3. The Convicted Rapist & the Shape of Sounds

3. The Convicted Rapist & the Shape of Sounds 

I. 

Helena Slivovitz, as the story most often goes, had very neat, precise-looking handwriting. The address of Spook McEntyre, c/o the Pelican Ranch, South Island of Qubar, had an effect not unlike the presence of exotic lobster tails and specialized bovine entrees being served in a city-school cafeteria. He sometimes felt, as the story most often goes, an uncomfortable mixture of hesitant lust and empowering rage towards the calm so obvious and almost arrogant sitting there in his name and in hers when he received the letter-filled envelopes. As the story most often goes, he received these letters every three or four weeks during the first 18 months of his imprisonment. 

They were, depending on his erratic moods, either an appreciated disruption of the anomic, tediousness and sheer agony of day-to-day life with others undergoing various types of behavior counseling and recovery counseling and maturity counseling, or they were simply an additional provocation to his heightened state of misanthropy and its concomitant aggravation packed within the 132 pounds of his being. In either case, his guilt became harder to navigate. 

As he read her letters, as the story most often goes, he had to remember all the details of his crime -- regardless what was said of it. On the helpful side of things, she wasn't the first person whose door he knocked-on as a salesman: he could remember all the steps of the process from other times, and how he typically entered any home, after the owner invited him inside. He remembered how her upper-middleclass living room was decorated and lit and the way it made him feel elusively small (like an ant being studied under a microscope) and how Mrs. Slivovitz smelled fresh from obviously taking a shower not long before his arrival. He remembered her asking him into the kitchen while she made herself coffee and offered him a cup and he declined. He couldn't remember much of what was said but her certainly remembered how her hand felt on his shoulder, the way she touched his face, the way she touched his privates. And her mouth on his. And them fucking on the kitchen tile floor. 

He had undoubtedly enjoyed the sex. Everything until she called the police. He would sometimes even remark to himself while urinating on the traveled-history of his certain appendage. 

And always, as the story most often goes, an indominable sense of guilt and shame would enter his thoughts while he read Helena Slivovitz detail her own personal recovery of the incident. How the loss of a husband of and a daughter combined with her first, tragic, paralyzing experience as a victim of a sex crime had taught her of an inner-strength she otherwise could never, under any circumstances, fathom. That he, Spook McEntyre (aka the McEntyre Wild Child) with his crazy little penis and that hideous raspberryblonde hair, had injected her with "an identity and sense of strength and purpose and luck beyond imagining. I don't know that I am a new woman or perhaps even a woman anymore at all. Butt I am something else something that I could never be without that awful, disgusting transformation  that you, you you you, Spook McEntyre gave catalysis." 

Her forgiveness repulsed him. As the story goes, he'd rather have cigarettes put out in his eyes than re-read any of her letters, although he certainly read every one to the last facetious syllable. He let the anticipated provocation and known-despair dissolve- and ebb- and flutter through his being. He reflexively learned meditative breathing. As the story goes, his derangement while imprisoned on that island is precisely and solely what gave Spook McEntyre the inspiration and will to apply, from the moment he heard about it, to a newly implemented program designed for emotion-addicts in recovery to help them earn an early release. 

II. 

Something between a Work Camp and a city for the socially-incompatible, the Pelican Ranch of Qubar (American Province) lives up to its curious reputation. While the North and West Island Facilities house foreign terrorists and those foreigners accused of terrorism in addition to native-born offenders of public safety and good & charitable will, the East and South facilities are reserved exclusively for the most incorrigible violent drug-addicts and other domestic anti-Patriots convicted on charges of self-destruction and "purposeful antagonization of themselves and others." Spook was incarcerated on the South Island. 

