THE FOUR STAGES.

OF CRUELTY.

KEITH HOLLIHAN.

Die, dear, that I may love you.

Live, and be my foe.

-NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS.

G.o.d has undertaken a plan: it is a daring and risky plan, involving G.o.d in so much ambiguity-one might almost say subterfuge-that he begins to look like a double agent, becoming compromised at many points in order to pull off the solution.

-N. T. WRIGHT.

Prologue.

Let's say your name is Joshua. You're eighteen years old, a quiet student who likes to draw and an otherwise normal person, but you're going out of your mind because your ex-girlfriend won't talk to you anymore and has been hooking up with another guy. You know her parents are out of town and you know she's with him in her living room right now, lying on the couch, shirt off, jeans unzipped, because that's exactly what you would have been doing with her on a Friday night a month or so before. You take your father's gun because you want her to know how painful it feels and how far you'd go to get her back. But when you're finally there, standing in the middle of the living room, nothing works out the way you'd planned. Not that you had any plans. The girlfriend, you realize, is no longer your girlfriend. She's screaming at you to get out, and there's a look in her eyes that doesn't fit with the way you feel. Meanwhile, her new boyfriend has decided to go all Rambo. It gets crazy. You're both fighting over the gun like it's a live snake, and it's pointing this way and that. You just want to get a firm hold on it, put it away, and go home. But Rambo won't let go.

And then he does, and you're both out of breath, and all the emotions have drained away, and you just leave. You drive home, numb and shaky, praying no one calls the cops or your parents. You're terrified for a month and ashamed for about a year. You bounce back a little in your second year of college and switch majors, dropping pre-medicine to work on a degree in psychology with as many fine art cla.s.ses as you can squeeze in. Once in a while you think about that Friday night. You even gain some perspective on it. In one of your cla.s.ses, you read some statistics about violent crimes and young males. It's practically an epidemic, except no one acknowledges it. At seventeen to twenty, the human brain isn't developed enough to fully distinguish right from wrong, reality from fantasy, but the young male has all this emotion and power and little ability to express it except through physical violence or acts of self- destruction. That's how soldiers and suicide bombers get recruited. Sitting there in the library, drawing pictures of her along the margins of your notebook, you think about that gun and what it felt like holding it, and how it slipped around in your hands when you were fighting, and how G.o.dd.a.m.n scary those few seconds of un certainty were. And you put down your pen, cover up the drawing, and thank G.o.d that nothing bad really happened.

Now, let's say the gun went off.

STAGE I.

1.

I can think of no gentle way to begin.

I need to explain why the biggest mystery for me was not how an inmate could go missing inside a maximum security penitentiary, nor what the drawings meant, or even who was involved in the murders. The thing that stays with me, like the memory of a limb now gone, is the mystery of human compa.s.sion. The twisted variations of it, the love and the hurt, the obsession and the neglect, the abuse and the need, all commingled and bound. Although I am as cynical and skeptical as can be expected, given my experience, I am not one to deny that genuine relationships can form between inmates and corrections officers. I do know, however, that those relationships are almost universally based on some form of trade, a commerce of getting by. You need them as much as they need you, and I will admit that debts acc.u.mulate and sometimes must be paid off in ways that compromise what you think is right. This can happen to any of us.

My name is Kali Williams. I doubt that my parents, when they changed a few letters in the more conventionally spelled Kaylee, knew they were naming me after the many-armed Hindu G.o.ddess of darkness and destruction. But out of that dull midwestern instinct to be safe but slightly different, I sprang: a personality of sharp edges and bruising elbows.

If this were just a story about Ditmarsh Penitentiary and my work within it, I would probably start by discussing the routine and even the incidentally interesting aspect of being a thirty-nine-year-old female-one of only 26 women on a corrections staff of 312-providing daily operational security over 950 (plus or minus) hard-core a.s.sholes, s.e.x offenders, addicts, liars, serial felons, white-collar d.i.c.k suckers, gang-bangers, and relatively honest murderers. I enjoyed my job. I liked the bang and clang of the cellblocks, the armored ease you needed to show in getting by, the acute attention to psychology and mood. For the most part, the bulls.h.i.t bounced off me, the rat-a-tat routine of jokes and looks, the subtle grind of male criticism disguised half-a.s.sedly as helpfulness. I never questioned the right and wrong of the work-it was pretty G.o.dd.a.m.n clear to me, and still is-but there were times when I got stuck wondering how I'd become this person who wore the belt and jangled the keys and relied on the way the quick decisions got backed up by the remorseless rules. Nothing good came of those moods, however, and I avoided them as much as possible. I have an irritable impatience for the overly steeped, self-pitying emotions of anyone with too much time on their hands, including, and perhaps especially, myself.

