“Got any music?”
Shit. He shakes his head again. He feels everything slipping away, every turn a wrong one …
“I … can’t,” he whispers.
“Can’t what?”
Sweat has broken out on his forehead. His pulse is racing. He doesn’t feel right.
“I can’t … kill you,” he says. His eyes slowly rise to meet hers.
She studies him a moment, lips parted, fear beginning to spread across her face. He feels himself getting hard. He feels the energy suddenly fueling him.
And then her eyes grow big again, when she sees the look on his face.
There. There it is!
She bounces off the bed, rushing for the door.
Yes.
“No!” she cries as he grabs her arm. “No, please!”
He pins her up against the wall, bringing a hand over her mouth. She bites down on his hand, causing a glorious pain, but he pushes back hard, slamming her head against the wall with all the force he can summon. Her eyes roll back and she begins to slide down the wall, unconscious.
He lowers himself, sliding down with her. He drags her over near the bed and lays her out properly.
“Thank you, Barbie,” he whispers.
He handled this wrong, but she salvaged it for him, a last-minute save.
He learned something. He won’t make this mistake again.
He walks to the corner to get his Fun Bag.
BOOK III
BRIDGEHAMPTON AND SING SING, 2012
37
SING SING CORRECTIONAL Facility, thirty miles north of New York City on the east bank of the Hudson River, houses nearly two thousand inmates over fifty-five acres of property. Up the hill from the lower-level secured facilities is Cell Block A—“Maximum A”—one of the largest max-security cell blocks in the world, with over six hundred inmates packed into six-by-nine-foot cells. They are murderers and rapists and sex traffickers and mob bosses and major drug dealers, divided into fierce factions predominantly by race—the Bloods and the Crips, the Latin Kings and Trinitarios, the Aryan Brotherhood. If you belong to one of the gangs, they have your back—you’re protected—but even then you’re not really protected, because the sins of the individual are the sins of the gang, and retaliation in Cell Block A is as common as census counts four times a day. In the last eight days, Cell Block A has been on lockdown four times, as the Latin Kings and the Bloods have worked out their differences the only way they know how. Guns are uncommon; it’s by shanks and razors, anything that can be pried loose and sharpened into a weapon, that most of the injuries are inflicted.
The first time Noah Walker walked into Cell Block A, he was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the sheer enormity, the cell block extending four stories high and so far from right to left that there seems to be no beginning or end, just an endless wall of steel and chain-link barriers. Overwhelmed by the noise, a deafening clamor of hundreds of caged men shouting, radios playing, gates slamming.
This is his home now, on the top tier of A-Block, Gallery L, seventh cell. He will live in L-7 for the rest of his life. He will live amid a massive series of cages, covered by a concrete-and-brick dome with windows that miraculously let in very little light, sunshine filtered through filth. The polluted air, the noise, the solitude of hour upon hour spent in a cell no bigger than a normal person’s closet—in the seventy-three days that Noah has spent here, they have had the effect of deadening him, killing his hope, erasing his dreams, leaving him numb.
Outside the cell—the mess hall, the showers, the machine shop, and the prison yard—it’s a different story. Noah is alert at all times, his eyes constantly moving about. Noah is not affiliated. The only real option for a white guy is the Aryan Brotherhood, and he’s not going anywhere near those racist morons. That makes him fair game to everyone. Stick a shank into Noah’s back, or accost him in the shower, or jump him in the yard, and nobody will retaliate. Noah is alone in every sense of the word.
And with every day that passes, he finds that he cares less and less. There is nothing for him here but the passage of time. He is simply waiting for time to move along until he dies.
His tiny cell is barren of personal effects. He hasn’t built up enough in the commissary for a radio, and no television is allowed. He has only two personal items, a photograph of Paige and a copy of his favorite novel, The Catcher in the Rye.