By Joshua Ryan

***This is the second to last chapter***

Three years had passed since I saw Steven on the Maskawa ferry, but I’d looked at the pictures maybe a thousand times, and yeah, that was him.  His head was bald, but his lips were still thin and his nose was still the kind I used to see on all those guys in prep school — long and narrow, as if it wanted to look down on everything.  And eyes never change.  The eyes looking at me were the same eyes I saw in the picture on the back of my first Steven Meres book.

The rest was totally different.  The body on the bed was packed into its uniform like a shell in a cannon.  Every inch was filled with muscle.  When he stood up, you could see the ripples moving under his white tee and the flex stretching his denim thighs.  Hot, very hot when combined with the little pointed chin and the intelligent brown eyes.  Which looked me up and down.  I remembered meeting a guy in a bar who gave me his address and told me to come over in an hour from then.  When I got there, I was met at the door by his boyfriend, who was packed exactly like this guy and was giving me the same look.

“So you’re the new fish,” Steven said.

“Yeah!  That’s me!”

“I knew I was gonna get one.  Put those sheets on the top bunk.  Uniforms go down there.”  He pointed to the space under the bottom bunk.  “My shit is on the left.  Don’t fuck with it.”

Underneath the bunk I saw spare uniforms, a couple of paperback books, and some stuff I couldn’t identify.  “His shit” occupied two-thirds of the space.  I wormed my own shit into the remaining third.

“They call me Sten,” he said.

“I’m Colly,” I said.

“That’ll change.  Cons in here, they give you a name.”

“OK.”  My mouth must have been hanging open, I was so much in awe of this man.  And that I’d DONE it!  Done it ALL!  I’d managed the whole thing, I’d got myself in here, I was now the cellmate of the great Steven Meres!  Fuck!  Imagine if I’d wanted to go into business!

“Put that crap in your baggie on the shelf.  That shelf over the sink.  Don’t fuck with the stuff I got up there.”

“Thank you!  I won’t.”

He saw me looking at the coat, shirt, and cap that were hanging on the wall.  “See how I did it?” he said.  “Do it the same.  Don’t just drop your clothes in your bunk.  Hang em up.  Exactly that way.  I got the pegs on the right.  You use the pegs on the left.  And you see how I put my boots?  Head of the bunk, toes pointing out.  Screws like to see em that way.  You do the same.  Foot of the bunk, toes pointing out.  Take care of your boots.  Take care of your uniform.  Very important to take care of that shit.”

“I will!”

“This cell is small.  I don’t wanta be runnin into you.  I’m on the can, you stay in your bunk.  I’m through, you use the can.  Same for the sink.  And when you wanta jerk, don’t do it in my face.”

By now, my cap was on one of those pegs and my coat was unbuttoned, and he was looking at my crotch.  Not checking it out — observing it.  Like a writer!  A writer has to notice everything, even if it’s not important.  Which is how he was looking — like I wasn’t important.  At all.  The old Colly with the curly locks and the cute little face would have been goin crazy about how this man was rejecting him.  The new Colly was like, of course he’s rejecting you.  You’re just a dweeb in a convict suit and a big bald head.  The man’s being smart!

So I was admiring him even more when a bell started clanging someplace up in the rafters and Mr. Meres told me, “You’re just in time for chow.  Button your coat and put on your cap.”  He got himself into uniform, buttoned right to the top, and he timed it exactly right, because as soon as he got his boots laced up there was this sound like all the old dying machines in the world were going at it, and the bars on the cell slid open.  Along with the bars of everybody else’s cell!  “Those bars open, you got one minute to leave.  Then they close, and nothin’s gonna stop em.”  He stepped onto the walkway and I followed him, and by the time we’d got in line with the 98 other convicts on the tier, the bars banged shut.

“New cellie, eh?” said one of the dudes from next door.

“Yeah,” Steven said.  “Name’s Colly.”

“Hey, like the dog.”

“Yeah, like the dog.”

I thought that he, as an author, would be interested in the wordplay, but no.  Too juvenile, I guessed.  When we left the cell, he checked to see if I was all buttoned up, and when we got down to the Yard he told me, “Walk like the rest of us,” which was with their hands clasped behind their backs.  That’s how we have to march, whenever we don’t have something we’re told to carry.  It’s called the duckwalk, and it makes me much easier to control.  Good for security, not to mention humiliation, which was coming over me big and strong.  Here I was, just a bug — an armless bug — in a line of hundreds of other armless bugs marching across the Yard to the entrance of the enormous concrete hive called the Chow Hall.  Inside, there were lines of cons all over the place, so the kitchen cons could slop chow onto as many trays as possible, as fast as possible.  I was glad Steven was there to get me into the right line and put me in my place at one of the long, long tables where the prisoners have to eat.  Otherwise I’d just have been an insect scurrying around until somebody squished me.