This is not about my job, though, or about me; it's about what happened, and all those mysteries I mentioned, and the mystery of compa.s.sion most of all. Even when I found the body dangling from a door in the abandoned cells beneath the prison, so terribly abused, it was the absence of compa.s.sion, the lack of pity in the place, that hit me hardest. Though surrounded by the dark output of violent lives, I had never before seen the ravages of such unrestrained brutality. I forced myself to edge past, pressing up against the cold wall where the scrawled drawings were most tangled, in order to see the face. In that dead gaze, was I the delayed rescuer or another tormenter? I'm not sure I can answer without sorting through the events that led up to it. As I said, I can think of no gentle way to begin.

2.

I liked the in-between times, too. It was the illusion of control, the condensed privacy. The post-dinner lull was a favorite of mine, a period in which inmate frustrations seemed to ebb and alpha energy got transferred into focused tasks. Even in the winter I often crossed the yard when I moved from building to building, avoiding the tunnels just to take it in. The cell lights showed narrow slashes in the granite, like countless white crosses in a military cemetery. In the mess hall, you knew the born-agains were with group. In the gym, the squeak and snap of basketball. In the library, the amateur lawyers searched for precedents like paleontologists dusting off dirt-covered rocks. In their cells, the book readers flipped pages of dog-eared mysteries, hoping the endings hadn't been ripped out. At key-up, when we sealed the cells and locked the blocks, the inmates got restless and edgy again, but after midnight, those who weren't asleep wanted to be alone, and that suited us fine. All the innocence held until an hour before breakfast, when a sizable minority woke and did whatever exercises, prayers, or self-abuse rituals their OCD fixes demanded. By that time their brains were stirring and they had plans or worries or irritations to ponder, and for those of us who watched them, that was the beginning of another s.h.i.t day.

Joshua Riff was an in-between kind of inmate. The first time I met him, I came in three hours prior to shift change, just after four in the morning, to wake him up in his cell. Most inmates jump long before you key, but Josh was still a puppy, a pale-skinned nineteen-year-old with wispy chin whiskers and sleepy eyes, sporting bed wood and mussed-up hair, a delinquent little brother late for school.

His cell was a dump. The typical inmate keeps a tight drum, even if it's overflowing with stuff, but Josh had scattered his belongings everywhere without organization-wet towel, dirty socks, one shoe flopped over, the other climbing the wall. He didn't have much, and he lacked the electronic amenities, visual distractions, and cardboard shelving units of a resourceful inmate, but if this were general population, someone would have rapped his head against the wall hard and forced him to tidy up his moldy s.h.i.t.

Josh was not housed in a normal range, however, but in the Ditmarsh infirmary, or what we called the howler ward. It was a storage house for misfits-the injured, seriously ill, and not-all-there. I'd probably pa.s.sed his cell a hundred times and never looked in. Like most COs, I didn't give the howlers and cripples and AIDS carriers much thought; it wasn't contempt so much as indifference to anyone who was too vulnerable to pose a threat or too weak to command attention. When Keeper Wallace told me where Riff was located, I made the quick a.s.sumption that my new friend was bugged up or self-injurious. He seemed utterly normal to me now, and that put another irritant into my brain, making me wonder why he wasn't shelved in gen pop like the other inmates. He was young and soft, but that shouldn't have made a difference-the cubs got tossed in with the wolves. So why the special treatment? Nothing p.i.s.ses me off more sharply than unearned privilege, and I was already confused about the strange and unusual task I had been given.

It was not a good day for Josh either.

"Why?" he asked in a low, sleepy voice.

"Why do you think?" I answered just as quietly, and told him to suit up.

I could see the memory pa.s.s over him in the grim, stilted way he got dressed. His father's funeral, and me his reluctant escort. I'd delivered inmates to court or the hospital before, and once to a school, but never in the middle of the night without paperwork, a.s.sistance, or formal permission, and never with the strongly worded advice to remain discreet about what was going on. I should have asked why. I should have mentioned that a pile of rules were being violated and a stack of lies were being told. But I kept thinking, what good would that do me against Keeper Wallace? Whistle-blowers never won out, they just got the hurt.

