[original]
Will demanded answers. Instead, he was tossed into a cell at the very end of Cell Block Something (he hadn’t got ten a good look at the sign when he was dragged inside). One of dozens of burly faceless guards Will felt he had encountered since his arrest pushed him in wordlessly as Will spun around on his heels just in time to see the door slammed and locked in front of him. Will’s first instinct was to grab the bars and look out at the rest of the prison. He was clearly bewildered and was breathing so hard he wasn’t inhaling anything. Someone in a cell across the hall laughed at him gently and Will whirled around to look at his cellmate for the first time.
“Hey,” said the large man, reclining on his bed with a literary magazine. He was an imposing figure, even lying down. He had the girth of someone who had played football in high school before hanging up his helmet to become fat after graduation. “My name is James,” he said. He paused, then looked a bit irritated that he was not given a suitable reply. He decided Will needed some help. “What’s yours?”
Will struggled to speak, collecting himself before he was able to answer the question.
“Nice to meet you, Will. What are you in for?”
“They say I murdered my wife,” Will stuttered.
“What are you stuttering about?” James asked, obviously annoyed.
“I’m just a little nervous, is all. I’ve never been in prison before.”
James chuckled. “Is that so?” he asked. “So what do you think I’m in for?” Will shrugged. “Big guy like me, you’d probably think some violent crime, right?” Will shrugged. “Well, you’d be right.” Will flinched.
“What exactly?”
“Embezzlement.”
“That’s not a violent crime,” Will said, becoming instantly afraid he had enraged the large man by contradicting him.
“Isn’t it?” James roared. “Bilking hard-working people out of their life-savings to fill my coffers? Leaving someone without enough money to pay for medicine or electricity for the month just so I could buy another boat? That’s not violent?”
“I guess it is.”
“Well not technically,” James said. “Metaphorically it is, though, you see what I’m getting at?”
“Yes I do, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir,” James said, returning to his magazine.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” James put down his magazine and examined Will closely for the first time. “Look at you, you’re shaking like a leaf. You’re pretty terrified right now, aren’t you?” All Will could do was raise his shoulders and tilt his head. “Watched too many prison movies. This place isn’t so bad.”
“No?”
“All the things you’ve heard about this place aren’t true.”
“No?”
“By that I mean prison in general. I don’t know if they told you anything about the structure itself or the history or whatnot, but that stuff is probably true. It was built in 1912, for example. I don’t think they would lie about that. But prison in general isn’t like you’ve heard about.”
“Good,” Will sighed, letting his guard down a bit for the first time. He laughed nervously and collapsed on his bed. He was almost overwhelmed by feelings of warmth for this criminal he had just met. He tried to think of something to say. “How many boats did you have?”
“I had four boats and one jet ski.” James put down his magazine. It was his turn. “So did you do it?” James asked. “The murder, that is.”
“No,” Will said, more dejected than defiant, as if he wished he had, if only so he could begin to understand what a mess he was in.
“Rough. Have you seen a lawyer yet?”
“They told me he should be here any second.”
___________
Almost three hours later, a guard walked up to Will’s cell and unlocked the door. “Your lawyer is here,” he said blankly. Will slid off his cot and followed the guard down the hallway as James gave him a genial salute. Will’s eyes darted around the prison nervously. He was on guard, afraid he would be jumped at any time for no reason, but the prison was quiet. One prisoner waved cordially as he watched Will march down the hall.
Will was brought into the visitor’s room and pointed to a stool in front of the bulletproof glass with the telephones just like he had seen in prison movies on TV, only the phones here were bright yellow like bananas. He sat down across from a young man wearing a navy blue suit that looked like it had been manufactured in the 1940s and perfectly preserved since. The man had blonde, almost yellow hair that was parted prominently down the center. He was rubbing his temples with his eyes closed and his head against the small desk in front of him. Two women sat on either side. They both wore matching conservative gray suits though one’s shirt was colored like a cantaloupe and the other like honeydew. The woman with the honeydew shirt was short with dark brown hair cropped just below her ears while the other had long light-brown hair that was held together in a bun at an odd angle on the right side of her head. When Will sat down and picked up the phone, Honeydew poked the man with a pen and he suddenly bolted up in his seat, looking a little nauseous.
