—Are you the Librarian? Joey asked, so quietly that Tomas almost didn’t hear him.
Because Tomas had made the mistake a decade or so earlier of telling one of the other COs that he’d once worked as a librarian, his colleagues and many of the prisoners started calling him that—the Librarian. There was indeed a library in the prison, smaller than some of the storage rooms, but it was run by the warden’s nephew and Tomas’s role in its operation was minimal. He’d been given his own desk in a back corner where he sat alone for a few hours each week, in the quiet of the night, cataloging any books that had been donated to the prison.
—I used to be.
—Can I ask you about a book?
—You can try.
Joey had recently read Slaughterhouse-Five, he explained, and he wanted to know if Tomas knew anything about becoming unstuck in time, as the character of Billy Pilgrim had. He sometimes wondered if that was exactly what was happening to him.
—Not scientifically speaking, Joey added. Emotionally speaking.
—Okay. I could see that. Feeling unstuck like that. In time.
So they started talking. Despite his own laconic tendencies, Tomas was surprised to find that he had quite a lot to say to this young inmate, especially on the matter of time and its impact on a person’s soul as it bent and stretched between one’s existence and one’s memories, and Joey seemed keen to listen. He didn’t seem to Tomas like the kind of kid who dropped cinder blocks onto moving cars.
Each shift when Tomas walked his rounds, he would find Joey sitting up in his cot, unable to sleep, waiting for his visit. As far as Tomas could tell, he’d become Joey’s only meaningful human contact, and in a way, Joey had become his. Maybe because he’d been living alone for a decade by then, Tomas talked and talked, sharing stories about Lydia and Raj, about the library and the doughnut shop, and when he was standing against those bars in the dark, telling Joey all about his life before—his real life, he always called it, back in Denver—it felt at times like Joey was the one helping him.
Of course Tomas never mentioned the O’Tooles or the Hammerman.
The day that Joey turned eighteen was an eventful one. For starters, that morning, as Tomas was ending his shift at sunrise, Joey was gathering his folders and his notebooks and heading out to the courthouse in Salida for some hearing or other that had to do with his legal coming-of-age. When Joey returned to the prison that afternoon, his solitary cell on level three had been emptied out and he’d been moved in with a skinhead from Lubbock who, within fifteen minutes, had beat the living shit out of him—broken ribs and nose, bruised cheekbones, split lips and brow—purportedly for reading any book but the Bible. Rather than trying to figure out a safe spot to move him, at Tomas’s urging, the correctional counselor and warden agreed to allow Joey to move back into the isolated cell he’d recently moved out of, just as soon as he was released from the infirmary.
When Tomas shared the news with the bandaged Joey, he suggested that the kid do some decorating of his cell since he was hopefully going to be there for the remainder of his sentence.
—Make it more homey, Tomas said. Plus the Pooh-Bah might be less likely to move you around if you make it your own.
—Make it my own?
—Usually people hang up photos or something.
—I have no photos, Joey said.
—They don’t have to be of family or friends, you know.
—I have no photos of anything. I don’t really get it, to be honest. I never have.
This was one of the toughest moments Tomas had ever had while working in the prison: having to explain to this brilliant kid why people took and kept photographs of their lives.
—I think it comes down to capturing happiness, Tomas said, before it gets away. Other things as well, but usually happiness.
—Does it always get away?
—Has for me.
Joey nodded along, but the walls of his cell remained bare.
Not long before Joey was to be released, two years into his sentence, Tomas was assigned to work the graveyard shift on Christmas Eve, but he didn’t mind. He’d worked enough holidays to know that those shifts were different, and that even the prison on those days could feel more like a community than an institution. They’d play Christmas carols over the PA system and give the inmates more time for phone calls and chapel and holiday shows on television. Joey didn’t participate in any of these attempts at festivity. But Tomas wanted to provide him with some semblance of cheer, so when he did his rounds that night he arranged to let Joey out of his cell and he led him, in shackles, down to his desk in the back of the prison library. He threaded his ankle chain through the chair and loosened his cuffs a little and gave him a popcorn-and-honey ball the size of a small globe that he’d made for him at home. As Joey peeled back the wax paper and bit into the sticky popcorn, Tomas pointed to the stacks of cardboard boxes that lined the wall opposite his desk.
—Those are books, he said. You can choose a few. Any ones you want. A gift.
—You don’t need them for the library?
The books had all been donated, Tomas explained, castoffs from thrift stores and estate sales, and 95 percent of them never made it to the prison library’s spare shelves.
—No more room. And, to be honest, not much interest.
Joey ate through his popcorn ball and looked around. On a corkboard behind the desk, near sheets of departmental phone numbers and a printout of the library’s classification system, Tomas had pinned a dozen or so photographs that he’d culled from his gunmetal box at home.
—That’s Lydia? Joey said, pointing to an old photo of a toddling girl in a pile of leaves.
—That’s her. From that spot there we could hear cars on Colfax every few seconds: Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. You get used to it.
After two years of Tomas projecting his memories through the bars as if they were old home movies, Joey had had all the context he needed to understand the people and places stuck in time on the glossy photos before him. Tomas gestured to pictures of Lydia in various Halloween costumes (Nancy Drew, Cleopatra, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle), of Lydia sitting on the steps of the library, and one of Lydia with her friend Raj and a redheaded girl—barely in the photo—leaning over a chocolate cake at her tenth birthday party. Looking happy.
—That’s the boy from the doughnut shop? Joey said.
—That’s him. Lydia’s best friend.
As the carols faded from the crackling speakers, Tomas focused on the task at hand.
—Let’s get you some of these books before I get in trouble.
He stooped to his knees and began sifting through the boxes.
—Thought you might like these, he said, handing back a small pile of sci-fi paperbacks. Bradbury, Heinlein, Clarke.