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  “You what!” the General said. Despite the heated argument he found himself in, his head felt cold, and he leaned out of bed and tried to reach his nightcap with one of his crutches, hoping to drag the nightcap within reach. Unfortunately Aurora had heaved it nearly into the bathroom, and he couldn’t retrieve it.

  “Well, you’ve always had a lot of goddamn cheek,” the General said. “Now my head’s cold. I might get pneumonia and die, in which case I have no doubt that you’ll immediately start screwing some little fop from Europe right here where I’m lying. You won’t have to bother about sofas if I get pneumonia and die.”

  Aurora retreated into an aloof silence, her favorite form of silence.

  “Too goddamn much cheek,” the General repeated. He wanted his nightcap, but he didn’t quite want it badly enough to get out of bed, which was now nicely warmed by Aurora’s body, and he didn’t want to ask her to get it for him, either. Asking her to get his nightcap for him was one of those things he just didn’t want to do.

  “How long have you been planning this little seduction?” he asked. “I thought you were acting odd, but I never thought you’d go that far, with Melly and me right upstairs.”

  “I didn’t plan it at all, my demon just happened to escape,” Aurora said. “I assure you I long ago learned the folly of planning, where men are concerned. One can plan till one faints and still be very likely to draw a blank.”

  At the thought of all the blanks she had drawn in her life, Aurora suddenly felt overwhelmed. She sighed her sigh and put her face in her hands.

  “What’s the point?” she said. “Everything I’ve ever done has failed.”

  The General gave up on his nightcap. He hated to see Aurora sad at any time, but he particularly hated it when she slipped into one of her everything-I’ve-ever-done-has-failed moods, which seemed to him to come over her much more frequently now. Probably that was his fault. Probably everything was his fault. He should have gone to Masters and Johnson’s clinic in St. Louis the minute he began to have trouble getting it up; he had suggested that very thing to Aurora, but at the time she wouldn’t hear of it. She said it would be far better for them to enjoy a peaceful old age than for him to involve himself with sex doctors. But a year and a half had slipped by, and they weren’t enjoying a peaceful old age at all—they quarreled day and night, and Aurora spent half her time sighing or deciding that her whole life had been a failure, or crying or sulking or being anything but the jolly woman he had known for so long. Very likely it was all his fault; he should have overruled her and headed straight for Masters and Johnson at the first sign of trouble. Sammy, his friend in Rancho Mirage, had gone to a sex doctor of some sort when he began to flag, and the doctor had turned Sammy right around and made it possible for him to continue his pursuit of bimbos.

  “I knew I should have gone to Masters and Johnson,” the General said. “Here you are, a comparatively young, lively woman, stuck with an old geezer who has to wear a nightcap. In my youth they had these goat-gland operations—they advertised them as gorilla glands, but I think they were really just goat glands. They wouldn’t have been able to catch that many gorillas, for one thing. My Uncle Mike had one of those goat-gland operations—he had to go to Mexico to get it—but it must have worked. Uncle Mike got married several times after that. If he weren’t dead I’d call him up and ask him about it. With all these transfers and transplants they do now I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve improved the goat-gland operation.”

  “Hector, go to sleep before I strangle you, like Pascal tried to do me,” Aurora said, taking her face out of her hands. “Why would you think I’d be interested in receiving the products of alien glands?”

  “It might be better than receiving no products at all,” the General said. He was thinking how nice it would be to go to Mexico for a few days—he had always liked Mexico, anyway—and come back potent. That prospect intrigued him so much that it took a moment for him to react to the fact that Aurora had said Pascal tried to strangle her.

  “Did you say he tried to strangle you?” he asked. “Tried to strangle you how?”

  “With his hands, Hector, a common method,” Aurora said, glad that the gland issue had been disposed of. It had come up frequently during the months of Hector’s decline. Evidently his Uncle Mike had made a big impression on him, although in her view several marriages might point more readily to the failure of such a method than to its success.