Compared to the other facilities, his had a relative sense of liberty. That is, he was confined to his cell (none of which contained a roommate or bunkmate) for ten hours a day, where he was expected to meditate and pray on the seriousness of his criminal behavior before & after sleep. And the guards on duty would rouse him and the others on the block each morning without fail at exactly 6 AM. They would be provided with a pair of handcuffs through a slide-drawer mailer, snap the cold things onto one of their wrists, then allow the guard who'd provided the restraints to affix the other bracelet by reaching through a separate cell-portal that was one foot by one foot and located at the opposite end of the cell. From there, he and approximately 50 others (of a total 200 perhaps) would be escorted to a dining-area for breakfast that was accompanied by a prayer-leader who was either retained by the Pelican Ranch in permanent employment, or had been selected from a host of candidates and volunteers from the continental United States. Few, if any, of the prisoners took these casual speeches very seriously. Least of all Spook who found all the effusive love and worship of Lord Bazzah and Mother Shelley and the Prophet to be nothing less than a questionable, broken fairy tale meant to harass him at breakfast and just about "any other damn time it fucking could." The prisoners ate their meals, handcuffs on, and there was only the rarest incident of disturbance to the prayer-leader or general meal during the first 18 months of his stay. He and the others would then turn in their trays & utensils before being escorted to a showering-area with showerheads posted two feet apart and running in a square-circumference about the room, whereupon, at gunpoint, the prisoners would be relieved of their shackles and be required to undress before being provided with a miniature bar of Abraham soap and a daily-allowance of Abraham Shampoo/Conditioner in a disposable 2 oz. cup. 

None of the other prisoners were as young as Spook and the oldest was perhaps in his early-thirties. Each man took his wash-products without incident and moved half-somnambulistically to a station on one of the four walls, as much by entropy as by personal navigation, and each man's water was the same medium-warm as the others and he lathered and rinsed his body of the previous day's debris. There would sometimes be a new guy who felt obligated to vocally lodge a complaint regarding the quality of the facilities and often as not decry the effectiveness of the water and the soap at other junctions of their strictly scheduled and neurologically rigorous day characterized by group meetings, individual counseling, and meals. The new guy was usually in his early-20s, but sometimes he could be closer to 40 than a teenager (like Spook) and it was always very stressful and embarrassing for the other prisoners to listen to some "self-absorbed shithead" bemoan his predicament while they, to a man, made an effort to stoically endure the inevitability of their punishment. 

Spook found it all maddening and fascinating. (To those unacquainted with his most early personal history: Spook was a below-average student with below-average social-skills and in his brief tenure as a traveling salesman of soap products he very, very rarely exceeded his monthly sales quota that had to afford the shared motel room and gas for the vans and food to eat and perhaps sixty- or seventy dollars leftover for the next month to either compensate a lack of sales or purchase luxury items such as cigarettes, alcohol and movie tickets. This is to say: he had a high-bar of quality and standards for neither the company he kept nor the refinement of their insights. It was, as they say, a perfect storm of one of the imbeciles learning something special from one of the other ones.) And he would listen to the new guy protest and criticize while the others responded with ugly, contemptuous faces or they would try some arm's-length reprimand as coded advice to silence his futile recriminations against the American Government in all of its imperialist and authoritarian splendor. Or, when the new guy's facetious attempts proved too much for them to bear, one of the crowd, usually someone sitting across from him, would rise up from the bench, making definitive emotional engagement with the new guy, and politely remind him he was intended by God and the strange course of evolution to possess a spine and at least one functioning testicle. The new guy would blather some meaningless equivocation in all but one of these episodes, but would eventually be numbed into some disfigured quietude. At times, Spook thought he might enjoy these moments in better circumstances. That the anti-sociality of the men was supportive and refreshing to those of their awful predicament. He would sometimes remember little details, but then forget them when he wanted to remember deliberately. His mind became an anarchic playground of the mundane and the emotional and the damned. And, in those first 18 months on the island, at the close of the day, after all the meetings and meals and the hour they were permitted access to a common-area to socialize freely and play cards or read books or magazines donated to the prison, Spook would lay with an implacable sense of exhausted accomplishment looking upwards at the ceiling of the cell counting how many more days and what to ask of them during his ten-year sentence. 