“Eric Haywood, I’m your lawyer,” he said breathlessly into the phone. He went to of fer Will his hand but it slammed against the glass between them.
“Where were you?” Will demanded. “You were supposed to be here hours ago.”
“I know, I know, and I’m sorry. I’ll be honest, I had to call a cab because I was still a little drunk from last night.” Both women whipped out legal pads and Bic ballpoint pens—one blue and the other black—and began taking notes.
“Who are they?”
“This is Sophie, she’s another attorney who will be assisting me on this case and this is Meredith who is an intern or a trainee or something.” Eric made no indication which one was which and neither lifted her head from her notes so Will decided that the short one would be Meredith and the other Sophie.
“Nice to meet you, so what are you going to do about my case?”
“God!” Eric said, massaging his temples and squinting unattractively. “I hate these surprise weekend cases. They’re the worst.”
“It’s Thursday.”
“Tell me about it.” Eric groaned and let his head roll around as if it were not connected to his neck, then grimaced some more. “So I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
“Well I’m just a little concerned about my impending murder trial and I was wondering if you were going to be able to help me.”
“Right, right,” Eric said. “See, here’s what I think we need to do, Meredith please take this down.” Both women, who had been writing continuously the entire time, continued writing just as they had been before. “Now first things first. How do you feel about pleading guilty?”
“Why would I do that?”
“I just ask so I know right off the bat what kind of work I need to do on this one.”
“No, I am not going to plead guilty. I’m innocent and I need you to get me off because I didn’t do it. Can you do that for me?” Eric groaned and lifted his left hand to his forehead.
“Have you ever mixed alcohol and pills?”
“What?”
“Don’t,” Eric said, laughing weakly. “I did a little bit of that last night and it was a pretty big mistake.”
“All right well I’m glad you had fun last night, but now it’s time to do your job,” Will said. He was seething now; his hand was sweating and he was holding the phone so tightly he felt it might dissolve between his fingers.
“I had sex with this one,” Eric said, pointing at the woman Will had decided was Sophie. Her head suddenly shot up and she looked straight ahead, mortified. “Not bad,” Eric said, shrugging. “I’ve had better but then I was pretty numb so maybe I oughta give her another shot.”
“You won’t get another shot,” the woman who could have been Sophie shot back into the phone, which she had grabbed from Eric’s hand. She handed it back and returned to her notes.
“I’ve got half a bottle of rum at my place that says differently. This one’ll do anything when she’s drunk,” Eric said, looking at his watch. “We about through here?” he asked.
“No! We haven’t done anything. How are you going to get me out of here?”
“Look. This is a complicated case and I just got the files this morning and I was going to read them in the cab but I fell asleep and I get carsick when I read anyway. Long story short I will read the files and we’ll meet again how about Tuesday?”
“That’s unacceptable!” But Eric had already hung up the phone and gestured to his companions that it was time to go. They capped their pens and followed him out of the room as Will sat dumbfounded, watching their lips move, all sound muted by the soundproof glass in between them.
___________
“How did your meeting with the lawyer go?” James asked when Will was returned to his cell.
“Awful,” Will said, dropping his entire weight onto his bed. He didn’t feel like crying as much as he felt like feeling like crying. But it was as if he was too confused to know what to feel. What do people accused of murder feel? Will had never been accused of murder before. He had seen people who had been accused of murder on TV. He tried to remember all the murder stories he had ever seen, but had trouble remembering anyone who had been wrongly accused as he had been. There were only the guilty ones and the guilty ones who avoided convictions with their talented lawyers and Will was not the former and he was certainly not the latter.
“Oh, buck up,” James said, looking up from a scarf he had been crocheting. He sounded a little annoyed and Will somehow found this immensely comforting. “You’ve got plenty of time to figure all this out,” he said.
“But what do I do?” Will asked, feeble like a child. He thought of a thousand cases where it was said the accused had just acted guilty because he hadn’t cried at the right times or gotten indignant in the right places but had never heard of anyone acting innocent. How the hell was he supposed to act innocent when everyone else who had been accused of murder was always acting guilty, innocent or not? He could act grateful or amused when he wasn’t, but somehow couldn’t act innocent when he was.
