In the photograph, Paige is in Noah’s attic bedroom, her hand up to shield her face from his camera, a look of embarrassed amusement on her face. Strands of her hair curl around her cheek. He likes this photograph because it touches all of his senses. He hears Paige’s voice—Don’t take my picture! He smells her the way he liked her best, sweaty after sex. He feels her hand on his arm while she tries to keep him from snapping the photo with his phone.
Paige. He will never see her again. He told her not to come here, and to drive the point home, he told her he wouldn’t see her if she came. They have no future now, and it’s better she remembers him when life was good, to hold that sweet memory close to herself, rather than having her image of him deteriorate slowly over the years as he grows harder, more bitter.
He met yesterday with his lawyer, who told him there would be a one-month delay in getting his appeal on file. Noah told him that was okay. He doesn’t have a chance. He knows that. He’s in no hurry to find out that his appeal has been rejected.
That’s the worst part, worse than the fear in the prison yard, or the loneliness, or the shame of being convicted of a double homicide. The lack of any hope, of any future, of any meaning to his life, will kill him—if a shank in the neck doesn’t.
Which of those will come first, he has no idea.
38
THE MACHINE SHOP in Sing Sing is in the former “death room,” where the electric chair, “Old Sparky,” killed more than six hundred people, including the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, over the course of seventy years. “Old Sparky” has been moved to a museum, and the death penalty has been abolished in New York—Noah now often wishes it hadn’t—so instead, Noah works in that space assembling chairs for toddlers, to be used, he assumes, in either an elementary school or a hospital.
If there have been any moments of enjoyment in his two and a half months in Sing Sing, they have come while he’s been doing this work, taking care and pride in putting together these chairs. He’s always enjoyed working with his hands, knowing that there is something tangible to show for his effort. Someone will sit in this chair. Someone will learn something in this chair. Someone will laugh in this chair.
“On the count!” One of the COs walks in for the census, taken four times a day to make sure all prisoners are accounted for. The correctional officers cannot, as a practical matter, follow around every inmate all the time, so they move them in groups through the narrow hallways, always staying to the right of the yellow stripe down the center, and even let them walk on their own when going to the yard or the gym.
At the CO’s call, Noah stands and keeps his hands at his sides. The CO counts off the inmates aloud. There are eleven in the machine shop, divided among the various rooms for printing, woodwork, and welding. There are only three, Noah included, here in woodworking.
Noah gets back to work, squatting down on one knee. Behind him, he hears the other two inmates—both of them African American, Al and Rafer—abruptly put down their tools and walk out of woodworking. Noah senses something.
He gets to his feet just as three men enter the room. Unlike Al and Rafer, these men aren’t black. They are white. He recognizes one of them as Eric Wheaton, the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood here at Sing Sing. His two friends are massive, with shaved heads and skin ink up and down their tree-trunk arms.
Wheaton, himself above average in size but dwarfed by his companions, is the elder statesman of his clan, probably fifty. He shows Noah his teeth. “Well, Noah. Seems like you been avoiding us. My friends have offered to be your friends.”
“I don’t need friends like you,” says Noah. He wishes he had something in hand, like the hammer on the floor.
“You don’t need friends? You’re the only guy in A don’t need friends? How’s a guy like you gonna get along in here with all the mongrels?”
The men on each side of Wheaton fan out, forming a semicircle around Noah. Two more men, nearly as big as the first set of goons, also proud members of the Brotherhood, enter the room. Now it’s five on one.
“So I’m askin’ nice,” says Wheaton. “For the last time.”
Noah takes a breath, steels himself. “I don’t need you or your white-trash racist asshole buddies.”