The Best of Lucius Shepard (79 page)

During
my first conversation with Causey, he had suggested I purchase some pictures
from the commissary to decorate my cell “until your wall comes in.” Though
struck by this phrase, at the time my attention had been dominated by other
concerns; but I had since discovered that once a cell was occupied,
discolorations manifested on the wall facing the bunk, and these discolorations
gradually produced intricate patterns reminiscent of the rock the Chinese call
“picture stone,” natural mineral abstractions in which an imaginative viewer
could discern all manner of landscapes. The wall in my cell had begun to develop
discolorations, its patterns as yet sparse and poorly defined; but Causey’s
wall, Berbick’s, and others were fully realized. It was said these
idiosyncratic designs were illustrative of the occupant’s inner nature and,
when reflected upon, acted to instruct the observer as to his flaws, his
potentials, the character of his soul. None of them-at least none I had
seen-compared to the elaborate grandeur of the one on Czerny’s wall. Gazing at
it, I traveled the labyrinthine streets of a fantastic city lined by buildings
with spindly, spiny turrets and octagonal doorways; I explored the pathways of
a white forest whose creatures were crowned with antlers that themselves formed
other, even more intricate landscapes; I coursed along a black river whose banks
were sublime constructions of crystal and ice, peopled by nymphs and angels
with wings that dwarfed their snowy bodies like the wings of arctic
butterflies. I cannot say how long I stared-quite a while, I believe, because
my mouth was dry when I looked away-but from the experience I derived an
impression of a convoluted, intensely spiritual intellect that warred with
Czerny’s drab, dysfunctional appearance. He was smiling daftly, eyes fixed on
his hands, which were fidgeting in his lap, and I wondered if the audience was
over, if I should leave. Then he spoke, muttering as he had out in the yard.
This time I understood him perfectly, yet I am certain no intelligible word
passed his lips.

“Do
you see?” he asked. “Do you understand where you are now?”

I
was so startled at having understood him, I could muster no reply.

He
raised a hand, trailed his fingers across the bars of the gate, the sort of
gesture a salesman might make to display the hang of a fabric. Assuming that he
wanted me to inspect the bars, I stepped around him and bent to look at one. A
bit less than halfway along its length the color and finish of the metal
changed from rough and dark to a rich yellow. The join where the two colors met
was seamless, and the yellow metal had an unmistakable soft luster and
smoothness: gold. It was as if a luxuriant infection were spreading along the
bar, along-I realized-all the bars of Czerny’s cell.

I am not sure why this unsettled me more profoundly than the rest of the
bizarre occurrences I’d met with at Diamond Bar. Perhaps it resonated with some
gloomy fairy tale that had frightened me as a child or inflamed some even
deeper wound to my imagination, for I had a sudden appreciation of Czerny as a
wizardly figure, a shabby derelict who had revealed himself of an instant to be
a creature of pure principle and power. I backed out of the cell, fetched up
against the railing, only peripherally mindful of Czerny’s attendants. The old
man continued to smile, his gaze drifting here and there, centering briefly on
my face, and in that broken muttering whose message I now comprehended as
clearly as I might the orotund tones of a preacher ringing from a pulpit, he
said, “You cannot retreat from the heart of the law, Penhaligon. You can let it
illuminate you or you can fail it, but you cannot retreat. Bear this in mind.”

·
· · · ·

That night as I lay in my cell, immersed in the quiet of the cellblock like a
live coal at the heart of a diamond, growing ever more anxious at the thought of
Czerny in his cell of gold and marble, an old mad king whose madness could
kill, for I believed now he was the genius of the place … that night I
determined I would escape. Despite the caution implicit in Czerny’s final
words, I knew I could never thrive there. I needed firm ground beneath my feet,
not philosophy and magic or the illusion of magic. If I were to live bounded by
walls and laws-as do we all-I wanted walls manned and topped with razor wire,
written regulations, enemies I could see. Yet the apparent openness of the
prison, its lack of visible security, did not fool me. Power did not exist
without enforcement. I would have to ferret out the traps, learn their
weaknesses, and in order to do that I needed to become part of the prison and
pretend to embrace its ways.

My
first step in this direction was to find an occupation, a meaningful activity
that would convince whoever was watching that I had turned my mind onto
acceptable avenues; since my only skill was at art, I began drawing once again.
But making sketches, I realized, would not generate a
bona fide
of my
submersion in the life of Diamond Bar; thus I undertook the creation of a
mural, using for a canvas the walls and ceiling of an empty storeroom in one of
the sub-basements. I chose as a theme the journey that had led me to the
prison, incorporating images of the river crossing, of Frank Ristelli, the gray
van, and so forth. The overall effect was more crazy quilt than a series of
unified images, although I was pleased with certain elements of the design; but
for all the attention it received, it might have rivaled Piero della Francesca.
Men stopped by at every hour to watch me paint, and the members of the board,
along with their entourages, were frequent visitors. Czerny took particular interest
in my depiction of Ristelli; he would stand in front of the image for periods
up to half an hour, addressing it with his customary vacant nods. When I asked
one of his attendants the reason for his interest, I was told that Ristelli was
revered for a great personal sacrifice made on behalf of us all and reflecting
on the origins of our common home-he had been on the verge of being made a
member of the board, but had forsworn the security and comfort of the prison
and returned to the world in order to seek out men suitable for Diamond Bar.

