The Enchanted (2 page)

The lady sees York is a small man, bent and oddly formed, as if his bones grew funny. Even in the cage, he holds himself with a sense of contained force.

His ankles are chained above his paper slippers. A heavy bull chain is attached to one ankle cuff, and the bull chain threads back between the wood bars to a huge bolt embedded in the stone wall. The bull chain is in case he tries any funny business. The funny business never ends up very funny, I have noticed.

The lady sees that York's front teeth are oddly notched with a strange little groove in the middle—as if God, or the devil, wanted to fork him. These notched teeth are surprisingly clean. He brushes them three times a day, he will tell anyone with his monkey grimace. He flosses with bits of thread he pulls from the cover on his cot.
Four hundred count, he chortles to anyone who is listening outside his cell door. York keeps up a constant litany on the row. Sometimes he will repeat the same soliloquy for days, until the guards swear they will go mad for listening, and then he will retreat inside his cell and stare at his hands.

Y
ork likes to think about what other people are thinking. He believes it gives him an edge. He says that twelve years on the row have honed his psychic abilities, but then, he claims, he was always psychic. Just as a blind man learns to smell better, York says his life has helped him read minds. The intense deprivation of our dungeon, he says, has made him better at what he does best: getting inside your head.

Of course, when he says this, the guards roll their eyes and comment that the only head York gets inside is his own.

Right now York believes the lady is thinking about him. He thinks she is feeling sorry for him, her poor new client who has spent twelve years waiting for death.

The lady isn't thinking that at all. She isn't even thinking about York. She is wondering how bad the roads will be on the way home. The spring weather has been fickle, and floods might close the single road leading away from our enchanted place. If that happens, she will have to stay overnight at the nearest motel, with its clanking radiators and mildew smell. Her mind is disconnected from
her new client. It works better for her this way. She hasn't even brought a notebook to the interview.

The lady smiles at York and relaxes into her chair. She has been on her feet all day, and sitting is a treat. The window shows the sky is full of dark rain clouds, as dark as slate. The yellow light fixture above them is warm.

In a prison full of liars, the lady has the advantage of being completely authentic. Even a man like York—especially a man like York—can see there is no game in her smile. There is warmth and kindness and something that looks like steel. You can tell me anything, her eyes say, because I will see the beauty in everything you say.

Eventually, York has to say something, anything, has to make his mouth move and ease the friction from his throat. The words tumble out as rough as rocks, but they are soon worn smooth, and more and more he hears himself talking—blessed surcease, a person just to
listen
to me—and the vowels round and the consonants grow into planets that become the universe that expands in the light in her dark eyes. She hears me, he thinks wildly—she
hears
me.

York talks and talks until his words sound like poetry even to him. He tells her why he has volunteered to die. “It isn't just that it is torture,” he says, “being locked in a cage. It's never being allowed to touch anyone or go outside or breathe fresh air. I'd like to feel the sun again just once.”

Her eyes show a sudden distance. What he said is true, but it isn't true enough.

“Okay. I'm tired of being meaningless,” he admits. “I'm done, okay?”

He talks about the confused mess inside of him. He says everyone thinks sociopaths are super-smart criminals, but he is just a messed-up guy who doesn't know why he does what he does. Except there is like a switch in him, and when the switch flips on, he cannot stop.

“If it made sense, I would tell you,” he says. “When you kill people, it is supposed to make sense. But it doesn't. It never does.”

The lady nods. She understands.

With each secret he tells her, her eyes get darker and more satisfied. York can see from the precious slot of window that the rain clouds have lifted and the sky itself is dark. He has been speaking
forever
; he has told her secrets he has been afraid to tell anyone, secrets he suspects she knew all the time.

The look in her eyes is of a person who drank from the end of a gun barrel and found it delicious. Her eyes are filled with a strange sort of wondrous sadness, as if marveling at all the beauty and pain in the world.

She stands up. For the first time he notices how tiny she is. She looks like a little dark-haired sparrow. Her equally dark, oblong bird eyes could be his eyes, her narrow skull his own. But her bones are long and finely made, while his are crooked and bent.

She raises her hand in a gesture that looks like goodbye but also says yes.

He lifts his hand cautiously. His fingers are thin from
lack of use. He holds his fingers out of the cage. It is the eternal gesture of hope that says
touch me.

She knows the rule. Death row inmates are not allowed to have human touch. It is part of their punishment. She could lose her license for that gesture alone. So she gives him another gift instead. She steps just close enough for him to feel her human warmth.

The warden hates her. But how we love her, the lady.

W
hen I first fell so long ago, I was placed in general population—Cellblock A, what they call the Hall of the Lifers.

I knew the dangers of prison for someone like me. I was so scared that I hid in my cell when the doors clanged open for yard times. I waited silently until the other men had all gone down the line, then I slipped along the walls until I made it to the prison library.

I can still remember the path from that cell to the library: two turns with the hand you write. Down the stairs. Then turn the opposite direction, like the way you turn off water.

I wasn't very good at reading back then. The last time I remember being in a real school was when I was eight. It was a little schoolhouse near my grandparents' place. I remember the smell of wet woolen socks on the ancient radiator, and the freshly shaved red neck of the older boy who sat in front of me. Those are the only details I can remember. As for most men in prison, my memories of the outside have become faint over time. The outside world
has become the unreal world. When I dream, my dreams are of the inside.

Reading was hard. Even the simple words stumped me. But I kept going back, mostly because I had no other place to go. Eventually, I came to like puzzling over the words in the dusty sunlight that came in the barred windows and lay in long slashes across the wooden table.

