You Are Free to Go. Sarah Yaw

into the story, closer and closer to death.

      “Caruso?” Moses asks.

      The devilish man turns slowly and mechanically. There is a certain movement acquired by some of the longtime residents. It is slow, robotic, as if they are acutely aware of each muscle and the work it performs to move the parts of the body, as if the simple experience of living in a body becomes the landscape one explores over a lifetime of forced monastic introversion. This man, this Caruso, he moves like this. Men like him make Moses feel like a mosquito. Like he has a monkey brain. Can’t sit still. The simple task of waiting for the man to push out his chair, remove his glasses, adjust his pants, smooth his hands over the front of his shirt, over his low, protruding belly, adjust his brimmed cap, step his foot out from in front of the chair, then the other foot, then slowly journey across the tiny cell, makes Moses vulnerable to his preoccupations and fears. He didn’t ask Lila what the hell an in-text citation is. He forgot to have her explain a Works Cited page. He’s forgotten how he was going to proceed with his thesis. What do “Aschenbach got what he deserves” and “he feared death” have to do with one another? He is tired. He can’t remember things the way he once could. Why does it feel, he wonders as the man moves slow as a mountain, like the tectonic plates of his life are shifting and he’s about to fall into the pit?

      “Moses,” Caruso says quietly.

      They know each other. They don’t know each other as men. They haven’t spent long hours in conversation, but they lived in the hole side by side at the beginning of their tenures as prisoners so they know each other’s patterns. What the other sounds like when he uses the john. What the other sounds like when he cries out in his sleep. They know each other like that.

      “Le-le-le-etter for you.” Moses gasps. The stutter shocks him nearly dead. It’s been too many years to count since it reared its ugly head.

      “Is that a stutter, Moses? I never knew. Are you nervous? Things have worked out nicely for you, haven’t they?” Caruso asks, slowly scratching his low-slung belly with long, yellowed nails. “You’ve made a life for yourself inside, such as it is. You and I are not meant for civilized society. We must be separated at least by walls. But you are a man of strong character, Moses.” When he says this he smiles. Long, horrible teeth hang wide and yellow as popcorn.

      “T-take it,” Moses struggles.

      “Oh, good. A letter from one of my young admirers,” he says, his voice slow and silky, intended to chill Moses to the bone. And it does. Caruso has an unspeakable history with children. When he sees Moses cringe, he laughs, and his low hanging stomach jumps and bounces.

      Moses tries to dart away, but it’s a hobble. He struggles to carry his satchel, to move quickly along the path as men hiss at him. Caruso laughs and Moses’ body aches. I’m losing my hold, he thinks, as the stutter pursues him. Ho-o-o-l-l-ly Mary Mo-o-other of Go-o-od. He tries to repeat the phrase. He’s a young man again, sitting at a desk, mouth full of marbles, a nun standing over him making him repeat the phrase: Holy Mary Mother of God. The nun. His mother. His sister, who shall remain nameless; he’s haunted by memories he hasn’t thought of in years. They swarm up and out of him like a tempest. He is losing his hold! “Since human development is human destiny…” the story read…Stop! Stop thinking like this, he thinks. His hair falls into his face. He rushes clumsily along the narrow path and remembers how, as Aschenbach tried to leave Venice the first time, he saw the Bridge of Sighs, along which, the footnote read, the condemned prisoners would proceed when walking to life imprisonment from the Ducal Palace.

      Tuesday, the next day, is surprisingly glorious. Lila has called in sick (he assumes she needed the extra time to finish her paper), so while Moses misses seeing her, he has the entire day to write. And in the perfect spring light of day, which streams into the gallery, lavishly lighting the wings of the sparrows that dart and play and soar along the wall of bars, and after the sacred clarification of sleep, Moses decides he overreacted to Lila’s acceptance of Cavanaugh’s overtures. And this, only this, was the root of the unexpected rearing of that ugly stutter. He reminds himself that she is, above all, kind, and not one to reject another human being. Unlike Moses, she wouldn’t judge Cavanaugh harshly. She would go out of her way to make anyone feel good.

      Not only does Moses wake cleansed (no hint of apprehension in his speech, thank God), when Jorge wakes, he is his old self. Lucid and fun. Kind and fatherly. He takes a walk out into the gallery and lets Moses work, even joins the others for rec and goes out into the yard so Moses can write. When he comes back in, his cheeks are flushed from the warm spring air. He is sweaty and smells like a young man. He doesn’t look at Gina’s letters maniacally. Instead he stretches out on his bed, folds his arms to support his head and starts to tell Moses stories.

      Moses isn’t entirely done with his paper. He has the bulk of it written. He just needs a conclusion, and he has a general idea how he is going to wrap things up. He is going to declare that “Death in Venice” is proof positive that you better not mess with your true nature. And if you start turning into Caruso and lusting after some young boy, you’re sure as hell done for. Something to that effect only more academic. He intends, in any case, to call the lessons in the story cautionary.

      Despite the loose ending, and his fear of proper documentation—the stylebook Lila loaned him is as clear as the penal code—he takes a break to enjoy Jorge’s lucidity and decides to finish the paper in the morning.

      “I came here from Ecuador an orphan, entiendo.”

      Moses knows, but that’s OK. He settles in on his bed, lights a cigarette, and revels in the smoke curling slowly out from between his lips and the security of Jorge’s storytelling lilt.

      “I came on a boat full of café and landed in Brooklyn. Portencia,” Jorge says, “Resented the beans it took to keep me alive.” Moses knows the story: Jorge’s mother’s cancer, his evil aunt Portencia, her plot to break him by sending her son to steal Jorge’s beloved’s heart, starving Jorge until he was driven to murder; but he loves hearing it because at the end he hears how Jorge and Moses became friends and this story, like the story of one’s birth, is endlessly captivating. It fills him with peace each time he hears it.

      “When I was convicted of killing the girl that I loved, I didn’t even know what happened to me! I didn’t speak Ingles. I had no education. I knew nothing of birds. I couldn’t even read Spanish! At the end of the trial, my lawyer turned to me and he say, Descuple, Jorge. It was the only word I understood him say to me. It wasn’t until I was at Sing Sing that someone told my fate to me: I was in for life!

      “You know what happens to a man’s heart in that moment, Moses. I broke every rule. I spit in every face, I hit, I yelled. They moved me up here to Hardenberg, and put me in the hole. That, Moses, is where I first knew Cavanaugh.”

      “Stop!” Moses puts up his hand. “Stick to the script, Jorge. I don’t want to know anything about Cavanaugh. Not today.”

      “Moses, I need to tell you something I have never told no one. You need to know why I trust him. Why I give him the letter for Gina. I want to tell you because you are my dearest friend.”

      Moses flicks his cigarette into the toilet and lights another. “I’m not happy about this. This is not the story I want to hear.”

      “Please, Moses, permiso. It is the root of it all.”

      “Get on with it, then. And cut the E-Spanish, will ya?”

      “Ha! You understand all that I say. Why should I?”

      “Because this is America. And in America, Jorge, we speak E-English.”

      Jorge waves a hand, laughs, comes to the edge of his cot and leans forward, “This story is to show you that it is through kindness, even the most unexpected and undeserving kindness, that we are saved. You cannot use this story against Ed Cavanaugh. And you can never tell another what I am about to tell you. Agreed?”

      “Why would I agree to that? I don’t even want to hear it.”

      “Do you agree?”

      “Who the