The Beyond
“They told me I’m going to be released a couple days early.”
As if he hadn’t heard it, he stared up at one corner on the cell ceiling, stained black with smoke from when the prison still had coal-powered fireplaces. They had poured wet concrete down the chimney network like long-waited rain rushing through furrowed fields and sealed all the fireplaces off, decades ago when a strong but foolish man reasoned that the fireplaces must’ve led to some chimney he could climb out of when it would be turned off on a summer’s night. The channels were not hot, no, but he choked to death on the toxic gases that slowly addled him and a slab of soot that peeled off the walls and fell in a pwoosh onto his face as he gazed up. The patrols found his body the next morning at check-in, a pile in some other inmate’s fireplace. It was bruised from having fallen haphazardly down the maze out of which he climbed halfway. Even as the guard unlatched the door, the inmate snored loudly and rolled over, un-roused knowing he wouldn’t be released for quite some time.
“When?” He hadn’t heard Robin come down the hallway.
“Tomorrow morning, on the first bus out. Said I’d been on good behavior. ‘Model inmate’ something or another.”
He blinked his eyes and returned to the stain. Robin’s voice trailed out of the periphery of the bars.
He thinks of the myths he’s heard of the release. The changing room in which you shed your prison uniform like a pilgrim’s garb and leave in a pile on the floor. Sometimes your old clothes don’t fit anymore and you have to belt up real tight to keep the pants balanced on your hips. Walking out blindfolded after being spun around three times and feeling dawn smear across your skin as you board the bus. How good the last shit you’ll ever take within these sterile walls will be.
“Seriously though,” Locksmith once said, “that first last prison shit was divine. Almost clogged the toilet full. Them guards best be glad I was kind enough to flush.” Locksmith was arrested and sent back into prison for two more years, four hours after his release, for aggravated battery of an airport attendant who informed him that, sir, unfortunately your flight’s been canceled.
Now, Locksmith’s back in the Beyond, the name which the prisoners affectionately gave to their place of containment, the most practical antagonist of their story (far more than the pissy warden or the apathetic guards). Calling it the Beyond gave it a sense of grandeur and mystique that they used to forget about the banality of the crimes for which they were being locked up in what was by all accounts a fittingly, equally, banal place. The Beyond was where you go when you have died, when you couldn’t find your way back by any miracle, when you have sinned so far beyond salvation that the only place left for you was eternal confinement.
In the 15 years the last warden had served his time at the Beyond, not one single soul had died in the premises of unnatural causes, a fact which the warden highlighted when nominating himself to be promoted to regional prison superintendent. The prisoners, though, liked to imagine that they were all dead in the Beyond, a place churning with aggrieved souls with no plan B but Bitter resignation.
He doesn’t know if he’ll believe the myths until he feels it. He peels himself off of bed and rings the guard. “Can I visit Birdman’s cell?” Once, a brutal gale picked up when they were all out in the yard. It tossed Robin’s small frame around as he choked on the wind and tried to stagger back inside. Locksmith, six-three and built like a mountain, picked Robin up from behind by his armpits like a little chick and swung him inside as he laughed over his shoulder, “Look at little Birdman over here. Stay out here a little longer and you woulda just flied away, won’t you?”
Everything is bare and desolate in a nearly-departed prison cell, like the mournful sea moments after a seabird slices out of its surface with a fish thrashing about in its beak. The soul has vacated the place long before the emigration, even as the body to which it is bound currently sits at the stainless steel table onto which he anoints one fingerprint after another. The fingerprints stick to metal like honey.
He asks whether Robin has a life to return to. “I came here early. Didn’t have time to find someone and settle down. If I had a high school sweetheart, maybe it would’ve kept me from getting here,” he replies.
“You think you gonna find someone once you get back?”
“With this resume?”
“You never know.”
Robin shook his head. “No, no. My sister has been taking care of my parents for all these years in their old house. Gotta pay my dues, even if I already did.” He imagines that, for Robin, many things lay waiting and unfinished, but few of those things pertained to the future, like a wilted plant left sitting too long in un-changed water, the roots nevertheless sprawling everywhere to escape the stillness.
He suspects it’ll be difficult for Robin, more difficult than he’s letting on, to return to the place he grew up, a shrine to the “olden days” that haunts everyone in the Beyond. He suspects it will be hard for himself as well. And the family, they live the olden days in a whole other capacity. What does one do when the object of your prayers at the memory-shrine appears at your door at a promised time and date? Will there be trumpets? Will the sea swell with blood?
He swallows these questions and presses the mundane ones. Sisters’ job, parent’s age and Alzheimer condition. Robin’s sister writes letters as often as possible, some part of it an indulgent act to spackle over his absence by making him witness: how their father’s back, straight as a pine before, now bends at the weight of all that he does not understand. In one of the pictures she sent – Robin has it in a small safety box purchased from the prison commissary – he’s recoiling from the camera, both the instrument and its wielder reflected in his foreign glare. “Hopefully me being back will dredge up some memories for him,” he sighs.
