Vanishing Acts

The door to the tank opens again and a female DO screams a series of names: "DEJESUS! ROBINET! VALENTE! HOPKINS!" We file to the door, the lucky ones. Individually we are brought up to a counter to sign a release form cataloging all the possessions that used to be ours. I am asked to press a thumbprint onto the back of two colored cards. There is an empty space beside it; I realize that I will do the same on the day I leave. After three months or eight months or ten years in this system turn me into a different person, they will be sure they are releasing the right man.

  A young girl whose hair smells like autumn is the one in charge of fingerprinting us. It is done on a machine and sent automatically to the FBI and the State of Arizona's main databank. There, it will magically connect to any other times you've been in trouble with the law.

  Sophie's school recently had a Child Safety Day. They took pictures of the kids and mounted them on Safety Passports. They had the local police set up to roll the fingerprints of each boy and girl. This was all so that they would have a protocol in place if the child was ever abducted.

  I helped out that day. I sat next to an officer of the Wexton PD and we made jokes about how the mothers were coming out in droves to the gymnasium at the elementary school not because they were concerned with safety, but because they had cabin fever after three days of steady snow. Child after child, I held those impossibly tiny fingers between my own, small and fleshy as peas, and rolled them across the ink pad. "Jeez," the officer had said, when I got good at it. "Why haven't we hired you?"

  Now, as I am standing in the Madison Street Jail rolling my own fingers across a blank screen, the technician seems surprised that I know how to do it myself. "A pro," she says, and I glance up at her. I wonder if she knows that the same treatment is given to the kidnappers as the kidnapped.

  From Tank Six I can see the boy in the suicide chair. A young kid with hair that covers his face, he whispers rap lyrics to himself and curls his hands into fists to pull at the restraints every now and then.

  The Mexican boy who advised me not to use the phone is here, too, now. He lifts up his hands when the door opens and the DO tosses a haul of plastic bags into the air, catching two of them before they land on the floor. "Ladmo," he says, sitting back down.

  "Andrew Hopkins."

  This breaks up several of the men in the cell. "It isn't my name," the boy says. "It's the lunch."

  I take the cellophane sack from his hand and look through the contents: six slices of white bread. Two pieces of cheese. Two rounds of questionable bologna. An orange. A cookie. A juice container. Just like what you and I pack Sophie for snack at school.

  "Why does the lunch have a name?" I ask.

  He shrugs. "Used to be a TV program for kids, the Wallace and Ladmo Show. They gave out goodie packs called Ladmo Bags. Guess Sheriff Jack thought it was funny."

  Across the cell, a big man shakes his head. "Ain't funny to make us pay a dollar a day for this shit."

  The Mexican sticks a long thumbnail in his orange and begins to peel it, one continuous stripe. "That's something else Sheriff Jack thinks is funny," he says. "Once you're inside, you got to pay for your food."

  "Hey." A Native American man who has been asleep in the corner rubs his eyes and crawls forward to snatch a Ladmo. "What kind of animal has an asshole in the middle of its back?"

  "Sheriff Jack's horse," grumbles the big man. "If you're gonna tell a joke, at least tell one we haven't all heard a thousand times."

  The Native American's eyes harden. "Ain't my fault you pop in and out of here like some skinny dick in your mama."

  The big man stands up, his lunch tumbling to the floor. Ten square feet is a small space, but it shrinks even further when fear sucks out all the spare air. I press myself up against the wall as the big man grabs the Native American by the neck and hurls him forward in one smooth move, so that his head smashes through the plate glass.

  By the time the DOs arrive, the Native American is lying in a crumpled heap on the bottom of the cell, with blood trickling down his collar, and the big man is eating his lunch. "Well, shoot," the officer says. "That was one of the stronger windows."

  When the big man gets thrown across the hallway into one of the isolation cells, the boy in the suicide chair doesn't even react. The Native American is hauled off for medical attention. The Mexican leans down and grabs the two abandoned lunch sacks. "The orange is mine," he says.

