I nodded.
“Do you know what that makes you?”
I shrugged.
“Dead,” he said.
Jessica Solomon wore a snug skirt and a weightless blouse. We sat across an empty table, players without a game. She told me it wasn’t looking good for me but everything was going to be alright. I was in no mood to embrace the contradiction.
She asked about the Vientiane project. I said it had been going well until I had found myself in my present difficulties. I actually used those words — “present difficulties.”
I should have been in Laos that morning, drinking strong, syrupy coffee, inspecting the site. “Zero environmental impact,” I told my lawyer, as if that might impress her.
The government had approved the plans, and I had a business-class ticket to Vientiane via Ho Chi Minh City, but my reservation was on hold until the police realized I hadn’t killed my best friend. I had been refused bail since the cops knew about Vientiane and suspected I might have a second passport. They were holding me because they were certain that Jamie was dead, though they couldn’t locate the body.
“They think it was gay panic,” she said.
I laughed. Jamie was the best man I knew. I would have been proud to believe he wanted me.
“The Lion King wants two hundred bucks a week,” I said. “It has to be paid to an electrician in Tempe — he said you’d know him.”
Jesse nodded. “I can do that for you,” she said. “But don’t trust the Lion King. He’ll only protect you from himself, and he’ll probably have you bashed anyway.”
“What for?” I asked.
“Control.”
I knew I was never going to last in jail.
I watched Vasari draw a comic strip in his spiral-bound sketchbook. He said he was making a graphic novel about prison life. He pronounced the p in graphic, as if he had read the word but never heard it spoken.
He showed me the opening pages of his story: a young Vasari, with a flick of black hair and a square jaw, was loaded up with home bake by cops who couldn’t get him on a breaking-
and-entering blue.
He asked to see one of my drawings. I told him to look out from the hill around Area One to Military Road, where Port Botany Towers rose from the docks like twin Ts joined at the ascenders. The bridge between the towers was a terraced garden. We won every award in the industry for Port Botany Towers.
“The Lion King doesn’t like that building,” said Vasari.
He rubbed the ledge of his nose.
“Everyone’s a classicist,” I said, “when it comes to architecture.”
Vasari farted like a foghorn, to show what he thought of the Western aesthetic tradition.
As a remand prisoner I didn’t have to work, but I volunteered as a porter in the hospital. The ward was choked with bed blockers stealing nurses’ time from dying men. I sat with the vanishing and held their hands, then carted bags of wet test tubes, jars, and needles to the incinerator, wearing gloves that gave me bear’s paws.
One of my patients was Vietnamese. He said he’d never met a man with a face like mine and a name like Chevapravatdumrong, but that when he looked closely, he could see parched rice fields in my eyes. He warned me the other Viets were coming for me. They thought I was trying to pass as a skip. They would take those eyes from me. He said I would have to pay two hundred dollars a week to the 5T. I said I needed the money for my defense. He laughed and said, “You’ve got that right.”
A nurse perfumed with iodine advised me to go into protection.
“But I’m not a rock spider,” I said. “I’m not even guilty.”
The men with HIV divided themselves into needle- sharers and cock-sharers. They said their disease was no longer a death sentence; it had been commuted to life. I wheeled their waste to the basement. I practiced deep breathing to try to keep calm, but panic chased the breath out of my lungs. I vomited in my cell, and my fingers shook as I tried to clean myself up.
The Lion King’s cellie sat beside the Lion King’s bunk, rolling White Ox tobacco. When he finished making a cigarette he placed it between the Lion King’s lips and lit it for him. Smoking was banned in jail, but the Lion King had earned unofficial privileges in unofficial ways.
“I hear you’re an architect,” he said. “What does an architect do? Take it up the arc?”
I blinked smoke from my eye.
“A bent fucking bird tells me you designed Port Botany Towers. I hate that cock-sore. What’s it supposed to be, anyway?”
“It’s a landmark symbol of the regeneration of a dockside suburb,” I told him, reading the brief from memory.
“It’s my fucking suburb,” said the Lion King. “I grew up five minutes from this fucking jail. And do you know what your building looks like to me?”
“Most people say it reminds them of a Japanese gate.”
“I couldn’t give a fat-arsed fuck,” he said. “To me, it’s two Ts, and those two Ts stand for Trent Taylor and the Tasman Tigers.”
I didn’t know what he expected me to say.
“Every fucking morning,” he continued, “when I went out on a work party, I used to see your fucking Trent Taylor Tasman Tigers Tower and think to myself, I’d like to get my hands on the cunt that built that, because I’ve got a strong fucking feeling that he put it there just to piss me off. In the end, I stopped going out on work parties, because I couldn’t bear to look at the fucking thing.” He patted his hairy stomach. “That’s when I started putting on weight. No fucking exercise except this—” He pulled vigorously on his cock. “I knocked Trent Taylor. Did you know that?”
I told him I didn’t.
“So why do you think I’m in here? Because I like the smell?”
“You were president of the La Perouse Lions,” I said, “at the Moorebank massacre.”
“Fucking oath I was,” said the Lion King. “And I knocked President Trent fucking Taylor, because the dog deserved to die.” He turned to his cellie. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Fucking oath it is,” said his cellie.
“What’re you in here for?” the Lion King suddenly asked me.
“Murder.”
“No, what’re you in here for?”
“I got arrested,” I said, “and refused bail.”
The Lion King looked at me, disgusted. “Do you know how many blokes I’ve knocked?”
I couldn’t tell whether he wanted me to guess low or high.
“Five,” I said. “Something like that.”
“Six. Three at Moorebank, outside the pub, and three Tigers who came in here after me, looking to get square for their brothers.”
Again, I didn’t know how he expected me to react.
“And now the Tasman Tigers are extinct,” he said, and smiled nicotine-piss, spider-cracked teeth. “What’re you in here for?” he asked me again.
A new Viet arrived on remand. He followed me around for days but seemed reluctant to approach. I guess he was scared, because it was a frightening thing to have to do. When he finally cornered me, he was apologetic, although he needed me to know that this was all my own fault. If I had cooperated, I would have been fine.
He was searching for the strength to stab me.
“Why don’t you just tell them you couldn’t find me?” I said.
“Because you’re a fucking traitor.” His voice was high and glassy.
“And who have I betrayed?” I asked.
“Listen to you,” he said. “Talking like a fucking... architect.”
I had never been to another place where it was a joke to be an architect.
He was bigger than me, but not by much. He wanted me to say something else so that he could get angry.