Endless Love

The pen smelled reassuringly of the dogs, fur and shit and breath and milk and reality. I crawled in feeling very fortunate to have found a place so perfect and so near. I placed my head where I could see the house and tried to prepare myself for the morning when Jade would see me and we could begin the long process of making sense of what we knew. I thought about making love with her in the Hotel McAlpin and decided it would help if I remembered that night in every detail, but as soon as Jade asked me into bed I fell asleep.

I slept through the dawn. The light was on me and Jade woke up, looked through the window, and saw me asleep in the kennel. It must have terrified her, made her feel there was no dealing with me any longer. I don’t know what the sequence of events was. She got dressed—but before or after she made the call? She put on a pair of khaki pants and a blue broadcloth shirt, rolling the cuffs midway to the elbow. Blue espadrilles. Then the call. I don’t think, somehow, she’d call the police naked. She was probably hoping that in the time it took her to dress I would have miraculously awakened, that she would look out and the pen would be empty, the straw mashed down in my form. But I was still there, asleep—no, beginning to stir. I remember opening my eyes before the police came, remember seeing the fresh pale sky, the smell of the straw, touching the cuts on my hand and falling asleep, deeper this time, submerging myself as if I knew I would not sleep in my miserable freedom again for a long, long while. “There’s someone here who—” Jade said to the police. But who is what? Threatening me? Who has killed my father? Who has broken into my house? Who has gone mad? I don’t know how she described me to the Stoughton police. She didn’t tell them I was wanted in Chicago because I’d been at the station for hours before they learned that. She probably just told them to come and remove me and didn’t bother with explanations. And when they arrived, she came with them to the back of the house so I could see her as well as them. One of the cops kicked me in the shoulder and when I woke I knew exactly what had happened. “Get up,” one of them said, in a fierce voice, as if expecting the worst from me. I hesitated for a moment, trying to think if there was anything else I could do, if I could alter the rush of events. The cop kicked at me again and Jade cried out. “You don’t have to do that,” she said, and one of the cops said something to her and I stood up. They grabbed me by both arms as if I were a truly dangerous man and they dug their fingers into me and yanked me this way and that, committing those small meannesses that break your heart. It was just a routine morning arrest and it should have been simple and calm; I don’t know what secret revulsion I touched in them by letting myself be discovered in a dog pen. Oh, I’m sure I looked like a creep, but I was hardly awake and I doubt if I looked dangerous. I think it was because I looked so unprotected and so obviously uninterested in defending myself. They walked me away and I moved my feet to keep from being dragged. I tried to look behind me, to see Jade, but they grabbed me harder and I had that morning’s first surge of terror: These guys really hate me, I thought. They pushed me into the back of their squad car. I could look back at the house then but Jade wasn’t in sight. She was still in the back, looking down at the kennels, remembering the dogs and how we had raised them and how they’d almost gotten us to start a family of our own. And she was probably shaking quite a bit and feeling the beginnings of doubt over whether she’d done the right thing. The car sped along. I was in handcuffs but there was no wire fence separating me from the cops in the front seat, like police cars have in cities. I always had heard how much handcuffs hurt so it was no surprise, but I wasn’t prepared for how violently the pain would turn my insides. I was sweating; I thought I might vomit into my lap and I had a huge icy fear of disgracing myself.

18

Whenever I had thought of the consequences of my leaving Chicago, I rooted my dread to the image of a return to Rockville, of pacing the grassy stretches, of the powder blue Wyon, Illinois, sky, and the blond children with their fingers wrapped around the black Victorian fence peering in at us. It was an image of exile, of fury, and, of course, of unacceptable loss because it meant that once again I would be forcibly separated from Jade. There were times during my life as a fugitive when the fear of capture was so great that it was nearly impossible not to torture myself further by imagining in detail what it would be like to be in Rockville again. But I was generally successful in keeping my mind off it, successful in keeping all the little ghoulish actors gagged and tied in their mental chairs, and it was just as well because what actually happened after I was returned to the authority of the Illinois State Police was far worse than anything I would have imagined—all of that dread would have prepared me for nothing, nothing at all. I was treated worse for violating the conditions of parole than I was for setting fire to a house and nearly burning a family to death. The first time I had broken the law of the world; but now I had broken the police’s law, and they treated that sort of transgression with more severity.

