You Are Free to Go. Sarah Yaw

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СКАЧАТЬ so they think he’s old and weak and they tell him go die and call him motherfucker. His pride doesn’t suffer from this. Moses is a survivor. And he, like Aschenbach, believes that the position he’s earned through his hard work proves he’s above the lowlifes.

      He tells Lila he feels connected to Aschenbach in this very way. Then she says, “I find it strange, frankly, that you think Aschenbach is the sort of character you’d want to identify with, given your feelings about homosexuals and pedophiles.”

      Humiliation aches in his teeth, and anger tightens his tendons. Why did he speak before he knew the story? Lila has promised to ask her professor if he would read and grade a critical literary paper on “Death in Venice” if Moses were to write one. She knows his greatest desire is to go to college. The paper was her idea. She probably regrets it now.

      He puts his hand in his pocket and fingers her hair. He’s not angry at Lila. Lila is pure as snow with that flossy, bouncy hair and that smooth, motherly skin and her practical pants and her practical rubber shoes that protect her feet from all the standing. Lila is the perfect, pure woman. He’s angry with Jorge for waking in fits of fury and laughter last night while Moses tried to read. He’s angry at Miller for forcing them all to go to chow early this morning, cutting into his reading time, for holding him in the gallery for an extra long time before he was cleared to report to work. He’s angry with himself. For getting old. For not being able to see.

      He stays quiet for a while and focuses on the job at hand, sorting the letters by block and by cell, pulling all the letters for inmates who can’t receive mail for one reason or another.

      Lila returns to her post on the other side of the low wall that divides the mailroom and is silent, too. (Moses must always stay on his side of the wall. Always.) Lila focuses on opening the mail and removing contraband: joints sent by lovers, baggies of heroin sent by brazen friends, razor blades sent by sworn enemies. She dumps them into a bin where all the contraband goes, then she reads the letters with a big black pen in her hand, blocking out anything she deems dangerous or incendiary.

      Moses has seen some wild things working in the mailroom. Letters sent by women to that Berkowitz son of a bitch years after his incarceration, panties sent to the preppie Central Park strangler. Who were the women who asked for it like that? Who sent underwear and overtures to these disgusting men? He distracts himself thinking of this. Thinking how low all the people around him are. When his sorting is over, before he loads up his satchel, before he straps it over his shoulder for his daily delivery, Moses admits, “I haven’t gotten very far in the story. I promise to finish it over the weekend.”

      “I look forward to talking to you about it Monday then, Moses. I’ll see you when you return,” she says.

      The prison is a walled city. It runs east-west and was built along a river by the very prisoners it was to house. The river, which Moses has only seen twice, is the reason for the location of the prison. It provided power for Industry, which was at the heart of the philosophy that built this place: inmates would find redemption through labor. The goods manufactured here would offset the costs of the prisoners’ incarceration.

      During a period of budget crisis a decade and a half ago, the state attempted to defray the costs of a growing prison population by hiring fewer corrections officers. There was a decision at the highest levels to evaluate the responsibilities of the prison guards and identify tasks that could be assumed by prison labor. By law, prisoners are allowed to send and receive mail. Each of the five stacked rows in each of the four cell blocks that run the length of the complex houses an official U.S. mailbox. It was the daily job of the COs to empty this box, deliver the mail to the outgoing bins in the mailroom, and then retrieve the mail for their row and deliver it to each of the inmates. Over the years, there had been complaints from the officers. More than a few COs felt like servants and were gladly willing to offer up these tasks to a trustworthy inmate. The state agreed, and an inmate in each facility was identified to work in the mailroom and deliver the mail to those who could not retrieve their own for reasons of illness, age, or punishment. The matter of emptying the US mailboxes was reserved for the COs; it was considered distasteful by all to give an inmate a key to anything, let alone the property of the United States government. So a job was created, and Moses chosen by the Warden himself.

      His rounds, therefore, are the proudest part of his day. And he is endowed, as he leaves the administration building at the most easterly end and ventures from the clean and respectable offices out into the shaded alley between the hospital and administration and then out into the sun that shines on the yard—a large concrete court flanked by five-story blocks, built block on block of stone, and striped like old-school uniforms with lines of barred windows—with a sense of importance that grows each day. As he carries his bag he feels the weight of his office, a position that dwells in the in-between, and his confidence grows. He is, according to the historical intentions of the place, a success. He walks along the cavernous walls of block housing that stack men on men with the stride of a man who has earned a place, his glasses hidden in his breast pocket.

      Moses decides on a few things to talk about when he sees Lila after his rounds so her lasting impression of him for the weekend won’t be that he has subconscious sexual desires for little boys. He plans to ask about her garden, about the bulbs she planted last fall, to ask what the trees in the park by her house look like. Have they begun to bud out? Are there flowers? Are there leaves? There are no trees in the prison yard like there used to be, so Moses doesn’t know spring anymore, except its upbeat warmth in the breezes; he doesn’t know fall except its tugging chill that pulls at his bones. If it wasn’t for Lila and the decorations she puts out with each upcoming holiday like a kindergarten teacher, Christmas-less years would pass unnoticed. At Easter, there are pastel egg cut-outs on the walls, for Halloween, a witch, at Christmas a crèche made from pictures cut out of magazines by the porters who clean the mailroom: The three wise men, Fidel Castro, Omar Sharif, and Yasser Arafat; Mother Mary, Benazir Bhutto; the baby Jesus, Brad Pitt.

      Moses passes a line of porters and he nods at them. “Moses,” they say, acknowledging him respectfully because of his job. He enters A block at the center of the yard. He climbs the steps and opens the door with purpose, walks through standing tall so his number can be seen on the breast of his green shirt, and the guards open doors for him. As he makes his way through the gates into the lower gallery of A block and starts down row one giving out letters to keeplocks, he acts like he’s as free as a CO. When he is finished with his row, he strides haughtily along the cells so as to inspire a little envy in those not allowed to move about as he is, and makes his way to the stairs at the front entrance of the gallery. A CO unlocks the gate for him and he ascends into the birdcage. Rows two through five have long pathways that run along the cells, and there is a cage of bars that runs from the second story floor to the ceiling to keep men from falling to their deaths. Moses doesn’t like the upper rows. He doesn’t live on one. He lives on the ground floor because of his age and because of his good behavior. Nowhere else in the prison does Moses feel more confined than in the birdcage, so he keeps to the outside of the pathway to distance himself from the men in their cells and he stays out of trouble. Until he doesn’t. One of the letters he’s palming slips out of his hand and glides gently to the floor. Just the corner of it slides under the cell bars. Moses glances at the cell’s inhabitant. There’s one quiet, angry-looking Latino lying on his cot reading a porno with Spanish all over the front of it. And that burns Moses’ ass, all the Spanish in America. He bends down to grab the letter and says, “Learn some English, muchacho.” Before he knows it, the guy’s at the bars, and as Moses stands, a fist meets him in the temple. The punch sends him across the pathway. The bars keep him from going over the edge to the gallery floor below. He sees stars. The guy yells something at him in Spanish and jumps around like an ape. Moses, just for fun, turns his back to him and farts audibly, flips him the bird and takes off down the path, his satchel hitting his hip in time with his heavy breath.

      The block is mostly empty. It’s three p.m., rec time for A block, a quiet time. But all the keeplocks are at СКАЧАТЬ