Authors: Jennifer Egan
I have a dream I’m stuck inside a burning tower. When I open up my eyes, there’s a flashlight so close to my face I can feel the heat from its puny bulb. It’s got me too blind to see who’s behind it, but when I hear the voice I remember where I am. It’s Davis.
I’ve got your number, pal, he tells me. Oh yeah, I’ve got it now.
He’s used that one before,
I’ve got your number.
I already wrote it down.
You’ve had my number since day one, I tell him.
Davis moves the flashlight back a little, but it’s still in my eyes. He’s looking at me like there’s something hidden behind my skin that he wants to see.
Nope, I didn’t have it on day one, he says. Didn’t have it yesterday. But now that I do, this camouflage act of pretending you’re brain dead is officially out-of-date.
I’ve got no idea what Davis is talking about, but I’m used to that. I say, What happened since yesterday?
He ducks, and the light is finally off me. It leaves a big green patch in front of my eyes. I look over the edge of my tray and see Davis hunched over, rummaging under the tablecloth that covers whatever’s underneath his bed. When he stands back up he’s got a bunch of typed pages in his hand. They start sliding and drifting down to the floor and I jerk on one elbow and shoot a hand under my mattress to see if my manuscript is still where I put it. A mistake. Davis drops his flashlight and grabs me in a headlock.
Are those mine? I manage to croak out.
They’ve got your name on them, he says. Already he’s easing up. The headlocks are a reflex with Davis, it’s nothing personal. As soon as I can move I push my hand under my mattress right below my head. No pages. I get a gnawing feeling, but I don’t let it show.
You read it all? I ask him.
Don’t act so surprised. I read up whole books on my bunk while you snooze away the night. I
use
my time. And I’m amazed—I’m in a state of shock, brother, that’s God’s truth—to find you’ve been using yours, too.
Brother?
He lets me go and I yank in some breath. Davis’s sweating hands have wetted up my hair.
That shit isn’t mine, I tell him, for two reasons: one because I don’t want Davis to know I give a damn about the pages, two because I want him to take that look he’s pointing my way and move it someplace else.
Don’t try to back off now, Davis says. Take responsibility for your actions! But Davis can’t say
responsibility
in a normal voice: he has to shout it.
Shut the fuck up! Luis yells from next door.
I’m saying I didn’t make it up, I tell him softly.
Davis snorts. Obviously you didn’t make it up.
My pages are all over the floor, and my computer time’s shot until next week. If anything is missing from the new stuff I’ve typed, I can’t give it to Holly tomorrow. This started the week after the fight: Allan Beard ate up a whole class reading a long thing about climate change, and when class was done and Holly was leaving, she stopped by my desk and said, Ray. She wasn’t looking at me—she still won’t even since the fight, but it’s different now. Now it’s like we’ve agreed not to look, because our eyes meeting up seems too private. I only want that to happen if we’re alone in a room, which in this place is pretty much impossible. In the break, when the other guys swarm around Holly all wanting their little piece, I go out to the hall.
Holly looked at my pages and said, Give me that.
I handed them up. She slipped them in her bag, and the next week she gave them back to me (still not looking) with these beautiful green marks on the edges of every single page,
Nice!
and
Cut?
and
More of this?
and
Careful
and
Heavy-handed?
and
Strange
and
Good tension
and
More?
and
More?
and
More of this?
and
Yes
and
Wow!
and
Yes
and
Very nice!
and this is as close to sex talk as it gets for me in here, so you bet I enjoy it. I never look at my part, the stuff she’s talking about—who cares? What I want is more, and the only way to get more is to write more, and every week I try harder so I can rake in all those yeses and nices and wows. Not just blabbing stuff down but really trying to make something out of it.
What I want—I actually have dreams about this—is to hold her hand. I remember how it felt on my forehead right after the fight, those dry cool fingers, and when I think hard enough I can still feel them there, like they left a mark. When Holly gives back my pages I try taking them from her in a way that my fingers will slide against her fingers or even just brush them for a second and I’ll feel her body there the way I did when she touched my head. No luck. I think holding her hand in here would be equal to fucking her on the outside.
