by Mason West
My left ear is the first thing people notice, so it's good she is boohoohoo-ing into my right ear, which is whole and unscathed. She complains that I am ignoring her. A thunderstorm rages outside.
"Does your sleeping mean you want me to go home?" The windows flash with blue light, and I hold my breath for the thunder.
"Home" means to her husband in Topeka. Our friendship, romance, affair -- I don't know what we're doing -- is rooted in a mutual love of literature and hundreds of letters, post cards, and e-mails. We have written almost daily for years.
"No, it means I'm sleepy." I bury my head in my pillow, but she will not let up.
"You asked me to come down here and now you're ignoring me."
Half of my left ear was blown away by a shotgun blast in a botched convenience store robbery. I don't hear well in that ear. Her warm soft breasts are pressed against my back and shoulder. I would be aroused if I weren't exhausted. I've averaged four hours sleep per night since Sunday, and it is now Wednesday.
Now she is weeping onto my shoulder, saying, "Don't you know that I love you! I love you! How can you sleep when I'm telling you that I love you?"
Traveling in England she had fallen in love with an American tax refugee who, thoroughly pissed off with his Zen-based psychotherapist in Japan, had walked out in mid-session, packed a suitcase, and flew to London where he enrolled in a graduate school so hungry for cash that it accepted anyone with $5,000 into its creative writing program. Only 72 hours had elapsed between the last English class that he taught in Japan and the first that he attended in England. He wrote the psychotherapeutic Zen master some hate mail, telling him all he had done.
The Buddhist was so pleased with his patient's progress that he replied by FedEx, pronouncing Bob fully cured. In response, Bob took the tour of Scotch distilleries twice in a row.
Charlotte was enraptured by Bob, who droned for hours on the Marxist deconstruction of Jane Austen. Charlotte's husband never talked to her that way. It made her wet, she confessed by e-mail. She was in love, and love for Charlotte is a state of anxiety, so her hair began to fall out and clog the drain. Her husband confronted her, not for infidelity, but for the plumbing bill.
After a sleepless month of barely eating, and fretting that she may be bald in a few months, she received a frantic call from Bob at 3 a.m.
Bob declared he had quit taking his lithium because he felt pretty damn good, but now he was having a breakdown and was going back to Japan this morning to see his estranged wife Masumi and Bob Jr. Suddenly, all the calls during which Bob had begged Charlotte to join him on the literary road, East and West, seemed crazy. They would, he had said, fuck in the basement of Henry James's house. She could come among stacks filled with the original scrolls of Sei Shonagon. He would promise enduring love for her in Shelley and Keats' free-love cottage. They would symbolically splash water onto parched lips at a memorial in Hiroshima. Their souls would touch in a British Museum broom closet. They would spend weeks in the realm of the senses at a primitive Japanese country inn under Mt. Fuji. He had promised her all this and more, and she had been hungry enough to want to hear them and sometimes even to believe them, especially when she was alone again with her husband in Topeka. But with Bob's sudden flight back to Japan, the madness was suddenly clear to her. Charlotte's hair stopped falling out.
"How can you sleep when I love you?" she blubbers in my ear. My cellmate used to talk about women doing things like this. He called them "meltdowns."
Prison psychologists deemed my cellmate and me compatible. That meant we probably wouldn't kill each other -- but it still happens: one night the guys in the cell next to us quarreled. One of them was going to hang himself at breakfast from the railing along the upper deck of cells, but then the knot in his sheet didn't hold, so he fell and landed on a table atop six breakfast trays, crying and groaning with a broken leg, the sheet landing on him like a pouncing boa. The guards we called Siskel and Ebert -- short and pudgy with thick black hair, and tall, thin, and bald -- discovered that the would-be suicide had killed his cellmate in the night by suffocating him with a blanket.
Things like that happen because you're locked in this tiny metal room that vibrates subtly with the weary and bored groans of the 60 guys on the block, and you share that room with some other guy who has done something as violent and immoral as you have, and you're in there from lockdown at night until some pre-dawn hour when the sound of the tumblers electronically unlocking our doors seems like a lie, because there is no other sign of morning. It's cold and dark outside your scratched pane of Plexiglas with a view of dead brown weeds in the milky moonlight, and the spotlight caresses a chain-link fence topped by accordion spirals of razor wire. Our keepers could be pulling some cruel joke before marching us out onto the grounds to dispatch us in the dark with .38 slugs in our brain pans. Then some fellow inmates appear with the food cart outside the door of the cell block, and there is a comfort in that, because now you know that this is a production of fellow inmates, the lucky ones who have kitchen duty.