It wasn’t La Ridicule, that’s for sure!  The food was about the same as what they gave me at Owosso.  But it was bigger and thicker — more meatloaf!  I felt like they were fattening me up for hard labor — which as you’ll see turned out to be kind of true.  But anyway … Steven seemed to know a lot of the convicts, but he didn’t have much to say to them.  When they got curious about me, he said, “New cellie.  Name is Lassie.”  He said it that way, like it was real and that was my name.  Great!  Already I had my prison name!  I don’t know how many of them knew that it came from a book.  One of them said, “Yeah — tongue hangin out and everything!” and they all laughed, but that didn’t mean they got the point, that I was like this dopey dog in a story, where the dog kept coming back to its home, even though it was just a dopey dog.

They don’t let you sit in the Chow Hall and chat over your coffee; you gotta head back to your cell.  So we went back there, and Steven started stripping down to his undies, and so did I, but I knew that nothing was gonna happen, despite how my tongue was definitely hangin out at all these sleek beautiful muscles I was watching.  He just hit his bunk and started reading some book.  I was dying to know what kind of literature the great author was, like, devoting his life sentence to, but I was scared to ask.  He saw me looking and told me, “There’s what they call a library.  You can go there one Sunday a month.  Mainly just shit that the cons get sent by somebody, and after a month they gotta give it to the library.  And some thrift shop down in the village sends up stuff it’s about to toss.”   Then he went back to reading, and I climbed into the top bunk.  First time I ever did that!  And I didn’t even step on him.  Just a little on his sheet, but I gave him my winning smile and I guess it was all right.

So here I was, in my bunk, in my cell — STEVEN’S cell!  The end of a perfect day.  I woke up at Owosso, got transported to Maskawa, got my head shave, got my uniform, got my cell, and got the great Steven Meres!  Who had just started showing me everything he knew about Prison.  And I’d get to see everything about him, too, from his dick to his reading matter!  I was so tired — but there was one more thing I had to do.  And I did it without getting it in his face.  You know what it was.

Beginning next morning, I found out how they do things in the joint.  I learned that the Pen is totally rational, which means that it seems totally not rational.  The screws don’t need to give any reasons for what they do, so they don’t give you any.  Steven said that his last cellie, some guy named Finn, “left a day before you showed up.  They moved him to another block.  No reason given.  Inevitable there’d be a replacement.  Which was you.”  Same for labor assignments.  Nobody was told why he was cleaning toilets or why he was working in the library (“as if anybody actually worked in the library”).  But it was obvious you had to work.

Visits?  After your first month at Maskawa you can get one visit a month, one hour a visit.  Maskawa is so far away from anything that the visiting hours are never filled.  BUT if somebody comes all that way to see you, they still need to wait till next month to get another hour — gotta keep the rules in place.  It doesn’t take long for your visitors to stop coming, which is OK for the institution.  Maybe for the convicts too.  I know that I didn’t want any visitors.

But back to “labor assignments.”  Yeah they had me cleanin toilets.  Officially called the Hygiene Detail!  They say that anybody can clean a toilet.  Even a monkey can clean a toilet.  But first time I stuck my shit brush into one of those johns it came to me: Lassie, you never did this before!  I mean, at home we had the household staff.  Then my frat, we had the housekeepers.  When I got my own place, I had somebody comin in four days a week.  So I never washed a toilet!  I never thought about toilets!  Despite how important and, like, interesting they are.  But I did OK with them.  I got yelled at, which is fine.  The whole thing is about humiliation.  That’s why I’m here!

Also I realized, I’ve never worked!  Never even had a summer job.  Didn’t need to.  Didn’t want to!  Even though everybody else seemed to work, even if it was just “work” in some “internship” their daddy got them — I didn’t!  Now that I was a toilet scrubber I got to see what it was like to do what everybody else had to do.  There were a few little hazes here and there.  I had to fight one of the guys to keep from gettin my head pushed into a bowl, but hey, I actually won.  None of those dudes was all that fascinating, but I totally got off on being the twentieth identical dude on the crew!  And these guys started off right away, teaching me how to be a criminal.  You couldn’t steal from the cell of another con, when you came in to clean his tracks; that would get you fuckin killed — and the cells are so small, if something’s missing the dude can tell right away — but if you’re on a crew that’s sent to the offices or the warehouse or the garage or whatever, you should do your best to lift something.

