Hot Sur (7 page)

The reason I’m writing you, Mr. Rose, is to unburden myself of everything I know, a confession of sorts that will bring me forgiveness and peace. I remember your first classes, when you had us do exercises so we would learn simple things, like how to tell a verb from a noun; and once you had us make a list of ten verbs that were important to us. We had to do it quickly, jotting down the first ones that came into our head, and among my ten, I wrote “phobia.” You said that you couldn’t accept it because phobia wasn’t a verb, but I defended my choice, I insisted it was a verb, in a way, because a phobia couldn’t exist if someone wasn’t there to feel it.

“Fine”—you were polite—“let’s say it’s somewhat a verb, but only somewhat.”

“No, Mr. Rose.” I laughed. “You don’t have to give it to me. I get how phobia is no verb.”

The next class you made us do another list, this time adjectives, writing the definition on the board. One of mine was “phobiaized” and I wrote beside it “consumed by phobias.” You asked if to be phobiaized wasn’t the same as to feel a phobia. And I responded that a person like you might feel a phobia, but one like me is fucked and phobiaized. That means that fear has gotten inside you, never to be released; it means that a person and her fears have become the same thing.

“Touché,” you said, and explained that it was a fencing term, touché, and it meant that I had won.

But in the following class, you struck back; you weren’t going to fall behind in the competition we had started. You came out with this thing about a philosopher who was called Heidegger, and this Heidegger talked about the difference between fear and anxiety. He said that fear was a feeling about something or someone, let’s say a barking dog or a cop who could arrest us, while anxiety was a state of mind about everything and nothing in particular, simply about the fact that we were in this world.

“According to that then,” you asked, “what do you feel here in Manninpox, fear or anxiety?”

“Fear about what we face in here?” I was the first to pipe up, “and anxiety over what we’ve left out there.”

You smiled, and I knew we were beginning to hit it off, to understand each other. Sorry to be so blunt, but the whole thing seemed as if you were just flirting with me, with this is this, and that is that, and this Heidegger, and that my mother’s ass, and if this means that and that means this
 . . .
I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but I think if we had met in a club instead of in a prison, we would have begun to get it on, like they say, or to “feel each other out,” which is the same thing; I got that expression from Marbel, a girl who just got here a little while ago. But maybe we better drop this, could be a slippery slope.

I like thinking that everything I have gone through will be kept inside an envelope, and that they will put that envelope in the mail so that it flies where you are so that I remain clean and light, like a blank page, ready for whatever may come. Me on one end and on the other end, far away, in that tightly sealed envelope, my panic and fear and phobias and anxiety. That’s why in my dreams, I imagine how you will recount each chapter, each detail. I’d like to think of everything that has happened to me as a novel, and not life that’s been lived. As such, it is loaded with pain, but as a novel it is a great adventure. I asked for your address to send you this package. I’d have liked to have given it to you in person, but they took us away from you before I had a chance to. And, of course, they didn’t give me your address. Who the hell are we, the inmates, to be given personal information about normal people, what right do we have, why else would I want your address if not to extort money or threaten you? I told them that it was to send you the novel about my life, and they cracked up. A novel—you gotta be kidding—and life? What life did inmates have?

“You, what do you tell everyone one in your
 . . .
novel? You tell them how you get up at six, eat at seven, and take a shit at eight?” Jennings, the most sarcastic, rotten guard asked me.

So they didn’t give me your address, Mr. Rose. I’ll have to come up with another way to get this to you; it will be like sending a message in a bottle.

