What if I don’t get out?”

He laughed and laughed. “You? You were out the day you were born. You’ll probably end up at Harvard or some fancy shit. You’ve got brains.”

“You’ve got brains too,” I said. “That’s how you got where you are.” He snorted and downed his drink.

“Pour me another,” and then, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked at me a long time, as if he were judging what I could handle. Finally he took a new sip and said, “Between you and me?”

“Sure.”

“I dropped out.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I quit. I haven’t been back for months. I’ve been working at a construction site near my apartment and selling some shit on the side. It’s not great, but it’s a life. And I’m meeting people—important guys. Guys who are connected.”

“Wait—you’re telling everybody you’re at college when in reality you’re fucking conning us?”

“What’s the con? I’m making a living on my own. I’ve got money. A job. Sex. Whatever I want. And like I said, I’m meeting some important people. The building we’re working on right now is filled with money. It’s a big opportunity. The guy behind the scenes is filthy rich. Had us up to his house in Dallas for a party. Wild, man. Chicks walking around with nothing but G-strings on, carrying mirrors of coke lines like platters at a restaurant. Pussy everywhere.”

I looked down at my hands, then down into my own lap.

“What’s the matter? Hasn’t anyone ever said ‘pussy’ to you?”

I nodded but couldn’t look up. My face was so hot I thought my head might explode. My hands made a pathetic cup between my legs.

He laughed again. “Don’t worry, baby. You’ll grow up soon enough.” He poured me another. “The whole world is one big fuckfest. Forget this life. Forget families—mothers, fathers, schools, jobs. There are only two kinds of winning, two ways of keeping score: bucks and fucks.”

I tried to laugh knowingly, then drank, then just sat there. I’ll admit it, I was in awe. We sat in silence after that.

Then he handed me something wrapped in what looked like the brown paper of a liquor store bag. The paper crackled as I opened it. It was a flask: a gift.

That birthday, from my parents, I received a set of all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, used copies, but beautiful somehow. The covers were dark red, with embossed lettering, and inside, the pages were as thin as moths’ wings. I could picture them burning, one at a time, lifting themselves toward heaven. My parents didn’t know me, not really, but they knew I loved books more than just about anything. They didn’t know why. Every page of words was a chance for escape, a chance to suicide into a life where the brain was something more than a heavy bundle of gray worms, into a place where the body lost its origins and confines and mutated endlessly. Whole worlds cupped between my hands. The only happiness I ever knew in that space came from between my legs, from a bottle, or from a book. Until the prison filled.

After my brother left, I thought about leaving myself, going to some college with ivy-covered walls, being in closed rooms with men spewing knowledge at me, writing papers that broke open dead worlds and constructed new architectures. I imagined living a double life in college, selling drugs, like him, fucking guys on the side for extra cash. On the edge, like Ophelia, rewriting her ending. After he left, I cried. Then I put my hand between my legs and rubbed so hard I thought I might bleed. Later I used a hairbrush to get at the deepest layers of what was inside me, to get it out, to make it alive and in the room with me, chaotic, heavy, wet, and free.

Nights overtook me. Alone in the attic, my hands dug and carried me into worlds of my own making. I brought my brother’s face into the walls now and again, as if he were watching, or guarding, or lifting me into darkness.

The day they lodged the last brick, stretched the last of the chain-link fencing, wound the last barbed loops overhead, I knew that my do-nothing life was about to be over. My dull, dead town had driven away like a herd of lost cows.

It hadn’t come easy. My parents had sat numb and silent while others argued their point: There were children in this neighborhood. What kind of lives could they look forward to? What kind of environment would this spread? How could they do this to good, honest folks who worked hard for their money, who saved to build back porches that now looked out on cinder block? But two years of grassroots petitions, city council protests, and a few stray acts of small-town resistance amounted to next to nothing. In the end those who were against the prison were overcome by those who brayed about five hundred family-range employment opportunities, about business and growth. To the people in the town, it was as if the summer had turned on honesty itself, on everything good and strong, as if something had grown up out of the ground and spread like disease.

What planted the prison in the town was money. The contractor, the mayor, and the governor had a relationship, and despite a few stories on the local news, the town was soon reduced to dirt and hot weather, until the only news stories were about the finishing touches on the penitentiary, and the town was half emptied and wrinkled like the skin on an old man’s knuckles.