  We are told to shower, but no one does, and I am not about to stand out any more than I already do. Instead I follow the others as they strip down, each man putting his clothing into a plastic bag. In return, we are given orange flip-flops, black-and-white convict-striped shirts and pants, hot pink boxers, a hot pink thermal tee, and hot pink socks. Another of Sheriff Jack's policies, I am told; the pink keeps inmates from stealing the underwear when they're released. It is not until one of the other men turns his back that I see the writing: SHERIFF'S INMATE. UNSENTENCED.

  It feels like pajamas. Loose and unstructured, an elastic around my waist. As if, at any given moment, I just might wake up.

  We are the ones who have been remanded into the custody of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, the ones who have not been released on bail. There is a courtroom right in the curve of the Horseshoe, one that meets several times a day.

  When it was my turn, I told the initial appearance judge that I wanted to wait for my lawyer. "That's nice, Mr. Hopkins," he said. "I'd like to wait for my pension, too, but we can't always get what we want."

  My hearing took less than thirty seconds.

  T-3 is the cell where we wait to be given our placement in the jail system. The man beside me has taken off his sandals and sits in a lotus position, chanting. Now that we're dressed alike, we are all reduced to the same bottom line. There is nothing to differentiate the guy who shoplifted an electric razor from the one who slashed a gang member's throat with a straight edge. We cannot tell one another apart, and this is both a blessing and a curse.

  Freedom smells of spores and ragweed and dust and heat and suntan oil and car exhaust. Of hot, buttered daffodils and worms hiding under the soil. Of everything that's outside, when you are in here.

  Two detention officers escort me upstairs to the second floor of the Madison Street Jail, the maximum security pod. The elevator opens up into a central control area. I am strip-searched again, and then given a toothbrush the size of my pinky finger, toothpaste, toilet paper, golf pencils, erasers, a comb, and soap. I'm handed a towel, blanket, mattress, and sheet.

  The house consists of four pods--cages, each with fifteen cells inside. A central guard booth looms in the middle of the space, communicating by intercom. In each cage, a handful of men sit downstairs at tables, playing cards or eating or watching TV.

  After my paperwork is transferred, the officer on the floor opens the door to the cage. "You're in the middle cell up there," she says. Immediately I can feel everyone's attention settling on me like a rash.

  "Fresh meat," says one man, with a barbed-wire tattoo on his neck.

  "Fish," says another, and he purses his lips.

  I walk past them, pretending I'm deaf. In my cell, I put my supplies on the top bunk. I can almost stretch out my arms and touch both walls.

  I lie down on the mattress, which is wafer-thin and stained. Now that I'm alone, all the fear that's been building up inside me during the intake process--all the panic I've been pushing out of my mind and covering with utter silence--presses down on my chest so hard I cannot breathe. My heart is thundering: I am sixty years old and in jail. I am the easiest target.

  When I took you, I knew this was always a possibility. But risk always looks different when you are beating the system than when you've been beaten.

  A man walks into the cell. Tall and beefy, he has devil horns tattooed on his head and is carrying a Bible. "Who the fuck are you?" he asks. "I'm off at church and they stick someone in my cell? Fuck that." He shoves the Bible under the mattress on the bottom bunk, then comes onto the landing and yells fo
r the DO. "What's with Grandpa?"

  "There's nowhere else to put him, Sticks. Deal with it."

  The man smashes his fist against the steel door. "Get out," he orders.

  I take a deep breath. "I'm staying."

  Sticks--is that really a name?--comes toe to toe with me. "What are you, a punk?"

  A punk, as I remember it, is a guy who rolls cigarettes up in his T-shirt sleeve and tries to act like James Dean. "Okay," I say. "Sure. Whatever. I'm a punk. You're a punk. We're all punks."

  When he looks at me, incredulous, and then turns on his heel and leaves, a sweet shock unravels inside me. Could it really be that easy? If I refuse to play the game, will I be left alone?

  Hopkins.

  My name is piped in through the intercom system, and I come to the front of the cell and peer at the DO who is speaking into the microphone in the central booth.

  You've got a visitor.

  *

  I am expecting Eric, and instead, I find you.

  I don't know how you've gotten to Arizona this fast. I don't know what you've done with Sophie while you're here. I don't know how you've made it past all these steel walls and locks and lies.