“Quit whining for a start,” was the advice James offered. “It could be worse,” and he stopped himself. And suddenly, Will thought of his wife for the first time since she had been murdered. He felt ashamed that she had not been his first concern all along and realized that she was still not his first concern, that even when reminded of her he was still too overwhelmed with his own situation to think of her. He crawled onto his cot and closed his eyes, a gesture James took for shame but was really just a recognition that there was too much to do and nothing to be done but hope it would all resolve itself somehow before too much damage could be done.
___________
Will was suddenly pulled out of his cell by a tall guard with dark hair and mirrored sunglasses who told him he had another visitor. Will was exhausted, but he followed anyway, only out of obligation and the realization that staying would accomplish nothing.
Will returned to the same telephone in the visitor’s room to see the wife he was accused of killing waiting for him. She was wearing a breezy summer dress pep pered with dim pastel flowers and her reddish wavy hair was clipped behind her head. She was wearing a fake moustache to conceal her identity.
“Sarah, where have you been?” His uncertainty tempered his joy and he suddenly felt embarrassed, as if he had been the butt of some cruel joke.
“Keep it down,” she hissed, looking back and forth trying to tell if anyone had heard what he’d said. “If anyone asks I’m dead, okay?”
“But Sarah, I’m in jail.”
“I know, I know. I just needed to get away for a while. I got into some trouble at work—it’s a complicated situation. And that’s another thing,” Sarah suddenly remembered. “Do I have to wait for you?”
“Well that would be nice.”
“Because I just think that the mature thing for you to do is to let me get on with my life and pursue other people. You could be here for years.”
“I could be out of here in ten minutes if you just told the police who you were and got me out of here.”
Sarah sighed, annoyed. “That’s clearly not an option,” she said, adjusting her mous tache. “Besides, then I’d be imprisoned for filing a fake police report.”
“What? Why?”
“Well somebody had to call in my murder. Lord knows you weren’t going to do it.” Sarah had “disappeared” on Sunday night at about 9:30 PM. Will had fallen asleep in front of the television and when he woke up the next morning, he assumed his wife had left for work early. When he got home that evening and Sarah was still not home, he assumed she was working late and fell asleep in front of the television again and awoke the next morn ing once again assuming his wife had left for work early. This went on until Thursday when Sarah (who had been observing her husband the entire time with a telescope from a ditch across the street) grew frustrated and called the police to report that she had been murdered on Sunday. Her husband’s ignorance of this lie immediately aroused police suspicion. The DNA that Sarah had planted was also difficult for Will to explain.
“Well isn’t it a little selfish to put me in jail just so you can run off on your own?” Will asked.
“Replace me with you and you with me and run off with stay out of prison and now who’s the selfish one?” Will pondered this for a moment. “I don’t think I can wait for you,” Sarah said before he had taken it all in.
“You don’t have to wait for me. You can walk up to the warden now and say ‘it’s me, that Sarah woman who everyone thinks is dead, so could you please let my husband go?’ and this whole thing could be over just like that.”
“I didn’t wait for you.” Sarah shrugged her shoulders in a comical show of apology and regret. Will just stared back at her. “Sorry!” she said, stretching the R and Y sounds like children do when they don’t want their parents to be angry with them.
“When did this happen? Is that what this is all about?”
“No, no not at all. I was nothing but faithful until the day I died.”
“And then?”
“Well a couple days after that, I met this really nice guy in a café and we got to talking and I think we really hit it off.”
“Is this what you came here to tell me? That you put me in jail and found somebody else and you’re going to let me rot in here while you run off with him?”
“I’m sorry. But that’s not why I came here,” Sarah said defensively. “I came here to ask you for a divorce.”
“A divorce?”
“Yes. I need you to divorce me so I can get married to David. David is the man I was telling you about. He’s six-foot-five and he plays basketball in an amateur league. He’s very good. I think you’d like him.”
“But if you’re dead then how can I divorce you?”
“You mean to ask how I can marry someone else if I’m dead. Divorce is the easy part. There’s not a judge in this country who wouldn’t accept murder as grounds for di vorce. Just sign the papers. I’ll have Haywood bring them by the next time he drops by.”
