10

Because I was the last cell on my side of the corner, I could see into the first cell on the other side of the corner, as long as I stood on the right side of my cell and he stood on the left side of his. At first, when I noticed him watching me, I paid him no mind. I was the observer, not the observed, and he would never be able to unravel me, anyway. Over time, though, I realized that he continued to watch my cell for those times where I stood on the far right. And so I began to watch him in return.

He didn’t laugh along at the rude jokes about the therapist when the other men began to make them. He didn’t talk to them and he didn’t join in their bawdy songs. He was as separate from the men as I was from the women. And as time went on, we would just watch and watch silently. He was interesting to me in that I wasn’t sure whether or not I could manipulate him. With his silence, he gave me an unclear, empty impression of his intelligence that could have been anywhere from blind idiocy to brilliance of my level.

I had been in the old jails about a year when he made a concrete signal. For months now he had been sliding his newspaper across the floor to me when he was done reading it; we received two different papers, and he kept sending me his day in and day out even though I never returned the favor. At this point in my life I was twenty six years old. It was September nineteenth when the top of the paper read, in a rough, penciled block lettering, JEREMY.

This Jeremy was, I supposed, the closest thing I had ever had to a friend without there being some sort of sexual relationship involved. I started passing my newspapers back to him, in hopes that he would give forth more information, something that would give me an idea of where he sat in my carefully composed mental diagram of the jail and its society. After several months more I found the pencil stub folded inside the sports section. He had been waiting for information in return.

I kept the pencil stub for several days, contemplating. All that I knew of manipulating people functioned on the ability to use my brilliance to maximize my knowledge of them while keeping their knowledge of me as low as possible unless it served to promote a healthy sense of fear. The knowledge here that I had killed twenty seven people served me well. The suspicions and speculations over why I’d done it served me even better. Mixed with a careful silence, the women on the block avoided me with a pointed, obvious fear.

This Jeremy was still an enigma. I didn’t know what level of danger he would present. But when I eventually, unsure of whether this was the best course of action, wrote in my narrow, even cursive Emily on the top of November seventeenth’s edition. When he saw that, and saw the return of his pencil, his craggy face cracked into a small, tremulous smile.

After that, he wrote to me in the margins day in and day out. He didn’t seem to want anything more from me except my name, and all of his notes, discussions of current events, seemingly fictional stories, complex mathematical calculations, started with “Dear Emily.” He never signed off with his name which was, in some ways, quite ingenious. They could be traced back to me but not to him. Sometimes I wondered if he was testing me with that, but I could not find anything nefarious in his notes. They spoke of boredom. To boredom I could certainly relate.