Fallen Land (2 page)

Present

In this republican country, amid the
fluctuating waves of our social life,
somebody is always at the drowning-point.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

I
t is her first time inside the walls of a prison. Or no, that is not quite true, because when she was still teaching she visited a juvenile detention facility where some of her students had spent time. The county called it a “Youth Center,” as if it were nothing more ominous than an afterschool club for the city’s underprivileged. It was located in a cluster of bland institutional buildings that included the county and Veterans Association hospitals, all faced in tan brick. She does not remember being subjected to any kind of search or having to pass through a metal detector, although in retrospect both seem probable. It no longer matters nor does she remember if she visited anyone specific, or if it was merely an opportunity to view the facility as a kind of public relations exercise for the local corrections department, making itself look good to the educators whose students might end up inside. Louise is certain she was cautioned not to speak with any of the residents she passed in the halls, solitary kids led by uniformed guards, boys avoiding the gaze of everyone around them, girls with long hair worn flopping over their eyes, children with crew cuts and buzz cuts and shaved heads looking at the walls or the floor or the ceiling, and then the other, tougher kids, who turned to stare at her in ways that were challenging and provocative and perplexingly thrilling. They looked knowledgeable in a way she knew she had not been at their age.

So yes, she has been to a detention facility before, but today is the first time she has ever been inside an adult prison, a state penitentiary, although this one is no longer an arm of the state. At some point in the last ten years it was offloaded by the budget-slashing legislature and is now a profit-making enterprise for a private corporation that specializes in corrections facilities.

When it was built, the prison was a sandstone fortress erupting out of cornfields and pastureland and even when Louise was growing up it was on the remote edge of the southwestern suburbs, a part of town she has still never managed to explore despite spending her entire life in the area. Coming upon the prison now, she is surprised to find it surrounded by strip malls and fast food restaurants and a tall white grain elevator from the days when this was still rural land. Across the street stands a ten-million-cubic-foot white cube with
COMPLETE COLD STORAGE
across the top in tall scarlet letters that remain aglow twenty-four hours a day. Train tracks run past the grain elevator and prison, straight into the refrigerated warehouse.

Drinking iced tea and watching cars drive by she waits for her scheduled appointment in a Mexican restaurant across the street. The air is distorted and shimmering from the heat rising off the asphalt. Her head twitches from side to side as if cars mean more to her than freedom, but her eyes are fixed beyond the traffic to the prison yard, open for everyone to see, where inmates in khakis and white t-shirts mill around behind chain-link fencing topped with curling-ribbon coils of razor wire under the aim of nine watchtowers that mark the perimeter.

A white woman and her two adult children enter the restaurant, order their food, sit down to eat. All three are overweight, but the son, in his early twenties, struggles to fit into his plastic chair. His hands shake and he fails to look at his mother or sister. “This must be the most tranquil restaurant ever,” he says, dipping his fried chicken strips into a variety of hot sauces, melted cheese, and sour cream. Listening as they eat and talk, it becomes clear to Louise that the three of them have just come from the prison, where they were visiting the woman’s husband, the long-absent father of the son and daughter. Across the room a table fills with penitentiary employees still wearing their badges. This is the collective purpose of the restaurant: to feed the prison staff and the families of the imprisoned. But Louise is not going to visit anyone she loves, or anyone she could ever be moved to think of as family.

Except for the stand of pines between the street and the penitentiary parking lot there are no trees for a half-mile in any direction, including the area inside the perimeter fence. As she drives into the lot a sign directs her to park only in a designated visitor’s space, not to loiter in her car, and to report without delay to the guard at the entrance. A pervasive smell of flame-grilled burgers from one of the several neighboring fast food franchises clogs the air.

There has been a prison in this location since 1866, although most of the original crenelated stone structures were demolished and replaced in the 1980s with a dozen separate brick units—the same tan brick used in the building of the Youth Center and the county hospital on the other side of town. If not for the razor wire and watchtowers, the facility might be mistaken for a suburban school. Indeed, it could be the same school where Louise herself taught for more than four decades, a period that felt at times like an endless term of daily incarceration, subject to the petty whims of sadistic principals, many of whom regarded their students as no better than embryonic criminals and the teachers as overeducated guards.

When Louise phoned yesterday to confirm her appointment, the secretary in the warden’s office directed her to wear long pants instead of a skirt, and explained that open-toed shoes and sleeveless shirts were forbidden. The entrance to the penitentiary is at ground level but stairs inside lead in only one direction, down to the basement. At the end of the long subterranean corridor, decorated with vintage photographs of the prison in its early years, there is a desk and a single guard, tall and fat and smirking. He wears a nametag: Kurt D—. Checking that Louise is on the roster of approved guests for the day, Kurt retains her driver’s license for the duration of the visit, provides her with a key for one of the lockers where she must abandon her jewelry and other valuables, and then stamps the inside of her left wrist with invisible ink that will show up only under an infrared scanner.

“In case there’s a riot and a lockdown,” he explains. “We’ll know to let you out.”

She laughs and then realizes Kurt is not a man who jokes.

“Remove your shoes, please.”

She does as he says, and then, saying nothing further, he jerks his head to indicate the metal detector. Stepping through the gray arch she waits as Kurt runs her shoes through an X-ray machine. Although she does not set off the detector, he pats her down, fingers intruding where only doctors now touch.

“What’s the worst you’ve seen?” she asks, raising her arms, spreading her legs apart, feeling the involuntary rush of sensation when Kurt’s hand moves up her inner thigh. His palms are hot through her cotton slacks and she wonders if he is ever tempted to go too far, or if what he is doing at this moment is, in fact, too far.

