Men Seeking Women Page 2

  So they locked him in a cage and threw away the key. No privileges, no visitors. The prison warden and jailers had no idea Claude was even on the computer; he used it on the sly, logging on whenever and wherever he got the chance. If they let him into the yard for some playtime, for example, he managed to sneak in a few sentences on his way out of the building, and a few more on his way back in. One time, the warden caught him staring up at the CRT, typing away, and he was sent to a room in the basement where they administered grueling shock therapy for two hours straight.

  Ann-Marie wanted to write the prison board about the abuses to which Claude had been subjected, but he was adamant that she stay silent. We cannot seek justice from the ones who dispense injustice, he wrote. You and I, we shall have our day together in the sun, and then, and only then, shall we both swing free.

  She just loved it when he talked like that.

  They discussed art and politics and music and travel, all of it shunted through Prisoners4Love.com, all of it magical and special and filled with the kind of banter that only two equals can share. It was easy, Ann-Marie found, to open herself up to this stranger, this Claude, partially because the rapid-fire e-mail was a faceless form of communication, but mostly because he was closer to human than any other man she’d ever met. He was kind, he was funny, he was caring and decent, and most of all, he listened. He asked questions. Claude was the kind of man her mother had always talked about, and even if he wasn’t quite a gallant knight in shining armor, he was at least a kindly knave in not-too-soiled trousers.

  And he was sensitive, there was no doubt about that, too soft a soul for the rigors of prison life. My fellow inmates are little more than animals, he wrote to Ann-Marie one day. A convict named Albert is imprisoned next to me, and some days we converse through the bars. But he understands little of what I say, and I choose to understand little of his grunts and groans. Most of the time, he sits in the corner of his cell and pleasures himself. I imagine his crime must be great, indeed. Across the way is Pierre, and he regularly enrages our jailers by throwing his feces at them through the bars; he finds this the height of amusement, and the more I tell him to refrain, the more often he does it. Animals surround me, and nothing more. But I was once exactly like them, a savage in a world of innocents, and I can only hope that one day they, too, will feel the warm glow of enlightenment.

  Ann-Marie responded in kind, writing of her coworkers, of her boss, of the details of her workaday life, and though no one on her side of the bars threw feces or masturbated in public, she managed to make their trials and tribulations with company bureaucracy sound interesting nevertheless. And as the weeks of communication grew into months, she found herself opening up doors she thought were sealed shut long ago. She told him about the relationships she’d had with other men, about the ways in which they’d treated her. About the abuse and the heartache. It sounds corny, she typed, but I think my sense of trust is gone. I think I’ve forgotten how to trust men.

  Do you trust me? Claude wrote back.

  She didn’t e-mail him for two days. Didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Didn’t want to say the right thing, either. For forty-eight hours she thought about his question. Was it possible to trust a man she’d never met? To trust someone whose picture she’d never seen? Whose last name she’d never even heard?

  Yes, she wrote finally. I trust you.

  And do you love me? Claude e-mailed in return.

  This one took longer. By this point, Ellen’s Ulysses had been freed from prison on a technicality, and the two had taken off on a whirlwind tour of Ohio, each professing to be madly in love with the other. They’d all gone out to dinner one night after he was freed but before the vacation began so that Ann-Marie could meet Ellen’s new beau, and she had to admit to herself that, felony conviction aside, he seemed like quite a catch.

  “. . . so the fingerprints couldn’t have been his,” Ellen said that night, speaking with near-religious fervor. “The crime lab was in on the setup the whole time, and Ulysses’s lawyers figured it out, so—”

  Ulysses laid a thick hand over Ellen’s shoulder, cooling her off. “It ain’t important, baby,” he said in a deep, gravelly tone that sent chills up Ann-Marie’s legs. “We got each other now, and that’s all that matters.” They fell into a deep kiss that lasted over five minutes, Ann-Marie twiddling her fingers and trying to stare at the walls. But she couldn’t blame them for their passion; Ulysses’s retrial wasn’t scheduled for two months, and the whole wide state was in front of them, ready to be conquered by their love.