After a series of delays, continuances, appeals, and what I suppose is normal bureaucratic foot-dragging, after questionings, tests, after transfers from one lock-up to another prison, and then to yet another prison, the court decided to send me to a medium-sized penal facility in Volkshill, Illinois, a small town about midway between Chicago and Wyon. I was placed in a cell with a man named Tommy Rita, a guy in his forties who was somewhere near the end of an eight- to ten-year sentence for black marketing cigarettes. Tommy looked vibrant, practically suntanned, and did two hours’ calisthenics in our cell each afternoon to keep his small, stocky body in reasonable shape. At night, in whispers, he liked to tell me how getting popped for avoiding the state cigarette tax only proved how stupid the law was. He had, he said, beaten people to a pulp, firebombed a restaurant, committed innumerable burglaries, married a woman in Hegwisch and another in Michigan City, and all they could get him on was a “little shitass cigarette rap.” I never believed Tommy’s list of felonies.

There’s nothing I really need to say about life in Volkshill. The fear was constant: even the depths of boredom and the mock heights of cynicism were laced with fear. The anonymity was crushing: you could be beaten to death, you could choke on a piece of pork, your brain could explode and no one would care—and perhaps no one would know.

It was my understanding that in less than six months I’d be out of prison, at which time I would not, of course, be free, but would be subject to some alternate, more lenient punishment. This should have made my situation infinitely more tolerable. Nevertheless, I wasn’t equal to it. Though I believed that each day was bringing me nearer to the time when my case would be handled with more mercy, the days themselves, even as they passed, were intolerable: I felt like someone who has been swept out to sea by an undertow; each wave that rolls toward the shore only draws you further away.

I began to see everything through a haze, as real and disorienting as a thick morning fog. There was an accompanying loss of body awareness so that as the world outside of me became less real my own reality decreased as well. My dreams were so vivid and lifelike that I hardly thought of them, and in the midst of my slow, careful prison day there wouldn’t have registered the slightest surprise in me if someone had grabbed my shoulder and shaken me awake. My appetite disappeared; sometimes the aroma of food—not to mention the sight of it—would cause a violent revulsion in me. I developed a limp; my hearing deteriorated. I talked to myself—at first, just to keep things organized, to remind myself of this or that, but then it became a habit and when someone would lean into my blurry line of vision and say, “Why don’t you shut your fucking face?” I’d be surprised that I’d been at it again, or else I’d have no idea what they were complaining about. This led to an enormous sense of persecution—really, everything started to go. The world an inch out of orbit can end all life. I could not adapt; I couldn’t recoup any losses; I only got worse. Every now and then in a moment of woozy lucidity I’d tell myself that all the madness, all the physical symptoms, all the unreality were somehow a product of my will, that I could still, if I truly wanted to, take the reins of my life in hand again. But it was empty comfort. I told myself I wanted to spiral down into madness, but even at the fullest pitch of self-accusation (which was somehow linked to self-congratulation) I couldn’t see or even imagine an alternate mode of behavior.

Rose and Arthur came to visit me in the humanely informal visitors’ room—shiny geometric wallpaper, orange plastic bucket seats, Formica-covered tables around which families could huddle, a portable Panasonic tuned to the local pop music station supplying the background noise. I don’t know what I said or how I carried myself but I made it clear that I was eroding and soon they increased their efforts to have me transferred out of jail and into a hospital. They spent money they couldn’t afford to keep the pressure on the state, and three months into my stay at Volkshill I was suddenly placed in the infirmary for psychiatric observation. I took the familiar tests and was interviewed by a pair of prison psychiatrists—first a Dr. Hillman, who looked like a big pink friendly animal in a children’s book, and then by Dr. Morris, a young black doctor with an Afro and some kind of enormous fang hanging