Straight-faced and unwilling to engage, refusing to smile or make eye contact, he grunts at her question: he has been trained to do his job, to read from a script, not to extemporize. It is possible that questions absent from his script do not register for him as words with meaning, but rather as extraneous noise. “Turn around, please,” he sings, “hands remain at shoulder height, arms extended, feet apart.”

“Alcohol? Weapons? Steel files? Do people still think you can escape from a prison with a file?”

Her teeth find the meat of her bottom lip and spasms warp her hands when she notices a sign warning her that
jokes about escape, bombs, or any criminal activities are inappropriate in a prison environment and may be treated as genuine threats.

“Put one foot up here at a time.” Kurt points to a machine that looks like a scale imprinted with the outline of a man’s dress shoe. Louise extends her left foot, which is dwarfed by the printed outline, and watches as the platform lights up and vibrates for a moment. “Now the next one—not yet—okay now.” She changes feet, feels the pulse again. “I guess your feet are clear but I’m gonna wand you one more time.” He picks up the metal-detecting baton, passing it around her body while rattling off a list of prohibitions, warning Louise that she may be searched at any point during the visit and that if she does
not abide by any of the rules heretofore explained and any others that might not have been explained but which nonetheless hold forth
, her visit
may be terminated immediately and without warning
, her personal possessions returned, and her person escorted off the premises and banned from re-entry to the facility
until formal security review by the prison administrators, which will take not less than two weeks
.

Kurt returns Louise’s shoes and another guard appears down a second set of stairs. Unlike Kurt, he does not wear a nametag, but introduces himself as Dave.

“I’ll be taking you up to secure-side, Mrs. Washington, and escorting you to the interview room,” Dave says.

Upstairs, they approach two sets of bulletproof glass doors adjacent to the Master Control Room, where a wall of green and red lights indicates which doors are open and which closed across the entire penitentiary. A guard in the Control Room sees them and opens the first of the glass doors. Louise and Dave step inside, wait for two other prison staff to join them, and the door closes. Several seconds elapse before the second door opens, allowing them into the secure portion of the prison where Dave leads Louise down the hall past a cage holding a dozen men, newly arrived, waiting to be processed, to be issued their ankle bracelets and identification cards with bar codes and photos, to spend time in the Diagnostic Evaluation Center where they will be assessed and assigned to a cell block. Waiting for their diagnosis, the new men all look terrified.

Dave turns a corner and shows Louise into the room where the interview will take place. The walls are white concrete block, the trim around the doors royal blue, and across one wall are half a dozen blue-curtained bays that would look at home in a hospital emergency room, but which in this context make Louise feel uneasy, as if the space might be used for sudden triage. A dispenser filled with hand sanitizer is mounted on the opposite wall, and in the middle of the room are two molded plastic chairs on either side of a white plastic table.

Louise sits in one of the chairs, waiting for Dave to return with the prisoner. Alone in the room she feels a flash of panic as she realizes where she has brought herself. It is not because of the proximity to all these dangerous men, although perhaps that is an underlying or ancillary fear: of what men like that are capable of doing, the harms and violations they have committed, that they are still able and liable to commit in this facility shut away from public view, where, for all she knows, even the guards are in on the act. Rather, it is because she fears that in bringing herself inside these bland walls she risks being mistaken for a criminal herself, daring the system to conclude that some error has been made in allowing her liberty and now, as she has in effect turned herself over to the authorities, permitting the prison to process her for the span of a few hours, to judge her likelihood to break the laws of the penitentiary itself, they will see in Louise a criminal quality she has not herself recognized, and after identifying this intrinsic, previously unrecognized flaw, they may lock her away from the rest of society, flush her into their own private septic system, return her to earth. Once, not that many years ago, she broke a law, risking her liberty, and escaped only through the intervention of a man who can no longer assist her. Perhaps, she worries, some record remains of her transgression.

Just as she is reaching a peak of panic and thinking of calling the guards to let her out, to cancel the meeting, Dave returns with Paul. Louise reminds herself why she has come: not for herself, but for him, as an act of altruism. It is not an unconsidered position.

His hair, cut shorter than when she last saw him at the trial, is a close thicket of straight dark spikes flashed with gold streaks, the color of a homebrew prison process, glinting even under the deadening effect of the fluorescent lights that hang from the ceiling.

“So here you are,” Paul says, sitting down in the other plastic chair.

“Here I am,” Louise says, speaking over him.

“To be honest, I didn’t believe you’d come.” She watches him flex his hands against the table. The guard, Dave, stands at the door, clearing his throat in what sounds like a warning to Paul before glancing at Louise, offering a corresponding gaze of reassurance and, she thinks, warning as well—not to get too comfortable in this room that is as white and windowless and unbreachable as a bank vault. Dave, however, is not going anywhere. It is his job, no less his duty, to protect her from harm, from this man who has committed such a catalog of harms.

Circumstances and environment being what they are, Paul appears for the most part no different than he did in the past. His face, the muscled curvature of his torso, the landscape of his veins make her shiver and push her chair away from the table, closer to the wall with the dispenser of hand sanitizer. She feels certain that if he wanted to Paul could catch her before she even knew she needed to escape, catch her and kill her before Dave could move his own large body across the room. Paul is big enough and strong enough that he could pick her up in both arms and carry her off, an unholy pietà
.
An old verse runs through her mind:
And the women conceiving brought forth giants.
The hard planar chest stretching his white t-shirt, the arms bulging from their sleeves seem less parts of an animal form than a system of gears and pistons, hard components moving only in one way because of the nature of their design and manufacture, elements built for a single purpose and not readily adapted to any space other than that which they were meant to occupy, a space he has now lost, which he cannot ever regain. Freedom is finished. He will never again be free, never released, not unless the country collapses into chaos. A diamond-cut file will not liberate him. It would take the bombs of revolution or apocalypse itself to free him from this prison, and for that Louise cannot help feeling grateful.