And he might have served every day of it had it not been for the Program... The Program was the brainchild of one Eugene "Husky" Kellogg. After many years of personal and professional research, the accomplished psycho-neurologist struck popular and academic gold when he created and developed a strategy of therapy to assist with patients of its "enlightened, ergonomic techniques" in their pursuit of recovery and well-being by finding select examples among their communities to present, in an amateur lecture setting, their insights and experiences to an audience of relatively equally dysfunctional peers in the hopes of generating meaningful & lasting connection towards betterment. Spook heard about the Program and in a breath was rigidly animated by the thought of giving speeches about fucking Helena Slivovitz. He also knew that describing the affair as a gratuitous pornographic event would be met with disgust and likely ridicule from the other prisoners and the staff of the Pelican Ranch. As a result he composed an ingenious strategy wherein the remorse he felt for his lustful actions had been the proof that a human such as himself contained a kaleidoscope of emotions that endured through its very spontaneous and eclectic conditions. 

And, after bringing up the matter with every guard and counselor he came within earshot of, after weeks of pleading and begging and losing his mind in public and in private, he'd finally established contact with one of the guest prayer-leaders to the Pelican Ranch, a man of youthful demeanor and handsome age who regarded McEntyre with affectionate, paternal concern.  

"I can do this, sir. I'm telling you, I'd be f--, I'd be really good at it. The guys tell stories all the time and--" 

"It's not just about stories, my child. You have to--" 

"No, I know, I know. You have to have a lesson. You..." 

"Lessons are not easy to teach, my child. They require a certain grace from Lord Bazzah and an appropriate vessel." 

The mention of Lord Bazzah of course, froze his thinking: Spook didn't have a lot of intellectual credentials to stand on, but it didn't take a neuroscientist or a geologist to figure out that people thousands of years ago could have been making shit up as a guess to comprehend their environment nor to calculate, by modern standards, that the Earth and everything that it stood in varying proximity to had taken longer than a week to form. That is, he was deeply aggravated by his inability to re-proselytize and correct the man in his beliefs. 

"He won't teach them," said Spook McEntyre. "He didn't fffah..." A curious switch activated inside him. "He doesn't know Helena Slivovitz like I know Helena Slivovitz. Believe me, sir. Believe me." 

And the guest prayer-leader, the priest of Lord Bazzah, smiled with tender love and set a hand on Spook McEntyre's shoulder. "I'll see what I can do," he said. 

III. 

The polished steel restraints that ran between both wrists and both of his ankles were not impossible to get around in but somehow their being composed of metal produced an almost complimentary contrast to the neon-yellow jumpsuit that he wore and in his busy, fevered mind there were even small flashes of positive excitement that he was cutting muscle beneath that wardrobe of impairment. Meditating the night before, he slipped from his neutral-zone and into near-fullblown insomnia and the ceiling and the walls of his cells became monstrously large and uninviting. He'd been trapped by his thoughts of pursuit. He felt them tickle and ebb and return. They moved with deft, insect agility only barrel-rolling into some temporary nothingness when he mercifully lost consciousness around 4 AM and swiftly returned when he awoke and all throughout that morning he was to give his seminal address to the children. 

Thirteen of them in all. Virtually nothing of an empathic face in the crowd. They were as young as 8- or 9-years-old and the oldest one, by Spook's estimation, was perhaps 14- or 15-years-old. They were the children of hateful parents and concerned parents and, ultimately, impressionable parents. Parents, who, to varying degrees saw the McEntyre Wild Child as some cruel and unfortunate reincarnation of the Anti-Savior, the feared mythical possibility that the darkest intentional energies could manifest and converge within a single host to perpetrate malice and carnage upon every last devotee of Lord Bazzah and His cult of Brothers and Sisters. The children, to say the least, didn't make the 19-year-old McEntyre feel at home.

But it'd be twice as futile to try coercing pity from them. His ultimate strategy -- which he clung to with desperate conviction -- was to present himself as a kind of agent or lightening-rod for bad decisions. If he could impress upon them some notion that his behavior, no matter how ugly and hateful and deplorable, was natural and correctable and that he knew it, one or two of them might be moved into agreement with the others to follow. 

