his cheek with it, then puts it in the box. He looks over his shoulder to make sure Jorge isn’t paying attention, and he reaches his right hand, the one with the bruise forming from Jenkin’s chair, into his pocket and pulls out the compact. He holds it greedily in his palms. It’s heavy and warm. He holds it up and smells it, then stashes it quickly away under the bed of hair.
A-one-and-a-two-and-a-three. Moses pushes up in the military style of the old school: one-armed! Like the black-and-white picture that hung on his childhood bedroom wall of the Air Force man, sinewy and powerful. The man in flat-front slacks, hair slicked back off his face, a cigarette hanging from his lip, Air Force jacket on the back of a chair in the background. Moses never saw his father in person, but he’d been an airman before he became a radioman, so Moses clipped the picture from Life magazine and hung it on the wall. At night he’d look at it while he listened to his father’s voice ringing across the airwaves. A man without a face, just a clear, strong voice, his father forever young. A cigarette hangs from Moses’ bottom lip now. He’s reassured as he pushes up against the humid air that he’s as strong as he’s ever been. Swipes the hair back from his eyes. Four-and-a-five-and-a-six.
“Permiso, Moses,” Jorge asks from his cot inside the cell. “Is this the letter?”
Moses ignores him. A-seven-and-a-eight.
Jorge asks again, his Ecuadorian accent still thick after all these years, “Is this letter written in the hand of mi hija after her death?”
Moses switches to his right arm, “What do I look like? An expert in fucking penmanship? Anyway, you know what it is. Stop acting like this.”
Jorge holds the letter out to Moses and shakes it; birds flutter off the locker, and off the shelf above the john. They fly up and out of the cell. “If it is a letter written by Gina after her death, then she is alive. Claro?”
“English!” Moses demands.
“Look at it, Moses. Tell me the date. Tell me, is it signed Te quiero, Gina?”
Moses ignores Jorge and enjoys the blood coursing through his veins. A-ten-and-eleven-and-a-twelve. He’s taking a break from “Death in Venice.” With the revelation of each of the story’s menacing, teeth-baring men, there’s been a tightening in his gut. What a fool he’d been, identifying with Aschenbach the way he had. “Reading this Thomas Mann is like wiping my ass with sandpaper,” he says to no one in particular, then he works faster, harder, pushing up and up and up. Sweating. He can smell himself. Vitality surges through him. He is not old.
Jorge, on the other hand, is really showing his stripes. His goggley old eyes, his slipping mind. He’s only sixty-seven, ten years Moses’ elder, but in here you age fast, like a dog. That combined with the piss-poor medical treatment and a lifetime of phenobarbital has Jorge acting like an old bat. Moses isn’t having any of it.
He’s just begun his second read of “Death in Venice.” He’s only now seeing how Aschenbach became a puff and how he should have seen it coming. What Moses wants to know is why Mann would write such a story. Aschenbach seemed like an upstanding man in the beginning. Moses is waiting for Miller to call him to report to work. He plans on asking Lila this very question when he gets there. In any case, his preliminary thesis: Aschenbach got what he deserved.
Just then, Jorge throws the blanket off his lap, looks at Moses with the veined eyes of a madman and asks, “Moses, is Gina mi hija or is she the girl that I strangled?”
Moses drops to his knees. He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and sits back on his heels. “Oh, Jesus. Let me see the letters.” He walks into the cell and takes his eyeglasses from the locker where they lay next to his typewriter and a few false starts of a paper’s beginning. He puts them on. They’re already missing an arm.
Friday night, Miller called them and as they made their way to chow, Collin caught sight of Moses’ glasses and he punched Moses in the back of his head with as much strength as he could gather, which was a lot because Collin is young and covered in tattoos. He is almost always high and either sleepy or violent because of it. Moses’ glasses soared through the air and he could hear them skid across the floor somewhere near everyone’s feet. The only guard who saw it was Miller, which meant nothing was going to be done about it. Moses had a horrible ringing in his ears and an ache in his temple from that Latino keeplock and one screaming pain radiating up from his shoulders through the base of his skull. When he stood up again, he looked Collin right in the eye and spat at him there. Collin decided to kill Moses; Moses could tell by the look that came over him. But Jorge held up his hand. Just held it up. Like Jesus or some saint. And Collin lowered his fist and instead of killing Moses, he pushed his chest into him so Moses fell against the wall. Collin slapped his face a few times to let him know what he was. “You’re nothing. You realize that?” Collin looked around and someone handed him Moses’ glasses. He took a look at them and smirked, put them on, pulled his pants up to his ribs, and pretended to be a geezer.
Georgy, hopping like a flea in a flea circus, was still screaming Fight! Fight! But Jorge turned to him and said, “Georgy, my boy, no fights tonight, or they might take away your book of numbers.” Georgy stopped his hopping; the crew of them fell back in line and made their way into the chaos of the mess hall for their nightly poisoning. At the long table, Collin looked at Moses. He was pretending to try to see him, pretending to be old. Moses stared back, took a bite of his food and nearly threw it up from pain. He stopped eating for fear he would end up in the infirmary and miss a day with Lila. Instead he focused on the silky texture of the blood red sauce the bits of chipped meat floated in and prayed the day would end soon.
He wouldn’t indulge Jorge like this normally, but truth is he got a late start on the reading and the paper because Collin held Moses’ glasses hostage for the weekend until Jorge finally went and negotiated for them last night. Moses only had to give Collin ten bucks in commissary, and even though this nearly wiped him out, it was nothing compared to what Collin might have asked for. He owes Jorge some mind.
“Moses, look at this letter and compare it to this other letter. Are you sure it is the same hand that wrote both of these?”
Moses looks up at Jorge and he can’t believe the weak old man who looks at him desperately is his longtime friend and protector. Jorge has diminished. Always of a medium build, he’s the size of a woman now. That big, rectangular head of his, his powerful Indian nose, that shock of black hair, the deep wealth of color in his skin, the strong teeth, these have all withered and begun to disappear. Moses is disgusted by him. Repulsed by his age. His smell. He sits next to Jorge, who is holding one letter from Gina written when she was fifteen, just before his wife, Marie, told Jorge she was dead, and another letter from a few months later, after Ed Cavanaugh told Jorge that Gina was still living and began arranging weekly meetings.
Poor Jorge, Moses thinks as he compares the letters. He endured Marie’s lies for so long that, even though he saw Gina with his own eyes at Christmas five months ago, he has started to worry again that maybe Gina really was murdered by those boys. Maybe all that he’s enjoyed of her success, her acceptance to Brown, his fatherly struggle to accept her disinterest in science, her big job in television, the news that she bought herself an apartment on New York’s Upper East Side with all the rich, white people, even the postcards and letters she sends, have been nothing more than mirage. Moses blames it mostly on this place. The lack of a horizon line, or maybe it’s the constant color of cement, or it could be the half-rotten beef they’ve been eating for what seems like months that must have been rejected by the retard institutions. Whatever the cause, Jorge has convinced himself Gina is dead.
There
