Greensboro Jail has become my monastery. I could stay here forever, ensconced in yellow covered cement and held by the crumb covered metal bed. For the first month, I was naked, taking every opportunity to piss off the guards by pressing my breasts against the glass pane in the door. I have a rock solid routine of prayer, meditation, walking in circles, and talking to God and all my imaginary friends. The girls come to my door and complain complain complain, failing to recognize the opportunity in having an isolation cell for months to reach deep and let the mind run through waves and rebirth. This is the kind of place that allows me to be with the love of my life. In the coolness and florescence, the clothing hugging his soul transforms from ice to water to vapor and back to water again. All in the space of my mind. Where who he really is lives. Loving someone I am not supposed to love makes jails, hospitals, and backseats of cars enticing respites. It’s where I find God and where I find my love.
“Bach!” The food door crashes down. “Hands.” I squeeze my hands far enough for the guards to fit the first set of handcuffs. After all, I am a special guest of Greensboro, requiring two sets of cuffs. They order me out of the cell and against the wall to get my ankles shackled like I am on my way to the execution chamber. Then everything is tied together like a Christmas bow at my belly. This is my gym suit, the outfit I don to take my walk. Shuffle 3 inches, then maybe another until I reach the indoor walking room. This day, the sun is hot even for August, and it manages to squeeze through the 12 inch slit running across the ceiling. I lay down on the dirty cement and shimmy into a spot to catch the 3 o’clock rays on my face. My eyes open, and we gaze at each other for minutes, a hobby I picked up while cutting across a field in Stafford, Virginia. Three majestic horses caught and directed my attention to the fireball in the sky. Look, they were saying. Wake up. It was the first time I stared directly into the sun. When the jail doctors measured my eyesight, they noted the rarity and superiority of my 20/10 vision. My eyesight had mysteriously improved, not declined, after 3 years of sun gazing.
I can feel the freckles rising out of my dermis, the bridge of my nose turning hot red. This situation would have induced panic in my vanity obsessed youth when the thought of the light wrinkling and crinkling my face would have made my heart race. With the stamp of the sun on my face, I rise up as if I had been nestled in a grassy field for 30 minutes. I stare at the light once more and close my eyes, asking to be directed. I turn around and see a daddy long legs humping up and down, humping, humping, and humping again. God is doing that for me just as God did it for me off Exit 89 in Maryland. My gas tank had gone dry and slid my car into the shoulder. I grabbed the cheap, crinkled, and green photo album my dad had just given me. The smattering of random pictures were offered as evidence that I was genetically connected to the members of my so-called family. I didn’t buy it. Abandoning my car, I separated a spot in the bushy moat and entered a quiet space of lush green, discovering a miniature stream.
In the walking room, God fills the air and saturates the cold hard rock beneath and above my feet. His voice began percolating in me behind a Target outside Richmond on a January night. I laid in the brush, took off my shoes, and rubbed my feet on the tree roots. The heat of the friction on my arches was sufficient to keep my whole body warm. I rose and pressed my feet into the dirt and grass until I reached the blacktop, greeting a blue dumpster. Turning my back to it, I looked up at the moon and saw a gray and white imprint of my love’s face. God or Satan. Good or Evil. The line is blurred in this dimension. God definitely comes to people in the way they can receive him. As if saying, keep your head up, you’re about to find some shit out.
“Time’s up, Bach.” Officer Jackson uses her oversized keys to open the metal beige door and watches me shuffle back to my cell. Three guards disentangle me from my chains and sequester me back into my colorless oasis. I lay down on my bed and gaze at the etchings on the wall, formed from years of lazy upkeep and scratches of bored inmates. Papa Lion sports a thick mane and balances his tiny daughter on his round nose, the suction of her kiss being so strong that it keeps her from falling. When I touch this accidental drawing, I feel God or Robert. Below and to the left is Robert’s other avatar – half man, half lizard with a perfect-looking protrusion. A foot away is an Elvis inspired profile of a man’s face replete with a healthy pompadour and a mouth agape. My eyes sometimes contort this image into Ethan, and strangely, at times, into one of Robert’s forgettable sons. Between Robert and Ethan is Sam who has been reincarnated as a simple outline of an eyeless boy with lips parting in the shape of a C. Robert. Ethan. Sam. No Daddy.