His cold face, with a day's worth of stubbly growth and the hair on his scalp only slightly longer and his warmish-blue eyes sunk marginally into that distraught and withered visage stood at the podium and he braced himself to speak. 

"Is this gonna take very long?" asked one of the older children, a teenage boy with a cheesy mustache whose mother had clearly bought his outfit for the day from a discount event at Macey's. "My mom says I don't re...re...retain info if I have to listen for too long. 

Spook had no prepared an answer for this. "I... It's gonna take as long as it takes. What else are you doing today, anyways?" 

"Like that's any business of yours, pervert." 

"Hey!" came a voice from the back, one of the supervising guards. Watch the language if you're gonna speak to him. No aggressive hostility to the prisoner." 

The boy with the cheesy mustache settled into some default. "Whatever." 

"Can we see it?" asked a little girl no older than 9-years-old. (You could feel some of the boys roll their eyes.) 

"See...?" said Spook McEntyre. 

"You know," said the little girl. "Your instrument of hate." 

"Oh," said Spook McEntyre. "Well, besides the jewelry and the uniform," indicating his bondage and jumpsuit, "I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to do that." 

"Is it really big or really small?" asked the little girl. 

Spook moved his eyes to one of the guards. 'Should I answer that?' his expression asked. 

"Don't answer that," said the guard, who was schooled in no witchcraft nor telepathy of any kind. 

"I'm not supposed to answer that," said Spook McEntyre. 

"Whatever," said the little girl. "I just hope it doesn't get caught in a bear-trap or anything." 

"I think I'm supposed to be giving a speech," he began again. "I'm supposed to be teaching you about what I learned." 

"Like some psychopath is gonna wise me up to the ways of the world."

"You know," he said, "I'm not just up here to sing and dance while you drink juice and wolf down cookies. You're supposed to be learning something from me. You know, like all the stuff I did wrong and how I became a better person or whatever." 

"You sayin' yer better'n me?" said a boy about 13-years-old. "And you callin' me fat or some shit?" 

"Hey!" came the guard again. "Watch your mouth. Adults are watching." 

"But this freak's up here callin' me names and implementing all sorts of tragic bullcrap and I ain't the one who's gonna eat it for 'im." 

"No one asked you to eat a thing," said the guard. "And if the prisoner doesn't speak for at least twenty minutes not counting interruptions than none of us gets to leave until the last flight of the day."

The portly lad settled himself. 

In the backmost regions of his brain, in some cluster of neurons that don't fire automatically every day, the 19-year-old convict heard every rehearsal he'd made for that day, heard his word-choices and gestures oscillate and flicker and establish. And the little, homunculus secretary that tracks our every breath and situation tried to preserve those thoughts, those word-choices and gestures.... But between the children's contemptuous interruptions and his own impairments from insomnia and imprisonment, the thoughts that made the speech fell into some at-least temporarily forbidden-zone of memory. The things he meant to say were reduced to the shape of sounds. He felt something ghostly yet curiously soothing move inside him. Not the words, but some extinctive sublimation of the words had manifested in their absence. The shape of a thing he had yet to ever experience in his life. And he began to make some remarks concerning Helena Slivovitz and what had actually happened. He stuttered through the very obvious things in an almost trance-like state. And when the children interrupted him, the guard interrupted them and, fortunately Spook got in enough words that they'd be able to catch the first flight from the Pelican Ranch. (They'd be able to go back home.) And Spook hated himself a little for being so easily caught offguard. He used to be able to forgive or pardon himself for being so stupid on account of school being boring and most other children being unbelievably fucking dull. But the excuse didn't work so well, now. He was, as they say, getting a little too old for that shit. He finished up his remarks and was even given an additional hour in the common-area to read books and magazines or play solitary card games or write or draw or do whatever he felt like... He thought about being young. He thought about the year ahead of him. 

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