After Hubris comes Nemesis: Adrasteia, the inescapable. A good man may be a bad man, and a bad woman may be good. To be untrue to thyself, youth!, that is the highest treason. Even the strongest fortresses can be taken by a siege. And the sky that we look upon may tumble and fall, and a mountain may crumble to the sea. And in the end your rough magic, O Prospero!, will eat you away unless, like Ariel, you set it free. Unless you break your staff.
The magic baby in Aeschylus’s The Net Fishers turned out to be the superhero Perseus. The magic baby in Sophocles’ The Trackers turned out to be the god Hermes. Now there was Vespasian, named for an emperor, the magic baby in the Gardens and in my heart. To survive, did I have to let him go? Did I have to set him free?
The Clinton Oaks Correctional Facility in Jefferson Heights, Minnesota, was the only maximum-security prison in the state. After the escape of two inmates, however, investigators found that guards there had routinely failed to perform security rounds, and made false entries into prison logbooks to say they had, when they hadn’t. As many as nineteen officers were subsequently disciplined for such failures. However, the negligence of the guards was not the primary factor in the prisoners’ escape. Love—or sex and desire, anyway—turned out to be the key. The inmates, the convicted murderers Carl Zachariassen and Peter Coit, who shared a prison cell and were serving life sentences with no possibility of remission, worked in the tailor shop at the facility, and became friendly with a prison worker, Mrs. Francine Otis, married, and a mother of two boys. The friendship deepened, let us not use stronger language than that, and Otis, as she afterwards confessed, had relations with both men in a storage closet leading off the long, narrow main work area of the tailor shop. Subsequently Otis brought the men the tools they needed, including metal-cutting equipment, and they proceeded with their plan. They cut rectangular holes in the steel at the backs of their cells, beneath the bunk beds, and put dummies made from sweatshirts in their beds to fool the guards when they made their rounds. (Though, as was afterwards established, the guards made no rounds that night.) Outside the hole in the cell wall was an unused catwalk which had not been patrolled for many years. They went down it five floors to a steam pipe which was off, because the weather was warm at that time of year, and cut a hole into it and crawled along to a manhole four hundred feet beyond the prison walls, where, using the tools provided by Francine Otis, they cut away the steel lock and chain with which the manhole was secured, and so made their escape.
The manhunt lasted three weeks, and involved over eight hundred officers as well as helicopters and search dogs. Zachariassen and Coit, as Otis afterwards confessed, had originally planned to meet her at a location on Route 35, where she had promised to have clothes, money, and guns waiting for them, and, sadly, delusionally, was expecting them to take her with them so that they could begin a new life of love and sex in Canada; but in the event they decided not to meet her, which was just as well for her, as their original scheme had been to take what she brought them and then murder her. During the next three weeks they were sighted a few times, their scent was picked up by dogs, DNA traces were found in a forest cabin, and in the end they were cornered in the Kabetogama State Forest not far from the Canadian border. Coit was captured alive, but Zachariassen was killed resisting arrest, receiving three shots in the head. The manhunt was widely reported on the national news.
We took our eyes off D Golden because we believed that Riya Z was with [him] every day, that her eyes would see everything that needed to be seen. But for three weeks, after her father escaped from Clinton Oaks, every minute of every day and night until he was shot dead in the Kabetogama Forest, Riya was out of her mind. And this, too, was the moment when D was asked to withdraw from the 2-Bridge club. It was the perfect storm; D needing her most at the moment when her attention was elsewhere.
They’re saying on the news he’s trying to get to Canada but that’s crap, she said, irrationally. He’s trying to get to me.
This was a Riya D had never seen, frightened, uncertain, a weak electricity crackling at her edges. The one thing [he] had believed in was her. In her, [he] had found [his] miracle rock. Then she crumbled and [he] couldn’t bear it.
Why would he come here to the city. It’s so far, the risk is too great, and in the city he would surely be seen and caught.
The city is where you go to hide, she said. In the country, in small towns or in the fields or forests, everybody sees you and everyone knows your business. In the city you are invisible because nobody cares.
But this is halfway across the country. He won’t come.
He promised me he would come. He will come.
Zachariassen didn’t come. He was running for the border in a northern forest. But in spite of the reports of sightings far from New York she remained convinced he was on his way, and so she got out the pearl-handled Colt revolver and loaded it and put it in her pocketbook and even after that she was like a cat on a hot tin roof. At the Museum of Identity her colleagues noted the wild-eyed frazzle in her, the uncalm, shocking in one usually so self-possessed, and everyone had a solution, maybe she needed a vacation, maybe she was unhappy in her relationship, maybe she should start taking kava kava which was one hundred percent organic and herbal and would really help her relax.
At night she hardly slept and sat instead by the bedroom window expecting that her murderous parent might at any moment climb up onto the flat roof outside, and on more than one occasion she came close to shooting a cat. Also more than once she did something she had never done before, which was to consult the drag queen Madame George downstairs at the Tarot Crystal Ball Horoscope Tell Ur Future salon, and when Madame George assured her that her future was long and bright she said, that’s wrong, deal the cards again, and even though the fortune teller added, your boyfriend, bring him down here, he’s the one I’m worried about, she didn’t do as she was asked, because she thought she knew D’s problems and didn’t need a drag queen’s help to understand him, and right now just for once it wasn’t all about him it was about her and her evil bastard of a father coming after her in the night. She went to see the termagant owner of the pink and yellow building and started telling Mrs. Run too loudly, much too loudly, that it was about time the building got a proper security system, with a video entry phone and an alarm and better locks on the exterior and interior, much better locks, anybody could get in, it was a tough and dangerous town, and she stopped only when Mrs. Run told her, “You come to me ask for lightbulb in hall, I think about it. You come to me like a hopping vampire jiangshi creature with screaming in your mouth and in one minute time I say to you, get outa my house right away. So you choose now.” Riya stopped dead, and stood silent and panting in the hallway while Mrs. Run snapped her fingers under her nose and turned her back and walked off into the Run Run Trading store to glare angrily at the hanging ducks. And Riya, perspiring and breathing heavily, didn’t even then understand that she was out of her mind with fear, but D Golden, watching her with great alarm from the top of the first flight of stairs, understood all right and it knocked [him] off-balance as well.