Newjack (54 page)

S
ing Sing at night felt like a catacomb. The parking lot and locker room were deserted. In the lineup room, the skeleton crew barely filled a single file. I recognized the B-block contingent from having relieved them on galleries or passed them in the tunnel on many mornings. There were only five of them.

“Nice way to spend New Year’s Eve, huh?” said Greene, sarcastically. He was the R-and-W guy. I’d first tried to swap shifts with him, but he wasn’t interested. Instead I’d swapped with Tracy Scott, just upstairs on S-and-X. My wife had to work tonight at her job, I’d told Tracy, so I’d decided I might as well, too. In fact, I’d been wondering whether the stories about B-block on New Year’s Eve were true or exaggerated and wanted to find out firsthand.

Greene joked with me as we walked the tunnels to B-block. I was obviously a day-shift guy; he could tell by my baton. I looked around and realized that nobody else was wearing his.

“It’s because no inmates are out at night—you’d never be standing next to one,” he explained. “They only can leave their cells in an emergency, and in that case you’ve got to have a supervisor standing there.”

The main duty of the shift, he reminded me, was just making sure that the inmates weren’t dead. “If they’re dead and hard, you’re gone” was the way the white-shirts put it. Dead and warm, on the other hand, showed you were doing your job.

I’d had a recurring dream about Sing Sing that took place in this tunnel at night. In the dream, I was turning the corner that led to the B-block front gate. The way had been only faintly lit, but once I turned that corner I found myself in complete darkness. A light-bulb had burned out, I figured. I’d have to make it to the gate on
intuition. In the silence, then, I realized I wasn’t alone: There were inmates sprawled across the floor, sleeping. I toed my way tentatively forward, shuffling so as not to step on them. Reaching out for the wall to keep myself oriented, I touched an inmate’s shirt and recoiled. Men were standing along the wall, too, I realized, on either side of a gate that had been inadvertently left ajar. I could make out vague outlines. Suddenly, instead of the guy in charge, I was the one at risk, and I tried to slip by silently, not even stirring the air.

I was surprised, in real life, by how dark the block was when we walked in around 11
P.M.
All the main lights were off; only the center-stairway landings were illuminated. Besides this, scattered inmates had on the short fluorescent lights over their basins, so standing on the flats, looking up at all the galleries, reminded me of being on a dark street near some hulking apartment building where only a few tenants were still up.

But the lights didn’t really tell who was awake. I was a bit taken aback when, at eleven-thirty, simultaneous whoops broke out from all over the building. The cue, I realized, must have been the in-house radio station, tuned to 97.1 FM (“Hot 97—blazing hip-hop and R&B”), probably part of the countdown to midnight. Behind all the dark and quiet was a certain electricity, an expectancy I wasn’t used to feeling in B-block and didn’t fully understand. What did New Year’s Eve mean here?

I made my rounds. Greene had advised me not to shine my flashlight into inmates’ faces while they slept but rather just to aim it at the ceiling or the floor. That would cast enough light over the cell to make sure the inmate hadn’t hung up or slit his wrists. (“Just check for blood on the floor,” the officer had advised.) I stood for a few moments in front of each cell, checking whether an inmate was breathing by the rise and fall of sheets and blankets. Some sleeping inmates had left their lights on. Some wakeful inmates had turned their lights off. I was disconcerted by the cells with lights still on and inmates standing up, because they were invariably backlit and I couldn’t see their faces or what their hands were doing. Many of those awake were holding their mirrors out and chatting with their neighbors. I had to tell several to quiet down—there was supposed to be no talking at all at this hour.

Occasionally, I could eavesdrop. Turning the corner from S to X, I heard one inmate say to another wistfully, “Another year.”

“Yeah, another year closer to goin’ home, you heard?”

Unlike my friends, they weren’t celebrating the arrival of the New Year so much, it seemed, as closing the book on the old.

The other officers seemed jumpy. I heard my office phone ringing as I finished my rounds at about 11:45
P.M.
The sound was much more audible at night, I realized. The OIC downstairs told me to quiet down whoever it was that was speaking so loudly on X—a silly request, I thought, so close to midnight. Even so, I told her I’d go check on it. Then, as I walked away from the office to do so, the ringing phone summoned me back again.

It was her again. “And don’t go out on the gallery after this,” she warned.

“Okay, why not?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea already.

“Just don’t,” she repeated. “You’ll see, if you haven’t already heard about it.”

As I walked, I heard the big windows in the outer wall being cranked open by somebody downstairs. A cool breeze started blowing through the block on this winter night. Somebody was anticipating the events to come so that they wouldn’t have to walk out on the flats again for a while.

The first fires started maybe ten minutes before midnight. I saw them flickering way down the gallery on either side of my office, one a pile of magazines, one maybe a roll of toilet paper. Turning the corner to X-gallery, I saw three more, one of them larger, like a small campfire, sending bits of burning embers flying into the dark space beyond the fence. Smoke was suddenly everywhere, like the air in a living room where someone forgets to open the flue before starting a fire.

I looked across the open space to the outer wall, which was now a wall of reflections. In its windows were a series of twinkling flames from floor to ceiling. Every gallery, apparently, was like mine. Then began a sixty-second countdown, with maybe a hundred voices jumping in by the end: “… nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.” Then whoops and shouts pealed from every quarter, and howls and even a trombone blasting. Everyone rattled the gates and the block literally shook.