  So Ann-Marie didn’t know if it was truly possible to fall in love over the computer, but she couldn’t deny the emotion between Ellen and Ulysses any more than she could deny the deep tugs she felt on her own heart every time she saw a new e-mail appearing in her inbox. There could only be one true answer.

  Yes, Claude, she wrote him after a weeklong hiatus of introspection. Yes, Claude, I love you.

  Wonderful, was his reply. Then marry me.

  Father Flaherty from www.findapriest.com presided over a beautiful ceremony, held on the virtual grounds of the website for St. Basil’s Cathedral. Ann-Marie found the site, a sprawling thirty-eight pages boasting pictures of gardens, gazebos, and flowered trellises, after an exhaustive hunt that practically shut down every search engine she encountered. She even contacted the I.T. manager at the cathedral offices and convinced him to add some lace-and-rose clip art to the chapel’s main page, further customizing the site for their big day.

  Claude spent his time bribing and sucking up to the guards so that they’d turn their backs during the twenty-minute wedding, allowing him to hop out of the cell and log on to the chat area at the same time as Ann-Marie and Father Flaherty. There was only one invited guest—Ellen logged in from Cleveland, where she and Ulysses had taken up residence in a Traveller’s Inn motel during the last few days before his new trial would begin.

  Ann-Marie was alone in her house when the wedding was set to start, standing in front of her television screen, four-hundred-dollar wedding gown draped across her small frame as she typed upon the small WebTV keyboard. Traffic was heavy that day, and the static on her phone line was acting up again, making connection difficult. Ann-Marie cursed under her breath and retried the connection; she knew that Claude would only be able to log on for a maximum of twenty minutes, and after that, he’d have to return to his cell. Ann-Marie simply couldn’t be late for her own wedding.

  But the third dial-up did the trick, and soon she was pulling up her bookmarks and sliding into StBasilsCathedral.org, firing up her IRC chat as soon as she saw the page hit her screen. Anxiety and anticipation flew into her chest, her heart fluttering, heels digging into her living room carpet, as the communication software pulled itself into a half-screen window.

  Claude was already there, and he shot her a smiley-faced emoticon. She tossed one back, fingers trembling against the keyboard. Ellen typed out G-A-G, and the show was on. Father Flaherty began with a sermon on truth and love, skipped over the part about natural law, and ended up with honesty and forgiveness. There were some fake cries of protest from Ellen and Ulysses and a minor incident with a fifteen-year-old who stumbled into the chat room while trying to locate his girlfriend from Norway, but soon enough Ann-Marie and Claude were typing in their vows and their “I do”s and blowing kissy-kissys across cyberspace in the form of little JPEG images Ann-Marie had yanked from some porn site. Soon enough, they were husband and wife, and, at thirty-five years of age, Ann-Marie was finally married to the greatest man she could ever imagine.

  The honeymoon four days later was a two-hour affair, graciously hosted by Jamaicanvacations.com, and they provided all the MP3 and JPEG files that the two lovers would need to make their vacation complete. Ann-Marie changed from her wedding dress into a monokini she’d bought specifically for the occasion, and though the temperature outside her house was well below fifty degrees, she was on fire as she sat on her sofa in that skimpy outfit and typed steamy
sentences of love to her new husband while photos of a blue ocean and perfect sky floated by on her color TV.

  Their marriage was valid only in a small county up in northern Minnesota, but Ann-Marie didn’t care. She loved being married to Claude, even if he didn’t have a last name, and their relationship only grew more intense with every passing day. Ann-Marie found herself taking time off work in order to stay home and sew sheets and pillowcases for the day when they could truly take to the marital bed, though she had no idea of when that day might come. Claude told Ann-Marie that as part of the special prison system in which he was an inmate, parole dates were not made available to the prisoners. He had no way of knowing when he would be released, if ever. And the time away from Ann-Marie, difficult before, was now growing impossible to bear.

