Libra - Don Delillo [51]
“That’s what they told my mother.”
“They sent me to JP to save me from West Dallas niggers. Believe this booshit? They put me behind bars so nobody slips off with my wallet and shoes.”
“It’s the whole huge system. We’re a zero in the system.”
“They give me their special attention. Better believe.”
“They watch us all the time. It’s like Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-four. This isn’t a book about the future. This is us, here and now.”
“I used to read the Bible,” Bobby said.
“I used to read the manual. I never looked at my schoolbooks but I read the Marine Corps manual.”
“Make you a man.”
“Then I found out what it’s really all about. How to be a tool of the system. A workable part. It’s the perfect capitalist handbook.”
“Be a Marine.”
“Orwell means the military mind. The police state is not Russia. It’s wherever we have the mind that can think up manuals full of rules for killing.”
“Where’s this Stalin, dead?”
“Dead.”
“I thought I heard that.”
“But Eisenhower’s not. Ike is our own Big Brother. Our commander in chief.”
They lay in the dark, thinking.
Because of what they did to us. The way she had to work and quit and take care of me and get fired and work and quit and pick up and leave. Let’s pick up and leave. Scraping up pennies for the next move somewhere. Daily humiliations all her life. This is known as ground down by the system. Except she never questions that. It is only the local conditions. It is Mr. Ekdahl and his puny divorce settlement. It is the whispering behind her back. It is the neighbors with their Hotpoint washers and Ford Fairlane cars, which she competes against the only way she can.
“My boy Lee loves to read.”
His mother never-ending.
Three days running, for no special reason, every meal was rabbit chow—lettuce, carrots, water.
Oswald ran past the chicken wire, turned into the cell block, stopped at the white line. Dupard was in the cell wearing skivvies and sitting on Oswald’s rack. Dupard’s mattress was smoldering. Oswald watched the pale smoke collect in the air. His cellmate just sat there, hangdog, thoughtful, picking at his feet.
“Bobby, how come?”
“You want your rack?”
“Stay there.”
“We’re not supposed to talk.”
“You’re only making things worse.”
“I’m evicting lice, that’s all. They’re boring into my skin. Time to rid the premise, man.”
“Did you ask for a new mattress?”
“I axed. They punch my face.”
He was calm, a little sullen, mainly thoughtful and resigned.
“They’ll only extend your time.”
“In my own mind this is nothing to excite themselves. I don’t feel like there’s any guilt to be handed out whereby I’m punished. I’m fumigating these lice on out of here. In other way of saying it, it’s like I’m doing their job for them.”
“This is your second fire.”
“Regulate the voice.”
“Well I don’t see the point of mattress fires, frankly.”
“Stop talking, Ozzie. They kill your ass.”
Two guards came down the passageway, brushed past Oswald and entered the cell. The fire was so insignificant they were able to delay getting water until after they’d spent five grim minutes pounding Dupard.
Oswald stood at the white line, looking away.
They moved him out to the chicken wire. Not only guards but fellow inmates, all those bodies to avoid, those eyes and inner melodies—terror, gloom, psycho violence. The trick inside the wire was to stay within your own zone, avoid eye contact, accidental touch, gestures of certain types, anything that might hint at a personality behind the drone unit. The only safety was in facelessness.
He developed a voice that guided him through the days. Forever, endless, identical. The brig was so unthinking it eventually drove out fear. He ran in the passageways, he ran in place. He scrubbed the brightwork in the head, squared away his area, made up his rack. The point of the brig was to clean the brig. He drew his bucket from the storeroom, stood at the white line. They’d built the brig just to keep it clean. It was where they put their white lines. Everything depended on the lines. The brig was the place where