“How do you know my lawyer?”
“Because I hired him for you.”
Will should have been shocked, but somehow, he thought that this was the only thing that made sense. “Why would you give me such an awful lawyer?”
“Because I need your lawyer to be incompetent so you stay in jail and nobody knows I’m still alive,” Sarah said matter-of-factly. “Haywood thinks I’m dead.”
Will had too many questions at once and he was too confused to express any of them clearly. “But what does me being in jail have to do with you getting away? And how can Haywood think you’re dead if you hired him?”
“How can a dead woman hire a lawyer?” Sarah said cleverly as if the two were sharing a secret. Will tried to speak again, but Sarah winked and put her finger to her lips to indicate that he mustn’t let anyone in on the insight to which he had just been treated.
Will could only sigh. “You’ve got to get me out of here,” he said, completely re signed to a situation he couldn’t even begin to understand, silently giving his consent to some unspoken deal as if he had been given a choice.
“This is only temporary,” Sarah insisted. “I’m going to get you out of here,” she said apologetically and with such sincerity that Will completely believed her and would have followed her to the ends of the earth. Sarah ad justed her moustache, hung up the phone, and left.
___________
“She’s alive,” Will told James as soon as he was shoved into his cell after his meeting. He said it without emotion, still unsure which emotion he should feel or, failing that, inflect.
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” James said, irritated. “Lots of people are alive, about half of them are women. More than half, I think, because of the longer life spans and all.”
“My wife is alive.”
James looked up from his thick Russian novel. “When are you leaving?”
Will looked at James strangely and it was clear that the thought had not yet crossed Will’s mind. “I’m not,” he said.
“What?” James yelled, standing up so quickly that Will flinched.
“I’m not supposed to tell anyone she’s alive,” Will said, well aware of how strange it sounded. He sat on his cot, then reclined and stared at the ceiling.
Will knew it was ridiculous, of course. The logical thing to do would have been to tell someone immediately and free himself. It might be betraying his wife, but she had betrayed him first—and besides, her punishment would be nothing compared to what Will was facing. But Will thought they might all be in on it, whatever “it” was. No lawyer could possibly be so negligent, no police force so bumbling, no wife so callous and uncaring. How was one supposed to act in the face of such nonsense? Why should anyone believe him or admit their faults? After all, they had just been fooled by a fake moustache, a disguise so transparent it seemed to Will that it would take nothing less than a superhuman effort to be tricked. Then Will wondered if it really was transparent or if it only seemed that way, realizing he had no context, or too much context, one or the other. All he knew was that his limited bank of sheltered suburban experience had no analogue for anything that had happened, so he could only revert to his default, which was apparently nonaction.
Yes, it was much easier this way, Will decided. It didn’t matter if he had logic or common sense or even physical evidence on his side. They had been on his side all along and they had all failed him already—why should they start working now? Everything had been in his favor since the start and he was still in prison. If he hadn’t won this battle already, Will didn’t think it could possibly be won at all. He decided that the only thing he could do was let the absurdity play out and hope that it all worked out in the end. It wasn’t that he had resigned himself to conviction—he still feared his trial intensely—but he had resigned himself to the fact that it would either happen or it wouldn’t no matter what he said or did. He felt better. For the first time since his arrest, he slept peacefully through the night.
___________
The next day, Will was hustled from the prison to the courthouse amidst a cyclone of flashing bulbs and lenses and microphones. It seems Will’s case had become the story du jour among the media since he had left the outside world. Beautiful wife goes missing, husband remains aloof in the face of her disappearance, suspicion piles, the husband is taken into custody—it had all the ingredients to entice the cable news hearse chasers. Will’s story had almost completely eclipsed the pretty all-American girl kidnapped by French neo-Nazis abroad much to the chagrin of her parents, who hoped the exposure would bring their daughter home and had quite enjoyed appearing on TV every night besides. Reporters milled around Will as soon as he left the confines of the prison and he guessed that the crowd went twelve or thirteen deep but it might have stretched forever as far as he could tell. Boom mikes circled him like birds of prey in formation until they began jostling for position and crashing into each other. Questions bounced around and blended together until all Will heard were dozens of identical voices shouting words that had been chopped off from their sentences; nouns fired through the air with no verbs or conjunctions or syntax of any kind to connect them in any sort of coherence or put them in any kind of context. Will’s bewildered face was instantly shot across the globe above fragments and catch phrases, neatly summing up the chaos in no more than six words.
