You Are Free to Go. Sarah Yaw
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right things: Soap. Toothpaste. Shampoo. Hair gel. Cigarettes, his only luxury. Unlike some of these lowlifes who trade their commissary credits for drugs and think it’s OK to smell like they’re rotting from the gut out. Like Collin, Georgy, and Don. They hang around in the gallery of B block all day watching television, getting stoned. Georgy, that cross-eyed, pimple-faced illiterate, spends his whole day with a Hardenberg phone book trying to get people to read him numbers so he can call girls collect and hope someday someone will care he’s in here and pay him a visit. Moses doesn’t do that anymore. He used to, but he’s reformed. Accepts his punishment, tries not to cheat God.
“Put ‘em on,” she says. “Here, I’ll get you a mirror so you can see how you look.” She crosses the room to the locked door that leads to a small office where she keeps her essentials. Moses can’t be alone in the mailroom. He knows this. She looks back at him. He nods and she unlocks the door and disappears.
Moses puts the glasses on and opens the envelope. Inside is a piece of official stationery from the optometrist, Dr. Thomas J. Rothschild, and the state Department of Corrections. It reads:
The Rules and Responsibilities of Glasses Ownership
Congratulations. Your good behavior has earned you the right to own a pair of Rothschild glasses. Glasses are a privilege granted only to those who earn it. They can be taken away at any moment. Please note the following:
Glasses may not be used as a weapon in any way.
Glasses must remain in one piece. If there is a missing piece, they will be confiscated immediately and a full search and seizure of all inmate belongings will be conducted until the missing piece is recovered and accounted for. If the missing piece is not recovered, it will be assumed that it has been stashed as a weapon, and the prisoner will be punished according to section 11.214 of the Prisoner Code of Conduct, thus resulting in loss of the right to own future eyeglasses, and /or keeplock or isolation.
All repairs must be made by Dr. Thomas J. Rothschild as surrogate of the State of New York Department of Corrections and will be made at the expense of the owner. Commissary credits can be used to cover the cost of repairs and/or replacement.
Sincerely,
Dr. Thomas J. Rothschild, O.D.
Lila returns with a fancy compact in her palm. “Oh, they look very nice,” she says. “How do they feel?”
Moses looks around the room and adjusts them on his face. “They’re ugly, aren’t they? I don’t think I need them.” He’s lying. Everything looks clearer. He can see the cobwebs on the ceiling, the dirt on the floor. (Corn, the porter who cleans in the mailroom, could use a pair, but his popcorn habit keeps him flat broke.) Moses looks back at Lila. He can see the fine lines around her eyes, the parentheses around her smile. She looks pleased for him, so he’s not going to let on that this is humiliating. He feels old.
“Take a look.” She holds up the compact for him.
The compact is white and gold and has an embossed emblem on the outside like a royal seal that reminds him of the ones he stole as a child in Buffalo. He used to sneak into the elegant homes on Elmwood Avenue, find the lady of the house’s dressing table, and steal the vanity sets, the brushes, the long-handled mirrors, the compacts filled with silky powders and puffs. These were his mother’s favorites, the ultimate symbol of wealth and luxury. He’d kneel next to wherever she laid—her bed, the rough and lumpy couch—and give them to her the way a subject presents an offering to a queen. But first, he’d clean the hair from the brushes and roll it between his fingers into a silky ball, hold it to his nose and smell, rub it along his cheek, then add it to his collection. He kept boxes of women’s hair, sorted by color, under his bed. In his cell, he has a Styrofoam cooler of Lila’s hair under his cot. He keeps a small ball of it in his pocket and fingers it when he needs to calm himself. There’s one in his pocket now.
He tries to find himself in the compact she is holding up for him and all he can see is a gigantic nostril.
“Other side,” he says.
“Oh, right,” she says, and flips it so he can see his whole face.
He wants to hold the compact. Wants to feel something luxurious, the weight of it like gold, heavy in his palm. He hasn’t touched money or anything that feels like wealth in years. He takes it from her, and his hand covers hers. Moses sees a blush rise to her cheek, and it thrills him. He loves that he can still do this to a woman. He loves that he can do this to Lila.
“It was my grandmother’s,” she says, looking off to the side.
“My mother had one of these,” he says.
Moses expects to see how good he looks. The glasses are horrible. But that’s not the worst of it. The hair at his temples is almost completely white. His teeth are yellow; his skin is gray and old, the color of clouds. Deep cutting lines map out years on his face. What the fuck, he thinks. He doesn’t say this aloud. He’d never swear in front of a lady.
He snaps the compact shut and hands it to her. “I like what I’ve read so far,” he says, turning away. “I think that Aschenbach has a good perspective on the world.” Aschenbach is the main character, or the protagonist, as Lila instructed him, of Thomas Mann’s story, “Death in Venice.” He’s reading it because she’s reading it for her college World Literature class. He’s always trying to impress Lila, so Moses doesn’t tell her that Mann should think about writing a story that doesn’t require a dictionary because Moses can’t use one—until now the small print was torture—so he keeps getting caught up on unfamiliar vocabulary and hasn’t gotten very far in the story. Nevertheless, he likes what he knows about Aschenbach so far. Like Aschenbach, Moses has come to believe in the redemptive power of work. His job in the mailroom has given him significant position in the prison among the guards (except Miller, of course) of which he is very proud, and this, combined with the pleasant routine of his friendship with Jorge, and the settling in of time, has given Moses some contentment and unlikely faith that he’s already paid his dues for what he did, and he’s come to believe that from here on out it’s just the simple decomposition of the body and then all this crap will be over with and he’ll be free of this life and on to the next and the next will be a whole lot better.
In the meantime, having important work in the world and the ability to bring a blush to the cheek of a good, chaste woman like Lila (a rarity) and having a good friend like Jorge who is well-liked and has Moses’ back when the B block lowlifes act up, these are the good things. He’s been inside since he was a young man and life on the outside wasn’t ever so good, so life now is the best it’s ever been. He’s learned to feign weakness around the young, violent gangbangers to prove his irrelevance. He farts whenever he’s around them so they think he’s old and weak and they tell him go die and call him motherfucker. His pride doesn’t suffer from this. Moses is a survivor. And he, like Aschenbach, believes that the position he’s earned through his hard work proves he’s above the lowlifes.
He tells Lila he feels connected to Aschenbach in this very way. Then she says, “I find it strange, frankly, that you think Aschenbach is the sort of character you’d want to identify with, given your feelings about homosexuals and pedophiles.”
Humiliation aches in his teeth, and anger tightens his tendons. Why did he speak before he knew the story? Lila has promised to ask her professor if he would read and grade a critical literary paper on “Death in Venice” if Moses were to write one. She knows his greatest desire is to go to college. The paper was her idea. She probably regrets it now.
He puts his hand in his pocket and fingers her hair. He’s not angry at Lila. Lila is pure as snow with that flossy, bouncy hair and that smooth, motherly skin and her practical pants and her practical rubber shoes that protect her feet from all the standing. Lila is the perfect, pure woman. He’s angry with Jorge for waking in fits of fury and laughter last night while Moses tried to read. He’s angry at Miller for forcing them all to go to chow early this morning, cutting into his reading time, for holding him in the gallery for an extra long time before he was cleared to report to work. He’s angry with himself. For getting old. For not being able to see.