This morning I get lucky. One table is totally open. After scooping up some powdered eggs and bacon and toast — I’ll skip the obvious comment about how awful prison food is — I take a stool in the farthest corner and begin to eat. For the first time in forever, I have an appetite. I realize that my mind has stopped going back to that night or even that photograph and has started to focus on something ridiculous and fantastical.
How to escape from Briggs.
I have been here long enough to know the routines, the guards, the layout, the schedule, the personnel, whatever. Conclusion: There is no way to escape. None. I had to think outside the box.
A tray slamming down on the table startles me. A hand is stuck into my face for me to shake. I look up and into the man’s face. People say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. If that’s true, this man’s eyes flash NO VACANCY.
“David Burroughs, am I right?”
His name, I know, is Ross Sumner. He’d transferred in last week, purportedly waiting on an appeal that would never happen, but I am surprised they’d let him out of his cell at all. Sumner’s case made headlines, the stuff of streaming-service documentaries and true crime podcasts. He was a superrich prep — do they still use that term? — who’d gone psychotically bad. Ross, who was handsome in a Ralph Lauren — ad way, had murdered at least seventeen people — men, women, children of all ages — and eaten their intestinal tracts. That was it. Just the intestinal tract. Body parts were found in a top-of-the-line Sub-Zero freezer in the basement of his family estate. None of these facts are in dispute. Sumner’s appeal is based on the jury’s conclusion that he is sane.
Ross Sumner still holds his hand out and waits for me to take it. There is a smile on his face. I would rather French-kiss a live rodent than shake the man’s hand, but in prison, you do what you have to. I reluctantly shake the hand as fast as possible. His hand is surprisingly small, dainty. As I pull mine back, I can’t help it — I wonder what that hand has touched. Supposedly, he slit his victims open while they were still alive and used his hands — including that hand — to rip open the slit and reach inside the abdomen and grab hold of the intestine.
So much for having an appetite.
Ross Sumner smiles as though he can read my thoughts. He is about thirty years old with jet-black hair and delicate features. He takes the stool directly across from me. Lucky me.
“I’m Ross Sumner,” he says.
“Yeah, I know.”
“I hope you don’t mind me sitting with you.”
I say nothing.
“It’s just that the other men in here” — Ross shakes his head — “I find them rather coarse. Unrefined, if you will. Do you know that you and I are the only college graduates?”
“That so?”
I nod. I keep my eyes on my plate.
“You went to Amherst, am I right?”
He pronounced Amherst correctly, keeping the H silent.
“Fine school,” he continues. “I liked it better when they called themselves the Lord Jeffs. The Amherst Lord Jeffs. Such a majestic name. But of course, the woke crowd didn’t like that, did they? They have to hate on a man who died in the eighteenth century. Ridiculous, don’t you think?”
I play with my powdered eggs.
“I mean, now they call themselves the Amherst Mammoths. Mammoths. Please. That’s so pathetically PC, don’t you think? But here’s something you’ll enjoy knowing. I went to Williams College. The Ephs. That makes us rivals. Funny, no?”
Sumner gives me a boyish grin.
“Yeah,” I say. “Hilarious.”
Then he says, “I hear you had a visitor yesterday.”
I go stiff. Ross Sumner sees it.
“Oh, don’t look so surprised, David.”
He still wears the boyish grin. That grin had probably gotten him far. On a purely physical level, it was a nice grin, charming, the kind that opens doors and lowers inhibitions. It was also probably the last sight his victims saw.
“It’s a small prison. A man hears things.”
That is true. Rumor has it that the Sumner family is not afraid to use their money to influence his treatment. I believe those rumors.
“I try to make it a point of staying informed.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, keeping my eyes on the eggs.
“So how did it go?” he asks.
“How did what go?”
“Your visit. With your... sister-in-law, was it?”
I say nothing.
“It must have been something, right? Your first visitor after all this time. You seemed distracted before I came over.”
I look up. “Look, Ross, I’m trying to eat here, okay?”
Ross throws up his hands in mock surrender. “Oh, pardon me, David. I didn’t mean to pry. I wanted us to be friends. I have been starving for any sort of intellectual stimulation. I imagine you must feel the same. Both of us being graduates of the Small Ivies, I thought we would have a bond. A rapport, if you will. But I see now that I’ve caught you at a bad time. Please forgive me.”
“It’s fine,” I mutter. I take another bite. I can feel Sumner’s eyes on me.
Then he whispers, “Are you thinking about your son?”
The chill starts at the base of my skull and scurries down my spine. “What?”
“How did it feel, David?” His eyes are ablaze. “I am talking on a purely intellectual level. A proper discussion between educated men. I consider myself a student of the human condition. So I want to know. Be analytical or emotional, that’s up to you. But when you lifted that baseball bat above your head and smashed it down on your own child’s skull, what went through your mind? Was it a release? I mean, did you feel you had to do it? Or were you trying to quiet voices in your head? Or was the feeling more euphoric—”
“Go fuck yourself, Ross.”
Sumner frowned. “Go fuck myself? Seriously? That’s the best you can come up with? Really, David, I’m disappointed. I came here for a serious philosophical discussion. We know things others don’t. I want to understand what could possess a man to do something so barbaric. To kill his own son. The flesh of your own flesh. I know that might make me sound like a hypocrite—”
“Lunatic,” I correct.
“—but you see, I kill strangers. Strangers are life’s props, don’t you think? Stage dressing. Deep background for our worlds — the inner world we create. We are all that matter in the end, don’t you think? Think about it. We cry harder when a beloved pet dies than when a tsunami kills hundreds of thousands of humans. Do you see my point?”
I see no reason to open my mouth. That will just encourage him.
Ross Sumner leans toward me. “I killed strangers. Props. Scenery. Window dressing. But to kill your own child, your own flesh and blood...”
He shakes his head as though mystified. I seethe but stay silent. What’s the point? I don’t need to win favor with this psychopath. I look for another seat, but it isn’t as though another table companion would be less disturbing.
Ross Sumner daintily unfolds his paper napkin and lays it on his lap. He takes a tiny bite of the eggs and makes a face. “This food is simply awful,” he says. “Absolutely tasteless.”
I can’t help myself. “As opposed to, say, human intestines?”
Sumner stares at me for a moment. I stare back. You never show fear in here. Not ever. Not for a second. It is, in part, why I made the wisecrack in the first place. Much as you might want to wallow in silence, you can never take shit in here because the shit will just grow exponentially.