What age is a black boy when he learns he’s scary?
Mingus showed it for an instant, then backed into shadow.
I think I went a little crazy when I wandered from there. Invisibility and Mingus’s voice had flayed me bare. I had no secrets to conceal. I had no mean face, or any face at alclass="underline" no wonder Zelmo Swift had treated me like a moron child! Zelmo Swift and Jared Orthman made adequate nemeses for a man without a face to turn to the world. I felt I couldn’t leave the Watertown facility without completing my mission, and yet couldn’t imagine surrendering the ring-it had become a part of me, become the truth about me. So for a while I split the difference, and meandered. In fact, I made my way to where Mingus had claimed I could acquire keys to the SHU, only I didn’t tell myself this was what I was doing. I moved recklessly, reeling past COs who opened doors for me, a live disturbance in the air waves, a poltergeist sick with ambivalence. It was easy to steal a fat ring of keys. I used them heedlessly, rattling through options until I fumbled the right key into a lock. I left doors swinging behind me as I moved through the compound. Maybe I thought they’d remain open for me when I needed to retrace my steps, maybe I only thought they ought to be open. I wasn’t thinking-my brain was invisible to itself.
I passed back through the yard. Now the moon was gone. Like a puppet under Mingus’s guidance I found the SHU, a squat three-story building, more a hospital annex than an arm of the prison proper. The look didn’t suit my mood. The beast at the heart of the maze ought to be captive in an open-air cage, or at the bottom of a pit, staked to a post. The SHU looked soft. They might as well have cordoned the Lord of Elbows, He Who Can Throw A Spaldeen Sideways, in a gingerbread house, where he could gnaw his way free.
I let myself in. The lower level housed a special ward for incarcerated paraplegics-dying AIDS junkies, spinal gunshot victims with maximum-security designations. On the second floor, protective custody, the rooms were Inspector Clouseau loony bins: barred windows, knobless doors with slots for the exchange, I supposed, of trays or papers. There, Robert Woolfolk and I had a tiled corridor to ourselves.
I needed to raise my voice to wake him.
“Will Fuck!” I called.
I removed the ring and stood where he could see me in the light, then came nearer to the mesh grille of his door.
“Dylan?”
“Yes, Robert.”
“Fuck you doing here?”
It was him, Robert Woolfolk, figment of my hatred turned real once more. With his jumpsuit and shaved head, and the long, disgust-lined sneer of his features, his eternal Mean Face, he resembled Scatman Crothers come for the garbage. Those limbs, now draped in prisoner’s orange, had tangled with Rachel’s on Bergen Street. I despised and envied him for having been embraced by her fists.
“Mingus sent me,” I mumbled.
“You must of thought I was sleeping, right?”
“You were sleeping.”
“Nah, I ack like that, but I was awake. Nobody could sneak up on me, man.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“You know what I was doing?”
This wasn’t the conversation I’d intended. “What?” I said.
“Writing rhymes in my mind. I wrote a whole album in my mind. None a these fools know what I’m doing, think I’m crazy ’cause I always got my eyes closed, my head be nodding-I’m a be bust out with this shit someday, shock all they world.”
Bust out sooner than you know, I thought.
“You want to hear?”
“Uh, sure.”
You know my name, read it off the liner notes
Pussy rappers with vagina throats
Get snatched out they designer coats
For trying to float concrete boats in the Gowanus
Talk about a battle but they really don’t want this-
His delivery was gruff and leaden, the lyrics growled incoherently-or perhaps the incoherence was in me.
Maybe your queer ass better wait till the fear pass
’Cause I could see your teeth chatter thru your jaw like it was clear glass-
“Robert, stop.”
“What?”
“I don’t have time.” I pushed the ring at his eyes, impatient. I’d wanted him to ask for it (Yo, let me see that ring for a minute, let me take it around the block, what, you don’t trust me?). Now the game was over.
“You remember this?” I asked.
“Ho, shit. That’s G’s.”
I hadn’t been able to get Mingus to accept the ring as belonging to him, but Robert made the call instantly. There was odd satisfaction in this. “Right,” I said. “He told me to bring it to you.”
“Ho, shit.”
“You can use it to get out.” I pushed it through the slot, to plop into his cupped hands. The instant it was free of my fingers I felt a tidal panic wipe all giddiness from me: I was drunk on nothing now. I had to go from here.
“Why don’t G want it for himself?” Robert asked.
“He wanted you to have it.”
“How’s it work?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
Robert puzzled on this briefly, then his mind slid to another question. “Yo, Dylan, man, you got keys?”
“I need them.”
“Unlock this shit, though.”
I stared at him, for what must have been a long moment.
“Yo, Dylan?”
“What?”
“Fuck you, motherfucker.”
Prisons slept. I had transit of the Watertown facility by now-three, four in the morning, whichever it was. The familiar music of clanking deadbolts and jangling keys alerted no one. I was only certain the A/B doors were my limit, a test I couldn’t pass visible. In my previous plan-just hours old, though it felt like another world-I’d intended to ask Mingus to wait a few days before using the ring, to give me a head start in getting clear. I doubted I’d get the same consideration from Robert. Anyway, I hadn’t asked for it.
I held to that previous plan nevertheless, which consisted of getting as near to the visitors’ room as I could. If I had to be found inside the compound, I figured innocence by association was my best hope-a civilian, I’d go to where civilians could be found, from time to time. There I’d wait out the last few hours of the night, then try to blend in with the morning’s first wave of visitors, maybe claim to have accidentally blundered through the wrong door. I still hadn’t scrubbed my ultraviolet-inked knuckles, and could reasonably hope the mark would still register in the COs’ scanners. I’d offer that up, with my whiteness, as sign I wasn’t part of the population. And, after all, I wasn’t. They’d have to let me go.
I reentered the green-tile pavilion which led to the visitors’ room, found my way to a corridor I’d passed through, one in sight, through wide Plexiglas windows, of the chamber where I’d removed my belt and shoes and had my earplug puzzled over. There I found a doorless room, really only a vestibule leading nowhere, with a pair of bright-lit Pepsi machines, another vending machine offering cellophane-wrapped Oreos and Cheez-Its at the end of corkscrew spirals, and a high-mounted television set, angled as though for a bedridden patient.
I slid the ring of keys into the dust deep between the feet of the Cheez-Its machine. They’d be retrievable if I needed them, but should I be caught, they’d hardly aid my case. Then I slumped inside the doorway, tucked my feet close, drew myself out of sight of the corridor from every angle I could calculate. Exhaustion was toxic, and my head began to nod. Not nodding in time-I wasn’t composing and committing to memory a lost masterpiece of a rap album, only nodding off. Anyone could sneak up on me who liked to. The black eye of the television glared down, but it wasn’t intelligible, wasn’t Vader or Big Brother. There was no authority here, malign or otherwise. The Pepsi machine glowed, but no one was home.