Our house was at the edge of town, so we were right in the crosshairs. My father had been raised in the oil fields near Port Arthur; he’d nearly gone crazy from the black heads of the bobbing wells, the stench, the slow stab of the drill punctuating everything in sight. When he left, he said, all he wanted to see was land and sky and nothing else—said it made him feel free, the wide expanse. My father, I think, was mourning something more private: The distance of geography. The land releasing toward sky. Who knows what my mother thought? To me she was a frightened doe, her brain wrapped around images of homes for pretty white families, not property for a state penitentiary, not prisoners like a black plague infecting the land.

That great empty expanse my father loved only made me feel dead. In the attic window, with next to nothing on, I’d sit hunched over a shot glass and conjure a kind of dreamscape to fill it. I looked out over the endless rocks and shrubs and imagined red-and-gray structures emerging from the wasteland of dirt, buildings getting born, architecture threatening the sky with its geometry. I watched the fencing contain everything, reaching for miles around the place, its silver crisscrossing and walling off this world from that in great sheets of fence. I’d watch ditches being dug and phone lines being unraveled from huge reels, I’d watch more metal than I thought existed in the universe coming and coming, I’d see them pour the concrete for sidewalks and parking lots. The sound of construction out there in the heat and dry woke me in the morning and covered my dreams at night. I dreamed cities emerging, whole populations breeding from within concrete and steel, an urban species clicking and pounding away like a collective machine. The literal meanings of things dissolved. Dreams took up the space of my reality, dreams rebuilt from the shapes and images crowding up against our little house and family.

The day the prisoners finally arrived was a bit anticlimactic. They came in large green buses, stepping down onto fresh blacktop in their orange suits, marching single file from bus to building, disappearing into concrete and wire and metal. Some of the lines of men had handcuffs, some handcuffs and ankle cuffs, some neither. From my window I built a story: This was a hierarchy of crime—the more dangerous, the more tightly constrained. In reality the men all looked the same, their orange suits smearing them into a single image, their hair and faces repeating endlessly, their footsteps indistinguishable. And the not knowing a single soul, the anonymity of it, nearly made me crazy. Here they were, hundreds of them, soon to occupy tiny rooms and tiny beds in a cage with a toilet and ten steps’ walking space, and I had no connection with them, none that was real, none that I could feel. That day I spent drinking and walking ten steps the length of my room, six steps the width of my room, over and over again until I passed out.

When I woke, it was night and my head swam and hurt. I sat up and took my clothes off, went to my window, looked out into the black speckled with stars. A breeze carried my imagination over and through, and I tried to peer in at them one at a time, each sleeping man in a slightly different position, some tucked in curls like infants, others straight as boards on their backs, mouths open. I pictured a man awake like me, trying to see, waiting for something to materialize in front of him, hopeless but resolved. I could see him. I played a child’s game: If I could see him, he could see me. I touched myself.

Things went on this way for a while. The penitentiary just out of reach took up all my thinking. I invented a hundred sexual fantasies that involved inmates, torture or escape, violence or the tenderness proffered after a body has given up. I moved from fourteen to fifteen this way, almost dazed; it was as if nothing at all were happening, as if time were thick and dry like the heat and geography. The people I went to school with had no meaning to me. Books continued to house me in a way that the world did not.

The summer of my fifteenth birthday, my brother did not come home. I had a bottle of Jack, a bottle of Gilbey’s, and tequila under the bed. I spent my days skipping school and getting high with guys I barely knew, guys I’d met through my brother. The more I let them touch me, the more they didn’t mind. From my parents I received a second set of Shakespeare, comedies to go with the tragedies. I count that summer as one that turned me inside out, a snake shedding skin, or just the explosion of a body. By then I had shot heroin a couple times, but that was not my main thing. By then I was making trips from my window to a place two hundred yards away from the fence for long hours at a stretch, waiting in the dark, crouched behind scrub and brush not four feet high off the ground.

They’d emerge twice a day. Once mid-morning, once late afternoon. They’d play ball, walk around, cluster in tight two- and three-person fists there in the yard. I was close enough to make out their figures but not the faces. Faces blurred into little knobs of head, the repetition of orange making me squint. Binoculars helped but also made the dull ache harder to bear. My first distant encounters with the fence of their world came at night, alone, dark, wind, nothing. I sat half hidden by bushes two football fields away. Looking at the patterns of fence, I could feel the hairs on my arms raising, asking, begging. I’d sit out there and drink, and think, acclimating myself to the edge of their world. Then I’d walk home, my feet making crooked tracks, my body not remembering my name, my hands dangling at my sides, fingers itching and twitchy.

