Moses looks at Ed and he’s instantly pissed off at Jorge. He doesn’t like how he found him half on the floor like that. It agitated Moses. Death, like Lila, was supposed to be sweet. La dolce vida, Jorge said. But Jorge struggled. And Moses knows he wasn’t nice to the doctor; word must have reached Cavanaugh.
The doctor asked him a lot of boring questions taken straight from the form he was filling out. At approximately what time did you find Jorge Padilla?
“How would I know? I don’t own a watch,” Moses said. “What time did Miller say I yelled for him? I yelled for him when I found Jorge, so you should ask him.” The doctor didn’t react to Moses’ crankiness. He was civilian. An older Italian man who stood in the doorway of the cell with medical disinterest and recorded Moses’ answers as coldly as if he had lifted the information from a toe tag.
And can you describe in detail what you saw?
“I saw a pathetic, old Ecuadorian,” Moses said, “with blue lips, lying in a pool of his own piss, smelling like shit, clutching a bundle of letters from his daughter, who incidentally, he couldn’t anymore distinguish from the girl he murdered forty-eight years ago.”
The doctor scribbled some notes and asked, And had he demonstrated any unusual behavior lately?
“No,” Moses answered, “Did you hear what I just said to you? He was fucking demented.” The doctor didn’t answer him. He wrote a few more quick notes and left without saying goodbye. Moses returned to his paper. He had found his conclusion in the night. Aschenbach, he wrote in pencil on the draft, had betrayed his true nature because he feared death. Because of this, he left behind what he believed in, making him vulnerable to evil and turning him into what he’d once despised.
Moses looks up from the paper. Ed is acting like he has something on him. Moses wonders what the doctor told him. “When they examined Jorge they discovered a large contusion on the right side of his head and a black eye. Do you know anything about that, Moses?”
“He had epilepsy. Have you ever seen a seizure?”
“So you didn’t hear anything during the night?”
“I was asleep,” Moses says.
“You don’t seem upset. What’s your problem?”
“Look, believe what you want. He was my friend. I didn’t touch him.”
“You didn’t hear anything.”
“I heard nothing. For once, I slept like I was dead.”
Cavanaugh sits quietly for a moment. Ed’s eyes are swollen and his face more flat than usual.
“Jorge was a good father. He was a good man,” he says.
“A lot of good it did him,” Moses says, but Ed doesn’t act like he’s heard him.
“When I first met Jorge, I’d just come on the job. I had a new baby and a wife who was on me all the time to work extra shifts and make more money and Jorge was also a new father. Gina was just a tiny little thing. God, I remember those girls when they were girls. It’s all over. They’re women now, which means I’ll never understand them. And this,” he says waving his hand toward Jorge’s empty side of the cell.
“I promise you; I didn’t hear or see anything.” Moses doesn’t want the boys thinking he’s getting friendly with Ed Cavanaugh. He imagines Collin sending Georgy to spy so he can run back and tell him if Moses is in with Cavanaugh or not.
Ed taps his foot and looks up at the ceiling like it might fall on him. Moses can feel everything going horribly wrong. He imagines what they’ll do once they know Ed’s in here blabbing like a Goddamned girl. With Jorge gone, he has no protection. And he needs some peace so he can finish his paper. He needs to give it to Lila this afternoon.
“I’m sure you know all about Marie. She’s one for the books.”
“No. I don’t know anything about her.” Moses isn’t lying. Jorge sheltered Moses from the emotion of his unexpected family life because it was unfair to bring it up.
“It’s only a matter of time for any of us, I suppose,” Ed says and then seems to understand for the first time that he’s let himself go in front of Moses. He stands up quickly. “I’ll be in touch once they find out the cause of death. I’m sure you’d like to know. In the meantime, I’m going to have to take those papers and the typewriter. And that book over there. It’s standard procedure.”
Cavanaugh takes his paper right from his hands, packs up all of Moses’ scraps, his typewriter, his World Literature Anthology, the stylebook he needs to complete the documentation and walks out of the cell. Moses’ rabbit heart beats. He watches Cavanaugh leave and can hardly breathe.
It isn’t until he sees her that the tidal surge of his mourning hits him and lifts him up, suspending him in a state of acute and tender sorrow. He stands in the entrance of the mailroom, and it doesn’t feel like his feet are even on the floor. Her back is to him. She doesn’t yet know that he is there. He imagines walking up behind her and resting his cheek on her shoulder, nestling his nose in her hair and resting. Just resting. Taking a moment. It isn’t until hours after a tragedy that people of Moses’ nature realize that indeed they have endured an event that trumps all others, a calendar-clearing travesty that wipes away goals, expectations, hopes, desires, and, above all, familiarity.
Lila turns. “Oh, sweet Jesus, Moses. I didn’t know you were there.”
Moses doesn’t feel like he is. He feels like there are two worlds. The world where Lila, Ed Cavanaugh, his paper, his typewriter, Wilthauser, the morgue where Jorge lays, the prison, its guts and functions, the other prisoners, the outside world, the town, the cars on the streets, the traffic lights, the cawing crows, the river, the dark sky, its clouds, the wetness of spring all exist, and then there is the world in which Moses finds himself. It is a different place entirely.
“Are you OK?” Lila asks.
He reaches out to her, as if he’s going to be able to reenter her atmosphere. He waves her over with a meek flop of his hand. He wanders over to his workstation because he could use something to help hold him up against the weight of his disappointment and loss.
“You look rotten. Did you stay up late working on the paper?”
The paper! She doesn’t know. “I d-do-on’t ha-a-a-a-ave it,” he suffers; his speech sounds like a typewriter.
Her eyes widen in shock. “Moses, have you had a stroke?”
He shakes his head and attempts to speak, but it’s as though the words have become bullets and someone else is firing the gun.
“I’m calling the infirmary.”
“N-n-n-o!” Moses yells and she turns around. He holds a finger up to her to tell her to wait. Wait just a fucking minute, he thinks. He puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out the ball of her hair.
“What is that?” Lila asks.
He shakes his head. Wrong pocket. He puts it away and puts his hand in the other pocket and his fingers find the compact. He pulls it out slowly and reaches it out to her.
She takes an unbalanced step backward into the swinging door in the low wall. It hits her in the calves.
Moses points to the compact with his chin. “He-e-ere.”
She shakes her head. Refuses to come to him. She starts to back away, so he lifts his arm into the air and makes like he’ll smash the thing on the floor. “No, don’t!” she says. “I’ll come.” She steps cautiously forward and reaches into his hand. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Moses.” She starts to cry. “What’s wrong with