Callista sampled and pushed aside the inoffensive meal. The state of New
Essex was feeding her well. Treating her well too--a star prisoner. A
room of her own and, now that the trial had begun, meals in private, on
a tray no less. No utensils of course except a spoon. She rose and
performed the infinite journey of three steps from the barred door to
the barred window a few times: shorten stride and you could make it come
out to four steps. _Best room in the hotel, southwest exposure 'n'
everything--gee!_ She adjusted the blanket on her cot to sharp military
precision: it would make Matron Flannery happy. A pity to sit down now
and spoil all that wonderful work. Anyway Biddy Flannery would be along
in a minute for the tray, with her usual not unfriendly clash of keys;
then back to the courtroom for the afternoon.
Callista gazed at the flat-faced wall where smears of old writing had
been not quite obliterated--for everything in this building was more
than a little tired, peevish, ineffectual. Indifferent mop or washrag
took a swipe at the graffiti, to keep busy; the law took a swipe, the
best it could manage, at the perennial smears of human confusion,
dishonesty, violence. High up--the woman must have been tall--enough
remained of a lipstick inscription to indicate a heart symbol enclosing
a pair of names: DAVY & ----: the other name had defied Callista's
months-long effort to decipher it. She tried again now, bemused, and
once more gave it up, although somehow this time she did feel a bit
nearer success. It was exasperating as a sore tooth.
She gave up also another effort to interpret the almost destroyed
black-pencil picture below the heart, probably someone else's
contribution. A thick phallus not quite erect, a baby with the facial
features gone, perhaps just a round-petaled flower or geometric design?
No use. Call it a Rorschach blot--but even for that, the months of
seeing it had made it impossible to see it at all. Callista turned away,
glancing with an amusement that held the warmth of gratitude at the
third and last writing--off in the corner, tiny and squeezed, it had
almost escaped the washrag's faint assault, and still transmitted a
cocky, not too cryptic message: WE DID IT IN A SNOBANK ON LINCAN'S
BIRTHDAY 1957.
In the death house too they would feed her well and treat her very
kindly, within the meaning of the statute. Callista examined this,
perplexed, trying to recall what form of the auxiliary verb her thought
had used. _Did the gray cells say WILL or WOULD?_
She journeyed again, to the window that for all its cramped ugliness was
a friend, because of its messages of night and day, cloud, sunlight, and
the wheeling of doves. And returning, she made a discovery, with the
suddenness of sunshine. She could read the red writing up there on the
wall, the other name. Amazing that it could have eluded her so long: