France, 1969
87. LIMBS. CROOKED, SCALDED, sculpted. Some bowed and bushy, others slender on men far too young to be in prison, their flesh still shinier than eyes. Limbs are all he sees. Limbs are how he distinguishes one prisoner from another. Mansour has stopped looking at faces. He’s discovered that the face of a fellow prisoner is the prison’s most dangerous place, for everyone is a mirror of him. When he sees another man’s anger, he finds that he beats the iron slab harder, the sparks growing brighter with the force of his rage, sparks soon so thick and golden that he expects, any day now, to spark a fire on the air. So he keeps, more and more, a new distance from himself, a thing that was easy to do, if you intended it. He knows now why Gil Rodney seldom ever smiled.
Men as stock, as product, as limbs and feet: he feels it when they are sprayed down on the yard, when they are weighted, when they are pulled by their chains, when they are left to perform their rage on one another’s bodies—locked in a mess hall and left to fight. He knows why Olu had fought so hard to put him in the choir, had fought so hard to keep him out of the world.
One man commits murder over socks with holes; others war over accents and cities—the kind of Black, the kind of brown, they are; the white men war in another cell block far away. When Mansour participates, the first time in defense, the second time as perpetrator, he knows then that what Keifer had accused Gil of—pulling a gun on him—was the truth. He knows how and why Gil Rodney became two men. And how easy it would be for him to do the same.
He discovers that he must intend to remain himself, for Bonnie, and their child, though this is a thing constantly tested. But he makes the decision. So that evening, when a guard strikes him, he strikes back.
88. ISHA IS PRAYED ALOUD, but Ishmael does it silently. Since he arrived from Tunisia five months ago, he does all five prayers under his breath. It is a practice he is ashamed of but, after the Paris riots, also too frightened to break, even though there are no other guards in this wing on shift. Working the night shift makes monitoring the most sordid section of a prison a little easier. For everyone, both the tortured and the torturer, must sleep. And that brings silence. A void that keeps Ishmael deaf and blind, to whatever really happens here in the waking hours. Things he can smell when he walks the halls, scents of things he has to wash out of his clothes once home but never has to witness.
As he lifts his head from his prayer rug, he hears the verses he was reciting in his mind aloud. His hands vibrate with the sound. An airy, elegant Tajwid rolling across the hall. He imagines himself to be hallucinating. Other guards who worked in solitary have been broken by less: rumors of ghosts, echoes of moans driving them from the wing. But there it is again, the sound growing purer, coming from the cell belonging to the Black man who came in the other night. He’d been cursing out the guards with a bloody face as they’d dragged him in, his accent so sharp and Parisian that Ishmael was shocked when he saw his complexion. It is another shock to him that now his own language, his own holy book, comes again from that man’s voice, a man in a body he would never associate with himself, or with God.
Mansour wakes palpitating. So soaked from the effort of lucid dreaming that when he peels off his clothes, darkened and weighted with sweat, and drops them on the cell’s concrete floor, they sound like mud. Each morning, when twilight arrives, he incants a spiritual request for freedom and a dream of her. Sweating cold when he comes down, headfirst on the sharp ground that awakens the rash on his forehead, a mark made in childhood from praying in this position.
Nights later, his prayer is finally answered. The dream begins the same way each time: yellow bees the size of apples, slurping sap from mango trees with the purple flowers that prophesy their harvest. He reflects, pondering on the metaphor. Then, Bonnie appears. A vision of her from the back, in bed, the golden waist beads she wears for him showing just above the white sheet at her hips. Just turn around, Bonnie. Look at me. I’m here, I’m right here. But she won’t turn around.
He begins to fast, for he knows from childhood that the more hunger he endures, the more frequent and vivid his dreams of her will become. He’s passing out in the daytime, but at night the dream sharpens: now the moles scattered across her back are visible to him. The only part of her he can see, he counts the moles from every angle: thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three … But still, she won’t turn around.
By the fourth week, he can touch her. He savors this breakthrough by slowing his breath in sleep, hot tears stinging his cheeks. She is so close to real. He knows that his scorching need to pull her toward him is a force that will wake him and end the dream. It feels like choking, suppressing his need for her. Though he does, to preserve the vision. Sliding his fingers down the round moles between her shoulder blades, touching them carefully, reverently, savoring, like he’s reading sheet music in braille.
Twilight after twilight, Ishmael listens. Some mornings, the Black man goes for longer than others. Some mornings, his incantations are rhythmless. Pauses in the wrong places. Long silences that drift into snores. Mixing verses from different surahs. Too many gaps, too much slurring. Ishmael starts to listen to the radio to drown out the man. Afraid he’ll hear murmurs, those first hints of insanity—a sound he’s been warned that some men in confinement begin to make on the fourth or fifth day. But the Black man makes no such sound. On the fifth day in solitary, judging by the noise from his cell, he is still lucid. Wearier, but still himself.
On the morning of the ninth day, the day before the Black man’s last in isolation, the hours pass in silence. Curious, Ishmael ventures to the Black man’s cell for the first time. His footsteps are the only sound in the wing, and a pool of white light from the one bulb that does not obey the switchboard blinks down at him. Nearer, Ishmael hears weak pounding. The pounding strengthens as he approaches. He unlocks and slides open the small window that allows in water and food and smells the Black man’s vomit before he can make him out: convulsing in the dark.
For the first time, Ishmael is seeing the prison in daylight. He should have long been gone, but after succeeding at getting the Black man transferred from solitary to the prison hospital a week ago, he is also responsible for taking him back to his old cell in population. He could weasel out of it, but he wants to see how all of this will end.
He is standing outside of the prison infirmary’s door, listening to the day begin on the floor below him: howls and the rummaging of chains. Doors slamming, men called by numbers in that strange singsong of guards, men pleading in Arabic and heavily accented French. The infirmary door swings open.
Passing Ishmael on his way out, all the prison doctor says is, “You can take him now.”
Ishmael enters the dim room; one tiny window is open to a cloud flashing its golden veins, threatening a storm.
From when Ishmael first saw him dragged into solitary to now, the man’s weight has dwindled. With a face mostly made of cheekbones and eyes, he is staring Ishmael down, and Ishmael remembers that he is the inmate that assaulted an officer. But when they catch eyes, the Black man nods, the smallest nod. Some kind of thanks? It is too subtle to tell. Ishmael unlocks the handcuff chaining the man to the bed and gestures for the man to put his wrists together before him to be rechained. The Black man sits up, allowing this, studying Ishmael very hard.
“Where are you taking me?” he says, a voice that surprises him in its calmness.
“Your old cell, with the others.”
“Tunisie,” the Black man guesses, with a curious glare as Ishmael locks the cuffs in place.