You Are Free to Go. Sarah Yaw

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СКАЧАТЬ that, Ed come to me to talk. He told me terrible things that were in his heart. He told me that one night he heard his hija crying and he got up and went to her room and saw her behind the bars of her crib and he flipped. He hit her hard because he couldn’t tell the difference between his hija and one of us, you know? He said he forgot where he was and who she was. He cried. That’s how hard his heart was from this place. He told me this in return for helping him.

      “When you arrived, I did not like you,” Jorge laughs and Papito jumps from side to side.

      “I remember. You don’t need to remind me of all that,” Moses says, the bashful burn of a teen on his cheeks.

      “When I found you,” Jorge laughs. “You were mean. Like a mongoose. You had a quick bite and you’d take anything you could get from someone. Moses, be careful. I know you took that mirror from Lila. You must return it to her, entiendo?”

      Moses looks away. “Get on with it,” he says.

      “I had a dream, you see. Jesús Cristo come to me and he showed me the blood on my hands. He told me that blood is the blood of passion. My crime was hunger, hurt, and fear. I recognized this in you. Your crimes were like mine. You killed that woman you loved because she beat you.

      “I know why I’m here,” Moses interrupts.

      “Moses, you must be honest about your crime or it will not go away. It will stay with you in death. You killed her because you wanted to save yourself. When she heard your stutter and laughed, when she beat you, you felt it in your body. The blood is on your hands, Moses, not your soul. You will be saved, but you must be honest. This is why you don’t make the phone calls no more. You must never give in to the temptation to avoid your punishment and the truth about the crime you have committed. You must promise me, even after I die, you will live an honest punishment. If you have served your time well, you will be saved. No calls and no more stealing, claro?”

      Moses sneers. He doesn’t understand why he’s getting a lecture, suddenly, or how Jorge knew about the compact. “Claro,” he grunts.

      “Good. Let’s thank Díos that we are going to be saved, and get a good sleep. You have much to prove tomorrow, mi amigo. I remember when I did my studies how worthy I felt. I’m proud of you, Moses. Now turn and give me some privacidad.”

      Moses lies on his side, facing the wall and he hears Jorge sit on the can right next to his head. He shits. Thankfully it is not the unhealthy shit of an old, worried man, as it’s been. Jorge finishes his business, washes his hands and face in the small sink, and gets into bed.

      On nights like tonight, Moses believes Jorge. He believes that goodness, even here in this rotten place, is possible, and that there will be peace on the other side. The pain of the procedures of his days, the humiliations that weigh him so heavily each night will all dissolve when he relinquishes his hold on this life. And he believes his passing will be peaceful because he will have lived out his sentence, paid for his crimes. He imagines that when he leaves he’ll be so pure, leaving his body will be the feeling he has when he looks at Lila and his breath suspends because she is innocence. He doesn’t need breath in that moment, looking at her. He rides on some other fuel. He has decided that the moment he leaves his body will feel like this; only it will be sweeter for every night he’s spent here. He promises himself he’s going to return Lila’s compact tomorrow.

      Moses turns his head and looks over at Jorge, already a lump under the thin blanket in the bed beside him. He thanks God for his friend, and he prays someday there will be a peaceful end to it all.

      Moses wakes clean and calmed from a death-like sleep. He rolls over onto his back and looks to the ceiling. There are eight black spiders running to the far right corner. He looks around to see if it is his cell he’s in or maybe heaven, and when he does he sees Jorge twisted and stiff. His torso hanging between their beds, arms over his head, Gina’s letters crumpled in his gnarled old hands, his knees bent up tenting the sheet, bruises on his skyward face.

      Moses sits on the edge of his bed rereading his paper, making small edits with a pencil. Ed Cavanaugh comes in and sits down across from him on Jorge’s cot. It’s already stripped and vacant, exposing its cheap and lumpy impressions. He only died that morning, yet all his belongings, the letters he’d thumbed to shreds and the pictures he worshiped of Gina, her diploma from Brown, are already gone. But the smell is still thick from his body’s release. They mopped, but it just moved it around. The sparrows have been flying in and out in a frightened panic all morning. The chirping frenzied.

      Cavanaugh looks tight and red-eyed.

      Moses tries to ignore him and keeps rereading the same sentence, but he can’t focus. “The doctor’s already been here and filed his report,” Moses says.

      Moses knew Jorge’s death would interrupt the regular schedule and the guards would tighten security in the block in case tempers flared, but Ed’s visit concerns him. It isn’t officially necessary. And despite Jorge’s final directive to be kind to Cavanaugh, he just can’t make himself.

      Moses looks at Ed and he’s instantly pissed off at Jorge. He doesn’t like how he found him half on the floor like that. It agitated Moses. Death, like Lila, was supposed to be sweet. La dolce vida, Jorge said. But Jorge struggled. And Moses knows he wasn’t nice to the doctor; word must have reached Cavanaugh.

      The doctor asked him a lot of boring questions taken straight from the form he was filling out. At approximately what time did you find Jorge Padilla?

      “How would I know? I don’t own a watch,” Moses said. “What time did Miller say I yelled for him? I yelled for him when I found Jorge, so you should ask him.” The doctor didn’t react to Moses’ crankiness. He was civilian. An older Italian man who stood in the doorway of the cell with medical disinterest and recorded Moses’ answers as coldly as if he had lifted the information from a toe tag.

      And can you describe in detail what you saw?

      “I saw a pathetic, old Ecuadorian,” Moses said, “with blue lips, lying in a pool of his own piss, smelling like shit, clutching a bundle of letters from his daughter, who incidentally, he couldn’t anymore distinguish from the girl he murdered forty-eight years ago.”

      The doctor scribbled some notes and asked, And had he demonstrated any unusual behavior lately?

      “No,” Moses answered, “Did you hear what I just said to you? He was fucking demented.” The doctor didn’t answer him. He wrote a few more quick notes and left without saying goodbye. Moses returned to his paper. He had found his conclusion in the night. Aschenbach, he wrote in pencil on the draft, had betrayed his true nature because he feared death. Because of this, he left behind what he believed in, making him vulnerable to evil and turning him into what he’d once despised.

      Moses looks up from the paper. Ed is acting like he has something on him. Moses wonders what the doctor told him. “When they examined Jorge they discovered a large contusion on the right side of his head and a black eye. Do you know anything about that, Moses?”

      “He had epilepsy. Have you ever seen a seizure?”

      “So you didn’t hear anything during the night?”

      “I was asleep,” Moses says.

      “You don’t seem upset. What’s your problem?”

      “Look, believe what you want. He was my friend. I didn’t touch him.”

      “You СКАЧАТЬ