News from Around the Island

Just north of the geographic center of Mystic Island, is Springback Prison. There aren’t many inmates in the prison anymore. Most of the facility’s wings  are now vacant. The only people incarcerated there are pretty much those that committed crimes on the island, or those temporarily locked up in the wing of the prison now used as the island’s police station. The prison, opened in 1913, was an anomaly to most. No one quite understood where the name came from, or why a prison was built on an island which was essentially envisioned as a summer vacation destination. Most figured it was because the prison would be less prone to break-outs, being that the only ways off the island were by boat or by bridge. Unfortunately, in 1918, three convicts did break out, causing a havoc few want to admit ever occurred. But this story isn’t about those three men (all of whom at their individual trials, swore a mysterious figure in the The Old Stone Church had precipitated each of their crimes which landed them at Springback). This story is about Cornell Philips. Cornell’s story is one of those tales that tightrope lucidity and madness. Cornell might tell you it was actually an over-lucidity that had hastened his crime. Now it is always quiet at night. And that’s all he ever wanted. He has a lot of time to reflect on things. In fact, more time than he needs, really. He—maybe I’ll just let Cornell tell his own story. Like most people locked away in a prison, and although they never admit to it, Cornell is always eager to talk to someone. Especially anyone who will listen:

When I lay down and the sheet is still cool, I consider getting some shut-eye. But that rarely works out and the sheet warms up around my legs and torso—before you know it, I’m kicking it off and laying there, my eyes tracing the slatted shapes cast into my cell from the cold corridor. Nighttime sounds have a mysterious quality here and each imprints its own stamp into the thin silence. Most times the sources of these sounds are indecipherable— retches of vomit, the crest and release of distant snores, the punctuation of a head bouncing against concrete during some conflict—yet, I am grateful for the buffer of bars between us.

I learned to savor nighttime quiet at a young age; in our family it never came without resistance. The only times I had a chance at peace were the nights at Half Moon Pond, and even then I needed to wait out my mom’s monologues about the crappy hand life had dealt her, or my little brother, Jesse, whining that he wasn’t tired and hated sleeping in a tent. It didn’t take me long to learn that the dark line inside mom’s screw top wine bottle was the sand of an hourglass and as soon as it was drained she’d be off to the tent with him, and I’d advance a step toward peace. While Half Moon was certainly not Club Med, I cherished those nights. We didn’t get many vacations when I was a kid and if mom took us camping, I knew that that was about as good as it was going to get. Like anything else my family did, these trips were threaded together by a fragile budget and mom’s vacillating whims.

The first time we ever camped at Half Moon, it was a fragile time for our family. Even though I was only eight, I knew when dad left us it was going to weave complexity into our lives. I didn’t doubt his love for me and Jesse —hell, he probably even still loved mom—it was himself that he came to despise. And a small piece of eight-year-old me felt guilty, watching out my window through a scrim of fog, when he finally drove away. It followed one of their fights, the words muffled by my bedroom door, a toxic finality sealed when he walked out. I knew mom intended for the camping trip to heal us as a family—a newly forged unit of three. And in a lot of ways it served that healing purpose, but it also sort of excised me from childhood and left me longing to touch something forever beyond my reach.

When we arrived at Half Moon, I didn’t know what to expect. My imagined camping experience consisted of neatly erected tents, marshmallows, and spooky stories by the fire. I figured mom would take care of the work—cooking over the fire, tidying the ground near our tent, tending to Jesse—and I’d be free to roam the edge of the pond to trap frogs beneath my palms or venture off into the woods to test my fear of snakes. Reality hit hard once we started searching for our site and she started peppering me with chores. A thin strip of dirt road bisected the campground and she drove way too cautiously and charged me with finding a good site on the pond side. Our car crawled along at a speed I’d expect if we were looking for a lost earring in tall grass. A sheen of sweat blossomed on her forehead and I wondered why it was so important for her to find a site near the pond. The vacant wooded sites we passed looked perfectly fine from my perspective. She explained that you needed to arrive early in the day to score one of the pond sites and that we may have missed our chance. I looked out at the water where a cluster of pale bodies splashed around or floated on chintzy rafts beneath the noontime sun, and I thought that the wooded sites might actually be more attractive since we wouldn’t have to listen to them out there horsing around. But just as I made that assessment, she chirped excitedly and pounded the steering wheel with her fist. Our car nosed into the empty pond side site and we all tumbled out, Jesse already starting to whimper his complaints from the car seat.