Josh avoided glancing at me as we walked. I figured he was probably rattled by the whole father funeral thing, and the less we said to each other over the course of the day, the better we'd both bear up. I brought him down the darkened stairwell of the infirmary and through the tunnel into the main hub. He looked up and around like a nervous tourist pa.s.sing through. The hub was the focal point of the entire prison, the center s.p.a.ce from which the four cellblocks, the education wing, and Keeper's Hall stretched out. When empty, it had a vacant stadium feel. At ground level, squatting in the exact middle was the bubble-the caged, bulletproof-gla.s.s central control s.p.a.ce for guards, equipped with closed-circuit television monitors scanning every cellblock and most of the hallways and access points. Below the bubble was the armaments room-where wistful COs went to fondle the weapons they could not carry-and deeper still the old isolation range we called the City, our medieval dungeon, our prison within a prison, welded shut these past five years in accordance with the kinder, gentler approach of the current administration.

Six stories above, a full two stories beyond the four levels of cellblocks, was the gla.s.s dome. At night it reflected a muted glow that turned the entire hub into a dimly lit cathedral, while in the day, it was the world's strangest greenhouse, the sun grinding through hundreds of years of dirt. It must have cost a fortune when it was built, and it must have seen a hundred thousand inmates and COs wasting their lives below. And for what? Once upon a time, the architects and builders had believed that inspiration for reform would come from the contemplation of G.o.d, visible no doubt through that far aperture. The hub-and-spoke system, with its stacked tiers of narrow cells lit by high windows, was made purposely cramped and austere in order to restrict activity and encourage spiritual reflection, a miscalculation regarding the true nature of human psychology that only got more ridiculous as the years went on. Reform was a hopeless dream, I believed. You could restrict what inmates did, but you could never restrict what they thought-and what they thought about practically all the time was doing bad. Instead of dreams about the higher power, most people inside-COs and inmates alike-spent their mental energy calculating the power at hand, mixing it with thoughts about survival, making money, or getting some kind of s.e.xual gratification or substance abuse in before the day was done. The rest was filler, the measly stuff of thwarted lives.

I avoided Keeper's Hall, where night shift COs might be doing paperwork, and we crossed the second yard outside. The cold air bit our skin. The ground was barren and snow free, but it crunched, the kind of early December morning that makes you long like a pagan for the summer sun to rise. Inside the front gate, Keeper Wallace stood behind the admittance counter all alone, waiting for us. He was flipping paper when we arrived, checking through old admittance reports, never a wasted moment for those thick, short-fingered hands. When he looked up, a tweak of guilt hit me, despite the righteousness that stiffened my spine.

I had admired him once, and that was the problem. There were four other keepers on staff-that's what we called our supervising COs-and all were of equal rank and similar seniority, but it was clear by the flow of decisions and the command he imposed that Wallace had the most authority at the field level. From the beginning I was drawn to his detailed knowledge and his understated character and above all his severe and never-wavering competence, a professional code surprisingly rare in an inst.i.tution of vigilant discipline. In my way, without being obvious about it, I'd modeled my own conduct as a CO on his, disdaining the slackness and the easy corruption I saw around me on a routine basis. I'd a.s.sumed that a supervisor like Wallace would notice such adherence. But my first two years on the job warranted no special attention or approval apparently, and the respect I felt for him drained away when my application for URF duty got turned down with his signature.

The Urgent Response Force was a kind of SWAT team of elite COs called to task during prolonged or particularly dangerous emergency situations. I had wanted in for a number of reasons. The money appealed-an extra fifteen to twenty thousand a year. The toughness appealed-even the name sounded hard, the exhale made when baton met belly. And the bullet point on the resume was the kicker. Maybe, just maybe, I could impress some federal law enforcement agency with a few years doing serious tactical work as a corrections officer. This late bloomer wanted to go places.

Despite my solid test scores, Wallace denied my application without any adequate explanation. Maybe I hadn't paid my dues. Maybe I wasn't connected to the right people. But I'd followed the rules and been turned down, so I filed a successful grievance, using gender to force my way into a club that didn't want me. To my paranoid eye, the a.s.signment with Josh smacked of revenge, a trick to catch me out. Wallace had asked me to do it as a favor. He'd told me that because I'd lost my own father a few months before, I'd be suitable for the role, more sensitive in my handling of a social situation. But I did not believe him. We did not think of inmates in such terms. When an incident of violence occurred somewhere inside the walls, one of the first questions we asked was, "Any humans involved?"-meaning any COs, even any civilians. The emotional well-being of an inmate was not our first, second, or third priority, and Wallace was no different in that regard from anyone else.