I don’t smoke, but butts are money and I was always taking em back to the cell with me.  Not to mention anything that’s lying around or sitting on a shelf or sitting in a drawer, especially if there’s more than three of them — you know, pens, cups, pieces of change, chocolates, packages of peanuts — they don’t notice if one of them goes missing, and that’s what these big pockets in your coat are for.  After you’ve hooked something, you can use it to trade up to something else.  A con told me that the ferry to Maskawa carries 20 tons of passengers and 30 tons of “items.”  There’s some definitely rich guys living in the officers’ quarters.  So pretty soon I was such a criminal I could give my cellie stuff that he liked.  Mainly little candy shit.  And those little plastic whiskey bottles.  He liked that.  Not that it got me any closer to him, unfortunately…

But speaking of convict labor … Steven worked on a chain gang!  No, really.  He did!  He spent his days chained to one, two, ten other cons making gravel at the quarry or cutting brush out of the dead zone or clearing culverts in The Firs, which is the place on the island where the most stylish houses and condos are built.  After a day rolling out sweat they sent him to the Shower Shack, where you wash yourself and change out of the jumpsuit they make you work in, and now you come back to the cell with your dome all shiny and your muscles all pumped and your cellie waiting with his all rod tender and sensitive … I was in awe every day!  Which he knew, and also did nothing about.  OK, so I kept loving myself every night in the bunk — and I had a lot of inspiration.  He was so much older than me, but that just made it more interesting, because he was the boss and that’s what I wanted.

It took me about a month to get up enough guts to ask him what books he was reading when he wasn’t just lying in the bunk asleep.  Which he did a lot of.  The problem was, I never could see what the titles were, because the cover was always ripped off or something.  That’s the way books in prison are.  Books that guys want to read, anyway.  But one day I finally asked what it was he had in his bunk.  “Isle of the Dragons,” he said.  Huh?  “It’s the fourth book in the ‘Seas of Elsewhere’ series.”  Oh yeah, I’d heard of that.  It used to be popular in the frat.  With the one guy that ever read a book!  It was some kind of fantasy adventure thing.  I was shocked!  I mean, here’s Steven Meres reading some rip-off fantasy trash.  But I knew he must have a good reason.  I fished around with a joke.  “Great!” I said. “Must take place on Maskawa!”  He gave me a blank look.  “You know, this is an island, and there are all these dangerous guys out here.  You know, like dragons?”  “No,” he said.  “It doesn’t.”  He put the book back in front of his face again.  Then he turned a page and said, “I don’t like metaphors.”  Whew!  What did he mean by that?  I’d have to find out!  I asked him, but all he said was, “I read for escape.”

So that was amazing!  I knew that was the way authors talk.  They never want to explain themselves.  Which just makes you want to know more!  He didn’t like metaphors — OK, but “escape” was obviously a metaphor for something.  What was it?  I was too scared to ask him.  Maybe he’d tell me later.  Also, maybe he’d tell me why he’d decided to get himself sent to Maskawa!  Well, I had plenty of time to investigate.

Mr. Meres, as you can tell, turned out to be the strong, silent type.  The other cons seemed to respect him; they sorta cleared out in front of him, if you know what I mean.  Like they didn’t want any conflicts.  “’Sup, man.”  “How’s it doin, man.”  That was about it.  Didn’t really have any friends, including me.  I was just this guy that he had to manage.  You know, keep the guy in line, so the cell wouldn’t get in trouble.  Which he did by … You know what they say about writers, that they’re supposed to show you rather than tell you?  Good writers won’t tell you that Steven Meres was a strong, smart man.  Instead, they’ll show him not saying much; they’ll show him working the chain gang; they’ll show him making sure that his uniform is hanging up every night and his boots are side by side, toes pointed outwards.

So that’s what he did — he showed me what to do in prison, mostly by doing it himself.  Usually, it was like he didn’t even know I was there, but that was so he could SHOW me the strength.  So when we stood at the bars to be counted, like we did maybe 20 times a day (yeah, that’s an exaggeration, but we had to do it a lot), I was SO proud that my shoulder was touching his shoulder and that right after he said “Meres, 746051,” I could say “Abbott, 759384.”  I was wanting to be a lot more to him than a number, but like I said, there was lots and lots of time for me to get into his story.  Maybe then I’d be allowed to call him Steven instead of Sten!  He’d never mentioned a guy named “Steven Meres” who’d had some kind of life outside of prison — not to mention being an author.

