Vanishing Acts Read online

  I sink down on the bunk, because I know it is true.

  "You wanna know what happened to Clutch?" Concise says bitterly. "Once upon a time a baby boy was born in New York City. He didn't know his daddy, who was locked up in the pen. His mama was a crack whore who moved him and his two sisters to Phoenix when he was twelve, and then OD'd two months later. His sisters shacked up with their boyfriends' parents, and he hit the streets. The Park South Crips became his family. They fed him, clothed him, and one day when he was sixteen they let him in on the action when they sweet-talked a girl into having some fun, and they all took turns with her. Come to find out later she thirteen, and a retard."

  "That's how Clutch wound up here?"

  "No," Concise answers. "It's how I did. Clutch's story, it's the same, the names are jus' different. Everyone in here got a story like that, except bling blings like you."

  "I'm not rich," I say quietly.

  "Yeah, well, you ain't from the streets neither. What you do to get in here?"

  "I kidnapped my daughter when she was four years old, told her her mother was dead, and changed our identities."

  Concise shrugs. "That ain't no crime, man."

  "The county attorney doesn't agree."

  "You didn't kill your daughter, did you?"

  "God, no," I say, horrified. "You didn't hurt nobody. Jury'll let you go."

  "Well," I say, "maybe that's not the greatest thing."

  "You don't want out?"

  I try to find the right way to explain to this man how I can never go back to the way things were. How, after a while, you believe the fiction you've told yourself so well that you cannot remember the fact upon which it was based. It has been nearly thirty years since Charles Matthews existed; I have no idea who he is anymore. "I am afraid," I admit, "that it might be even harder than this."

  Concise looks at me for a long moment. "When I got out the first time, I went to breakfast to celebrate. Found me a little diner and sat down and watched the waitress movin' in her short dress. She come to take my order, and I say I want eggs. 'How you want them cooked?' she ask and I just stare at her like she speakin' Martian. For five years, there weren't no choice--if we had eggs, they be scrambled, period. I knew I didn't want them like that, but I didn't remember how else they could be. I'd lost all the words, just like that."

  Language, of course, vanishes like anything else in disuse. How much time before I cannot remember mercy? Before forgiveness is gone? How long will I have to be in here before I forget how possibility sits on the bridge of the tongue?

  I am no less bound to circumstance than Concise, or Blue Loc, or Elephant Mike, or even Clutch. I would not have run with my child if I hadn't married Elise. I would not have married Elise if I'd been in a different bar that first night. I would not have been in that bar if my car hadn't broken down in Tempe, and I needed a phone to call for a tow. I would not have been in Tempe if I weren't taking a graduate course in pharmacology; padding my chances to get a better job with a bigger paycheck so that one day I could provide for a family I could not even yet envision.

  Maybe Fate isn't the pond you swim in but the fisherman floating on top of it, letting you run the line wild until you are weary enough to be reeled back in.

  When I look up, Concise is staring at me. "I'll be damned," he says softly. "You one of us."

  Inker, the resident tattoo artist, melts down chess pieces for the monochrome green pigment he uses in his craft. His client already has sleeves--a run of tattoos covering his arms, from wrist to shoulder. It says White Pride down each of his triceps, and on his back is a Celtic knot. You can tell a lot about inmates by reading their skin. The swastikas and the twin lightning bolts tell you their racial affiliation. The spider webs and Constantine wire tell you they've been in prison. The clock faces have hands placed to show you how many years they did time.

  I wonder where Inker plans on putting this new one. He will scrape the skin with a sharpened shank and rub the ink into it, to scar. He'll do it all in record time, between the detention officer's walk-throughs, meant to keep things like this from going on.

  Behind the cover of a card game, Inker bends down over the bared left shoulder blade of his customer and begins to dig, blood welling up in the shape of a heart. "Five-oh," one of the card players says, a warning that an officer's coming. Inker slips his shank under his stripes, hides the tiny packet of ink in the ham of his hand.

  But the guard that passes by doesn't even glance at Inker. He moves to the upper level, down the block of cells. I rise, running after him.

  By the time I reach my cell, the detention officer has balled the bedding into a heap and tossed the mattresses off the bunks. He overturns my little cache of soap, toothbrush, postcards, pencils. Then he reaches under the bunk for Concise's cardboard box.

  Concise isn't here; he's left the pod to attend church services. It is not that he's particularly religious, but going to church allows him the freedom to sell his bootleg alcohol to inmates he would not otherwise see. Of course, after having the cell tossed, he won't have any merchandise. And once he is moved to close custody, he won't have the means to make it at all anymore.

  The detention officer opens up a tube of toothpaste, puts a taste on his finger and lifts it to his tongue. Then he reaches for the shampoo bottle full of hooch and unscrews the cap.

  "It's mine," I blurt out.

  I would like to tell you that I'm being selfless when I say this, but it would be another lie. What I'm thinking is that Concise and I have a fragile trust; to start from scratch with a new roommate could be a disaster. What I'm thinking is that I have little to lose, and Concise has everything. What I'm thinking is that there might be a karmic balance to the acts one undertakes in life, that maybe keeping one person's existence as is can erase the time you changed someone else's.

  *

  Being in disciplinary segregation is like being a ghost, something at which I've actually had a fair amount of practice. The officers get right into your face, yet don't seem to really see you. For one hour each day, you are allowed into the dayroom by yourself, to shower and to haunt a greater space. You go for hours without using your voice. You live in the past, because the present stretches out so far it hurts to glimpse it.

  Since there are an odd number of prisoners in the pod, I am in a cell by myself. At first, I consider this a blessing, then I begin to have my doubts. There is no one to talk to, to have to step around. Anything to break up my routine becomes a gift. So when I am told that my attorney has arrived for a visit, there's nothing I'd like more than to be taken down to the visiting room, if only for a diversion. But there is also nothing I'd like less. I know why you asked Eric to be my lawyer, but at the time, you didn't know the whole story ... and neither did Eric. It is clear, from our last meeting, that Eric can't easily separate my story from his own. Would he have agreed to represent me if he'd known that he'd have to walk through the memories of his drinking all over again?

  "Please tell my attorney," I say, "that I'd rather not."

  A half hour later, the inmates begin to stir. A few of them start hollering, others begin to pace like hamsters in a cage. I look back over my shoulder to see what's causing the stir, and find Sergeant Doucette leading Eric toward my cell.

  I turn my back. "I don't want to speak to him."

  "He doesn't want to speak to you," she tells Eric.

  Eric inhales sharply. "Well, that's fine by me. Because God knows I don't feel like hearing what the hell landed you in lockdown."

  At that moment I remember when I first realized that Eric was going to be the one to take care of you after I let go. You were fourteen, and had just had four teeth pulled by the dentist; your whole face was numb with novocaine. Eric came to our house after school to visit, and I let him take you the chocolate milkshake you'd asked for. When the liquid dribbled down your chin, Eric wiped it with a napkin. Before he let go, though, he let his fingertips caress the side of your face, as if he was finding his way acro