  “Let’s see your neck,” the General said, turning on the bed light. He had to put on his glasses to see her neck clearly; and when he did put on his glasses he could see nothing out of the ordinary about her neck, or about the bosom just below it. Now that he had his glasses on, he rather preferred to look at the bosom.

  “He doesn’t seem to have done you much damage,” he said.

  “No, he has small French hands—he’s virtually hopeless as a strangler,” Aurora said. “I wish you’d stop leering.”

  “Well, why’d he do it?” the General asked, reluctantly turning off the light.

  “When I saw he was going to thwart me I became merciless,” Aurora said. “As you know yourself, I can ill abide being thwarted.”

  “It probably fired him up, though,” the General said. “He’s a lot younger than I am. I doubt he would have got as far as strangling you if he wasn’t pretty fired up.

  “I wish you liked the Midwest more,” he said; his mind reverted to Masters and Johnson. It was a pity Aurora didn’t approve of the Midwest. If there was only some way to get her interested in St. Louis, or even Chicago, he might be able to slip in a few visits to Masters and Johnson. A few visits might well be enough—with science advancing practically every day, fixing him up might be a simple matter. Obviously Aurora was never going to sit still for the goat glands, but perhaps now they had pills or injections or something.

  While he was thinking of sights Aurora might possibly want to see in the Midwest—he had given up on the Gateway Arch; whenever he mentioned it, she yawned—he grew tired and went back to sleep sitting up, with his mouth open.

  Aurora felt relieved—quarreling about sex or the lack of it with Hector in the middle of the night was not her favorite way to spend the middle of the night. Far better to read Proust, or merely sit with the light off looking out the window at the moon above the streetlight, fantasizing about a time when Tommy might be out of prison, when Teddy and Jane might be back in school, when Melanie might be happily married. If even one of those fantasies would come true, she could sleep at night rather than spending so much of it staring and fretting.

  Meanwhile they weren’t coming true, and there was Hector. When he was asleep she found she still occasionally had nice feelings for him, even if he happened to be sleeping with his mouth open. Cranky and irritating as he was, at least he was there beside her and was sort of staying the course—not an easy course, she knew, and not one too many men would have wanted to stay. It was something, and, when she thought about it, it still touched her.

  She got up, went around the bed, and found his nightcap, which she managed to get back on his head. Then she turned back the covers and began to try and scoot him into a reclining position; it was difficult but it was also necessary. He had gone to sleep sitting straight up: the military posture that had once thrilled her so was now something of a burden—depending on which way he tipped, he could easily fall out of bed, and if there was one thing Aurora was sure of at that hour, it was that the two of them didn’t need any more broken bones.

  9

  In Huntsville, in his cell, seeing that Joey, his cellmate, had finally gone to sleep, Tommy got his notebook from under his bunk and began to work on his code. Teddy, his brother, was the only one who knew that he was devising a code in which to write a book about prison life that would freak out the world.

  “Why a code?” Teddy had asked, when Tommy first mentioned his plan. In fact, Teddy was thrilled that Tommy was interested enough in life even to contemplate the creation of something as a
mbitious as a code.

  Since Tommy had been about fifteen, his only ambition had been to have no ambition. His main way of being himself was to refuse to try to do anything that society might consider worthwhile. Teddy considered Tommy to be the brightest person he knew—he was even brighter than Jane, and Jane would have graduated summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr if she hadn’t gone crazy one semester before graduation. But for all his brightness, Tommy had barely graduated from high school and had refused to stay in college more than a few weeks. He just wouldn’t try: he felt that all ambition was cooperation, and that cooperation was corrupt. At one point Teddy had engaged Tommy in many conversations about ambition and corruption and the capitalistic system, as well as all sorts of matters related to trying, and he was convinced that his brother was absolutely pure in his beliefs, which meant that he would never try anything. Teddy had been the one person in the family who wasn’t shocked when Tommy killed Julie. Though he had never told anyone his deepest suspicion—not even Jane—Teddy didn’t really believe the official account of the killing, which was that Tommy got rattled in an argument over drugs and accidentally shot Julie instead of the dope dealer she was then going with. Teddy had never seen Tommy get rattled enough to shoot the wrong person in a quarrel. In Teddy’s view, Tommy probably shot Julie because she had sold out and betrayed the no-ambition ideals they shared, or seemed to share, when they were first going together. Julie wasn’t pure; she was conniving. She wanted money, and lots of it. Teddy had never liked her and didn’t mourn her—she just wasn’t smart enough to deal with a person as dedicated to silence and nothingness as his brother Tommy. She should have known Tommy would kill her if she didn’t stay out of his way. Tommy didn’t try to make disciples, but of course he wasn’t absolutely smart in all areas of life: he had been hustled by girls more than once.

