The Interloper (24 page)

I’d imagined a victory speech at the end of my travails, a justice-was-done-one-way-or-another coda to cap off a blisteringly honest narrative of one man’s search to bring balance to the scales of justice. I’d imagined, even as I knew things were getting difficult, presenting my story to Patty, helping her understand why I’d done what I’d done. The unveiling of a normal life. The lights were out, people crouched behind couches. But no one ever came into the room, no one yelled “Surprise!”

Patty and her family cut me off completely once it was clear that I was 100% guilty of the charges brought against me. My aunt and uncle, no great communicators in the best of times, stonewalled me. I resigned myself to living out the rest of my years with no one in my life. Institutionalization, meals, exercise, reading, keeping to myself. I would be a hermit in my own mind, a brain in a jar. Bounded in a nut, a king of infinite space. I’d seen them around the prison. Clarence had pointed them out. They were the shell-shocked, the dazed, the inmates who had broken out long ago, mentally, never to return. I would join their ranks, await the final reckoning.

Except that I am directly responsible for destroying a human life. I constantly bump my head against the fact that I can’t turn back time and undo it. I suffer the most acute form of regret; my mind will not accept what has happened and can only think of trying to undo what I have done. I am all reverberations and shock waves. I look around the prison yard at other men, at those who are in for murder, and I wonder: You have eliminated someone from the planet. How does that knowledge not crush you every second of every day?

There is only one way to make it stop. Sleep, or its cousin.

More than once I assembled a noose out of bedsheets. I strung up the noose, I put my head through it, but I could not make the leap off the bunk. At first, Clarence watched with amusement and curiosity. After a while, he dozed through my set-ups. I could not bear the cessation of consciousness, even if that consciousness was pure torture to experience. Each time I could not kill myself, the torture grew worse, because I had approached the boundary between life and death and had decided to turn back. I had pushed someone else over that line, but I myself could not cross it. My own death is a joke to me, but a joke I cannot bear to tell. Night after night. The physical facts of prison are nothing compared to what is going on inside my head.

I began this account eight weeks ago, believing then that only by writing my confessions could I save myself, restore balance again, cauterize all the old wounds. I offered up the only thing I had left, a few extra ghosts—may they persist in the memory. But there is no balance, the wounds bleed forever, I am not saved. The words keep coming, and nothing changes. You can talk until the front yard is flooded. All the talking in the world doesn’t make a difference.

I still am haunted by that look of Raven’s, by the confidence of his glare, and by the glint of recognition that lay behind it, as if he knew why I had come, knew that I would not succeed. How I wanted to watch his body crumple to the ground as I filled it with bullets! I could have lived with that, extracting from him in reverse the pain he’d inflicted on Calvin Junior, on the Stockings,
on Lily Hazelton. All the damage, compressed into dense pellets of lead, backed up with gunpowder, finally coming home to roost, all over Raven’s body.

But he escaped the fate I had so carefully constructed for him.

I would have shed exactly one tear for the author of those letters as I pumped him full of bullets, and that would have been that. Instead I killed Portia, somehow, and the still-living Raven of my mind cannot shake off the speck of humanity I’ve stuck to him.

It is the noblest mistake to see humanity in everyone.

Fifty-six days have passed. Shard of a life. Every morning when I awaken in my cell, I picture Patty, over a thousand miles away. She’s pulling closed the bedroom curtains, darkening our room, crawling under the covers for another day of sleep. I see the glass of water at her bedside, the water evaporating. There’s no one there to refill it.

We get two hours a day outside for exercise. Yesterday I found myself at the edge of the yard, standing by the first row of chain-link fencing, with an unobstructed view. They set this place down on the plains, a hundred miles from anywhere. On the blue-gray horizon, I saw the faintest outline of those majestic mountains to the west, the mountains separating me from all I have known and loved, the mountains in which the Stockings lost their CJ, the mountains in which Raven now roams free. I stood close to the fence, the wind stinging my eyes. The peaks began to change shape. The mountains drifted across the horizon. Clouds. A buzzer sounded. It was time to go back inside.