We exchanged good-mornings. Wallace didn't thank me or indicate through any shared glance or hurried movement that what we were doing was out of the ordinary. I'd been curious about who would be on shift at the gate, because I figured that would allow me to meet one of his cronies, someone else who did his bidding when the work was off-the-record. I wanted to see whether my fellow CO was sheepish or brazen about it and to get a little more insight into the way Wallace operated and what it cost and what it provided. Seeing the Keeper alone made my stomach twist a little bit more. Either this outing was so wrong he didn't want to involve anyone else, or no one else had been willing to attach themselves to the deed.

Instead, ever efficient and grim, Wallace told Josh to shackle up, and Josh held out his hands for his three-piece suit-the metal bracelets and taut chain looping his ankles, waist, and wrists.

When Wallace stood straight again, he grimaced, as though the bending over had bothered an already tight back. Then he spoke.

"You've got a day pa.s.s," he told Josh. "You've got a medical condition requiring a CT scan. You're getting the scan done at the veterans hospital. Officer Williams is your escort. There was another CO along for the ride, but you don't remember his name. I hope you'll remember that story without embellishments. It's for your own well-being as much as anything else."

I was rattled to hear the lie so openly blueprinted. Josh gave an inarticulate teenager nod, the kind you never quite trust, and Wallace turned to me and said thank you. This time I detected a flimsy grat.i.tude in the sagging lines of his face. I gave my own inarticulate nod in return.

3.

Josh was my property now, so I checked his bracelets and gave his chain a couple of quick jerks to make sure they were fastened, even though the Keeper had done the snapping himself. Then I directed Josh to the door with a little more force and spite than necessary. He almost tripped at the first few steps; then he remembered how to do it. You cup your hands near your groin, crouch so that your back is hunched and the vertical chain is slackened, and take high-speed baby steps to keep the ankle chain from striking taut. They call it the shackle shuffle, and it makes you move like a b.i.t.c.h.

A brown sedan was waiting at the curb edge. Wallace had lent me his car so I wouldn't have to pay for the miles. Josh sat in back on the right so I could keep an eye on him, like a child in a car seat, but he was so meek and glum I had to remind myself to keep a steady awareness. He turned rather suddenly as we pulled onto the old post road, and I realized he was looking back at Ditmarsh. The high walls were spotlighted but otherwise dim and hard to make out, but the dome was glowing like an orb. I bet he was thinking it should have been a lot longer before he saw the outside of that house, and I bet he was hoping without hope it would be a lot longer before he saw it again. Then it was all silence along the highway, my directions spread out beside me.

I typically tried not to converse at any length with inmates-it made the job easier when you saw through every attempt at banter or connection like it was one more grift or lie-but the holdout got harder as the day went on and on.

We hit the Super 8 motel first, and I parked next to the room door and walked Josh out. His mother opened the door and met us, hugged him, and thanked me. She was older than I expected.

"Please come in," she offered-as if there were any other way this was going to play out.

I showed appreciation for her kind hospitality, and we occupied the room like members of the same family, barely enough s.p.a.ce in and around the twin beds to avoid one another's limbs. I unshackled Josh more gently than I had handled him before, and he looked at me for instructions.

Mrs. Riff took over. "Your suit's hanging on the bathroom door hook. I turned the shower on to steam the wrinkles out."

"Is that okay?" he asked me, and only moved after I gave my a.s.sent. I'm sure it was strange for his mother to see that.

Josh went into the bathroom. I wished the TV was on, a blast of Fox News to smother the uncomfortable hush. I could smell Mrs. Riff's perfume over the staleness of industrial carpet and bedspread fabric. Distracted by other thoughts, she put on a watch and some rings, and touched her hair awkwardly, like someone newly blind. There was a pinkness to her cheeks that did not look healthy. When she noticed me again, she seemed almost startled by my presence in the room, so I told her I was very sorry for her loss, but in such a stiff and trite way I probably came across more uniform than human. She nodded in acknowledgment and looked down at her lap, her mouth tight with irritation. The vibe I got was that at some level, below the politeness and the prim dignity, she nurtured a little spark of hate, and held me, and those like me, responsible for everything bad that had happened to her precious boy. While this p.i.s.sed me off, it also settled my own anxiety and gave me a nice sense of distance from her concerns. I did not want to get personal, and the wretched scene was already too social worker by far.