  Tommy had gone almost a decade, all through the latter part of his adolescence, hardly doing a single thing to further himself in the world. Twice he had starved himself to the point where he had to be institutionalized and force-fed. He only permitted himself actions that he perceived to be essentially terroristic—such as selling cocaine to white upper-middle-class kids. Tommy believed that white upper-middle-class kids were the trash of the planet; helping them destroy themselves seemed to him a worthwhile goal. He was no rabid ecologist, no particular friend of the planet, but he did consider that turning rich white kids into mindless freaks was the sort of service that he shouldn’t disdain.

  Tommy did like working on his code late at night, when the prison was asleep. Teddy, who owned more than a hundred dictionaries and grammars, had provided Tommy with Xeroxes of a good many alphabets and twenty or thirty grammars from which to form a basis for his code.

  Actually, Tommy had no real interest in devising a super-sophisticated code that would require hundreds of years to decipher. Once, when he was about twelve, their father, who was an English professor, dragged all his kids to England and made them go to all the boring literary shrines that he himself had always wanted to see. The one thing that interested Tommy was at the Bodleian library. It was the diary of Samuel Pepys, written in a weird shorthand. Part of the diary just happened to be on exhibit the day they were there. Tommy had never heard of Samuel Pepys, but when he got home and tried to read the actual diary he couldn’t get too interested. The only really interesting thing about Mr. Pepys was that he had chosen to make up his shorthand. From the very moment that he had seen the fragment of the diary in a glass case at the Bodleian, Tommy had had the urge to develop some form of secret writing. In high school, when he still liked to read, he had ripped through quite a few books on codes and cryptology. He read about the Brontës and their secret script, and about the great codemasters and codebreakers of World War II, some of whom, he had to admit, were supersmart. Obviously you had to have a brain to do that kind of stuff.

  But then, about the time he starved himself the first time, and had to go through the ridiculous force-feeding routine, he turned off reading. It was too much his dad’s kind of thing; for years his dad had always pressured him to read this book or that: Nostromo, for example. His dad seemed to think life would shape up and be all hunky-dory if he would just read Nostromo, so one weekend Tommy did read it. Then he took a paper cutter, cut the book into a million shreds, and sent it to his dad in a shoebox. No note, just shredded Conrad. After that, his dad never mentioned reading again; in fact, his dad never mentioned much of anything again—not to Tommy. He was too pissed by having this great classic turned into confetti. This was about the time Tommy had his second bout of force-feeding, after which he gave up on starvation. If society wasn’t even going to let him have control of his own digestive tract, then the time had come to pursue more aggressive ways to hit back at it.

  After he shot Julie and got sent to prison he refused to read any books except those written by people who were actually in jail. Even with that limitation he was still left with a lot of books. Jane and Teddy drew up a list and got the books for him. It was their dream, he knew, that he would use his brain to write stuff as good as Dostoevsky or Cervantes or Defoe or Genet or whoever, but Tommy didn’t plan to. He just wanted to use the code to sketch out his beliefs about murder and rebellion, and he didn’t even plan to explain the code to Teddy and Jane. He felt that true rebellion had to be undertaken absolutely alone; the minute you started sharing your plans or recruiting allies you just started society all over again. He meant to keep his plans for rebellion entirely in his own head, because his own head was all he could trust. After all, even his guts had complied with the system; they had processed the mush shoved down him when he was hospitalized.