Finally inside, Will found himself in a small conference room with Eric, Sophie and Meredith. Eric was pacing around the room nervously until he saw Will walk in, at which point he sat in a chair at the end of the table and gave off an air of composed confidence as if Will had not seen him pacing around in terror seconds before.
“William,” he said, speaking slowly. “Good morn’ to ya, eh buddy, how’re ya feelin’?”
“I don’t know. What’s your strategy? Is my defense planned out?” He was concerned, in spite of his decision to stop caring and let the Fates decide.
Eric tapped his fingers on his briefcase. “Well all the papers are in here,” he said, pointing, “but there are a lot of them and I haven’t gotten a chance to look at all of them yet.”
“How many have you looked at then? And what information is contained in all these papers?”
“May I answer your second question first?” Eric nodded, answering himself. “I have not looked at any because I don’t want to look at any if I can’t look at all of them at once. I was going to last night, but these two came over, some alcohol was served, one thing led to another, you know the rest of the story, am I right?” Eric chuckled.
“How are you going to be my defense attorney if you know nothing about the case?”
“Well I’ve been watching cable news so I know a bit. You killed your wife—”
“I didn’t kill my wife.”
“No?” Eric looked at the woman to his left. She shrugged.
“I thought he did,” the shorter woman said.
“But you didn’t? And that’s the story you’re sticking with?”
“I really don’t think you’re qualified to be my attorney, I want—”
“Hey. HEY. I’m qualified, all right? Look. The first day is just a bunch of preliminary stuff, blah blah, if worse comes to worse the papers are arranged chronologi cally and I’ll just pull the ones off the top and read from those real quick, OK? I can read fast, I can promise you that.” Eric recited this earnestly as if it were the tag line to his commercial. Will did not look convinced. A deputy poked his head in the room and informed Will and his defense team that it was time to head into the courtroom.
“Are you absolutely sure that you’re competent?” Will asked, deadly serious. Eric did not hear him.
“It’s showtime, right?” Eric said. He adjusted his tie and opened his mouth for Sophie or Meredith, one of whom sprayed Binaca in his mouth. Eric jumped up and down, letting his arms flop, then punched his chest and exhaled loudly. He raised his hand, asking Will for a high five. “Let’s fucking do this thing.”
___________
Will was amazed how quickly eight months could vanish when one was nothing more than a passive object, being shuttled to court each morning, being defended by an incompe tent, being prosecuted for the murder of a woman who watched the proceedings mustachioed from a seat in the back of the courtroom every day, being convicted by a jury of one’s peers. It seemed like it was only yesterday that he was being thrown into a police car and the next thing he knew, he was sentenced to life in prison. He was hopelessly alone through all of it. James had been released and though his wife and lawyer visited him frequently, he trusted neither and was convinced that they were orchestrating the whole thing somehow. But they were all he had, so he let them direct the absurdity, sitting quietly in his chair for the entire duration of the trial.
Will spent the morning after the judgment pacing in his cell waiting for his attorney who was late for their nine AM appointment. Fifteen hours later, a guard pulled him out of bed without bothering to wake him first and dragged him to the visitor’s room.
There, Will found Eric on the other side of the bulletproof glass. Eric was biting his fingernails and his eyes were continually darting around the room suspiciously. He was wearing a nondescript navy suit with a white shirt, a solid red tie, and makeup to conceal his identity.
“Eric,” Will began softly, more desperate than anything at this point, hoping his attor ney had some news about his appeal.
“Shhh!” Eric hissed, pressing his finger against his bright red lips. The lipstick rubbed off onto his finger and Eric distractedly wiped it against his chair. “Listen, I’m not—that—so don’t use that name anymore. I’m hiding out for a while.”
“Wait a minute, you can’t hide out, you have to work on my appeal.”
“There isn’t going to be an appeal, don’t you see? If you think the court of law had it in for you, you should see the court of public opinion. They’re wondering why you weren’t hanged months ago.”