Overhead in the control room the tall, buxom, big-hipped guard allows the prison schedule to proceed. She sits before banks of switches controlling all the locks and sometimes she talks to us through a microphone and we yell back at her speaker so she can hear us. We eye her with a mixture of loathing for authority and the lust of deprivation. Rumor has it they put saltpeter in our coffee. We line up for trays of eggs and oatmeal, and sit silently to eat our chow. Then the medic comes to the door and hands us little paper cups of Streptomycin or Prozac or Valiums. We have to make a show of taking the pills, sticking out our tongues to show that we really swallow them.
We all had stories justifying why we robbed convenience stores and liquor stores or did things about which we would only mumble to our buddies in Day-Glo orange jumpsuits, but we all knew it was bullshit, so we didn't belabor the point. I ran a pen pals ad in a little magazine of essays published out of North Carolina. Charlotte's first letter appeared in mail call the day after the murder-suicide. It was a happy day, not just because of the mail, but because the tragedy during the night had given us something to talk about during the day. One rumor said they had a lovers' quarrel; the other said the guy was killed for snoring. We worried after that.
In jail I finished my GED and started work on a BA in English. I had done a pretty good job hiding the nature of my residence, and Charlotte believed only that I lived in a dormitory that mandated a lot of numbers in my address. We read the short novels of Henry James together, and I wrote her everyday, and somehow she found the time to write back just as often. I especially liked The Turn of the Screw, and she dreamed of going to England to see James's English house.
Eventually I prepared Charlotte for the truth about me in a series of 12 prepared paragraphs. I nested one paragraph at a time in my daily letters to her. She wasn't happy with the news, but, she said, she cared too much to let me go.
In my sophomore year I got parole. Charlotte wrote a letter that may have helped the parole board lift the latch. I rented an apartment in a student ghetto in Austin and found a job in a portrait studio, which was a joke because none of those people, dressed in their picture-best, knew I was a jailbird. The state helped pay my tuition -- "to reclaim me," my parole officer said, though they had already claimed me pretty hard by locking me up and then releasing me to counseling and to a parole officer who liked to nose around in my underwear drawer as much as he liked to read my pay stubs.
Over the next two years Charlotte talked less about literature and more about her husband and the myriad details of her domestic life.
Meanwhile, my interest in writing became an obsession. I studied in the morning and worked in the afternoons and evenings in the portrait studio where my head filled with notes on how I would write about the families I arranged in grotesquely happy groupings -- the affairs, the incest, the father passing out at the dinner table, all those filthy secrets hidden the way a layer of Covergirl hides a zit boiling just below the skin. My circus stories about an elephant nibbling off my ear with his trunk got great smiles from children, and I sold a lot of pictures with those smiles, and that made my employer happy enough to give me raises, and that made my parole officer happy, and that kept me out of jail. But it was the certainty that a shotgun lay behind every counter that kept me out of convenience stores.
Monday Charlotte and I went for coffee. I was feeling like I had always carried the weight of our conversations, and I was waiting for her to talk, so we sat suspended in silence. Finally Charlotte broke down and said, "So...?" She looked at me with her eyes bugging out of their sockets.
"`So?' Does that mean you want me to talk? Why don't you just say `Speak, boy! Speak!?' Arf arf!" I gave her my best Yorkshire Terrier falsetto.
Now Charlotte and I are having another one of those talks which convinces me more than ever that we all need shrinks.
"So, you lured me from my husband," she says, "and now you leave me stranded? I know you don't love me, but have you no kindness with which to pity me? I may as well burn all your letters when I get home."
She's testing me because we've always fantasized how those letters would be the mother lode for our biographers. "Hush, and listen to the storm outside," I say. God is bowling strikes.
"If only I'd never subscribed to that stupid stupid magazine with your ad -- `a small East Texas junior college,' my God! I was so stupid and naive to write to you, and then to believe everything you said. Where will I go now? Can I hope for my husband's help after this? I am stranded in Topeka. I can't even find Cotswold cheese. There is no hope."
I realize she resigned herself to failure long ago by clinging to me. She recites the words "I love you, I love you" as an inviolable oath that will keep me with her as her dream of writing dies. She is desperately afraid of living, but she is even more afraid of dying alone.
I tell her she must leave.
And this morning, while it still seems too dark to believe the day is here, I say to her again, just in case she has rationalized her way out of her eviction notice, "I want you gone by the time I get home today."