All that summer I could hear the electronic drone of the talking heads come through the vents in the house up to the attic like a televised haunting. Debates and news reports and town halls all revolving around the prison, its inhabitants, its dark center. The people on the outside wanted proof that the inmates were doing hard time. They didn’t want those convicts, those perverts and degenerates, to have televisions or weight rooms. No luxuries. Doing time is supposed to hurt. Do they expect some kind of special treatment? I remember thinking, Christ, why do people keep asking that? My thinking is, if you can ask the question, you don’t deserve to know the answer. Go read The Tempest, or don’t even talk to me. Someday I’m going to make a bumper sticker that reads: THIS THING OF DARKNESS I ACKNOWLEDGE MINE.

It came to me the day I was skipping an English class, smoking pot with a couple of heads behind the auditorium. Guys who had brothers who knew mine. Guys who by now had put their hands inside me. I was rolling a joint, twirling the paper till it formed itself into something tight and thin and potent, when the idea hit me. It was the most simple and clear thing I’d ever done in my life. I asked where they got their shit; they told me a guy’s name, said my brother used to know him; I asked if I could meet him. The whole thing took less than a minute. Convincing the guy about my idea was even simpler. Who would suspect someone’s sister, a girl coming to see a man wretched and dismal in his shame? I was already passing as an adult, buying beer and cigarettes at the 7-Eleven, getting into the town bar. My brother had fixed me up with an ID—some girl he met at college. Some girl he probably fucked. I swear to god, we looked like twins, that unknown girl and me, faces echoing each other, two lives touching.

The guy with the drugs gave me the name of the first guy I visited inside. I passed my ID and the contents of my pockets through a slot at the bottom of a Plexiglas window. I was wearing no jewelry, no underwire bra, nothing metal, as I’d been warned. A guard made circles around the edges of my body with a metal-detector wand. My skin shivered. My mouth burned. My lips felt too big. I thought I might cry. But that first time, my body knew a truth that I did not. My legs carried me as if they had memorized the steps without my involvement.

His name was Earl. His gray-blue eyes sucked me up like I was thin as air. He did not smile, he barely spoke, he put his hand near my collarbone as if he knew me. He was supposed to know me—I was supposed to be his niece, maybe, or his daughter or his sister or maybe just some ripe young thing he’d have killed if she tried to run. His hand moved down toward my waist, squeezed me just under the rib. His face came to me, and his image went out of focus as the blurry stubble on his chin got big and he kissed me, not on the mouth but as close as is possible, wet, hot, lingering there before he withdrew. I could feel his tongue, spittle. He’d deftly taken a small bag from underneath my shirt in back. My spine shivered, my belly convulsed, my mouth filled with saliva. I had to pee so bad it was painful.

I’d never felt more alive in my life.

I saw Earl once a week for about a year.

At night I’d continue my vigils, my hands alive and my body firing its pistons relentlessly. Now I had a precise reason to live; it was as if the world had written itself before me and all I had to do was read it into being. Sometimes during visiting hours in the common room, I’d give Earl a hand job or he would me, and we kept on not knowing each other at all, rarely speaking, and the pleasure was so intense I thought I might die. Sometimes a guard would fondle my tits in an empty corridor. Once an inmate came on my hand while Earl and I were getting each other off. And all the time I was reading and reading Shakespeare, all the words spinning me into my body, love scenes that turned into death scenes, identities lost or stolen or deformed, good and evil slipping into each other’s body, murders and suicides and incests erupting in marriage beds, between brothers and sisters, between the powerful and the enslaved.

In my own bed, dreams wrestled me into color and vision, orange to red to blue and back again: armies of men breaking loose from their rooms, breaking walls and heads and bodies, making inside and outside crazy, blowing the stupid human organization of things to bits. I saw the logic of the inside-out. I knew the world through a body and a mind cut pure and fine as a diamond. I felt as if no other world existed. No other home, no other skin for the body. In books and dreams and inside the penitentiary, between my legs, everything was being reborn.

Night wind changes the structure of things. The distance between my room and the prison closed, as if I had forged a dirt river through craggy desert rocks, my little boat-body bringing me to the other side, not to an idea of womanhood but to a chance to reinvent myself endlessly. I became an expert at the logic of waiting, how it housed the forsaken. Like me, the men in that house had the long wait ahead of them, marked off on the wall in chalked scrapes like tire marks on pavement. Their lives like mine were mutating, their bodies turning from one species to another, from hot-blooded mammals to the cold belly of something with night vision, some animal that could survive in the desert. They knew something from our past about survival and deprivation as a motivation to live.

Whiskey and heroin could keep a girl from letting the dust of a town settle on her, as if they kept the molecules moving around at such a pace that no school, family, daughter-life could close around her. I understood the confines and also the way a mind could be forced to bust them open, its puny rules and knowledges, little gods and the fingers of old women. Sometimes I’d bring pills inside my panties. Sometimes pieces of plastic or wood or dope under the cup of a budding breast. I was at the edge of the world.