Bit by bit it got easier, and when it did, the floodgates opened, and all of a sudden I was reading. I read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. I read Louis L'Amour and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
,
Wuthering Heights
and the Best American Short Stories collections. I read every book I could on nature, so when the author took us on a walk in the woods, I was there, too. I fell completely for the dark strangeness of Sidney Sheldon and the magic of Ray Bradbury. I read my favorite books over and over again and each time found new things inside them, as if the writers had put in new words in my absence. I'd be reading a passage from my favorite,
The White Dawn
, by James Houston, and all of a sudden there would be a new paragraph that I could swear I had never read before.

I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the Columbia Indians made their longhouses, or how to make a solar toilet, or how to dry bear meat in the sun. I could tell you all of this if I could talk, but instead the words stayed inside of me and marveled.
This I could accept, or so I told myself for a long time. Because the words were there, and they carried me to another place.

After many years of this, the warden came in. The chair I sat in had two deep grooves in the seat where my skinny shanks fit. The area of my table had come to be known as for me and me alone.

The warden was brand-new back then, and a lot younger. His hair was glossy and black, and his face was tanned. He looked like a man who went boating. He held his hand as if proud of his thick gold wedding ring. Everyone joked about how he paraded around his young wife when she visited.

He stood next to my spot at the table where I stacked the books like walls around me. He picked up
Butterfly Collecting for Young Boys
. “Here you are, just like they said,” he said.

I nodded, swallowing.

“They say you don't go to the yard or to mess.”

No. I shook my head. I wanted to say: The books are enough.

He paused, turning the book over to see a photo of a boy on the back cover. The boy was wearing a short-sleeve shirt. He had a face full of obligatory freckles and a wide innocent smile. He was holding a butterfly net and stood against a field covered in dazzling blue flowers.

“I appreciate you staying out of trouble.”

I knew what the warden meant: He appreciated me staying out of the yard, away from the inmates who liked
to hurt me, because he was afraid I might someday hurt them back.

“Fellow like you is smart to play it safe,” he added, putting the book gently down in front of me.

The other inmates in the library that day were watching all of this with their jaws open. One was a man I knew—he lived in my cellblock. He was a huge, muscled ruddy man with narrow teeth turned in like a rabbit's. I knew as soon as I left, he would lumber up and saunter after me, following me down the dark, empty stairs.

The ruddy man watched the warden talk to me. His smug grin turned to puzzlement at what the warden did next.

The warden smiled and patted me on the back. The warden—patting me.

And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but always had room to be read again. I became fascinated with how writers did that. How did they make a story feel so complete and yet so open-ended? It was like painting a picture that changed each time you looked at it.

Some of the things in the books troubled me. The high school biology textbooks reorganized my mind into epicenters of new worlds until the cells of my own walls began to race. The color plates in the medical textbooks showing the insides of people made me shake. It was as if
someone had planted these books in the library to remind me of a question that had troubled me for so long: What lives inside the coils inside people? Why did God create us with so many winding, dark puzzles? In times like these, I would have to go back to something comforting like
The White Dawn.

Sometimes, when reading a book, I would think of the other people who might have touched it before it was donated. A nice woman who lay down with her baby for a nap might have held the book I was reading. I could see her, lying in a sundress on faded rose-printed cotton sheets, the book splashed open in the sunlight. A little of that sun could have soaked into the pages I was touching.

After a time, it seemed that the world inside the books became my world. So when I thought of my childhood, it was dandelion wine and ice cream on a summer porch, like Ray Bradbury, and catching catfish with Huck Finn. My own memories receded and the book memories became the real memories, far more than the outside, far more even than in here.

B
ut after many more years, I did the other bad thing, and they sent me here.

When you do a really bad thing inside a prison, they don't have many choices. They can kill you and call it an accident, or they can send you into the dungeon. I got sent to the dungeon.

The doors here no longer bang open. If they ever did,
I would panic. I would hide on my cot with the blanket over my head. There is no library down the hall with two rights and a left. There is now only me, in my cell, trapped forever. But the trusty still brings me books on his cart.

And the warden comes. Every few weeks he passes my cell, silently pushing a book through the slot. I wait on my cot, blanket over my head, and after I hear the book drop, I scramble for it.

The warden always seems to know which book to bring. When the sun grows dusty hot outside the walls and the sky is gunslinger blue, the warden brings a western. When rain slates against the towers and the world has gone hopeless with gray, it is Bible stories. When the halls ring with the cries of riot and the bars of my own cell rattle with pain, the warden drops a soft book on the floor, solace in its pages: the collected poems of Walt Whitman.

And oh, my favorites, like the tastes of childhood. Every few months the warden passes me
The White Dawn
, and for a few precious days I traverse the open heavens on hard-packed moonlit snow and see the blue splashing arctic lights, and I fill my belly with frozen seal meat and laugh with my Inuit friends.

W
hen I first started reading, I didn't know how to sound some words. I would whisper them inside my head. Sioux, paisley, ruche. Obsolete, rubric, crux. How do you say
those words? How do they sound when others say them? Are they as pretty as they sound inside my head?

Once, early on, I tried endlessly to say the word “Sioux” inside my head. I am still not sure how it sounds. Is the X silent? I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?

I decided that in the end, it doesn't matter. In my mind, the words sound right. They chase each other around like boats on a lake after dusk, and who cares if my metaphors or semicolons or whatever are correct.