Another little thing before starting, I’ll tell the story and you believe everything I tell. That’s something Dr. House doesn’t understand. He’s my favorite, that limp bastard, my favorite of all time. We hear inside that he has gone out of fashion in the rest of the world, that audiences grew sick of his insufferable pedantries, and it’s true the guy does think he’s hot shit. But in Manninpox, his fame is eternal, always the king, maybe because time stands still in here and what comes in never leaves. According to House, everyone lies. That’s why he doesn’t believe what his patients tell him or what other doctors recommend. He won’t trust anyone so he goes around suspicious, spying out deceptions, because he is absolutely convinced everyone lies, all the time and about everything. And although he’s wrong, he’s still my favorite; fucking House, he’s wrong. No one is better than he is at diagnosing an illness, nothing gets by him, but about the lying he’s way off. I know, because for many years I worked as a market investigator for a company that made cleaning products. That was before my life burst into a hundred pieces. I liked the job and I was good at it, one of the things I most regret was losing it. I had to go door to door asking things such as How many times a week do you clean the bathroom? or, Do you wash your lingerie in the machine or by hand? or, Do you think your house is cleaner or less clean than your parents’ house? Those types of things. Maybe it sounds dull to you, Mr. Rose, but it wasn’t. People are crazy at heart, as you know, and the topic of cleaning sets off their weirdness. They come up with some surprising responses, sometimes very funny. I was happy with what I was doing, till that dreadful thing took place. It happens sometimes: everything is going well and lightning strikes and tears you apart. I’m not even thirty yet and I’ve been to hell, there and back and there again.

But as I said, in that job I found out a few things. For instance, I discovered that when people respond to a survey, generally, they more or less tell the truth. Maybe they exaggerate or play down things, but only up to point. A middle-class woman may tell you that she takes two trips a year when she only takes one. But if she goes to her mother’s house in South Carolina, she’s not going to tell you that she goes to the Ritz in Paris. That’s why, Mr. Rose, if you get inspired to write my story, it has to be as you hear it from me: I’ll tell it and you believe me. I might lie to you a little bit, exaggerate, so feel free to rein things in or delve a little deeper when you see that I skip over something. But in general you have to believe what I say. That’s our deal.

There’s a novel called
The Distant World of Christina
, based on the painting
Christina’s World
by Andrew Wyeth, the American painter whom you know better than I do. Well, I found out about the painter and that portrait here in prison when I read the novel not just once, but three times. One, two, three. Three whole times from beginning to end before I met you. The author’s name is Jordan Hess and there was a picture of him on the back cover, big head with a ridiculous comb-over, all long on the sides and bald up top, should have just buzzed it all off like Andre Agassi, the divine bald. Who cares if he admitted to snorting heroin; to me he is still a god in sneakers. While I was reading that novel I told you about,
The Distant World of Christina
, I liked to think of Jordan Hess as Andre Agassi, even fell in love with him, I think. With Jordan Hess, not Agassi, or I should say, Hess as Agassi. I have that issue, sometimes I can’t separate fantasy from reality, maybe that’s why all this crap has happened to me. Anyway, I read that novel three times because it is one of the few that they have in the prison library. Of course, it wasn’t just because of that, but more because of what that paralyzed girl’s story meant to me, Christina, who in Wyeth’s painting drags herself on the dry meadow struggling to get to the home that glints in the distance where she can’t reach it. The artist painted the deadened legs lovingly, her hair long and black fluttering in the wind, her arms skinny. I don’t know if you remember this but my hair is long and black as well, and although you knew me when I was chubby, I’m skinny as a lizard now, like Christina or even skinnier. Her face is not completely visible in the painting because she’s mostly turned away, seated on the dry meadow in her pale pink dress. I imagined my own face on that disabled body, she paralyzed and me imprisoned, and I imagined that everything that happened to Christina was happening to me. I kept telling myself, if she could do it why can’t I, if she can get to that house glinting in the distance, why couldn’t I be free one day.

