Matty

My uncle calls from prison, and I ignore it and let the melody ring out, continuing to put light creams on my face and dark wax on my eyelashes and eyebrows. I resume the YouTube video that’s been playing out loud on my phone as background audio, just for him to call and interrupt again a few minutes later. For whatever reason, I decide that this time I’ll pick up. I move my finger onto the green answer button before I can change my mind.

“An inmate at Airway Heights Correctional Complex is calling,” the automated female voice starts, This call may be recorded and monitored. “If you wish to make this call private …” I feel the onset of regret for having answered.

She informs me of my options, that to accept the call I must press “one.”

I linger between the video’s play button and keypad’s open button, and then I dial one.

My uncle starts every phone call the exact same way, like “Heyyyy,” all sing-songy, and then the tone gets flaccid as the word trails off, so he sounds sort of disappointed, like he’s constantly about to deliver bad news. I say “Hi” back. He goes into a few quick sentences about being surprised that I picked up, which he always does, because I don’t consistently answer his calls.

I don’t know why I’ve answered, it just felt like I was supposed to.

I brush off his comments—“You actually answered!”—in an apathetic manner. I then try to talk as normally as possible. I figure if I were in his place, I’d just want someone to talk to me like things were normal. I tell him about the really good sandwich I ate yesterday, that I went to the gym this morning, that I’m currently looking for another job.

My uncle tells me it is his twenty-seventh day in this place. I laugh and ask if he’s been scratching tally marks into the wall, and he says that, actually, he’s been using a piece of paper that he keeps next to his bed. He uses this paper to track his daily workout of pushups and dips and pull-ups, and that’s how he knows if another day has passed, if the workouts have been checked off. He gets one hour on the indoor track and he was recently granted one hour in the room with the metal bar, which can be used for either pull-ups or dips. He is also fortunate enough to receive an allowance of three books a week, of which he can request the genre, and unlike most of the other inmates, he gets some kind of cheap tablet, which he uses to call me and speak through its grainy, underwater-sounding internal microphone.

“I can’t just waste away in my bed here, you know? I have to be sure I’m not just wasting away,” my uncle says, and I respond truthfully that I completely understand him, that “the worst thing you can do” is to lie in bed, to do nothing. I think of the past few days of my life spent lying in bed and doing nothing and wince. For a moment, I fantasize about being in prison, which I’ve concluded is the place where I’d finally be forced to do nothing but read and workout and write my magnum opus.

My uncle shares with me that there is another inmate on his row who, every morning, can be heard fighting with the guards because he refuses to shower or even change his clothes, or do anything for that matter. I ask my uncle if he thinks the inmate is perhaps just trying to die. He says he doesn’t know.

My uncle goes on to tell me that the longest he had ever spent in The Hole was forty-nine days, and that was almost twenty-five years ago. The inmates were on strike, they had refused to do any of their jobs, and anyone found to be participating was sent straight to solitary confinement. My uncle didn’t have a job. When the guards asked him if he was refusing to work, he told them no, he didn’t have a job, and they then instructed him to push a cart full of rags down to the kitchen. He said he wouldn’t do it, not when everybody else was striking. They told him they’d send him to The Hole and he told them “Fuck you.”

“You want to know something sad?” he asks. I don’t consider if I really do.

“What?”

“That was the last time I ever saw Katie. She and Dad drove four and a half hours to come see me—they didn’t know I had been put in The Hole that morning. I could only talk to them for twenty minutes and it was through a piece of glass. After that they drove home and I never saw my sister again.”

And all I can say is “Jeez.” I pat my fingers into the concentrated dots of pink blush on my cheeks to disperse their color.

My uncle tries to ask me about college and the future and where I’m going to live and what I’m going to do. I give unsure answers, focusing hard on not betraying any resentment or stress, which gives the conversation the texture of a job interview. I’d rather talk about the noncompliant inmate or his dead sister. I’m feeling hostile towards the subject of myself and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to push the conversation elsewhere. He asks about something and I confess plainly that I’m really sad. I don’t know why. I hadn’t planned on telling anybody that today. I didn’t even want to talk to him in the first place. Maybe I just do this to shut him up.

