“But it’s like the Roxy, you know?” the taller blond said. He was obviously the spokesman, the eloquent one. Lead guitar. “The Roxy. It’s like the . . .”
“The Roxy,” the other blond said.
I finally worked up the nerve to open the first letter, slitting the beautiful envelope with the Denny’s dinner knife. Inside was a series of ink drawings done in Paul’s unmistakable comic book style, bold blacks and whites: Paul, walking lonely comic book streets. Paul, sitting at a Nighthawks cafe. He sees a blond girl on the street with short chopped-up hair and follows her, only to have her turn out to be somebody else. Would he ever see her again? the last caption read, as he drew at his desk, the wall covered with pictures of me.
The second envelope held a comic strip story of a prison break, three boys blasting their way out through steel doors with rocket launchers. They steal a car, the signs say Leaving L.A. They tear across the desert in the night. Next there’s a street sign in broken mosaic, it says St. Marks Place. Angular hipsters in black pass a doorway, 143. The Statue of Liberty in the background wears shades, it’s reading a comic book.
I folded the drawings, slipped them back into the envelope decorated with lightning bolts, stars, and a girl on a white horse in a comic book sky. Hold for Astrid Magnussen. If only I’d known that he would.
And now it was too late. I looked at Sergei across the table in Rena’s kitchen. He could care less about my boyfriend in New York. He didn’t even care about his girlfriend in the next room. He was just like one of Rena’s white cats—eat, sleep, and fornicate. Since the night I’d seen them together on the couch, he was always watching me with his hint of a grin, as if there were some secret we shared. “So how is your boyfriend?” he asked. “Big? Is he big?”
Niki laughed. “He’s huge, Sergei. Haven’t you heard of him? Moby Dick.”
Olivia had told me all about men like Sergei. Hard men with blue veins in their sculpted white arms, heavy-lidded blue eyes and narrow waists. You could make a deal with a man like that. A man who knew what he wanted. I kept my eyes on my broccoli and cheese.
“You get tired of waiting,” he said. “You come see me.”
“What if you’re no good?” I said, making the other girls laugh.
“Only worry you fall in love Sergei,” he said, his voice like a hand between my legs.
MY LATEST CASEWORKER, Mrs. Luanne Davis, was a middle-aged black woman in a white blouse tied in a bow at the neck and relaxed hair in a pageboy. I spotted her right off when I arrived at the McDonald’s on Sunset after school. I ordered a burger and fries and a Coke, and for once, the screaming of children in the ball pit didn’t bother me. I’d gone to Playland the night before with Niki, where she sang with one of Werner’s bands, Freeze. I carried her microphone stand, which made me a roadie, so I didn’t need an ID. Niki was the only one who could sing. She had a purring, ironical voice, she sang the way Anne Sexton read poetry. But everyone else screamed, and nobody could play, and I was still half-deaf from it.
The social worker passed a wad of letters across the sticky table to me. Such potential for damage, I didn’t even want to pick them up. I hated the sight of them, my mother’s handwriting, the crabbed lines I could see through the blue airmail envelopes. She could get seven pages per stamp, and each thin sheet weighed more than the night. They were like a kelp forest, they cast a weird green light, you could get lost there, become tangled and drown. I had not written to her since Claire died.
Sipping her black coffee with Sweet’n Low, Mrs. Luanne Davis spoke slowly, overenunciating in light of my temporary deafness. “You really should write her. She’s in segregation. It can’t be easy.”
“I didn’t put her there,” I said, still eyeing the letters like Portuguese man-of-wars floating on the innocent sea.
She frowned. She had lines between her eyebrows from frowning at girls like me, girls who didn’t believe anybody could love them, least of all their dangerous parents. “I can’t tell you how few children I have whose parents write. They’d be thrilled to death.”
“Yeah, I’m super lucky,” I said, but I dutifully put them in my pack.
I finished my food, watching the kids jump off the net onto one small boy who couldn’t find his feet in the ball pit. Over and over they jumped onto him, laughing while he screamed. His teenaged mother was too busy talking to her friend to help him. Finally, she yelled something at the other kids, but she didn’t get up or do anything to protect her son. When she turned back to her friend, our eyes met. It was Kiki Torrez. We made no sign that we knew each other, we just looked a little longer than a casual glance, and then she went on talking to her friend. And I thought, prisoners probably traded just that glance, when they met on the outside.
When I got home, Yvonne was in front of the TV on the figured green velvet couch, watching a talk show for teenagers. “This is the mother,” she told me, not taking her eyes from the screen. “She gave up the daughter when she was sixteen. They never saw each other before this second.” Big child’s tears dripped down her face.
I didn’t know how she could stand to watch this, it was as phony as an ad. I couldn’t help thinking of the adopted mother who’d raised the girl, how sick it must make her feel to see her carefully raised daughter in the arms of a stranger, applauded by the talk show audience. But I knew Yvonne was imagining herself coming back into her baby’s life twenty years from now, slim, confident, dressed in a blue suit with high heels and perfect hair, her grown child embracing her, forgiving her everything. And what were the chances of that.
I sat down next to Yvonne and looked through my mother’s letters, opened one.
Dear Astrid,
Why don’t you write? You cannot possibly hold me responsible for Claire Richards’s suicide. That woman was born to overdose. I told you the first time I saw her. Believe me, she’s better off now.
On the other hand, I am writing from Ad Seg, prison within a prison. This is what is left of my world, an 8x8 cell shared with Lunaria Irolo, a woman as mad as her name.
During the day, the crows caw, dissonant and querulous, a perfect imitation of the damned. Of course, nothing that sings would alight near this place. No, we are left quite alone with our unholy crows and the long-distance cries of the gulls.
The buzz and slam of the gates reverberate in this great hollow chamber, roll across poured cement floors to where we crouch behind a chain-link fence, behind the slitted doors, plotting murder, plotting revenge. I am behind the fence, they say. They handcuff us even to shower. Well they should.
I liked that idea, my mother behind the fence, handcuffed. She couldn’t hurt me from there.
From the slitted window in the door, I can see the COs at their desks in the middle of the unit. Our janitors of penitence, eating doughnuts. Keys glitter important at their waists. It’s the keys I watch. I am hypnotised by keys, thick fistfuls of them, I can taste their acid galvanisation, more precious than wisdom.
Yesterday, Sgt. Brown decided my half hour in the shower counts as part of the hour I’m permitted out of my cell each day. I remember when I had hoped he would be a reasonable man, black, slender, well-spoken. But I should have known. His deep voice seems not to issue from his meager frame, it’s as artificial as a preacher’s, steeped in an overblown sense of his own importance, the Cerberus of our concrete Inferno.
In my extensive leisure time, I am practicing astral projection. As Lunaria’s voice drones on, I rise from my bunk and fly out across the fields, following the freeway west until lean see the downtown towers. I have touched the mosaics of the Central Library’s glared pyramid. I have seen the ancient carp glistening orange, pimento, dappled silver, and black in the koi ponds of the New Otani. I ride updrafts around the Bonaventure’s neat cylinders, its glass elevators ricocheting between floors. Do you remember the time we ate at the top, went once around in the revolving bar? You wouldn’t get near the windows, you screamed that the space was pulling you out. We had to move to a booth in the center, remember? You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don’t know whether you’re going to jump.