Episode 138 · The Wrong Number

He measured the strip in the yard every morning before going home. He did it with his boots, heel to toe, the way he had measured rooms as a boy. In the first week, the wet stones were two boots wide. In the second, three. By the end of the month he needed five, and the steam no longer stayed at the foot of the wall. It rose along the stones, faintly, up to the windows of the ground floor. It was thickest not under any window but at the old corner where the east wing met the yard wall, where the stones were darker than the rest. The last of those windows, the narrow one near the corner, belonged to the last cell on the corridor.

He told himself that meant nothing. The cell was at the end of the wing, and the end of the wing was where the wall was. That was all.

When he mentioned the steam, the shift chief said it was the pipes. Old prisons had pipes nobody remembered laying. The guard nodded. He knew every pipe in the building, and there were none under the east wall.

On the last Thursday of January, he brought the man in the last cell his dinner tray and stayed in the doorway a little longer than he needed to. The man was sitting on the bunk this time. There was no light in the cell, only the yellow glow from the corridor.

— Is the wall in the yard warm? the man asked.

The guard didn’t answer at once.

— How would you know about the wall?

— I can feel it from here.

He said it simply, the way he had said good morning for seven weeks. He took the tray and set it on his knees and did not start eating.

— Don’t stand next to it for too long, he said.

— Why not?

— Because you’ll start to like it.

The guard looked at him. The man looked back. There was nothing in his face that the guard could hold on to, no threat, no joke. Only a kind of attention, careful and patient, as if the guard were something the man was responsible for.

The guard closed the door. He locked it. He checked the lock twice, the way he always did, and walked back along the corridor, and only at the end, by the stairs, did he realize that he had counted the doors on the way. Under his breath. All of them.

He did not go out to the yard to smoke that night.

At midnight he did the count with the older guard. East wing, ground floor, then up. Every cell, every hatch, every face. The older guard counted the doors out loud. The guard counted the men in silence. The numbers matched. They always matched.

At the last cell, he opened the hatch.

The man was sitting on the floor in the dark, in the middle of the cell, facing the wall where the light fell in the mornings. There was no light now. His hands rested on his knees. He did not turn around.

— Tonight, he said quietly, to the wall. It’s tonight.

Somewhere above them, on the second floor, a man screamed.

The scream came again, longer this time, and then it was not one voice anymore.

The guard shut the hatch. The man in the last cell had not moved. The older guard was already running for the stairs, keys jangling on his belt, and the guard ran after him. Halfway up, the lights flickered, steadied, and went out.

For a moment there was nothing. No light, no sound, only the dark and his own breathing and the cold iron of the handrail under his palm. Then the emergency lamps came on above the landings, weak and orange, and the noise came back all at once.

The second floor was shouting. Not the way inmates shouted at night, at each other, at the guards, at nobody. This was different. Men were calling out the way people call out when they wake in a house that is on fire. Fists on doors. Something heavy hitting metal, over and over, with a deep, flat sound that the guard felt in his teeth.

At the top of the stairs, the older guard stopped so suddenly that the guard nearly ran into him.

The corridor was warm. Warmer than the east wing had ever been. The air smelled of wet stone and of something sweet underneath it, and the orange lamps made the steam look like smoke. Halfway along, the door of cell nine bulged outward in the middle, as if someone had pushed a fist into soft clay. As they watched, the door bulged again. The hinges screamed. On the third blow, the top hinge tore out of the wall with a chunk of plaster still attached and the door hung crooked in its frame.

The man who came out of cell nine was the one who had broken his cellmate’s jaw in October. The one who had cried for an hour and asked for a broom. He stood in the corridor in his socks, looking at his hands. His knuckles were bloody. He did not seem to feel it.

— It’s open, he said, as if he could not believe it. It’s open!

Then he laughed, and went to the next door, and put his hands on it.

The older guard raised his baton. He did not move forward. The guard saw his lips moving and understood, with a cold feeling in his stomach, that he was counting. One, two, three. The doors. All the way to the end of the corridor and back.

— Leave it, the guard said. Come on! Leave it.

The older guard did not hear him. He stood in the steam with his baton raised, counting, and when he reached the end of the corridor he started again, and his face had the same look the man in cell nine had had when he looked at his hands. As if the number was the only thing in the world that still made sense, and it kept coming out wrong.

Doors were giving all along the corridor now. Not all of them, and not the same way. One was pulled off. One sagged in its frame as if the wall around it had gone soft. One simply swung open when the man inside leaned against it from the other side, and the man walked out looking surprised, and then started running. They ran past the two guards toward the stairs, some laughing, some silent, some crying. Nobody touched them. Nobody even looked at them. It was as if the guards were not there.

The guard grabbed the older guard by the collar and dragged him back down the stairs. The older guard let himself be dragged. He was still counting.