Before we even unloaded the gear from the car, I looked out at the pond and was glad we’d persevered for that site. A small row boat, roped to a nearby buoy, bobbed an invitation to me from the water’s surface. I didn’t know if someone had left it there and would be back to retrieve it or if it actually came with the site. I knew better, though, than to show any interest in front of mom. Even if I had a life jacket, there was no way she’d let me go on the boat by myself and she also wouldn’t trust herself with a two year old out on the water. Jesse would anchor her to the shore for the duration of our camping trip. So I bookmarked the row boat in my mind and went to unload the car.

I suppose as an adult, I could’ve lived with the sounds of what the police later called “just plain life noises”—a  patter of Mr. Morris’s footsteps through the ceiling above my living room or the occasional barks from downstairs when Hilda’s mutt took exception to the postman on the front porch. But the disturbances weren’t so benign. And that’s why I considered measures to make them all go away.

I took a cordial approach as the noise problem surfaced on my first day in the apartment house. My tolerance for distraction was pretty robust when I’d moved from my mother’s house into the new pad, and I wasn’t quick to let a yipping dog or a heavy-footed old man morph me into a pissy neighbor. After all, a noisy apartment seemed a more attractive option than staying with mom any longer. I spent that first day lumping consignment shop furniture from a rented van up to my place on the second floor, and with every trip I was forced past that asshole dog yip-yip-yipping, sputtering in circles on its chain in the yard. By sundown, I couldn’t be bothered with the dog, now yip-yip-yipping in the apartment below me; I was bone tired and flopped out on the futon with a bottle of Molson. But by the time I was ready to surrender to sleep, it was clear that the mutt had plenty more stamina.

The muscles in my legs protested as I eased down a flight to the apartment on the first floor, and from out there in the hallway I listened to the barks intensify until I decided there was no way anyone could be home. I actually felt a fleeting notion of pity as I ceremoniously knocked on the door and readied to climb back up the stairs. But the door opened and a heavy odor fell into the small landing where I stood—the kind that might seep from a long forgotten box in an attic. Hilda stood there in her floral-print house dress. Dust rose like confetti in the lamp-lit room behind her and she grimaced at me as if I were the annoying one. My first inclination was to introduce myself as her new neighbor and promptly retreat back up the stairs without mentioning the dog. But when the mutt approached the open doorway and snarled at me, I couldn’t let it go. After a brief moment of contemplation, she scowled and agreed to “keep a lid on the little dear.”

I walked back up to my apartment and sat on the futon just as the pounding began upstairs. At first, I wondered if maybe someone was hammering, but more like a sounding weight moving across the floor, and later that night I met Mr. Morris for the first time. He was much nicer that Hilda, but that didn’t make the continued pounding any more palatable when I stretched out on the futon with pillows pressed against the sides of my head. I was exhausted. Sleep, however, was not nearby. On that first night, I quickly realized that I was sandwiched by noise. When the dog barked below me, it was as if up above me Morris started dancing to that canine’s song. My new floor and ceiling had become a very unfriendly vice pressing away any chance of a quality night’s sleep.

