Page 64 of The River Is Waiting

A third book catches my eye, too: a pocket-sized collection of Buddhistquotes. I don’t know much about Buddhism, but the book’s free and Buddha’s serene smile reminds me of Dr. Patel’s. Mrs. Millman is spraying the circulation desk with Fantastik. “Okay if I take three of these?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes and smiles. “What does the sign say?”

Solomon and I are halfway down the corridor, headed for the stairs, when Javier calls to us. I stop but Solomon keeps going. “Hey, hold up,” I tell him.

When Javi catches up, he says, “Where is it?” He’s talking to Solomon.

“Where’s what?” Solomon says.

Javier grabs the books he’s checked out. Shakes them and fans the pages. Mrs. M’s razor blade falls out ofEragon. Javi picks it up and hands the book back to Solomon. “She said to tell you you’re suspended from the library for the rest of this month. After that you’ll be on probation for three months. That means you can check out books, but you’re not allowed to stay and read. Or use the computer. Got it?”

Solomon shrugs. Says it’s a shit library anyway.

“Knock it off!” I tell him.

“Don’t tell me what to do. You’re not my father.”

“Thank God for that!”

Javi shakes his head, then turns and heads back up to the library. Solomon and I go down the stairs and out of the building. I’m so pissed at him that we’re halfway back to our block and I still don’t trust myself to speak.

“Do you think I’m gonna get another ticket?” he asks.

“I have no idea. You should. Of all the stupid… Why the fuck would you want to pull a stunt like that to someone who was nice to you? Can’t wait to cut yourself again? Is that it? Or were you planning to slit the throats of those turkeys you keep staring at?”

He starts to cry. “What makes you think I’d do something like that?”

“Hey, why not? Maybe you’ve got it in for all kinds of animals.”

“Fuck you!” he screams. “At least I didn’t kill my own kid.”

Lucky for him, he runs ahead after he says it. Lucky for me, too, because I don’t trust what I might have done to him if he was in reach.

Back in my cell, I flop down on my bunk and try to make sense of what happened. Why, if he wanted to get to the library so badly, would he risk burning his bridges once he got there?… Why did he ask me the reason I’m in prison when he already knew?… What would he have done with that razor blade?… I shouldn’t have said that about the turkeys, but why had it made him cry?…

There’s a saying in AA: too much analysis can lead to paralysis. I need to chase that kid out of my head before he drives me nuts. I do some deep breathing to calm myself down. Then I take out Dr. Patel’s letter and read it again: live in the present; the mind-body connection; stay engaged with work and other people. Well, I’mdisengaging from Solomon and if Lieutenant Cavagnero kicks me off the crew because of it, then tough shit.…At least I didn’t kill my own kid.… I’m done working with that little monster.

I put Dr. Patel’s letter back in the envelope and look at the books I grabbed off the throwaway pile. Start leafing through the little book on Buddhism. Read a random page.In truth will I speak, not in falsehood. Gently will I speak, not harshly. To his profit will I speak, not to his loss. With kindly intent will I speak, not in anger.Easy for Buddha to say; he never had to deal with a kid like Solomon. Still, I shouldn’t have lost my shit and gone off on him like that. He’s not a monster; he’s just a fucked-up, badly damaged boy trying to survive in a place where he doesn’t belong.

Next I look through that yearbook and read about stuff that happened the year I was born. Someone was killing people by lacing Tylenol with cyanide.…Timemagazine’s Man of the Year was the Computer.… Prince Charles’s wife, Diana, gave birth to the future king on the same day Mom had me, something I’d been told but had forgotten.… The CDC announced that the general public needn’t worry about the mysterious new immune system virus; the disease was “mostly confined to drug addicts and homosexual men.”… And this: seventeen months after he’d tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, John Hinckley was acquitted by reason of insanity and sent to a psych hospital instead of prison. I shakemy head when I read that. Most of those state hospitals have closed. Prison is where they send a lot of the mental cases now. That’s got to be why Solomon’s here instead of someplace where he might get decent treatment. And why, thanks to Reagan’s policy of beefing up the sentences of drug offenders, two-thirds of the guys in here are Black or Brown.…Mostly confined to drug addicts and homosexual men. So neither of those groups count? That pisses me off on behalf of Manny and the majority of the guys doing time here. One thing about having to come to prison: it gives you twenty-twenty vision about who wins and who loses in the good old USA.

Most of the stuff in the mythology book is familiar: Pandora’s box, the Minotaur, the one-eyed Cyclops. I was really into all those gods and mortals when we studied ancient Greece in sixth grade. But now I’m taken with the artists’ depictions of human suffering on the faces of the characters: Sisyphus’s torment as the boulder begins its backward roll; Orpheus’s despair as he realizes his mistake and sees Eurydice fading back into the shadows; the fear in Icarus’s eyes as the wings his father constructed for him fall apart and he begins his fatal descent.

The book includes two renderings of the Icarus myth. InLandscape with the Fall of Icarus, Bruegel the Elder’s painting, it’s business as usual in a seaside village: a farmer plows his field, a ship sails along the coast, a man fishes, a shepherd boy minds his flock, and Icarus plunges headfirst into the sea, unnoticed by the villagers. It reminds me of being in here versus being on the outside, where life goes on at a busy pace. In here, our lives—and sometimes our deaths—mostly go unnoticed. Notorious inmates get ink and prison suicides sometimes make the news, but an inmate with no name recognition who dies of natural causes gets the quiet “back-door parole” and that’s that. No service, no obituary in the paper. Within a week, a new arrival is sleeping in the dead guy’s bunk.

In Jacob Peter Gowy’s dramaticThe Fall of Icarus, father and son are aloft in close proximity at the moment the wings of the impetuous boy begin to fall apart. When I was younger, I identified with Icarus, whosefather’s warnings not to fly too close to the sun fell on deaf ears. What do parents know about anything? Now, studying Gowy’s painting, my sympathies are with Daedalus, powerless to save the boy. And as the inventor of the wings, he realizes he’s the unintentional orchestrator of his son’s death.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

November 2018

Days 477–80 of 1,095

Hoo hoo hoo-hooo…

Hoo hoo hoo-hooo…

There they go, calling to each other. You only hear them in the quiet of early morning before the clamor and white noise of another prison day gets going.You hear that, Corby? Those are great horned owls. The male calls, the female answers. Snowy owls, grays, pygmies, great horneds: they’ve all got their own mating calls. Hoots, most of them, except for barn owls. They don’t hoot. They scream.

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