Meanwhile, down on the flats, three or four big fires were getting going. From small starter fires, inmates had been throwing out boxes and sheets of newspaper and Lord knows what else, trying to achieve the fuel density necessary for a real blaze. And in at least
two spots, they were succeeding. Flames from these fires were leaping some five feet into the air, producing a lot of cheers.

The fire alarm went off. It was a bell that, given the block’s acoustics, echoed loudly off everything and lent an aura of nightmare to the surreal scene. It sounded for about five minutes, and then, I guessed, was shut off manually. Less than a minute later, though, it began ringing again. One last time it was shut off, and then, apparently, the OIC gave up: The bell just rang and rang, unanswered, jangling my nerves and no doubt many others’. It put me in mind of those nuclear power plants where blasé technicians had grown so weary of false alarms that they’d begun to miss the real ones, with profound consequences.

Meanwhile, the block filled with smoke. This was not like the smoke from the mattress on U-and-Z a few days before but a thick, eye-burning, lung-choking smoke. The air moving through the windows—it was getting cold in the block—didn’t seem to diminish it at all. Under the stairway lights, you could see the dark smoke billowing, moving by in clouds.

CO Greene came up the stairs from R-and-W to take a look at my gallery. “Got any marshmallows?” he asked with a grin.

I slipped down the stairs to look at his gallery; the picture was the same. I walked over to chat with Larson. He had a blanket pulled over his head, was apparently asleep, absenting himself from the whole affair.

Back to my gallery. Twelve-thirty now. The officer on T-and-Y came downstairs and sniffed around disapprovingly. He was an old-timer and apparently had thought of a way to assuage his own irritating feelings of loss of control.

“You should put these out and write them up!” he said sternly.

“Probably,” I said. “But don’t you have your own fires to worry about?”

“Mine are all out.”

I looked at the windows on the outside wall, saw reflections of flickering flames just overhead. I pointed. “I don’t think so,” I said.

He left. It was hard to know how seriously to take the fires. The contents of individual cells could burn, and wood in the catwalk area between the galleries could burn, but not the block as a whole. I didn’t know about the roof. Smoke inhalation was a concern, but with the windows open there was some air circulation. Just to have something to do, I got out a fire extinguisher and
blasted the smoldering toilet roll nearest the office. It didn’t put out the flames, just sent it spinning down the gallery. Inmates nearby immediately complained about the smoke. I walked down and tried to stamp it out with my boots, but it smoldered all the more.

“Tough luck,” I said over their complaints.

I passed another fire on my way back to the office. The inmate who had probably set it appeared to be having second thoughts. He was trying to seal off the front of his cell by hanging plastic bags and blankets all over the bars—the smoke was that dense.

I sat in the office chair and closed my eyes, trying to get some of the smoke sting out. The phone rang. It was an officer outside the locked front gate of the block, wondering why nobody was answering the bell. He said he’d been standing there for fifteen minutes.

“I think it’s the same bell the fire alarm uses,” I told him. “As you can probably hear, the fire alarm bell is ringing.” I told him I’d go downstairs and let him in myself.

“Christ,” he shouted, stepping into the block and standing a little too close to the bell. We looked in both directions down the flats. The fires were as high as our heads. The sight, I thought, would give Sergeant Bloom a heart attack. “B-block’s out of its mind. I just came from A-block, and there’s no fires at all over there.”

“It’s because it’s so young here,” said the OIC, whose nerves seemed frayed.

I thought about the day I’d been helping another officer search a cell on Q-south. We’d taken an inmate’s junk outside his cell, piled it on the flats, and were searching the remaining contents one piece at a time. Unbeknownst to us, an inmate from some nearby cell—we never found out which one—was tossing lighted matches at the heap. Maybe he hated us, maybe he hated that inmate, maybe he didn’t know what he hated, but eventually the pile caught fire. We felt the heat from a sudden inferno on our backs and leaped out of the cell. Dragging corners of things that weren’t yet alight, we pulled the bonfire apart. It took a long time to burn out. Tonight’s would take longer.

“Guess they just need to let off some steam,” said Greene with a grin as we stood on R-and-W, still gazing at all the little fires as the clock approached 1
A.M.
1998.

“Huh,” I said. That explanation seemed a bit thin. I thought
about the photograph I’d stood next to in the basement hallway of the Academy countless times as we waited for chow, entitled something like
Smoldering Ruins of Auburn Prison
. There had been a massive riot there in 1929. I thought about my anger and frustration after I’d been slugged in A-block, my fantasy of the building and all its contents going up in flames. An incident later in B-block had called my bluff: I’d discovered a fire in the service area that ran down the center of the block; welders upstairs had unwittingly ignited a length of PVC pipe. When I’d blasted it with water from the fire extinguisher, the burning plastic had simply scattered and the fire spread, and for a moment I’d been terrified—the service area was full of old wood. The thing had finally gone out by itself, but not before an image of a stable full of burning horses had flashed through my mind.

Above all, though, I thought about the inmate I had spoken to on R-and-W who had explained to me the essential difference between the slave who worked in the field and the slave who worked in the house: The former, he said, wasn’t sad when the house burned down.

In fact, I thought, the slave who worked in the field, in a certain frame of mind, might even be happy to see the house burn down. I only wondered how bad things would have to get before he could see it burning down with himself inside.