Eyes Full of Empty. Jérémie Guez

      “So what do we do now?”

      “Shut up. I’m trying to think.”

      —JAMES BELLECK, RED CLAY VISIONS

      Contents

Prologue

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

       PROLOGUE

      SO TODAY’S MY BIRTHDAY.

      On a stool, elbows on my knees, head in my hands, I wait for the feeling to go away. This joint has fried my brain. Hash so bad you have to squeeze the glowing end till your thumb blisters, just to break it up. All so it can do you the service of shoving a rod through the middle of your skull, scattering thoughts good and bad and indifferent, mowing down everything in sight. This fucking piece-of-shit hash has done time in plastic wrap, pockets, socks, probably even someone’s ass, before getting fobbed off in the yard. A gift horse from my cellmate, Tarik. I told him it was my birthday today, and he handed me the joint and said, Have a happy one, on me. I really lucked out with him. When all you have is a hundred square feet to live in, better get along with the guy you share it with.

      “Gonna take a shit,” says Tarik.

      I turn the lighter on an orange peel I keep in a plastic box under my bed for times like these, to freshen up the cell as needed. I watch the peel blacken, flames running down the coarse grain. I take a deep breath, filling my lungs with smoke. It smells like citrus and ash. I am seriously high.

      Odds were almost zilch a guy like me would end up in prison. On paper, I was spotless. My dad thought he’d steered me down the straight and narrow; to be fair, he’d nearly killed himself to make it happen. He’d come looking for me whenever I was hanging out on the stoop or somewhere else in town, messing around with the guys from the neighborhood. When I turned eighteen, it seemed like he’d won. I went to college. The old man, happy at last. His integration now 100 percent successful. A guy who’d grown up in a podunk village in the Djurdjura mountains—limestone everywhere you looked, a lunar landscape where he wore out his shoes each morning walking miles to the only school for natives. A kid from Buttfuck, Algeria, born to illiterates, who’d ended up a French citizen. And a doctor.

      You’re Kabyle. Don’t you ever forget it. He’d said that over and over to me, all through my childhood, clinging to his story even while occasionally denying it. I never forgot, which didn’t keep me from fucking everything up. All those stories I never wanted to hear again—all I wanted was to hear about my mom, who wasn’t Kabyle or French, just Absent, with a capital A. You catch on quick when your dad doesn’t know his way around members of the opposite sex. It starts when you grow up without a mom. You might see a few random women over at the house, but they never get asked to stay for dinner. And then you never see them again.

      The toilet flushes. Tarik pulls back the curtain and heads over to his cot. He lights a cigarette and watches TV with the sound off, as is his habit.

      I don’t blame my father for anything. I don’t know anyone who had a better dad than me. He knows it too. That’s probably why he took my time so hard. Six months, no appeal. I can still see the expression on his face in the courtroom. He looked more shattered than me when the judge pronounced the verdict. Assault and battery: Guilty. Premeditated aggression: Guilty. Didn’t think the asshole would press charges, or that I’d hit him and he’d start choking on his own blood. Or that his dad was the head of a huge media conglomerate. I didn’t see any of it coming. But in the end, half a year isn’t so much out of a whole lifetime.

      I borrowed a book from the library. The author was an ex-con. All told, he did more than a dozen years inside. It’s like some people are made for prison. Is that possible? He says he never thinks about it at all anymore. He also says he’s known people who just did a few weeks for some bullshit—a license infraction, a scuffle with a brother-in-law—and they never get over it. I’m one of those people. I’ll never forget this as long as I live, I already know it. I don’t blame society. I don’t blame the justice system. I blame myself, just myself, for having been so goddamned stupid. I wanted to be a tough guy. Every day I wake up and remember I’m just a little turd here, a fact soon confirmed in the exercise yard, where I’m at the very bottom of the food chain.

      Eyes glued to my shoes, I hear a shout from the hallway. I pay no attention, don’t even realize the shouting’s louder than usual, until Tarik gets all excited.

      “Oh, holy shit! Look at that!”

      I look up at the corner of the cell with our commissary-bought TV. I see the images, but my brain isn’t processing them. A plane in a skyscraper. A commercial jet. A massive building. Tarik yells, “It’s New York!”

      We have no idea what’s going down as we turn up the volume and start listening to the news. Word spreads swiftly from cell to cell, dumb rats in cages given a bit of a distraction. The guards tell us to shut up. They shouldn’t have raised their voices. And suddenly, it’s on. All the prisoners start going at it: blacks and whites, reds and yellows, believers and everyone else with no god but their dad and a few belt-whippings for their sins.

      I celebrate my twenty-fourth birthday behind bars, my only gifts the worst joint I’ve ever had and the first major disaster of the new century, joining everybody else in the world with no fucking clue of what’s going on. So I start screaming too, as loud as I can, half hoping the tears will come, but they don’t. And it wouldn’t change a thing. I just want to do something. Because I wish the planes had crashed here. For once, something’s going down; I’m not about to miss out. Happy birthday my ass. They can all go fuck themselves.

       TEN

       YEARS

       LATER...