The letter paper is of rather good quality, he muses to himself as he flips through the stack of letters from Robin’s sister. The papers are all crisp, thick, and creased carefully along the middle. The prison commissary rotates between a stock of the glossy copy paper that ink glides over and doesn’t truly settle into and a stock of recycled, grainy plant-based paper. On the latter, ink bleeds haphazardly along the whiskers of fiber, and the paper swells in humidity. He has a stack of unsent letters to his family decomposing in the back of his closet, summer dampness brimming the pages year after year. He never sent those letters, and now the ink is far illegible.
Information spills out of Robin, of senior home options and the scattering of old high school classmates that still remained in town, like the flow from a waterfall transitioning out of the dry season. On the precipice of the wet season, the accelerating waterfall does not drain itself out but rather fattens and swells with every lurch forward.
All at once, he realizes that he knows more about Robin’s past and future than he remembers of his own.
This dread is the same dread that stands before the door, not knocking, before Thanksgiving dinner, the dread whose smell mingles over the smell of something roasted, born of the knowledge that the people around that table are the same as you remember them and irrevocably different. The pause prison put on Robin’s life will unwind, very soon.
There is no elaborate send-off ceremony when a fellow comrade escapes the clutches of the Beyond. They don’t – and can’t – tell you about that brief moment amongst the divinity of the last prison shit where you wish you had a buddy next to you to comment grandiosely about. Locksmith’s aggrandizations conveniently leave that part out.
The bus was scheduled to leave at the crack of dawn. The small window of his cell did not offer much in the way of views, not the place from which the bus will depart nor its vanishing point on the horizon. Briefly it should bisect the window, blurred by water stains from rain two nights ago.
The rising light inked the water stains in rings. He scooted around to avoid the glare and eventually sat next to the window. His gaze grew antsy and began to dart around when the bus still did not lurch into the window-box at 7am. He asked for leave to go to the yard. The view through the fences was simultaneously more panoramic and more sliced up, a poorly edited movie montage of concrete walls, fields laden with damp dew, and prison buses.
He had scarcely come into view when the bus revved into motion and took off. He did not see Robin’s face as sunlight glinted sharply off of the bus window.
The wheels drove up a round of dirt, and a dandelion exhaled its spores into the miniature dirt-tornado. They twirled in ringlets before settling general, cautious, half-buried over the earth.
The window of the prison commissary faces uphill and has quite a depressing view. During heavy rain, the water drains off of the roof and pools in between the concrete walls and the slope of the hill. The commissary does not have many things and organizes them alphabetically, like a library. Painkillers are sold next to paper stacks are sold next to pencils and pens. The prison commissary does not receive many customers, and the guard who sits behind the cash register watches a small TV that he keeps hidden under the counter.
The commissary is damp and humid today. The fan is positioned the wrong way and labors only to blow hot air in through the mesh window instead of out. At high noon, the heat penetrates the metal skeleton and concrete flesh of the building like radiation and smears across the skin, condensing into sweat too slick to swipe off. He buys a stack of papers and a pen with the last of the unused money he was sent the first few months from his family and never since.
It’s been four hours since the bus pulled out of the driveway and kicked up a small tornado of dandelion spores. He estimates the length of the country roads, a mix of curves and cutting edges, and imagines that Robin’s probably been dropped off at the nearest city’s train station, waiting for – he recalls – a 1:20 steamer that’ll take him back home.
He hasn’t ever taken a train before, but as he lies in bed he conjures up the movies he’s seen and summons to imagination his cousin’s descriptions of a cross country train at Thanksgiving dinner eighteen years ago, whom he had gazed upon with wishful envy.
The steam and smoke would trail behind the head of the train and shower down on the passing fields. When the train docks at the station, the steam, accompanied by a pwoosh of the wheels as they halt and loosen into stillness, descends and wraps around the station, an industrial fog. The passengers would board carefully, not knowing where the edge of the station ends. It must be the only time one can feel like they’re walking on clouds. The view out the train window probably flies by so fast that it looks like the dark swirls smearing across windows during a car wash – but more colorful, like the swirls behind eyelids that are impossible to grasp when one closes their eyes.
He does not know when he started to write of his own imaginary future departure. He does not think he will have the luck of an early release. He will count down the days. It would be inauspicious, anyways, if the premise of the promised day was shattered, even if it meant freedom a couple days early. He would be reminded of the capriciousness of it all, the ritualistic waiting with no set end.
He will take his last prison shit, and maybe it will feel sacred. He will board the bus and not know whether it kicks up a tornado of dandelion spores. He will take a taxi or a train or an airplane back to his childhood home, unsure if his family lives there still.
On the last leg of the trip, in the car of a stranger or his long-estranged family, he will fall into a deep sleep and wake as the car rounds the turn onto his block, the turn that all bodies know to be encoded in itself even in displacement. The car will palm the turn’s curve and centrifugal pull, will churn quietly, will hum an old lullaby not heard in so long that it rocks him to wake, and he will live his return again and again, an endless, unfurling variation on the same theme, as he writes himself out of the Beyond.