Candy Wallace opening it, wearing a toweling hotel robe. A little crest embroidered on the breast. Don lying on the bed, a pair of reading glasses balanced on his nose. Candy and Don, safe in their white cocoon. Don, did you order food, she asked.
I spared them nothing. My blade, working. I could not hear the screams, the pleading. All the time I was in another room, far away in the past, listening to that dreadful laughter. And then the blue lights came and I was returned to myself, drenched in blood, sitting on the front steps of the hotel, as the police circled wide around me with their guns.
Believe I buy a graveyard of my own
Believe I buy me a graveyard of my own
Put my enemies all down in the ground
Charlie watched me, sitting there. A skinny white boy, covered in blood. All ridden out. If I’d been black they probably would have shot me, just put me down right there and then. Instead they hung a coat round my shoulders as they led me to the car.
WHEN YOU LISTEN TO AN OLD RECORD, there can be no illusion that you are present at a performance. You are listening through a gray drizzle of static, a sound like rain. You can never forget how far away you are. You always hear it, the sound of distance in time. But what is the connection between the listener and the musician? Does it matter that one of you is alive and one is dead? And which is which?
Living things are those which resist entropy. They possess a boundary of some kind, a membrane or a skin; a metabolism; the ability to react to the world. And to make copies. To pass something on. That’s all Charlie Shaw wanted, to reach forward, to obey the urge of life. I have made no copies. I am a punctum, an end. A point, not a line. I do not know if I have ever been alive. How would I tell? Where in the living creature does life actually lie? No single part of a cell is alive. And life itself is just an aggregate of non-living processes, chemical reactions cascading, birthing complexity. There is no clear border between life and non-life. Once you realize that, so much else unravels. Death walked into me through Carter, but even before that I’m not sure. My blameless suburban childhood and its small pains: none of it felt real to me. And then I brought death back to those I loved, to Leonie, to Carter. I thought I wanted life, but maybe that’s not true. Maybe I never wanted it, was never even capable of wanting it. And now I am here. If this is not hell, it is what comes before it, its antechamber, its downward slope.
The irony, of course, is that in here skin is everything. The color line is absolute. You may not believe in race, but in prison it believes in you. I am supposed to stand with the white man and I have not done that. Here I am the lowest of the low. They have abused me in every possible way.
On your record deck, you played the sound of the middle passage, the blackest sound. You wanted the suffering you didn’t have, the authority you thought it would bring. It scared you, but you thought of the swagger it would put in your walk, the admiring glances of your friends. Then came the terror when real darkness first seeped through the walls of your bedroom, the walls designed to keep you safe and dreaming. And finally your rising sense of shame when you admitted to yourself that you were relieved the walls were there. The shame of knowing that you would do nothing, that you would allow it all to carry on.
That is not me. I had darkness enough already. Carter was the one. I never wanted the authority of suffering—I suspected it would have a bitter taste. The needle vibrates, punctures my face just below my left eye. The tattooist’s homemade gun is powered by a motor from an old CD player. The ink is made out of soot. Four tears, one each for Carter, Leonie and their parents. I listen to the buzz of the motor and think of what I learned by listening through the crackle and hiss, into the past: they either add dollars or days and if you don’t have dollars, all you have to give is days.