It was because of that book that I decided to take your class. I signed up right away when they announced that a writer was going to teach a class in the inmate rehabilitation program and that enrollment was open. I did it not because I imagined I could learn how to write—that seemed like an impossible dream, a dream I hadn’t even dreamed—the truth is that I signed up because I wanted to meet a writer in person, just to see what a writer was in real life. Maybe you’d look like Jordan Hess, or better yet, like Andre Agassi. I have to tell you I was quite surprised when I did meet you, so tall, so scrawny, so pale, with the little lightning bolt on your forehead, your cute freckles, and those short-sleeved Lacoste shirts and canvas sneakers you wore, those light-colored pants that would have fallen off if not for the tight belt. It looked like you had been dressed by your momma or come directly from the campus of a very expensive university, or from an old-fashioned tennis court. I grew concerned because this was no place for you, buried in this dark world, breathing this rotten air. It seemed as if you had come from very far away, and you looked clean and innocent, always freshly showered, but as if someone had sent you here by mistake. You even told us yourself, not that first class but the fourth or fifth class, that white prisoners had three to four times the suicide rate of blacks or Latinos, because the whites weren’t used to such harsh conditions. Of course, you could come and go as you pleased, you’d be in the prison for your classes a few hours every night; but even so, coming into this place is not something everyone can take. Soon after, I began to look forward to your classes, and it was much easier to put up with that face of a seminarian freshly shaved and shirts the color of baby chicks, although sometimes baby blue, and sometimes white, but always the alligator brand. It had even become a running joke among us, taking bets before class on the color of your shirt that day. I always bet yellow, and almost always won. But the most intriguing thing was that lightning-bolt scar; you must have taken some motherfucking whack on the head to get such a scar, which I thought was a mark of intelligence. Someone with a lightning-bolt scar is one of two things: Harry Potter or some brainiac, which is what I thought when I first saw you, even though another inmate, old Ismaela Ayé, a superstitious witch, had spread the rumor that the scar meant you had the gift of prophecy. And it might be so, who knows, it doesn’t seem like such an off-the-wall theory, but I still prefer mine because I just don’t get along with Ayé the witch. Others said it wasn’t a lightning bolt but the letter
Z
, like the mark of El Zorro. As you will see, everyone had a theory.

The marketing investigation company gave me a job right away. It was my first interview after having become free. That wasn’t so long ago, but it feels like prehistoric times or some earlier life. They noticed my good disposition and strong work ethic right away. Also, I was bilingual and the consumer survey business was made up of both Latinos and gringos. In the actual field, I had to deal with all types of people: blacks, Latinos, whites, Quakers, Protestants, evangelicals, Jews, hippies. Even Catholic priests. They probably hired me just because I was bilingual, but I made it a point to prove to them I was a good worker and that everything I did was done right, door-to-door surveys, focus groups, pantry checks. And don’t think it was easy; forcing your way into people’s houses and asking them questions about their personal habits required both talent and guts. It’s always risky because you’re out on the streets and the streets are the streets. In the bad neighborhoods, you get robbed, and in the good neighborhoods, doors get slammed in your face. You rely on your coworkers for everything, the only ones who defend you and stand up for you. Anyone who goes off on her own is as good as dead, vulnerable to any kind of assault. My coworkers pretended to be the musketeers, all for one and one for all, and as I said before, it’s a job for warriors, in which you have to earn the respect of others. You have to be forceful to break down the resistance and then quick and wily as a fox to find the psychological give-and-take that will grant you access. You also learn to be tolerant and take everything as it comes and respond properly to all those who say I can’t, or to come back later, or right now I don’t have any time, or not really in the mood, or get the hell out of here.

Mr. Rose, one time you said that I was intelligent. We were coming out of class when you said it. It was quite a surprise. No one had ever said that to me. I had been told that I was a good worker, that I was sharp, that I was pretty. But intelligent, never. I kept hearing the word all that afternoon, all that week, and to this very day. I like knowing that inside of me I have this little machine called intelligence, and that mine is working well, that it’s well oiled. I tell you things about my job as a market surveyor so that you know that this job was like the schooling that awoke an intelligence in me that perhaps had been dormant. Others begin their careers after they finish college, but I didn’t even graduate from high school. I was schooled as a market surveyor, house by house. And I was the best one on the team—well, one of the best. But what I did so well at work, I did not know how to do in the rest of my life. I haven’t been quite as smart about living as I have been about working. At work, everything was about precision and efficiency, while in my life everything has been about daydreaming, longing, and confusion.