Lila returns to her post on the other side of the low wall that divides the mailroom and is silent, too. (Moses must always stay on his side of the wall. Always.) Lila focuses on opening the mail and removing contraband: joints sent by lovers, baggies of heroin sent by brazen friends, razor blades sent by sworn enemies. She dumps them into a bin where all the contraband goes, then she reads the letters with a big black pen in her hand, blocking out anything she deems dangerous or incendiary.
Moses has seen some wild things working in the mailroom. Letters sent by women to that Berkowitz son of a bitch years after his incarceration, panties sent to the preppie Central Park strangler. Who were the women who asked for it like that? Who sent underwear and overtures to these disgusting men? He distracts himself thinking of this. Thinking how low all the people around him are. When his sorting is over, before he loads up his satchel, before he straps it over his shoulder for his daily delivery, Moses admits, “I haven’t gotten very far in the story. I promise to finish it over the weekend.”
“I look forward to talking to you about it Monday then, Moses. I’ll see you when you return,” she says.
The prison is a walled city. It runs east-west and was built along a river by the very prisoners it was to house. The river, which Moses has only seen twice, is the reason for the location of the prison. It provided power for Industry, which was at the heart of the philosophy that built this place: inmates would find redemption through labor. The goods manufactured here would offset the costs of the prisoners’ incarceration.
During a period of budget crisis a decade and a half ago, the state attempted to defray the costs of a growing prison population by hiring fewer corrections officers. There was a decision at the highest levels to evaluate the responsibilities of the prison guards and identify tasks that could be assumed by prison labor. By law, prisoners are allowed to send and receive mail. Each of the five stacked rows in each of the four cell blocks that run the length of the complex houses an official U.S. mailbox. It was the daily job of the COs to empty this box, deliver the mail to the outgoing bins in the mailroom, and then retrieve the mail for their row and deliver it to each of the inmates. Over the years, there had been complaints from the officers. More than a few COs felt like servants and were gladly willing to offer up these tasks to a trustworthy inmate. The state agreed, and an inmate in each facility was identified to work in the mailroom and deliver the mail to those who could not retrieve their own for reasons of illness, age, or punishment. The matter of emptying the US mailboxes was reserved for the COs; it was considered distasteful by all to give an inmate a key to anything, let alone the property of the United States government. So a job was created, and Moses chosen by the Warden himself.
His rounds, therefore, are the proudest part of his day. And he is endowed, as he leaves the administration building at the most easterly end and ventures from the clean and respectable offices out into the shaded alley between the hospital and administration and then out into the sun that shines on the yard—a large concrete court flanked by five-story blocks, built block on block of stone, and striped like old-school uniforms with lines of barred windows—with a sense of importance that grows each day. As he carries his bag he feels the weight of his office, a position that dwells in the in-between, and his confidence grows. He is, according to the historical intentions of the place, a success. He walks along the cavernous walls of block housing that stack men on men with the stride of a man who has earned a place, his glasses hidden in his breast pocket.
Moses decides on a few things to talk about when he sees Lila after his rounds so her lasting impression of him for the weekend won’t be that he has subconscious sexual desires for little boys. He plans to ask about her garden, about the bulbs she planted last fall, to ask what the trees in the park by her house look like. Have they begun to bud out? Are there flowers? Are there leaves? There are no trees in the prison yard like there used to be, so Moses doesn’t know spring anymore, except its upbeat warmth in the breezes; he doesn’t know fall except its tugging chill that pulls at his bones. If it wasn’t for Lila and the decorations she puts out with each upcoming holiday like a kindergarten teacher, Christmas-less years would pass unnoticed. At Easter, there are pastel egg cut-outs on the walls, for Halloween, a witch, at Christmas a crèche made from pictures cut out of magazines by the porters who clean the mailroom: The three wise men, Fidel Castro, Omar Sharif, and Yasser Arafat; Mother Mary, Benazir Bhutto; the baby Jesus, Brad Pitt.
Moses passes a line of porters and he nods at them. “Moses,” they say, acknowledging him respectfully because of his job. He enters A block at the center of the yard. He climbs the steps and opens the door with purpose, walks through standing tall so his number can be seen on the breast of his green shirt, and the guards open doors for him. As he makes his way through the gates into the lower gallery of A block and starts down row one giving out letters to keeplocks, he acts like he’s as free as a CO. When he is finished with his row, he strides haughtily along the cells so as to inspire a little envy in those not allowed to move about as he is, and makes his way to the stairs at the front entrance of the gallery. A CO unlocks the gate for him and he ascends into the birdcage. Rows two through five have long pathways that run along the cells, and there is a cage of bars that runs from the second story floor to the ceiling to keep men from falling to their deaths. Moses doesn’t like the upper rows. He doesn’t live on one. He lives on the ground floor because of his age and because of his good behavior. Nowhere else in the prison does Moses feel more confined than in the birdcage, so he keeps to the outside of the pathway to distance himself from the men in their cells and he stays out of trouble. Until he doesn’t. One of the letters he’s palming slips out of his hand and glides gently to the floor. Just the corner of it slides under the cell bars. Moses glances at the cell’s inhabitant. There’s one quiet, angry-looking Latino lying on his cot reading a porno with Spanish all over the front of it. And that burns Moses’ ass, all the Spanish in America. He bends down to grab the letter and says, “Learn some English, muchacho.” Before he knows it, the guy’s at the bars, and as Moses stands, a fist meets him in the temple. The punch sends him across the pathway. The bars keep him from going over the edge to the gallery floor below. He sees stars. The guy yells something at him in Spanish and jumps around like an ape. Moses, just for fun, turns his back to him and farts audibly, flips him the bird and takes off down the path, his satchel hitting his hip in time with his heavy breath.
The block is mostly empty. It’s three p.m., rec time for A block, a quiet time. But all the keeplocks are at the bars reaching out trying to get Moses as he flies past feeling giddy despite the stars he’s seeing and the ringing that’s settled into his ears from the blow.
He looks up and sees the officer in charge look out from his office, blurry-eyed and bored. The officer yells down for number forty-three to settle down, and Moses knows that the keeplock just got another two weeks in his cell without rec time or meals with the general population and that makes Moses’ day. He thinks people like that need to be shown their place. He thinks it’s his job to do it.
The mailroom is empty. He looks around for her. Goes to the low wall and looks to the left into the intake room, as if she’s hiding in there. “Hello?” he calls, but she doesn’t answer. He looks at her station, packed up and tidy. Her grandmother’s compact is pushed off in a corner, set neatly on a stack of sticky notes. It is strange that she is not here. He quietly opens the door in the low wall and walks to her station. He’s never been there before. He’s never broken the rules. He picks up the compact. Turns it over in his hand like a nugget. He smells it. It’s sweet from the fake smells that cover up the real meaty smell of a woman. He pulls on the drawer where she keeps her letter opener, but it’s locked.
He hears the lock on the door to her office and he quickly moves across the room and slips through the low door. He hovers over his sorting table, pretending to look for something. She walks in from the other room and looks a little caught off guard, though he always comes back at the end of his rounds. She smells like sweet smelling soap and there’s a red mark on her face where she was messing with a pimple. He imagines her hands damp and cold from running under the faucet after sitting on the toilet, wiping herself.
There’s something different about today. It’s quiet. Lila is alone;