My uncle says he understands, that it’s no different than what he feels, having been ripped away from his comfort and everything he ever knew. I laugh and tell him that being abducted by guards in the middle of the night and driven four and a half hours east of the prison where he’d spent the last twenty-five years of his life, without any warning or explanation, is perhaps slightly worse than what’s going on with me. In my head though, I consider the idea that maybe all pain really is the same, but I don’t say this. He seems to respond: he tells me that it’s really the same.

My uncle hopes that my mom can get him out of this place soon. I have no idea if this will happen, but I cautiously assure him that it will anyway.

I think about what happened in the car a few weeks ago. My mom was complaining, lately every day was phone calls to prison wardens and higher-ups, followed by phone calls from my uncle to see if he was going back to his prison-home yet. She had sounded so exhausted. She said she couldn’t think about how bored he was, and then she suddenly started to cry. This was scary, because I was pretty sure I’d only ever seen it happen once or twice before: I remembered seeing my mom quietly suppress tears at a farmer’s market because she saw some decrepit old men who apparently reminded her of her late father, and I saw her cry out of frustration on her forty-fifth birthday.

My mom repeated that she couldn’t think about how bored he was, only now with regret. She said that every time she took a dance class at the gym or ate a home-cooked meal, all she thought about was her brother alone, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that came in cling wrap. She said when Katie died it was the same, that she couldn’t enjoy anything without seeing her sister, who had died of a bizarre medical tragedy at twenty. I told her I was sorry.

We mutually, silently decided that to distract ourselves, we would instead direct our attention to the newly opened deli on our left that had replaced the Korean-owned convenience store, which was named either “Polar Market” or “Arctic Market,” I could never remember which.

“I think it could be like, Malaysian,” I guessed of the deli’s cuisine, basing this solely off of the appearance of the smiling mascot character on the sign. It turned out to be Laotian.

There’s a short silence before my uncle finally announces he’ll “let me go.” I wish him luck on his pull-ups and dips and pushups and I hang up. I don’t resume the YouTube video I was watching before.

I’ll never know for sure if he did it or not. But it’s not my place. I spent too much time within the bright white walls of the visiting room, under lighting so harsh it resembled the view during a dental examination, the vast tiled floorspace occupied by nothing but tables and rows of vending machines, trying to write stories on scratch paper with a box of crayons, eating Red Vines and not listening to a word of my mom and uncle’s conversations about lawyers, custody battles, property, or wills, my mom’s tone always exasperated, at a loss, like she was explaining all of this to a small child. The correctional officers would sometimes come into the carpeted play area, which was designated by a short white plastic picket fence, and force my brother to dismantle his intricate replicas of specific guns from Call of Duty games that he had been constructing with LEGOs, and almost always they would make us recycle our drawings in the lobby as we exited, but still every time we’d try to take them home, in case one of the nicer ones was working that day. When I was still small enough, my uncle would pick me up in his arms, toss me above his head, clap his hands one to three times while I was suspended in the air, and then catch me, and I’d make him do this over and over until we were asked to stop by a guard or it was suggested by an annoyed look on my mom’s face. I swear I was so high up in the air, and that I hung there for a length of time that was just impossible enough to be supernatural. The prison was just far enough of a drive to be an event, warranting its own special car games, landmarks—our favorite being a tiny, raggedy tree that wore Christmas ornaments year-round—and a set of CDs that an amateur DJ had gifted my mom.

It’s not my place. I could never be a fair jury. At some point, it must have been around age fourteen, I thought about the fact that I’d never gotten the chance to be a fair jury, and I was so intimidated by the abyss this created that I stopped going along with my mom to the prison entirely, I even skipped the Christmas parties and the Summer barbecues, which were my favorites. I mouthed to my mom from the passenger seat, “I’m not here,” when my uncle would call and it would automatically transfer to the car speaker, and I patiently waited for the ringing to stop each time the prison’s number overtook my own phone screen. It wasn’t until I was nineteen years old that I went again, to the Summer barbecue, where I picked at a paper plate of baked beans and mac-salad with black olives in it and iceberg lettuce that was drenched, drowning really, in ranch dressing. I carefully spectated the inmate fathers with tattooed faces as they played lawn games with children whom they hardly saw. I felt satisfied. There was no sudden change of heart, no burning reason for my coming. It was like answering the phone today, it just felt like it was supposed to be that way.