  I grow tired of this life, he wrote one day. Of the sterile white walls, of my jailers and their patronizing tones, of the beasts with whom I have to share my space, every day, in every way, of the pain and the tests and the terrible inhuman tortures I and my fellow inmates are forced to endure. But as long as I know that you are on the other side of these walls, my beautiful Ann-Marie, waiting for me with open arms and a smile upon that tender face, then I may indeed last an eternity, with only your letters and my dreams to see me through.

  Such optimism did not last long, and Ann-Marie’s e-mails to the Department of Corrections about the abuses did no good; they either claimed not to know what she was talking about or bounced her back and forth to different departments until she gave up in frustration.

  Then one night, as Ann-Marie returned from a long quarter-day at the office, she found a short e-mail in her inbox. It was from Claude, and bore none of his usual devotions of love.

  They took Albert away this afternoon, it read, I don’t know where to. But when he came back, he was dying. An hour ago, as I reached through the bars and held his head in my hands, he looked up at the ceiling, smiled, and passed away. I fear that I am next.

  Ann-Marie wrote six e-mails that night, and ten the next morning, but there was no response from Claude. Another fifteen followed, and twenty more after that; she hoped that if she could flood the server with mail, someone would notice, someone would alert the proper authorities. He couldn’t be dying. He couldn’t be dead. This was Claude, her husband. This was the only man she had ever truly loved.

  Three days later, when she had just about abandoned hope in the Internet and prepared to make an actual phone call, the telltale bing! of incoming mail interrupted her Web surfing. She could almost hear Claude’s voice as she read the letter, his hurried, impassioned tone:

  Dear one,

  This is the hardest letter I have ever had to write to you, and I only wish that it did not have to be so terse. But my time is short, and you must believe me when I say all will be explained in time. For now, you need only know this: They are coming for me.

  After Albert’s death, Pierre was next. Last night, Enrico passed into the great beyond, and as I write this, old Ben sits behind his bars, coughing and wheezing, barely able to take a breath. My jailers tell me that nothing is wrong, that I’m being paranoid, that it’s just a virus going around the prison, and that I’m safe from harm, but I know the truth. They are waiting for me, because I am the brightest, because I know it is coming, but they will indeed take me soon, and it will all be over.

  Attached to this e-mail you will find an address, a blueprint, and a set of instructions. The address is that of the prison in which I am held captive; the blueprint is an exact diagram of my building. The instructions go into details regarding the date, the time, and the best method of executing the plan.

  Please, my love, my life, my wife, my dearest Ann-Marie, help me. Release me from this dungeon, this hell, before they release me first.

  No more letters, my love, lest they find our communications in their pitifully small disk cache. But I know that you will understand, that you will believe, and that I will see you soon. And then we will finally be together, as near to man and wife as is possible in this crazy, mixed-up world.

  Your ever-faithful, ever-loving husband, Claude.

  This time, it didn’t take any thought on Ann-Marie’s part. There was only one option, and nothing more. The law and morality and ethics would have to be put aside—none of it mattered, not now, not like this. As far as she was concerned, Claude was no different from that Hurricane Carter, whose story she’d just seen in a movie on pay-per-view—hate had put him into prison, but love, in the guise of Ann-Marie and a set of blueprints, was gonna bust him out.

  Ann-Marie had the cab drop her off a mile from the prison so that she couldn’t be placed at the scene afterward. This was the kind of thing Claude had suggested in his e-mail attachment. She also wore a wig purchased at a shop near her home, as well as an all-black ensemble picked up at an army surplus store, with the exception of her shoes, which were a pair of comfortable Nine West flats she’d had for some time. Claude had suggested that she don something easy on the feet; he said that jailbreaks tend to go awry when you dandy up the footwear.

  Whatever part of her once understood and obeyed the law had been overshadowed by her desire to free her husband from danger. And even as she stood in the shadow of his prison, the cold night drilling into her clothing, chilling her skin, she felt no fear. She felt only excitement and exuberance that she and her one true love would soon be united.

  Claude had already alerted her that there would be no barbed wire, no guards in high towers with powerful rifles, none of the standard things she’d naturally come to expect from a prison due to years of overexposure to film and television. But she wasn’t expecting to find a short, squat building with a host of large windows along the side and a wide expanse of green lawn out front. Strong halogen lights kept it lit even in the dark of night, but it didn’t have the menacing aura Ann-Marie expected. It looked a lot like the high-tech campuses she’d seen on the late-night news shows, or some low-rent college. Perhaps Claude was being held in another wing.