My index finger traces Sam’s jagged head round and round gently so as to not disturb the paint. My sixth sense died with him, incinerated in the furnace that transformed his body into dust. Now, when I think something bad is about to happen, it’s just textbook paranoia and catastrophizing. I bury my forehead into the pillow. After I abandoned my Honda Fit in a Food Lion parking lot in some town named “Thomas” something, Sam walked me to Highway 84. Men with motorcycles and long hair blasted rock and roll and flashed the backs of their leather jackets at me. Yeah, that’s Sam. The rust that had accumulated on him when he was alive has since dissolved. Sometimes, he’s my only friend. Too many times, he has grabbed my hair and lifted me up from whatever I wanted to drown myself in. I am alive because he died.
Something bad is about to happen. Something bad is about to fucking happen! I kick off whatever no name guy is gyrating on me between a bush and the fence surrounding Belmont Park. It is two in the morning. I am thirteen. My mother, who I call Maura, is somewhere other than where her children are. Putting on my shoes will slow me down. I sprint across the street, accumulating prickly indentations on my soles and grabbing painful pebbles between my toes. I swing the storm door open, kick the heavy wooden front door, and run to the basement. “You sick motherfucker bastard!” Before I can even get to the bottom of the stairs, I see that Patty’s face is cherry red. She is crying so hard, her cheeks look like they are glazed. His pants are down. My best friend wraps a blanket around herself and grabs the edges to meet her face. I jump on top of him, punching and kicking him, you sick fuck! what the fuck is wrong with you! Sam was a sex offender well before the age of 16, but by exactly what age, no one knows for sure. My little sister can’t remember the first time he came into her bedroom.
More indelible than Patty’s shaken face is Sam’s empty stare, his capitulation to my assault. His mouth is slightly open, like he is being hypnotized by a tiny speck of dust on the wall. With each punch, he weeble wobbles back and forth, moored by this phantom spot. I am bracing myself for an epic showdown. Come on motherfucker! But it never happens. The “never happens” smacks me with a dichotomous confusion. Any chance he got, Sam would glare at me ominously and unnervingly, throwing a milkshake of contempt and pure hatred in my face on a near daily basis. For the crime of existing, I was beaten, punched, choked, scratched, kicked, smothered with pillows, thrown downstairs. I concluded all forms of suffocation were the most terrifying. This would be the worst way to die. He liked to straddle my rib cage and press the air out of my lungs, interlocking his thumbs and digging his hands into my voice box. If I hid in the bathroom, he would kick down the door. If I ran outside, he would follow in hot pursuit. The worst was when it rained, and I had no shoes on. I earned the scar on my wrist by crashing through the glass storm door in one of my evasion attempts.
Sitting up on the jail’s plastic mattress, I roll, twist, and contort my wrist, trying to find the correct calibration. Is it permanently damaged? The bruises faded from purple to yellowish brown within two weeks, but my wrist is still weakened by a strain after six. The mental health team knocks on my window, “Ms. Bach, can we talk?” “No.” “You know if you don’t do this, we have to take away your clothes again.” “I do not want to hurt myself or anyone else. Leave.” “We have medication for you. Would you like to take it? If you take it, you’ll get more privileges.” I want to stay in here. I like the restriction. “No.” Dangling treats in front of me never works. I wrap myself in the scrap of cloth that Greensboro calls bed sheets and return to the secret highway garden. I take off my shoes and plop my tushy in the mud beside the water. Somewhere between New York and Maryland, the edges of some of the pictures started bleeding from mystery moisture. After obsessively turning and flipping and removing and inserting photos while meandering through six states, I could recite each scene and character in the glossy rectangles.
A photo falls loose from the album. Khaled is leaning against the 5 foot high white rock partition with his feet crossed and his arms relaxing at his side. A red and white keffiyeh is draped across his back and shoulders, accenting his olive thobe, or what an American would say is an ankle length shirt. His long curved knife, a jambiya, is tucked into a belt around his waist. He has serious eyes that glisten when he smiles and tilts his head. The only Westerners who find their way to Yemen are thrill seekers, iconoclasts and intellectuals who study esoteric and largely useless subjects. It’s pre-9/11. We study Arabic because it makes us more fascinating, a cut above the ordinary, not because we are patriots. My stomach is aching, and the school master summons Khaled to escort me to the doctor. Foreigners, especially white ones, need armed guards with them at all times, or they could be kidnapped.
