in the system.”
He takes his glasses off quickly and puts them back in his pocket. He hands her the letter. Without looking at him, she takes it and walks back through the swinging door over to her counter. She pulls up a stool and sits in front of her computer and begins to type quickly, the keys popping loudly. She leans over to Ed and whispers. He turns toward Moses and smiles and looks arrogant.
“It’s a B,” Lila calls to Moses.
“Thank you,” Moses says, humbly.
“What happened to you? Walk into a door?” Ed smirks. “You better watch out. These doors have a way of giving you a good pounding every once in a while.”
Moses returns to his letters. To the menial. To the mundane. To the miserable tasks of the mail. Where he once found pleasure and pride, he now only finds insult. Writing that paper, reading “Death in Venice,” talking about it with Lila as if he too were a student, the little nibble of a student’s nourishment, have ruined him for the simple pleasures of his life. What he’s always wanted was to prove his smarts. He has a good mind.
He sorts his letters, prepares his satchel for his route, and he can hardly understand how he ever found any of this satisfying. He wants to think about ideas. He wants Ed Cavanaugh to disappear. For Lila to take back her coy gestures. Her batting lashes. Her sweet hip-bend. Her come-closer whispers.
Moses swings his satchel over his shoulder. “That was a beautiful compact of your grandmother’s. Was it quite old?” he asks.
Lila turns. “It was. I’m very sad about it, though. I’ve lost it, Moses. Last I remember I had it here. I don’t know what happened to it, but it makes me sick just to think about it. You didn’t see it by any chance?”
“No,” he says. “Too bad you lost it.”
On his route he’s burdened by the mail. The bag is heavy. His limbs feel weak and leaden. The halls, always a dank and dungeonous journey, are particularly foul this late afternoon. It’s dark as night, despite the lights. There is a smell that sometimes erupts on wet days when the hundred-year-old sewer backs up, reminding them that they are little more than rats. The problem with his conversations with Lila is that they make him sensitive. They expose him to everything. Every detail of his day is infused with the meaning of his life, so this smell of shit, this occupies too much of his thinking about himself, as he wanders aimlessly into the deep of D block.
He passes Corn with his bucket and his mop on his way to push dirt around the mailroom floor. Corn says, Howyadoin, Moses? Moses ignores him. He is consumed with the angst of art. What Corn passes without comment or even notice takes on huge meaning for Moses. A spider. A web. The sound of the big metal doors opening, some by machine, others by crank. The sound of those doors shutting. The sound of his demise. He’s being dramatic, but why, he wonders, would she give a rat’s ass about Cavanaugh? Why would she turn away from him in the moment of revelation of the true meaning of the story? Why at that crucial high note would she pull the arm of the phonograph, screeching the conversation to a halt?
Each keeplock he passes looks more menacing, more violent, more disturbed until he gets to the very last cell in row five. In it sits a man Moses tries to avoid at all costs. It would figure that today he’d have a letter to deliver to him. The man sits at a desk. He is neatly dressed. He is reading from a book. Moses thinks it’s always the same book, but he doesn’t know which one it is. He’s sure it’s not the Bible because this man is as much a devil as any he’s ever known. The man is fairer than fair. His skin sees no sun. He’s lived most of his life in the hole. He is freckled and the sharp contrast of the melanin creates a pocked, rough, rocky look that is deceiving; his skin is really rather smooth. He wears a fedora. And this reminds Moses of Aschenbach, the men in brimmed hats who lead him deeper into the story, closer and closer to death.
“Caruso?” Moses asks.
The devilish man turns slowly and mechanically. There is a certain movement acquired by some of the longtime residents. It is slow, robotic, as if they are acutely aware of each muscle and the work it performs to move the parts of the body, as if the simple experience of living in a body becomes the landscape one explores over a lifetime of forced monastic introversion. This man, this Caruso, he moves like this. Men like him make Moses feel like a mosquito. Like he has a monkey brain. Can’t sit still. The simple task of waiting for the man to push out his chair, remove his glasses, adjust his pants, smooth his hands over the front of his shirt, over his low, protruding belly, adjust his brimmed cap, step his foot out from in front of the chair, then the other foot, then slowly journey across the tiny cell, makes Moses vulnerable to his preoccupations and fears. He didn’t ask Lila what the hell an in-text citation is. He forgot to have her explain a Works Cited page. He’s forgotten how he was going to proceed with his thesis. What do “Aschenbach got what he deserves” and “he feared death” have to do with one another? He is tired. He can’t remember things the way he once could. Why does it feel, he wonders as the man moves slow as a mountain, like the tectonic plates of his life are shifting and he’s about to fall into the pit?
“Moses,” Caruso says quietly.
They know each other. They don’t know each other as men. They haven’t spent long hours in conversation, but they lived in the hole side by side at the beginning of their tenures as prisoners so they know each other’s patterns. What the other sounds like when he uses the john. What the other sounds like when he cries out in his sleep. They know each other like that.
“Le-le-le-etter for you.” Moses gasps. The stutter shocks him nearly dead. It’s been too many years to count since it reared its ugly head.
“Is that a stutter, Moses? I never knew. Are you nervous? Things have worked out nicely for you, haven’t they?” Caruso asks, slowly scratching his low-slung belly with long, yellowed nails. “You’ve made a life for yourself inside, such as it is. You and I are not meant for civilized society. We must be separated at least by walls. But you are a man of strong character, Moses.” When he says this he smiles. Long, horrible teeth hang wide and yellow as popcorn.
“T-take it,” Moses struggles.
“Oh, good. A letter from one of my young admirers,” he says, his voice slow and silky, intended to chill Moses to the bone. And it does. Caruso has an unspeakable history with children. When he sees Moses cringe, he laughs, and his low hanging stomach jumps and bounces.
Moses tries to dart away, but it’s a hobble. He struggles to carry his satchel, to move quickly along the path as men hiss at him. Caruso laughs and Moses’ body aches. I’m losing my hold, he thinks, as the stutter pursues him. Ho-o-o-l-l-ly Mary Mo-o-other of Go-o-od. He tries to repeat the phrase. He’s a young man again, sitting at a desk, mouth full of marbles, a nun standing over him making him repeat the phrase: Holy Mary Mother of God. The nun. His mother. His sister, who shall remain nameless; he’s haunted by memories he hasn’t thought of in years. They swarm up and out of him like a tempest. He is losing his hold! “Since human development is human destiny…” the story read…Stop! Stop thinking like this, he thinks. His hair falls into his face. He rushes clumsily along the narrow path and remembers how, as Aschenbach tried to leave Venice the first time, he saw the Bridge of Sighs, along which, the footnote read, the condemned prisoners would proceed when walking to life imprisonment from the Ducal Palace.
Tuesday, the next day, is surprisingly glorious. Lila has called in sick (he assumes she needed the extra time to finish her paper), so while Moses misses seeing her, he has the entire day to write. And in the perfect spring light of day, which streams into the gallery, lavishly lighting the wings of the sparrows that dart and play and soar along the wall of bars, and after the sacred clarification of sleep, Moses decides he overreacted to