After I had returned from my visit, I was in bed with a boyfriend, and I painted him a picture of the fascinating environment that is a barbecue at a prison yard, I repeated all the hilariously wild things my uncle had said about his time there, like how he would refuse to share rooms with fat inmates, or the story about a sociopathic Chinese man who burnt down his adopted parents’ home.
It was then that I finally saw the news report from my uncle’s sentencing, thirty years ago, when he was the same age as I was laying in that bed. I hadn’t avoided knowing to protect his innocence or maintain his image in my eyes. To me, he’d only ever existed as a prisoner; it’s not like knowing would change all that much between us. I avoided it, I think, because I believed it would somehow cause some kind of severe, irreversible change between my mom and I, that she would be further complicated in a way that felt intimidating, almost menacing. That if I told her I knew, her face would contort or darken into an expression I had never seen her make, and I’d be faced with some kind of grave consequence.

As a child, the crime had only ever appeared to me in dream-like flashes. I imagined everything playing out in a cartoon logic, like a Disney scene in which the mean bearded villain captures the dainty princess and taunts her by holding his sword up to her chin. Using a mixture of sources, I constructed a mental image of my uncle, joined by a faceless secondary character—the other suspect, his best friend, the supposed true culprit, whom I had given the appearance of a “general criminal” with facial scruff, dark clothes, and a black beanie atop his shaved head—grinning maniacally as they dangled the girl from the balcony of an apartment complex, the setting taken directly from an old rental property my grandfather once owned. It always ended the same, with my uncle bailing out at the last second, after realizing what was happening to the girl, darting down the steps and out the heavy exit door.

I didn’t want him to, but I also felt zero inclination to protest, when my boyfriend pulled the article up on his phone and read pieces aloud. When he got to the part about a chunk of concrete being used for a final blow on the girl in the park, he grimaced and repeated the words “chunk of concrete,” looking to me for an answer. I had none for him.

“I feel like you of all people would be the first to agree that it was ‘the man’ who did it in this kind of situation. You know, like when a girl gets killed it was most likely her boyfriend or some other close male, something like that,” he said, seeming more earnestly surprised, curious about the situation and my thoughts, than anything else.

I thought about how the article had described the girl as writing countless diary entries about my uncle. A teenage girl writing diary entries about a boy she was obsessed with. I thought, It is true that dead girls are, more often than not, made by some close male. But in the moment, I didn’t feel like I could explain the cards I had been dealt.

I tried thinking about it in a utilitarian way. I tried to make life a math problem, an equation, though I was never very good at math. I thought, There’s my uncle, there’s my mom, there’s their dead sister, there’s the dead girl in the park, and there’s me. There’s love and death for everybody. How could I choose so that I was choosing for us all?

This is my current answer, my attempt to reflect all my feelings at once. It goes in a zig-zag pattern: I answer a call because maybe all pain really is the same. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I skip a call because I’m busy. I answer a call because my mom cried in the car. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I answer a call for no reason. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I skip a call because I don’t feel like talking that day.

I skip on joining for the majority of visits. But I’ll go to the prison sometimes, particularly for those special barbecues or potlucks, because all pain is the same, and I like the feeling of being buzzed through the double-door security entrances and walking down the stretch of courtyard that leads into another two sets of security entrances; I like the taste of the “French Vanilla Latte” that my mom always gets from the coffee vending machine, and I like the smell of the visiting room when you first walk in and the guard at the entry post pushes his invisible ink stamp into the top of your hand. I like to see it all again, everything and everyone so unnatural and unchanging. Every correctional officer is still fat, and my uncle’s face bears almost no signs of age, his small, athletic stature and his buzzed haircut and his green eyes and his light gray sweatsuit are all still the same as they have been my whole life, and likewise his brain bears almost no signs of age, his older sister still glares at his humor, so juvenile that it’s almost uncomfortable, his naivety is charming and sad and confusing all at once, and when he smiles he looks just like a dumb child.

____
Evelyn Patneaude lives in Brooklyn, NYC.