Placing
Ristelli’s zoned piety in context with the psychological climate of the prison,
it was not difficult to understand why they perceived him to be their John the
Baptist; but in the greater context of the rational, the idea was ludicrous.
More than ludicrous. Insane. Recalling how laughable Ristelli’s preachments had
seemed back in Vacaville reinforced my belief that the population of Diamond
Bar was being transformed by person or persons unknown into a brain-dead
congregation of delusionaries, and fearful of joining them, I intensified my
focus on escape, exploring the sub-basements, the walls, the turrets, searching
for potential threats. On one of these explorative journeys, as I passed
through Czerny’s block, I noticed that the massive oak door leading to the new
wing, heretofore always locked, was standing partway open and, curious, I
stepped inside. The space in which I found myself was apparently an anteroom,
one more appropriate to a modern cathedral than a jail: domed and columned,
with scaffolding erected that permitted access to every inch of the roof and
walls. The door on the far side of the room was locked, and there was little
else to see, the walls and ceiling being white and unadorned. I was on the
verge of leaving when I saw a sheet of paper taped to one of the columns.
Written in pencil upon it was the following:

“This
place is yours to paint, Penhaligon, if you wish.”

A
key lay on the scaffolding beside the note-it fit the oak door. I locked the
door, pocketed the key and went about my business, understanding this show of
trust to signify the board’s recognition that I had accepted my lot and that by
taking up their charge I might earn a further degree of trust and so learn
something to my benefit. To succeed in this I would have to do something that
would enlist their delusion, and I immediately set about working on a design
that would illustrate the essence of the delusion, The Heart of the Law. Though
I began with cynical intent, as the weeks went by and my cell walls were
covered with sketches, I grew obsessed with the project. I wanted the mural to
be beautiful and strong to satisfy the artistic portion of my nature, my ego,
and not simply to satisfy the board-in truth, I presumed they would approve of
anything I did that hewed to their evangel. The dome and walls of the anteroom,
the graceful volume of space they described, inspired me to think analytically
about painting, something I had not done before, and I challenged myself to transcend
the limits of my vision, to conceive a design that was somehow larger than my
soul. I came to dwell more and more on the motive theory of Diamond Bar, that
the criminal was the fundamental citizen, the archetype in whose service the
whole of society had been created, and in the process I came obliquely to
embrace the idea, proving, I suppose, the thesis that high art is the creation
of truth from the raw materials of a lie, and the artist who wishes to be
adjudged “great” must ultimately, through the use of passion and its obsessive
tools, believe the lie he is intent upon illuminating. To augment my analytic
capacities, I read books that might shed light on the subject-works of
philosophy for the most part-and was astonished to discover in the writings of
Michel Foucault a theory mirroring the less articulate theory espoused by the
prison population. I wondered if it might be true, if delusion were being
employed in the interests of truth, and, this being the case, whether the
secret masters of Diamond Bar were contemplating a general good and the
experiment of which we were a part was one that sought to evolve a generation
in harmony with the grand design underlying all human culture. The books were
difficult for me, but I schooled myself to understand them and became adept at
knotting logic into shapes that revealed new facets of possibility-new to me,
at any rate. This caused me to lose myself in abstraction and consequently
diminished the urgency of my intention to escape. Like everyone who lived at
Diamond Bar, I seemed to have a talent in that regard.

The
design I settled upon owed more to Diego Rivera and Soviet poster art than to
the muralists of the Renaissance. The walls would be thronged with figures, all
reacting toward the center of the design, which was to occupy the dome and
which I had not yet been able to conceptualize-I felt the image would naturally
occur as a byproduct of my labors. It took three months of twelve-hour days to
lay out the sketch on the walls, and I estimated that, if done properly, the
painting would take a year to complete. Chances were I would be gone from
Diamond Bar before then, and realizing this, when I began to paint, ensorcelled
by my vision; driven by the idea of finishing in a shorter time, I worked fifteen
and sixteen hours a day. Dangling in harness from the scaffolding, crouched
over, forced into unnatural positions, I gained an appreciation for the
physical afflictions that Michelangelo endured while painting the Sistine
Chapel. Each night after work I tried to shake off the aches and pains by
walking through the sub-basements of the prison, and it was during one of these
walks that I encountered the plumes.

In
prison, sex is an all-consuming preoccupation, a topic endlessly discussed, and
from my earliest days at Diamond Bar the plumes had been recommended as a
palatable alternative to self-gratification. The new wing, it was said, would
house both women and men, thus ending the single unnatural constraint of prison
life, and many held that the plumes would eventually become those women,
evolving-as were we all-into their ideal form. Even now, Causey said, the
plumes were superior to the sex available in other prisons. “It’s not like
fucking a guy,” he said. “It feels, y’know, okay.”

“Is
it like fucking a woman?” I asked.

He
hesitated and said, “Kinda.”

“‘Kinda’
doesn’t do it for me.”

“Only
reason it’s different is because you’re thinking about it not being a woman.”

“Yeah,
well. I’ll pass. I don’t want to think when I’m fucking.”

Causey
continued urging me to give the plumes a try, because-I believed-he felt that
if I surrendered to temptation, I would become a complicitor in perversion, and
this would somehow lessen the guilt attaching to his sexual assault on me. That
he felt guilty about what had transpired between us was not in question. As our
relationship progressed, he came to speak openly about the event and sought to
engage me in a dialogue concerning it. Therapy, I supposed. Part of his process
of self-examination. At the time, I rejected his suggestions that I visit the
plumes out of hand, but they may have had some effect on me, for in retrospect
I see that my initial encounter with them, though it seemed accidental, was
likely an accident I contrived. I was, you see, in a heightened state of
sexuality. Immersed in my work, essentially in love with it, while painting I
would often become aroused not by any particular stimulus-there were no visual
or tactile cues-but by the concentrated effort, itself a form of desire maintained
at peak intensity for hours on end. And so on the night I strayed into the
section of the prison occupied by the plumes, I was, though tired, mentally and
sexually alert. I was tempting myself, testing my limits, my standards, hoping
they would fail me.