Some nights I feel badly about everything that happened—particularly with Morris upstairs. That old bastard just gnawed on my last nerve. Part of the problem was the shoddy construction of a cardboard-thin ceiling that amplified every step he took. I could envision his bathroom habits, as momentary rhythms of gushing water let me know he was shaving and the lengthy humming of pipes signaled a shower. He may have been a man, but his bladder seemed systematically programmed to fill up twice every night. 11:55 and 2:15. It wasn’t fair that he was the one who had to take a leak and I was the one who suffered the resulting insomnia. I tried not to let it bother me and just get back to sleep, but it was always at least an hour before I fought off the annoyance. When he started dropping things—shoes? books? goddamn bowling balls from the sound of it—that’s when I really felt nudged to the edge of noise tolerance. And even though I planned everything with precision, I still have a tough time accepting any responsibility for eliminating the sounds of Mr. Morris.

You would’ve done the same thing if you were me.

And then there was Hilda downstairs. If it wasn’t her vacuum cleaner or her goddamn hairdryer, that mangy half-breed beagle was enough to drive anybody with a set of ears over the edge. Not that I ever exactly went over the edge—by my estimation, anyway. It was just that I sat there like a eunuch in a whorehouse one too many nights, unable to do anything but plug fingers in my ears, my mind blazing with possibilities for fixing the problem.

I started to focus on Mr. Morris because that was where my sympathy pooled. If I could somehow muster the balls to take care of him, then the dog would be cake. See, Mr. Morris only had one leg, which you’d think might make him a fine neighbor as far as the noise is concerned. I could rest assured he wasn’t going to be up bouncing around to some Jane Fonda video or any happy horse shit like that at the crack of dawn. He got the leg blown off by a land mine back while he was in the service and it was actually a pleasure listening to him tell the tale wrapped so neatly in war hero luster. I felt bad for him when he told me how the VA screwed him out of insurance benefits for so many years. And, it was a feel-good moment when they offered assistance with a prosthetic limb.

I was headed toward the bus shelter across the street that day to wait for the Downtown Express when Mr. Morris stepped off the idling #39 bus. His mouth curled into a bashful grin when he saw me, like a kid on Christmas morning hoarding a secret knowledge of Santa. I made a half-witted crack about him looking like he just got lucky with some supermodel and he hoisted the paperwork from the VA like a trophy and told me his news was much better than that. Beauty fades, he said, but titanium is permanent. It turned out that the limb they equipped him with must’ve come from Walmart because the rubber nub at the end of that titanium ankle wore down after exactly two weeks. Morris insisted he liked the feel of it better that way. I wanted to shoot down to the local VA office and recommend a head exam for Mr. Morris. From that day forward, every movement above the ceiling in my apartment sounded like a lethargic SOS message.

Whenever I voiced my complaints about the noise to any one of my somewhat reasonable acquaintances, I was given well-intended advice. Just go up there and ask the old guy to tread more lightly on your ceiling. Call the cops. Put a pillow over your head and just try to get some sleep. At one time or another, I tried all of those things and nothing proved to be anything other than a very temporary fix. One night, I came home from The Dutch Horse Pub after watching the Celtics squander an overtime lead and I could hear his hollow thuds up there before my key even passed into the lock. It sounded like a blind mannequin, gifted with life, was making a frantic attempt to get out of his apartment. I continued up the next flight of stairs, my balance wobbled by the sympathy whiskey doled out after the basketball game, and pounded on the door. It took him a minute to get there and the look on his face spelled genuine surprise. I lied that I needed to get up for work in the morning and that I couldn’t fall asleep with the racket of his footfalls overhead. Later, it dawned on me that I was still wearing my parka during the conversation and I wondered if he’d noticed. Mr. Morris nodded a brief apology but resumed his heavy-footed approach to life after a five minute respite.

By that point, I’d been living in the apartment for a month, and his empty promises toward noise regulation signified the end of my hope for a peaceful existence there. I’d given up completely on Hilda by then; on the few occasions when I was compelled to knock on her apartment, she stopped answering. The paint toward the bottom of her door flaked away when my knocks progressed to kicks, but she stayed the course and resisted a conversation with me. The door rattled in its frame, the mutt yipped itself into a frenzy, and I eventually stopped knocking.

Instead I huffed and I puffed and hatched a new plan.

To be Continued