“But I didn’t do it,” Will insisted, his voice rising an octave.
“That doesn’t matter,” Eric sighed, obviously frustrated he had to explain all this. “Look, here’s what you need to know if anybody asks. We met this morning, I was on time as I always am because I am a punctual and responsible attorney who takes his job seriously and you were so enraged with the result of the trial that you murdered me.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“This story is already all over the news. There’s nothing we can do now. Look, I just need to get away for a while,” Eric said running his fingers through his hair. “This trial has been hell. Do you know how hard I’ve been working?”
“Yes, I know exactly how hard you’ve been working,” Will said. Eric had not worked very hard at all. He fre quently showed up at court intoxicated (or “a bit buzzed” as Eric phrased it) and passed on cross-examining each of the prosecu tion’s witnesses. The only witness that Eric called for the defense was a mentally unstable man dressed in a doctor’s coat who, when quizzed on the mental competence of the defen dant, jumped onto the witness stand, grabbed an umbrella, and swung it at anyone who tried to get it away from him. He was only talked down with a specially-ordered twelve-inch meatball sub topped with Munster cheese and lettuce. On top of that, Eric had been overheard insinuat ing that the jury was fat and had called the honorable Judge Charles Winslow “Ma dame” with a French accent on no fewer than six occasions. Even when Eric wrote a powerful closing statement, convincing Will of his legal skill and rhetorical prowess, he forgot it at his hotel, instead printing out and reciting in full a seventeen minute dramatic monologue about the unpredictability of the speaker’s menstrual cycle.
“So then you understand that I need a break from all this. I mean the press has been killing me. Not literally, of course, everyone thinks you did that,” Eric joked. Will scowled and Eric flinched. “The point is, when I come back to life and implicate the real killer, this whole ordeal will be over.”
“What does that mean?”
“Listen,” Eric continued, his voice suddenly becoming soft. “I know you don’t think I did the best job out there defend ing you, but you’re my client. I know you’re innocent and I care deeply about you and I will do everything within my power to make sure you get out of here.” Will thought he believed him and was suddenly filled with confidence, assured that his lawyer was really a brilliant and capable mastermind who had known what he was doing all along. Eric checked his makeup in a compact, hung up the phone and left.
___________
They lived up to their word. The next evening as Will followed a single-file line that seemed to stretch for miles and was headed God knows where—Will hadn’t bothered to ask—an explosion shook the prison. The old stone building shuddered and moaned. Another explosion blew a hole in the ceiling and huge chunks of brick and plaster crashed to the ground below. Prisoners and guards alike ducked for cover as a helicopter hovered just above the hole in the roof. A crude ladder dropped from the hatch. Will looked up and squinted into the light that blared down from above his head.
He saw his wife and his lawyer waving at him, shouting as loud as they could over the screaming of the helicopter and the anarchy of the collapsing prison and the panicked people all around him. Eric and Sarah were urging him to grab onto the rope, desper ately trying to express through pantomime that there was little time and Will could not waste a second.
Will stood at the bottom of the ladder, frozen. His first instinct was to climb out of the prison to safety and freedom but he didn’t act on it. Another helicopter with another powerful spotlight appeared just above what was supposed to be Will’s rescue chopper. Eric looked up and neither he nor Sarah seemed surprised or distressed in the least. It seemed like an easy choice and some of the other inmates were already milling around and reaching for the ladder, which Eric had grabbed to dangle just above everyone’s hands until Will made a motion to climb. But Will didn’t move and he didn’t know if he should. It could be another set up—but why? Would he make things worse? Was that even possible? It had been so long since the last time Will made a decision he wasn’t sure if he remembered how. He tried to remember a similar situation so he could assess the pros and cons, thinking of all the times he had ever experienced explosions or helicopters or prison escapes—nope. Nothing. It was only then that he was fully realized what was happening and for a moment, he was couldn’t help but admire the sheer awesome senselessness of it all.
He started laughing to himself, just a bit at first, but then harder. He wondered how long they would stay there, suspended above his head, waiting for him to make a move before they gave up and left and he wondered how long it would take for him to give in and grab the ladder. He started counting.
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