Before he leaves the prison library, Dae has completed the work that Carlos had interrupted. The portrait that Carlos had drawn is spread out and weighed down by books at the top and bottom.
There is also a book open, a book of works by Pecou, and a black man with his face down, no shirt, and white pants dominates the page. There is a white hoop necklace around his neck with white strings hanging from it like a dreamcatcher. The man’s right hand is extended down, across his chest and he spreads five fingers wide just below his crotch. His left hand is mostly behind his back, just below his waist, and there are long feathers that arch out and down from the position of his left hand like a tail. His pants go down past his calves but stop short to expose his plaid socks and gold shoes. Even though the man’s head is down, the gold rims of his glasses are visible.
Dae lays out his drawing on the tabletop between the Pecou and the piece by Carlos. He feels like he is in a house of mirrors with three versions of himself on the table, only one where the face is actually visible. He hadn’t intended to draw himself. Dae had developed the strong urge to see his father’s face thanks to a series of dreams that plagued him shortly after he started drawing; which also coincided with the death of his cellmate.
Truck Dead
Dae had lost consciousness so many times since he’d been in prison, that it became a regular occurrence. He looked forward to it, actually, it was different from just falling asleep, or easier. Falling asleep in the prison cell wasn’t easy because of the chill in the winter time, and the stuffy heat in the summer. Losing consciousness required only a brief moment of pain, or ingestion of a foul tasting alcoholic beverage that some inmate had whipped up in their toilet, or even smoking what passed for weed. He tried to avoid smoking anything in prison, it was a sure bet that it wasn’t weed at all but something vaguely green and covered in whatever substances were available to the seller and he didn’t want to become addicted to meth or fentanyl, but if there was nothing else to ingest, he would buckle to the desire to lose consciousness.
Of course, depending on the mood of his cellmate, Truck, he didn’t need to find any substances to knock him out. Truck had developed a habit of knocking Dae unconscious any time he wanted to anally rape him, which occured at least three times in a week. When they first became cellmates, Truck forced sex on Dae regularly, but fellatio required a conscious performer and Truck didn’t seem to mind pounding Dae’s backside in the dark with a hand firmly covering his mouth to muffle the sounds of pain that escaped Dae. But after he started smiling more, and Truck beat away his hope, Dae started to feign pleasure during Truck’s assaults. His moans of pain gained a tenor of enjoyment, and he seemed to greedily accept Trucks penis into any orifice. Dae had hoped that his enjoyment of Truck physical attention would turn him off of the acts, but Truck just started knocking him out to perform anal sex and he skipped the oral altogether.
During his increased bouts of unconsciousness, Dae was visited by an old friend who was disappointed in the shell of a man he’d become since their last meeting at the center of everything.
“How’d I lose to you?” Azathoth asked with disgust in the closet at the center of everything. “You’re just a sex toy for an emotionally scarred brute. I was the Idiot God.”
They sit on the floor of the closet that is all white around them with empty hangers strewn all about.
“Then I was,” Dae said glumly. “And it all came crashing down.”
Azathoth laughed uproariously, throwing his head back and grabbing his sides.
“You are so naive,” Azathoth said. “Or maybe you are just dumb. It was me the whole time. Did you not recognize me?”
Azathoth ‘s face began to change like moving clay, and Dae saw the faces of all of his enemies in that moving mass.
“You were never the true Idiot God. You couldn’t handle it and I showed you that.”
Dae hung his head and slow tears began to pool around him. Azathoth stood in disgust.
“I forget what I ever saw in you to bring you here in the first place.”
There is silence between them for a moment and then a voice booms in the silence, startling them both.
“The devil planted fear inside the black baby!” the deep voice boomed through the white expanse. Azathoth looked around, perplexed by the origin of the voice.
“You ain’t never been no Idiot God,” the voice continued. “My seed grows God Kings.”
The last word woke him up with a start. He was face down in his bed and his backside was sore, but it was overshadowed by the throbbing at his temple where Truck had punched him until he lost consciousness.
“I’m a king,” he said as he dragged himself off of his bunk. It was dark, still the middle of the night, and Truck was sound asleep on the top bunk. “I’m a king,” Dae said again and he put a hand over Trucks mouth, then dug his fingernails of the other hand into Truck’s neck. Truck was strong, but Dae was newly inspired by the three words he’d been saying since he regained consciousness.
When the guards came around for roll call the next day, when the inmates lined up outside their cells before going to the showers, a guard stopped in front of Dae and asked about his cellmate.
“Truck dead,” was all Dae said and he was dragged to solitary.
Even though he’d been convicted of voluntary manslaughter for Truck’s death, Dae was distracted because he knew that he had heard the voice of his father. Something deep inside of himself was sure that it had been his father’s voice in the closet at the center of everything, and since he’d heard the voice, Dae was determined to reconstruct the man’s face.
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