When Josh came out wearing an off-the-rack black suit, his mother fussed with it until she was satisfied, and then they forgot about me and sat on the edge of the bed and talked. I removed myself to the deepest corner of the room and did a good job of keeping my ears shut, even though it was impossible not to absorb the long pauses and sniffs, the unspeakably hesitant touches of sleeves and shoulders, as though real contact was as forbidden as it would have been in the VnC room. Josh was hunched over and twisted away like someone hiding from a physical blow. Mrs. Riff looked at the tissue in her palm. Tough haul, I thought, but then again, those are the dividends you earn serving a major bit in a maximum security penitentiary. Lost birthdays, missed weddings, whole lives. Any sympathy I felt always curdled a little when I thought about the reasons they were inside in the first place. I did not know what Josh had done, but it had to be something nasty, horrific, or repeated to end up at Ditmarsh.

When it was time to go, I didn't put the shackles back on, but used the plastic zip cuffs instead, practically invisible if Josh kept his hands clasped and those overly long sleeves extended. Of course it was ridiculous to feel as though he were less an escape threat in his civilian suit than he had been in his orange smocks, but it seemed obscene to send him to the funeral in chains. Mrs. Riff took her own car, and we followed close behind. They walked into the funeral home together, me hovering in the near background. Casket open. A waxy, sharp-nosed face fixed in stern bewilderment. That cloistered, stuffy room. All kinds of memories for me, my own father's death so recent. I counted seven mourners total, and one of them might have been an employee of the funeral home. Part of me was relieved; the fewer who knew about this craziness, the better. I wondered if it had been arranged that way, in which case the paltry attendance seemed another sacrifice that might have made a prodigal son's shame even harder.

Once the service ended, mother and son hugged long and hard; then we parted so she could follow her husband's body to the cemetery and we could go back to the house on the hill. Spell broken, I became all business and made Josh change back into his orange jumpsuit right there in the reception room, then shackled him up again, walked him out, and slid him into the back of the sedan. He rested his head against the cold gla.s.s and barely looked up until we were on the highway and he announced that he needed to hurl.

I didn't understand the urgency at first, but then I saw him bucking, and I said, "Oh, no you're not," even as I took a shoulder check, launched the car across three lanes of traffic, slapped the hazards on with my palm, and watched the side mirror for oncoming. Before I could get out and open his door, he vomited on the vinyl seats.

His coughing and crying barked so violently it sounded as though he were being rent from within. I didn't care, or rather, I took all the caring I normally would have felt and zipped it up, knowing too well that inmates lie and fake and induce illness right before they ruin your career or take your life. So I dragged him across the vomit and out of the car and pressed him up against the door with a baton-what we in the business affectionately call a f.u.c.kstick-until I could get some zips free to secure his shackles to the doorframe.

"He hated me!" Josh said. "He hated everything about me!"

And he moaned and coughed, thick strands of spittle hanging over his mouth like tendrils of skin. Then softer, losing energy, shaking hard, so that I knew he was in physical shock, "I didn't know ... I didn't even know. Oh, G.o.d, he hated me so much."

I'd jammed the f.u.c.kstick into his back so hard I'd probably bruised his kidney. Did I really think he'd try to escape-out there on the side of a highway, chained ankles to wrists, covered in puke and snot, wearing orange pants? And yet it's the astonishing unlikelihoods that generate the most hilarious ridicule in the CO room-those legendary f.u.c.kups dreaded by all.

He repeated "I didn't know" like it was a childish prayer, so often, so weakly that it became necessary, in that shriveled, suspicious part of me, to process what he was talking about.

"Didn't know what?" I asked, standing back, watching him carefully.

He hung his head and muttered that he hadn't known his father was going to die, hadn't known about the cancer, hadn't even known he was sick. His father had never forgiven him. And in dying without reaching out, his father had punished him in the cruelest possible way.

I've witnessed some Jerry Springer moments in my career, but this was a new twist in the ever-varied f.u.c.ked-upedness of family.

"You didn't know your father was sick until Keeper Wallace told you he'd died?" At the funeral home I'd heard whisperings about brain cancer and the doctor visits, and out of that blur of detail I'd gathered that the progression from symptom to treatment to hospitalization and deathbed had been a quick seven-month tumble. But the boy hadn't been told?

He kept mentioning his mother's visits, and how she hadn't said anything, how she'd acted as though everything was all right, had excused his father's absence by claiming he was too busy, overwhelmed with work, unable to join them.

"He hated the G.o.dd.a.m.n sight of me. He always did," Josh said, and then he started throwing up again, this time on the outside of the car door. It was tough to watch, even for a softy like me. He hung on the zip wires as though his parachute had gotten tangled in a tree, and tried to wipe his face with his shoulder.