  But despite the lack of ambient danger, she kept to the shadows as she crept up to the building, slinking around back where Claude said he’d bribed a guard to leave the door unlocked. Ann-Marie tried the knob, and was relieved to find that it was indeed open. Keeping her movements even, she pulled the door ajar and slipped inside.

  Once again, her assumptions failed her. Here were stark white walls, a hallway full of doors rather than the dull gray bars her mind had conjured up. Here were signs saying DID YOU SIGN IN TODAY? and A STEADY TECHNOLOGY FOR A STEADY TOMORROW. Ann-Marie ignored it all. Set her mind to the task. Followed that blueprint.

  As she walked down the empty halls, her footfalls echoing even with those comfortable flats, she kept an eye out for cell 242. Claude had said that the outer door would be open, but that once inside, he could instruct her on how to free him from behind the bars that had so long held him captive.

  Ann-Marie came to an intersection of hallways and stopped to get her bearings. Suddenly, as she stared down at the printed-out map in her hands—she’d had to borrow Ellen’s printer for the occasion—a voice rang out behind her, carried upon a breath tinged with filtered Marlboros.

  “You’re lost?”

  Suddenly, Ann-Marie couldn’t breathe. All of the bravado, the overriding sense of righteousness, disappeared in a lick of smoke and two simple words. It came again. “I said, are you lost? You’re lookin’ at that damn map like it’s the Bible.”

  Ann-Marie turned to find a tall man draped in a white lab coat. “My husband . . .” was all she could say. She knew she was done for; no need to start lying now. The arrest would come now, followed by a quick trial and her own incarceration. Perhaps she could get off in five or six years with good behavior.

  “Your husband . . . what? You’re here to see him?”

  Ann-Marie nodded mutely. “Two-forty-two,” she mumbled.

  The man sighed, grabbed her shoulders, faced her in the opposite direction, and said, “Walk. Six doors down on yo
ur right.” He then brushed past her and disappeared into another room, muttering, “I don’t know why they let these people inside . . .”

  Ann-Marie’s heart had barely swung back into a steady rhythm by the time she arrived in front of cell 242, and the proximity to her one true love made it kick up once again. She put her hand on the knob, steeling herself for the initial view, that very first glance. Ann-Marie was at the door to cell 242, but she knew that, in many ways, she was at the door to the rest of her life. And all she had to do was open it up and walk inside.

  It was bright, brighter than the hallway, brighter than the halogen lights outside. Ann-Marie had to squint in order to make out the contents, and as she stepped inside, closing the door behind her, she was once again surprised at the physical makeup of the cell. Shiny metal tables were bolted to the floor, and atop them were computers, instruments, and wires that fed through loops and hooks hanging from the ceiling. Charts and tables lined the walls, graphs splattered with reds and blues, greens and oranges, as if a five-year-old with a bucket of paints had gotten to them.

  And in the far corner, surrounded by a host of empty cages, was a single, five-foot-by-five-foot-by-five-foot barred cell. Attached to the front was a brass nameplate, etched with six simple letters: CLAUDE.

  Ann-Marie, her brain in a fog, her body acting on its own accord, ran her fingers over the nameplate once, twice, a third time, only then bending down to take a look at her husband and true love inside his confines.

  And the chimpanzee inside the cage grinned back with delight.

  As Ann-Marie moved in closer, the chimp held out a sheet of paper, his furry fingers grasping the edges tightly. Ann-Marie took it from his hand, nearly tearing the letter as she snatched it away.

  My dear one, it read. If you are reading this, we are together at last. Unfortunately, my primitive vocal cords are unable to convey the words I wish to say, though my jailers here have, indeed, taught me how to type as part of their little experiment. Please, find the keys to my cage inside the closet across the room and free me, and we can run away from this place, together forever. Look into my eyes, Ann-Marie, and tell me that we will always be together.