I get off my bunk slowly, trying to avoid another headlock from Davis. I crouch down and start picking my pages up from the floor. Our leaky head has gotten one of them wet, smearing up Holly’s green ink. I blot it with toilet paper. All this while I’m down by Davis’s bunk, which he usually guards like a dog because of whatever the hell he’s got under there. But he watches me now like I’m a magician setting up a trick.
Look at you, he says. And here you’ve been acting all these months like you don’t give a shit about anything.
When I’ve got all the pages I can find, I put them in order and count. My heart kicks up, because if the numbers aren’t right I know I’ll have to fix it, I’ll have to solve it, or I can’t do anything else.
I’m missing forty-five, I tell him.
Davis acts like he doesn’t hear me, so I get in his face. Four-five, Davis. Page forty-five. I need it.
Look at you, he says. It’s like he’s fallen in love. His wild face looks soft as a puppy dog’s, and he keeps tilting his head and shining his eyes my way.
Stop looking at me, I tell him, because Davis in love is not a sight you want to see.
Relax, he says. We’ll put your ghost story back together just like it was.
Ghost story? I say. The fuck are you talking about?
Don’t play possum with me, he says, and I hear it,
play possum,
but the missing page has me too rattled to care.
I leave what pages I’ve got on my tray and crouch on the floor and start looking for forty-five. There aren’t a lot of places a piece of paper can go in a room this size, but I feel around behind the head and under the sink and over near the window. There are no ghosts in this story, I say to Davis.
Oh yeah? Then show me where the people are.
I look up at him. What people?
Davis waves the pages I’ve left on my tray so they flap in the air.
These
people, he says. I can see them, I can hear them, I
know
them, but they’re not in this room. They’re not on this block. They’re not in this prison or this town or this country or even this same world as you and me. They’re in some other place.
I think: If one more page falls out of that bunch I’ll squeeze Davis’s head between my hands until it pops. But all I say is, C’mon, man. It’s just words.
Davis holds the flashlight under his face: angles, sweat, eyes, and the sight of him lit that way gives me a shake from my ass to my neck. They’re ghosts, brother, he says. Not alive, not dead. An in-between thing.
I can’t look at him that way on hands and knees. I stand back up. You could say that about any story there is, I tell him.
Now you’re singing my song, brother.
What’s all this brother stuff? Since when are you and me brothers?
More than brothers, Davis says. We’re one mind.
It’s the highest compliment he has to give. I’m going to show you a top-secret thing, he says. Brother that you are. I keep it just here.
He leans down and lifts up the red-and-white checked tablecloth that covers up the space below his tray. Davis points his flashlight under there and I get a pretty good view of a whole lot of crap: Cups. Plastic forks. A shower head. Mustard packs. Newspapers, nail brush, bottle caps, rubber bands, plastic bags, a beat-up phone book, soda cans. It looks like one of those nests a hamster makes, except Davis is 6'2" and can bench-press 350 and he’s been in this cell a year plus and the nest is more like what ten thousand hamsters would make. Right on top is a sheet of white paper. I pluck it out: forty-five.
Things settle down in my head. I stand up and put forty-five back in its spot and knock the pages against my mattress until the edges line up and slide it all underneath where my head goes.
Davis is rooting around in the nest. Out come two skateboard wheels and some paper party hats for little kids and a bunch of prison forms: work orders, permission slips—all contraband. I see cotton balls and some kind of birdwatching guide. Finally he pulls out a cardboard box painted orange. It’s about the size of a shoebox—in fact it
is
a shoebox, I can see the Adidas logo right through the paint. He lifts off the top and I look inside the box and see dust. Lint, hair, fur. Dust of every color and thickness. A lot of dust balls all clumped into one big clump. Davis holds the box right under my face.
Listen, he whispers.