Khaled sits down on a metal chair covered in white paint next to the receptionist’s desk. He holds out his hand toward me and motions for me to sit in the chair across from him. For twenty minutes, we stare at each other, occasionally looking down and returning with wicked smirks. Since the only word he knows in English is “hello,” Arabic mediates the heat between us. We both attempt to camouflage our fiery attraction in front of the doctor’s staff. Flirtation is unheard of in this part of the world. Yemeni men never see any woman who is unrelated to them. Women wear head to toe burkas, ensuring not a millimeter of skin peaks through. In the suffocating heat of Sana’a, these women are draped in layers of black cloth, soaking up sun and sweat.
I fabricate reasons to leave the school compound. “I need bandages.” “I need lemonade.” “I need underwear.” Khaled! Take Suzanne. After a week of these shenanigans, I return from a night out with my cohort of strange foreigners at a time when the streets are empty and subdued. Khaled is not there to greet me at the gate. Don’t hide my toys from me. I want. I want. I want. Mentally stamping my feet up and down, I insist that the fat guard tell me where Khaled is. He replies, “il-bayt Saleh.” I run out into the street without a gun toting male and arrive at the six foot high black metal gate leading to the school owner’s house. Bang bang bang bang. Khaled pulls me into the small double gated vestibule. “Susanna, Saleh is going to be angry. You need to go.” Married Muslim male. White American Atheist female. One of us had to step over the prism of forbidden. I leaped and landed on his lips, and he pushed my head against the wall with his. The penalty for adultery is death by stoning.
The language barrier provides soundproofing for the vulnerability and complication that I french pressed a couple of years back. I need to survive. I cannot feel or do anything that could poke that dragon. My first year level of Arabic determines how far and wide we go, and simultaneously, gives me permission to let go safely for the first time and get drunk in a man. Khaled may be my first passionate affair, but he is not my first love, the one who eviscerated my psyche when she took a sledgehammer to my heart.
Knock, knock. Officer Meyers holds up sheets of lined paper, and I scurry quickly to meet her at the food trap. “From Ashley.” “Please tell her thank you.” According to one of the many memos posted behind a glass case on the wall, talking to other inmates through their doors during walking time is forbidden in the administrative isolation section. Fortunately, most of the guards look the other way. While enclosed in her cell, Ashley interweaves florescent pink faux hair, gifted by an outgoing inmate, into a young woman’s corn rows through the small unlocked trap door. The first time I shuffled my way to Ashley, she immediately asked me if I needed a pen and paper. More than food and water, that’s what I needed.
“How did you know?” “I don’t know. You look like a writer I guess.” She picks up a few books off her shelf, “Do you like to read?” “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind having a book.” I have nothing to offer in return, but that’s not why she is being generous. Ashley isn’t accumulating credits, keeping score, or waiting to cash in one day. This degenerate criminal gives for the sake of giving. She gives because some of us have nothing. She gives because it is the right thing to do. Through Ashley, everything gets passed around, and the guards are her mail couriers. On the metal shelf fastened to her wall is a letter notifying her of a disciplinary hearing. I do not ask her how she got in jail or how she got in isolation. I figure the disciplinary hearing means she had a fight in general population. I never touched down in gen pop. The jail fast tracked me straight to isolation.
“You know, mathematics is the only true language. It unites the whole universe.” I respond, “You mean, like, one day, we will evolve to communicate in formulas and theoretical geometry?” “Something like that. The universe is infinite, so many galaxies.” She shoots a look over my head, “Hey Meyers! Look up the number of galaxies in the universe!” Officer Meyers pulls the keyboard toward her and fulfills Ashley’s request. “Over a billion, Ashley.” Ashley turns to me, nodding her head and lifting her forehead, “You hear that, over a billion. Civilizations have risen and fallen for an infinite number of years. We just can’t see them. When I’m in here, laying here, I swing on a pendulum, I see things.” I smile almost flirtatiously, “I know exactly what you mean.”
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