  You're staring at me with every step, and at first I'm embarrassed--that you should see me like this, wearing convict stripes and stripped down to the very marrow of my faults. I'm too ashamed, at first, to even meet your gaze, but when I do, I'm even more ashamed. I bet you don't realize it, but there's still hope in your eyes. After all this, you still trust me to explain why your whole life has been upended. I am responsible for putting that trust there in the first place; I did not earn it as much as demand it by default.

  How am I supposed to make you understand that in order to give you the life I thought you deserved to live, I had to take away the life you knew?

  When you were little, and I had to count the minutes that I was allowed to see you, I wanted to give you the world. So I'd pick you up in my car and we'd drive across the desert with the windows rolled down. When we got far enough away, I'd turn to you and ask: Where would you go, if you could go anywhere? And you'd give me the answers of a little girl: To the moon. To Candyland. To London Bridge. I'd rev up the engine and nod, as if any of these destinations were possible. I think we both knew we'd never get there, but that hardly seemed to matter, as long as we were driving around looking for them. There were no car seats in those days; there were no seat belt laws, but you trusted me to keep you safe. You trusted me to take you somewhere wonderful.

  You are on the other side of the glass booth, and you are sobbing. I pick up the phone, hoping you'll do the same. "Delia, baby," I say. "Don't cry."

  You lift up the bottom of your shirt to wipe your eyes. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  Well. There are a thousand reasons for that, some of which are truths I'm still not able to share with you, and never will be. But mostly, it was because I knew firsthand what it was like to love one person so hard that I'd staked my life on her, only to realize that somewhere along the line, she'd unraveled me. And I couldn't stand knowing that you might one day feel about me the way I had come to feel about your mother.

  You ask me for your name, mine, my old profession. I hand these details to you like the bargaining chips a crisis negotiator would use to keep someone on the edge from jumping, except the life at stake here is the one we've carved out together. I watch your face for clues, but you do not look me in the eye.

  When I forced myself to picture this moment in the origami folds of the night, I'd run through multiple scenarios: the police coming to the senior center; my credit card being denied at a gas station because it set off a red flag; Elise showing up on our doorstep. In each of them, I always pictured you holding fast to my hand, unable or unwilling to let anything come between us.

  This is why, maybe, I'm caught off guard when you get angry. I don't know why I've always assumed that since I was the one to take you, I would also be the one who decided when to let go.

  I didn't have a choice, I say, but my words curl under at the ends, like a beaten dog's tail.

  "You had a choice," you answer, but it's what you don't say that slices through me like a clean blade: And you made the wrong one.

  For a long time, after we ran away, we both had nightmares. Mine involved you holding your mother's hand, stepping off the curb into a wall of oncoming traffic. I'd lurch forward to push you out of the way, only to discover that I'd been watching from behind a glass wall. I'd listen to the scream of brakes and your high cries, knowing I could not reach you.

  When you leave the visiting area, I drop the phone and press my hands to the glass. I bang on it, but you can't hear me.

  Your nightmares used to be about getting left behind. You'd rip the seam of sleep wide open and wake up, damp and sobbing. I'd rub your back until you fell asleep again. Nightmares don't come true, I'd soothe.

  As it turns out, I was lying about that, too.

  *

  Instead of going back to my cell, I wander around the pod. There is a communal area where some of the inmates are playing cards or watching television. The toilet facilities are in the cells, but there is a room with showers off in the rear corner. It's empty now, and that's enough reason for me to duck inside.

  In the aftermath of your visit, I am moving slowly, as if I'm swimming underwater. I had hoped to see you because I am selfish, but now I wish you hadn't come. It's only made me more sure of what I told Eric before I was extradited from New Hampshire: I am no longer a source of protection for you, but a source of pain. I heard as much, minutes ago, in the cramped breaths you took between sentences. For the first time in your life you wondered if you'd have been better off without me.

  I gave up my life once trying to do what's best for you. Tomorrow, in front of a judge, I'll do it again.

  I am leaning my forehead against the cool tile of the shower area when a shadow falls behind me. Sticks is there, surrounded by a brace of men as large as he is, their tattooed arms folded and their bodies blocking the exit.