I think I’m waiting for Davis to tell me something, but he closes his eyes like he’s listening, too. Right now is as quiet as the castle ever gets. I hear the quiet, but the more I listen the more the quiet starts to dissolve and I hear all the little noises of 412 men breathing on metal trays. And there’s a background noise, too, a ringing sound you almost can’t hear but it’s there, maybe a leftover vibration from so many gates and locks clanging shut through the day.
It’s not an ordinary radio, Davis tells me softly.
I look at him. Radio?
Gaze at the face of a revolution, Davis says.
There are dials on one side of the box. As in: Davis has collected broken dials off other machines and punched them through the cardboard. Now he starts twisting those dials with his eyes narrowed up like he’s concentrating. There, he whispers. Wait—that! You hear that? Okay, let me tune it…now she’s coming through. Listen to that—clear as day. You hear? And he’s so goddam believable I have to keep looking at the nubs of those broken dials he’s turning to remember that what we’re dealing with here is a shoebox full of dust.
What are we hearing on this radio of yours? I ask.
Davis glances at me. You know it, brother. Don’t start pretending on me now.
Okay, I know. But say it anyway.
It’s the voices of the dead, Davis says. He looks gentle, like the idea hurts him somehow. He says: All that love, all that pain, all the stuff people feel—not just me and you, brother, but everyone, everyone who’s ever walked this beautiful green planet—how can all that disappear when somebody dies? It can’t disappear, it’s too big. Too strong, too…permanent. So it moves to another frequency, where the human ear can’t pick it up. And in all these thousands of years, no man has found the technology to tune in to that frequency except once in a while—you know, by mistake. Blips and blops here and there, but nothing steady, nothing regular.
Until you.
Until this, he says, and he holds up his box full of dust. Here’s what I’ve been doing all this time, brother: developing this machine! Making the design, tracking down the necessary parts. Assembling and testing and revising and testing some more, until finally I’ve got myself a prototype that lo-and-behold actually works!
His eyes shine like a little boy’s. I’ve been calling Davis crazy from day one, but in all that time I missed out on the fact that he’s actually
crazy,
as in nuts. A genuine bug. A bug who thinks he’s built a machine that can talk to ghosts.
I see that look, Davis says. You’re thinking, What’s old Davis playing at? Is he trying to pass himself off as some kind of sorcerer? But think about it, brother: new technology always looks like magic. When Tom Edison turned on that tin phonograph of his back in 1877, you think people believed that was for real? Hell no. Ventriloquism, they said. Voodoo. They thought no machine could do such a thing. Or Marconi with his radio: voices floating around from one place to another place—you think people believed that shit? Well, this is no different. It looks mysterious when you don’t understand the
technology.
But if you’re the engineer, if you built the thing from the ground up, there’s no mystery to it.
He holds out the box and I open the lid and look inside again. After all his talk I don’t know what I’m expecting—something different. But there it is exactly like before, except now I can pick out stuff inside the dust: A burnt match. A piece of wrapper from a straw. A dead spider. Half a blue button. A piece of maybe scrambled egg. A tile chip, a pin. Chunks of cigarette filter. A ton of hair: head, chest, pubic, most of it dark but some light. Some gray. And between all that, around it,
dust:
grit, sand, powder, debris, some of it glittery like sand or glass, some in chunks like plaster, some in little fibers thinner than threads. Someone told me once that ninety percent of dust is dead skin cells. It looks like you could put together a whole human being from what Davis has got in that box.
With all the people out there who are dead, I say—still playing along because why not, what have I got to lose?—how can you tell which ones you’re hearing?
Now that’s an excellent question, Davis says, and he actually gives me a pat on the back. The fact is, he says, right now I’ve got no control whatsoever. It’s like an old CB radio, picks up whatever happens to be out there at any particular time. It needs years of refinement like any new invention—hell, when Alexander Graham Bell first put in his telephones, every line was a party line. You couldn’t even have a private conversation! What we’ve got right here is just a start, but it’s a big start. Eventually other inventors will get involved too, they’ll make their own improvements and modifications. And a hundred years from now, a bunch of kids on one of those school trips? They’ll look at this old prototype through some museum window and laugh about how crude this old thing was.