  Working a little bit every night on his code excited him. It was his work, and not a soul except himself knew what it meant. The prison shrinks, who kept grinding the gears of their little brains trying to think of activities that might get him motivated, hadn’t the faintest idea that he had his own work and did it with exact discipline every night.

  Of course his cellmate Joey, a Mexican kid who had killed his brother and his best friend, both in one wild fit, occasionally woke up and noticed him scribbling in his notebook, but Joey had no curiosity about anything except sex and automobiles and had asked him about the notebooks only once. Joey was just twenty; he usually woke up long enough to masturbate before drifting back off to sleep to the music of Mexican rock, which he listened to night and day through his earphones.

  Why Joey needed to masturbate so much, Tommy didn’t know, unless he was just a maniacally oversexed twenty-year-old. Joey’s nickname on the cell block was Cunta—he had acquired it because he was so easy. He was the little whore of the block, available for very little—a joint, a cassette, a can of hair spray—to anybody who wanted him, even scummy old murderers or child rapists who had been in for twenty or thirty years, men who had done every act, taken every drug, had every disease, and probably still had a few diseases, old and new.

  Tommy rather liked Joey—in many ways he was an ideal cellmate—and attempted once or twice to warn him about AIDS and other dangers, but Joey paid no attention. He continued to fuck everybody. He was young, cute, and careless; he liked his music and he liked fucking. Some nights he cried like a baby because he missed his mother. Joey had gotten only fifteen years and probably wouldn’t serve more than four or five. Crowded as the prisons were, they weren’t going to keep a young Mexican too long just for eliminating other Mexicans who might just soon have become part of the prison population themselves. In fact, the prison personnel treated Joey very well; they took the attitude that he had sort of saved them money and freed up beds by killing his brother and his best friend.

  Also, Tommy knew, Joey whored with the prison personnel just as happily as he whored with the inmates. Joey basically fucked his way through his prison term. Tommy, on the other hand, had been celibate since the day he threw Julie out. Joey though he must be sick or something—sometimes it bothered him a little that Tommy had never shown the slightest interest i
n coming on to him—but Joey had sense enough to leave well enough alone. Tommy was a guy you didn’t press, whether you were his cellmate or not. He was a little like an alien or something—a little spooky in the eyes. It was okay with Joey if Tommy wasn’t interested; plenty of other people were.

  Their cell was on the fourth tier. When Tommy worked he could look out across the large open space in the center of the building. Some of the personnel referred to the prison as the Huntsville Hyatt; being on the fourth tier and having the space to look across was a little like being in one of those Hyatt hotels that had a high lobby.

  At night, looking into the space gave Tommy a certain sense of peace. He could always jump into the space someday, and that would be that. Of course, he’d have to be sure to do a proper dive and land on his head. An Indian had done that once—a chief called Satanta. An old chain-smoking guard named Mack Mead, who had worked at the prison all his life, told Tommy about it.

  Mack Mead collected prison lore and was eager to tell it to Tommy. Not too many prisoners were interested in prison lore. When Mack detected that Tommy had more curiosity than the ordinary murderer, he became loquacious and told Tommy more than he really wanted to hear. He even got special permission and took Tommy one day to the place in the old prison where Satanta had made his fatal jump.

  “It don’t look too high,” Mack admitted, squinting upward. “But old Satanta was smart. He dove perfect. He hit right on his head and died instantly.”

  Tommy filed that piece of information away. The solution to the system was a perfect dive. Sometimes he played cards with Mack in order to pry out of him whatever he could remember about other prison suicides. It didn’t take much prying. Mack loved to talk about notorious convicts who had done horrible things to themselves or to other convicts. One man had become befuddled by prison evangelists to such an extent that he cut off his own penis because he believed it had caused him to sin too much. But most of the prison suicides Mack told Tommy about were just ordinary suicides: hangings, throat cuttings, shootings—the same kinds of suicides that people resorted to whether inside or out. None of them were precise or political in the way Satanta’s had been.