Lights Out

Something clicked in the steel walls of F-Block. Eddie heard Prof sit up on the bottom bunk. “Hey, big guy, whaddya know?” he said. The barred door slid open. “We’re free.” Prof had a sense of humor. Not as good as Rafael DeJesus’s though. DeJesus had been really funny. He’d even performed at Catch A Rising Star once, after jumping bail.

Prof went into the corridor. Eddie heard it fill quickly with restless, noisy men. They’d been in lockdown for five days, all because Willie Boggs had lost another appeal. That had led to a demonstration of Willie’s supporters outside, a demonstration covered by local news and therefore seen inside. The footage had fed delusions of hope on death row, causing a commotion that spread to Max and then to F-Block. Lock-down reminded everyone what the situation really was and that all Willie’s pastors, ACLU lawyers, and anti-death penalty crusaders-including the head of Amnesty International, the justice ministers of two Scandinavian countries, and Mother Teresa-couldn’t put Humpty together again. The only appeal left was to the governor’s clemency, of which in his ten years of office he had shown none.

Eddie climbed down off the bunk. He took his Remington cordless from his lockless locker and shaved his face by touch. Mirrors had been confiscated years ago, following a shard slashing on the third tier. Fat drops of blood had plopped down onto the floor outside F-31, as though from a roof after the passing of a red storm. Eddie ran his fingers over the top of his head, felt stubble. He shaved that too, feeling the razor buzz against his naked skull. Not unpleasant.

He went out, into the line of men moving toward the checkpoint that led to the mess hall. He smelled their smells, saw the details on their unsunned skins, the details he always saw, couldn’t not see, although they no longer made an impression: the scars, the bruises, the dried semen stains, the open sores, the tattoos. Eddie had a tattoo on the inside of his left biceps, self-administered with a sharpened pocket comb and a bottle of red food coloring during his only stay in the hole, at the end of year two. In block letters about half an inch high it said “Yeah?” It was a joke he no longer got.

Eddie passed through the scanner but turned into the east wing before he got to the mess hall, and walked to the library. “Not eatin’, Nails?” said the C.O. outside the door, patting him down. Eddie went inside, making no reply. “Got to keep your strength up,” the guard called after him. “For when you’re in the real world.”

Eddie sat in his favorite chair, the only one in the library not bolted to the floor. Left over from an earlier era, it was a sagging armchair, spavined and sprung, too heavy to be used as a weapon. He was almost finished with the morning paper, in the middle of a book review on the last page that was panning a novel because it contained “elements of melodrama,” when Willie Boggs shuffled in, a C.O. on either side, loosely grasping his mahogany-colored arms above the elbow. Willie had a proud face and erect bearing; he only shuffled because of the shackles around his ankles. He saw Eddie and nodded. Eddie nodded back. Willie looked the way he always did, except that the skin bordering his lips might have been a little chalky. He took a few books off the law shelf and sat at a table. The C.O.s unlocked his handcuffs and sat beside him, eyes glazing almost at once. Willie opened a book, found the page he wanted, took out a note pad, started writing. He was the best writ-writer in the system. That’s why he was still alive.

Eddie folded up the paper and took down the collected Coleridge. Coleridge opened to “The Ancient Mariner” by itself; in fact to page 248, where the central problem was. Eddie stared at the stanza:

“God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-

Why look’st thou so?”-With my cross-bow

I shot the ALBATROSS.

No explanation, unless you count the small-print text in the left-hand margin-“The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen”-and Eddie didn’t consider it much of an explanation, didn’t even know if the small print was part of the poem or added later by someone else. No explanation. In one verse everything’s cool with the bird, in the next the guy plugs it. Why? Eddie had been through it a thousand times, without getting any closer to the answer. That didn’t mean much. Eddie knew there must be plenty he didn’t understand about “The Ancient Mariner.” For example, it had only recently struck him that there might be a reason the mariner stopped only one of the three wedding guests, instead of telling the story to all of them. Maybe the wedding guest wasn’t saying, “Wherefore stopp’st thou me?” but, “Wherefore stopp’st thou me?” So Eddie wasn’t sure he even understood the first verse.