I’d like to say I saw it coming, that I’d sharpened my senses enough to expect it. But who among us can see a self? Great minds have failed and failed. And so it was that on my eighteenth birthday I saw my brother in the yard of the penitentiary, his orange suit brighter than the others, his face in full focus, his hands dangling from his arms like a man’s so familiar I couldn’t recognize them.

At first I saw him as entering a kind of tribe. I wrote the story in my head quickly: He was entering a realm of my own making, a place where reality was not infected with the disease of citizenship or social organization. I felt a kind of pride, as if I had readied the environment in some small way for him. There in the underbelly, I thought we could find a deeper relationship than blood could afford.

The first time he saw me, during a visitation period with Earl in the common room, he ignored me completely. He looked straight through me, his eyes blue-gray stones.

I signed up to see him immediately.

The glass between us, black phones in our hands, eyes locked on each other’s face.

“Hello.”

Silence.

I was hot and excited. My breath trapped in my lungs. My words flew out in all directions, pinched and condensed through the tinny microphone. “You shocked my shit the day I saw you. What are you in for? Do Mom and Dad know? I don’t think they do. No one has said anything. What are you in for?”

Silence.

His eyes crept up my collarbone and rested somewhere between my jaw and my chin.

“It doesn’t matter,” I babbled on. “How long are you—”

“Shut up. Listen to me. I’m only going to say this once. I want you to hang up. I want you to stand up, turn around, walk out of here, and never fucking come back.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You think you’re the only reason I’m here? I’ve been here hundreds of times. It’s no big deal. I just thought I’d—”

“SHUT UP. Shut the fuck up.” He raised his hand; his fist and its reflection hovered there like threatening question marks. “I know why you’re here. I’ve heard all about it.” He paused; his rage seemed to melt for a moment, then snapped back. “What happened to you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re famous in here. You’re, like, the talk of the fuckin’ town.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. People here know me. They’re used to me, is all. I know the name of—”

“You don’t get it, do you? You want to know what they call you around here? Do you? They call you Hole. Just Hole.” He laughed hard enough for his missing teeth to show. “You’re like this child who spreads her legs and humps any guy who wants it. There’s pictures of you—little cartoons all over this fucking place. There’s little poems about you, about your pussy, the way you put out, how you’re a little whore.” He picked something out of his ear and looked at it, then back at me. “I heard a guy say you sucked the dick of a dead man.”

“You’re lying. You’re a fucking liar.” I stood up. A guard glanced at me. I sat back down. I lowered my voice. “I know the scene here a lot better than you. Look. If somebody said those things, it’s a lie. People here know me. Guards. Inmates. They work with me. Give me shit. I sell it. Or I get shit for them. Like you used to do.”

“Yeah? Well, how come every guy in here can give a play-by-play description of what you do?” He folded his hands on the table.

Were those my brother’s hands? His fingers? I looked at my own hands down on my thighs. They just looked like the hands of a girl. “Fuck you! You don’t know me at all. I’ve got my own life. My own money. I’ve worked hard for it. I thought you’d be glad to see me. I’m all you’ve got. I’m leaving soon anyway, don’t worry. When I’m gone, no one will know you’re here.”

“You know what happens to me when they find out you’re my sister? I’m fucking marked. I’m a dead man.”

I tore loose from his ugly mouth and words like some scared animal. I ran from that room and his hand on that black phone and his voice and his face. I ran down the linoleum hall and past the fondling guards, smirking, laughing, touching themselves, I ran past the check-in desk and out the colossal metal doors I’d seen installed, I ran down the concrete path I’d seen poured, I ran past some men in the yard, orange suits laughing like mouths, I ran against chain-link and sky, I ran to the gate, and it was closed, and I climbed it, I clawed my way up, guards with guns drawn pulling at my heels and tears and spit and my head pounding like crazy. I growled and kicked all the way down, and they were laughing, they saw who I was, and they started laughing, and when they got me to the ground, pinned and wriggling there on the asphalt, saying, “Hold on, now, hold on, we’re just trying to help you, damn it, calm down, now,” holding my wrists and thighs, I screamed, I took all the voice in me and screamed out to that big sky, to the men holding me down, to all the men in that place I’d given myself to, to the walls, the fences, the whole architecture, I screamed, “He loved me, he did, forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up the sum!” and an ambulance came, and men standing in the yard would say later, “That crazy little piece of tail finally lost it,” and “Didn’t she have a sweet pussy, all pink and sticky like the open mouth of a child, didn’t she just?”