"I'm real sorry," he said for the fifteenth time, meaning the puke and the standing on the side of the road.

"Not as sorry as me." The p.i.s.sed-off, hard-a.s.s CO in me talking, the one who waded thigh high through the s.h.i.t flow of lousy lives. I needed to rea.s.semble some order. I popped the trunk, stared inside for a few seconds, came up with a gray flannel blanket and a bottle of blue windshield wiper fluid, cracked open the bottle, and proceeded to splash the fluid judiciously inside the car. The mess ran along the vinyl like an overflowed toilet, and I sopped it up as best I could with the blanket.

"You are not sitting in the front seat with me, you are not sitting in the front seat with me," I said to him, myself, and whoever else might have been listening in the cars streaming by.

But the backseat was soaked, so I ended up making him my wingman with three zip lines linking his chained right wrist to the handle above the pa.s.senger window. I even wiped his face with a tissue from my pocket.

We drove for another half hour, windows wide to clear any remnants of the smell, aching with the cold air, before I turned off suddenly at a highway McDonald's. Why did I do it? The weakest of weak moments. He was still crying, and there was revolt in my heart, and I decided suddenly and almost violently that if I didn't give that kid a moment to collect himself before going back inside, he might not make it, figuring if a few chicken nuggets cost me my job, they might just save my soul.

"Can your stomach handle some food?"

Meek and surprised, he just nodded, and then he told me he had twenty bucks that his mother had slipped him. It was a stupid thing to say, verboten to bring currency inside, but instead of punishing him or confiscating the bill, I told him the Happy Meal was on me.

I ordered food and a pop for him, coffee for me. At the service window the uniformed attendant looked shocked at the sight of us together in the front seat. I noticed the camera. Watch that show up on f.u.c.king YouTube, I thought. When the food got pa.s.sed in, I pulled away and lodged the car in the empty lot close to the exit. I rearranged the zip cuffs so one of his hands was free enough to eat, then handed him the bag.

Though I was used to unpleasant messes, the faint smell of the vomit and the greedy way he slurped his food made me squeamish. They all did that, as though even the bite in their mouths could get taken away. I asked him if he felt any better. He told me it had settled his stomach and that it tasted really really good. Then he went to work on the extra-large fries.

I took a sip of coffee and watched the highway.

"Have you worked at Ditmarsh a long time?" he asked. Like he was new on the job and we were colleagues.

"About three years." I said nothing more. Watching him eat, I wondered if I should have gotten him two meals.

"I saw you once, in the infirmary," he said.

Great, I thought, my very own stalker, and added my own inanity to our conversation.

"Ditmarsh must be a big adjustment for a person like you."

I meant privileged, middle-cla.s.s, so much better off than the average hard-timer as to seem like a different species.

"I'm starting to get used to it," he said. And then he began talking about his father again, and the shock of not knowing he'd been sick, and how he'd always thought they'd have the time to work something out between them.

I know what he wanted: unconditional love. He wanted to be told that it didn't matter what he'd done or how bad he'd been, that the love itself was limitless. But he didn't get any of it, and lacking the smallest proof, he wondered if there'd been any love at all. At some level, conscious or cancer-addled, dear old dad had chosen not to make peace with his son. Some fathers are like that, incapable of getting over shock, incapable of dealing with the jagged complexities of an imperfect relationship. I thought of my own father.

"In my experience," I said, "people die exactly as they live. You don't get that deathbed reconciliation."

He nodded, as though what I said actually resonated. Part of me wished I'd sugared it up a little. But maybe Josh appreciated the hard truths for what they were-those rocks you get to stand on. Anyway, that was our moment of connection, the link that led to everything else.

We drove the last stretch of highway, then took the old post road, and when he saw it, I could almost feel the tightness come over him again. Ditmarsh loomed on the hill above the river like a fortress, the dome radiating a gentle light above the walls. There could have been a city below it. A planetarium. It was difficult to picture the inmates warehoused in the dark ranges.

The parking lot was mostly empty. We were ahead of schedule. I stopped the car, turned off the lights, and remained in the driver's seat. When I spoke next, the sternness was back. "You realize, of course, that none of this happened." I wanted to make it intensely clear for his sake as well as my own. "You mention it to anyone, and your life will be s.h.i.t." Both of our lives might be s.h.i.t. "I'm not warning you. I'm stating a fact. Because there are people in there, people you may even trust, who will hold this against you with a level of resentment you may not be able to imagine." He said that he understood, though it looked to me as though his comprehension was all murky and confused.