  "I'm no punk," Sticks says.

  The next thing I know I am splayed on the floor, my head ringing from a blow. There is an impossible weight on my legs, and I can feel my pants being ripped down. I try to curl up into a ball, but he starts hitting at my face and my gut. I try to yell for help. As his hands lock onto my legs I start kicking anywhere, anything, because I am not going to let this happen. I am not.

  I start sewing together all the fury I've been gathering together since the moment the police took me out of my kitchen in Wexton days ago. I let loose the panic I've stored for twenty-eight years, about being found out. So when his arm anchors me at the waist, when his hips are parenthetical to mine, I reach out for the bar of soap on the shower floor. I twist; shove it into his grinning mouth.

  He lets go of me immediately and I roll to the side, dry heaving and grabbing at my clothes. I can't think of you in here; I can't think of anything but me. And I won't be left alone, not even if I try to fade into the background. Everyone else will just pick at me until they see what color I bleed.

  That's all I can hold in my head, before everything goes black.

  When I fall asleep in jail, it is never dark, and I am never tired. So I find myself imagining what got me in here in the first place, twisting it into a Mobius strip in my mind.

  I don't count sheep; I count days.

  I don't pray; I barter with God.

  I make a list of the things I've taken for granted, because I always thought I would have access to them:

  Meat that requires a knife. Pens. Caffeinated coffee.

  A child's belly laugh. A butterfly's tango.

  Paperwork.

  Pitch dark. Snow clouds.

  Utter quiet.

  You.

  I open one eye, the only one that works, and find myself staring at a short, muscular black man who is picking through a collection of food. It is nearly dark, and the door to the cell is locked. He takes an orange and slips it under his ma
ttress.

  I try to sit up, but feel like I've been beaten from head to heel. "Who ... are you?"

  He turns, as if surprised to discover that I'm alive. "Concise."

  "That's your name?"

  "It's what the ladies call me. Because I may be short, but man am I sweet." He takes a handful of carrots and eats them. "Hope you weren't counting on dinner," he says, pointing to what must have been my tray.

  "What happened to ..."

  "Sticks?" Concise grins. "The motherfucker got a D."

  "A D?"

  "He in disciplinary segregation for a week."

  "Why didn't I get one?"

  "Because even the DOs know: You get called a punk, and you either gotta fuck or fight." He turns a sharp eye on me. "Don't be gettin' comfortable. No way are you stayin' here for good. They didn't want to mix races at all, but I was all they got open."

  Right now it would not matter to me if Concise was African American, Hispanic, or Martian. He takes a postcard from the pocket of his striped shirt and sticks it through the bars at the front of the cell. On the door, he has fashioned a mailbox made of plastic spoons. There is even a little flag, colored in with red Magic Marker.

  I wonder whether, if you rot here long enough, you grow a thicker skin. I wonder if prison is any different from this. Once I go to court and enter a guilty plea, that's where I will be headed--for years. Maybe one for each I stole from you.

  I try to roll over and wince at the fire in my kidneys. "Why are you here?" I ask.

  "Because the damn Ritz was full up," Concise says. "What kind of fool question is that?"

  "I mean, why are you in jail?"

  "Six months for dealin'. Would have been three, but I already done time before. That's the thing about a habit. It's like a pet, man. It don't go away just because you're in here. It's waitin' to jump all over you the minute you walk back onto the street."

  From my vantage point on the bottom bunk, I look up and see the steel tray holding the upper mattress. I look at the tack welds and wonder how much weight they can support.

  "Sticks, he one tough cracker, man. He thinks he own this pod." Concise shakes his head. "We all wonderin' who the hell you are."

  I close my eyes and think of all the people I have been in my lifetime: a boy who fell in love with a broken girl a thousand years ago; a father holding a newborn and thinking that nothing could ever make him let her go; a man starving for one more moment with his little girl; a fugitive on the run; a liar; a cheat; a felon. Maybe the habit that is always waiting to jump me on the other side of the fence is revival. Maybe I will do absolutely anything to wipe the slate clean, to start over.