In the meantime, it was good for me that he didn’t have any friends — I couldn’t get jealous of them!  But there were some cons that he seemed to notice.  One of them was this very hot, handsome older dude called Nesto, who I saw once or twice when Steven and I were in the Yard, and Steven just stopped in his tracks and said “Later” and walked off with the guy and talked more than I’d talked with him in the past three months.  How jealous was I?  Totally jealous!  But I guess that was more of an accident, because a few weeks later I saw Nesto out behind the Shower Shack when I was going someplace to clean some more toilets, and he was in the corner with a guy who looked like he was giving him a really good time.

Then there was this young couple, Cameron and Jet, that we saw a lot, because they were on our same block and our same Yard time.  They were just a cute gay couple.  But I don’t why, I always got a little vibe from them that there was a mysterious something going on.  I mean, Jet was usually cool and enjoying himself — you know, “Today’s haircut day, I LOVE gettin my baldy!” — but he would have these days, like, “Man, they canceled another fuckin visit!  I don’t know how I can take this shit.”  Then Cameron would give him a sexy look and say, “Cmon, babe, you didn’t wanta see your fuckin brother anyway.  He’s not gonna get you out.  And it’s not like you wanta get out!”  Then they’d sorta snuggle up to each other and Cameron would whisper something like, “Just think of all the trouble I had, tryin to get in!”  And pretty soon Jet was having a good time again.  So I thought I was the only con that enjoyed being locked up!  But what was that shit about trying to get in?  I had this fantasy: Cameron was like me, he paid to get in here, and he did it in this great act of love for Jet, who I knew had got sent up for manslaughter when he was driving drunk.  I guess I was a romantic at heart!  But there was something going on there.

Of course, the real mystery was what was up with Steven, why he was the way he was.  He was so brilliant, I thought he probably just enjoyed his own thoughts a lot more than talking to some little dick like me.  But that’s not how Jet and Cameron looked at it.  For a long time, I only ran into them when Steven was there, and it was just some little bullshit chat.  Then one day we had Yard and Steven was on restriction for gettin smart with an officer, so it was just me in the Yard, and along came those two.  “Where’s Sten?” Cameron said.  “Yeah,” Jet said, “where’s the Great Stone Face?”

“Huh?” I said.

“Well,” Cameron said, “it can’t have escaped your attention that your cellie has become the biggest musclehead in the joint.  He’s probably never even let you handle his dick.”

“Which I know you’re dying to,” Jet giggled.

“When he finds out you exist,” Cameron added.

“You’ve got him wrong,” I said.  “We have a very … good relationship.  It’s just that he’s …  so smart.  So much smarter than me.  He’s a writer, you know!”

“Yeah?” Cameron said.  “What does he write?”

“Of course, he’s not writing anything NOW.  But he writes novels.  Mystery novels.  You know, Steven Meres.  The Danny Brant novels.”

“Is that something we’ve heard of?” Jet said.

“I don’t think so,” Cameron said.  “But I don’t care how many books he writes.  He’s a twisted, morose, embittered con.”

So right there — that was another reason why I thought there was a mystery about Cameron.  “Morose, embittered” — his vocabulary was just too good for him to be in prison.

“If Sten had any brains,” he continued, “he would’ve fucked you on Day 1.  You’re welcome — that was a compliment.  But if you want his ass, go after it.   Sixty-forty he won’t kill you for trying.  But if you want to wait, that’s fine too.  You’re gonna be living with him for the rest of your life.”

For some reason, they both started to giggle.  Then it was “later, dude,” and I was left standing in the Yard alone.

So I was now the morose, embittered con.  I don’t know about “twisted.”  Maybe.  After all, I was still enjoying prison!  But I was also still in love with Steven Meres, and I had to do something to make that work.  The cell got quieter than ever.  Night after night I lay on my bunk, trying to decide what to do.  Obviously, he didn’t think that anybody like me would know about him being a writer and so forth.  Should I finally throw the bomb and tell him I had Worshiped Him from Afar and that’s how I got into his cell?  Or would that just make it seem like I was crazy?  And what if it didn’t work?  What if he just said “yeah” in that way he had of replying to whatever I said?  And what exactly was I going to say — “Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I know all about you?”  Out of the fuckin blue?

Then a week later, it was library day, and my tier got to troop into the little brick building with the high barred windows and walk through the lines of low shelves made out of packing crates and inspect the mishmash of books that happened to be there right then.  Looked like the same old crap, but there was a bin full of stuff that was about to be thrown away, so I decided to pick through that.  I’d once found a yellowed book of O. Henry stories in there — which I enjoyed, although Steven gave it a contemptuous look and said, “Funny little stories by some ex-con.”  I knew I wasn’t as smart as he was! but I couldn’t see why that book was any worse than “Lair of the Blue Worm,” which is what he was checking out at the moment.  So here I am, going through the bin, and there, under a layer of Lous L’Amour, was “A Problem of Identity, and Other Stories,” by the world-famous Steven Meres.  Of course I’d read it before.  I’d practically memorized it.  But I grabbed it and took it back to the cell.  And that night, looking up at my bunk on his way to the crapper, he noticed.  I made sure he noticed.  I practically held it under his nose.

“So you know,” he said.  “You always knew.”

“Right,” I quavered.  “I … I think it’s a great book.”

“That’s your opinion,” he said, unbuttoning his crotch and extending his cock over the little steel toilet.  Usually he was a quick pisser, even when he knew I was looking in his direction.  This time, he seemed to be having trouble.  “All those stories are bad.”

I didn’t reply; I was too astonished.  I listened to the hollow splash of his piss.  He buttoned up and returned.  “Get off your bunk and sit down here.  I don’t want to stand up to talk to you.”

So, for the first time, I was invited to sit on his bunk.  That doesn’t count the times I was returned to the cell before the end of his labor detail and I leaned onto his mattress and rubbed my face on it, so happy to be in the place where his body lay down every night.

“Those things are like every other mystery story,” he said.  “They’re supposed to be so real and even … technical, but it’s all magic; it’s all sleight of hand.  I’m a con.  I don’t need to do my time imagining how smart my creation Danny Brant used to be.  Danny Brant, AKA Steven Meres.  If I was smart, I wouldn’t be a con.”

I was looking for something to say, but he could see I was resisting him.  He went on.

“Look.  You’ve got the hero, impossibly smart and clever.  You’ve got a series of ‘adventures,’ just long enough to fill the usual number of pages.  Danger, distress, insoluble problems that of course have already been solved, but the reader doesn’t know that.  Lots of coincidences that are made to seem logical.  Then, a chapter or so before the end, a new character appears, who without knowing it has the key to solving the mystery.  Afterwards, a final danger, a sudden reversal, a happy ending, in which nothing is changed.  Did you notice that?  Danny goes on to the next book in exactly the same way.  Like an author who keeps writing the same book.  That’s not real!  Did you even notice that?”

He was really angry.  A wave of red crept across his thick, muscly neck, and one of his boots beat on the floor like it was about to fly up and kick somebody.  Me!  He was talking so loud I was scared that the cons in the next cells would hear him.  But I was happy — for the first time he was showing some actual emotion!

“Sure I noticed it,” I said.  “That’s why, that’s a reason why I liked … admired you so much!  It’s beyond real.  It’s better than real.  And you created it all!  It’s … Remember why you told me that you read those … I’m sorry, those garbage novels?  To escape!”

“Yeah.  What about it?”

“That’s why I read YOUR books!  To escape!  Into the world you created!  That’s why I’m in prison!  You created a world, and I wanted more of it!  And I got it!  I’m living in it!  But actually, it’s better than I thought.  Because even you couldn’t imagine every detail…”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

He was right to interrupt me.  I was sort of losing it there.  So I got it together and told him the whole story.  How I read his books, saw him on the ferry, fell in love with the whole prison thing, planned and invested, and got everything I wanted, and more … except for him.  That was a detail that was missing.

“How’s that for a reversal?” I said.  Kind of a bad joke, but OK, by then I was starting to cry and I needed some way to end it.

He kept looking at me, and I was scared he was gonna start hitting me or something.  I was a lot younger than he was, but I wouldn’t stand much of a chance against that body.

“So,” he said, after what seemed like about an hour and a half, “I guess we’re living in a story YOU wrote.”

I was still crying, but I thought that was funny, so I started laughing at the same time.  And kind of choking, you know.  And for fuck’s sake, he was smiling.  That was a first.  Unless when he was making some snarky remark, but that wasn’t really a smile.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Not a very believable story,” he said.

“No,” I said.  “I guess it’s not.”  Then I thought of something.  “But it’s just as believable as those dragons on that island.”  And he laughed, so I added, “The difference is, this one is true.  Isn’t it?”

“I guess it is.  But it’s up to me to give it a happy ending,” he said.  “Crawl outta that uniform, convict.  You’re about to be fucked.”

(one more chapter to go!) …

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