“What the hell makes you say that?” he says, and the tone of his voice makes me turn. I see that his face has clouded over.

“Well…”

“I killed a guard because he was going to kill me,” Lester says, holding up a single bent finger in the air. “It’s wrong to kill, except in self-defense. There is no other justification. None.”

“No, I guess not,” I say and his eyebrows ease up.

“I was there for Jan van Eyck’s panels of The Crucifixion and The Last Judgment,” he says. “I had it. I was in and on my way out. The guy wasn’t even on duty. Do you want to know what he died for?

“A pen,” he says. “His wife gave him a silver pen for their anniversary. He came back for it and saw me going up a rope. He shot three times and missed. I didn’t…”

“The well-placed little things are the ones that can move mountains,” I say. “I guess that goes the same for the misplaced little things too. You want me on the top bunk?”

Lester rubs the white stubble on his chin and looks up at me.

“Is that Aristotle?” he asks.

“My dad.”

“The top is fine,” he says.

I hop up and try it out. The ceiling is twenty inches from my face. I am looking at a print of The Slave Ship by Turner from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

“God, Lester. How about something a little more cheerful?” I say. “To look at, I mean.”

“Of course,” he says. “How about an earlier period?”

“Like from the Renaissance or something?” I ask.

“Too far. I was thinking rococo,” Lester says, musing as he holds up the soft colorful print and examines it at arm’s length. A broad beam of sunlight filters down through the trees, illuminating an elegantly dressed young woman on a swing. “Fragonard’s The Swing.”

“It’s better,” I tell him. The colors are pleasing and everyone in the picture seems to be happy. Then I lower my voice. “But I shouldn’t bother you about it. We’re not going to be here very long anyway, eh?”

Lester drops his voice too and says, “We don’t need Einstein to tell us about the relativity of time.”

“Meaning,” I say, “a week? A month? A year?”

The bunk below me creaks and Lester’s face appears beside my ear. His bug eyes are wide. I smell those soft carrots from breakfast.

“Every tool in this prison sits on a shadow board,” he says. “Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“A board with the shape of that tool painted in black,” he says. “If a tool is missing, any tool at all, the entire prison is locked down. Everyone is searched. Everything is searched. Heads roll…

“I was in the shop in 1970 when the riot broke out,” he says. “I got a hacksaw blade, a chisel, and a claw hammer. More valuable than a Rembrandt. More valuable than the crown jewels. I will have one chance.

“I know you’re different, kid. You’re not one of these other animals. You saved my life for no reason, and I could use your strength. So, I’ll take you with me if I can, but I will not be rushed.”

Lester’s finger stabs up at the ceiling before he drops down out of sight. His bunk creaks, then he lies still. After a time, he begins to snore quietly.

I close my eyes. He’s brilliant, but he’s mad. A lonely old man who wants someone to care. I cannot stay here. They will get me before the day is out. I’ll have to punch the guard when they let us out for lunch. My eyes pinch tight and I try to slow my breathing.

LESTER MOANS and the bunk begins to creak. The girl in the picture above me is laughing. Her dress balloons out, showing her skirts. The bunk complains and Lester’s face is back by my ear.

“You need to sleep as much as you can during the day,” he says in a whisper. “We work at night.”

“What do we do?”

Lester looks around. He takes off his glasses. His naked eyes widen and blink. His fingers twist the plastic stem of the glasses. I roll on my side to get a better look.

“Drill bit,” he whispers. “With you, it’ll be twice as fast. I don’t know how long. Twelve months, maybe. Look, kid.”

Lester disappears and I slide off the bunk. He checks the bars, listening, then comes back and bends over the toilet. I lean close.

“Each cell is a steel box. Boilerplate steel,” he says, whispering. “But the prison was rebuilt in 1930 after the ’29 riot, so it’s old. Even the molecular order of steel is in the constant state of decomposition, returning to chaos.”

When he sees me looking at him funny, he says, “All matter seeks chaos. When it’s hot in the summer the sewage line from the toilet sweats like a bastard. In seventy-five years, even seamless half-inch-thick steel gets weak.”

He looks over his shoulder, then smudges his thumb against the metal wall close to the toilet. I detect a small hole, filled with a black substance.

“I fill the holes with shoe polish,” he says, “Every night. We work at night. After lights-out, they do a walkaround every hour to check. On the end cell, you hear the keys to the box before the guard opens the door to get in. You have plenty of time to get to your bunk.”

Lester looks wise again. My fingers shake as I reach out to touch the hole. I’m a basket case. Up. Down. Up. Down.

“What’s behind there?” I ask.

“Catwalk,” he says. “Access to all the pipes and wires and ductwork. Three times since ’77 I’ve broken drill bits off when I’m working in there and let them drop down. This one took a year to find. Down below is the basement, a holding tank of shit and piss and ten inches of scum. They left me in there to unclog a sewer pipe in ’99 and I hopped down into it and got this bit.

“Used to be you put everything up your ass, but they got smart back in ’98. Now they got the Boss Chair. It’s a metal detector you sit on, but my glasses work like a dream. It’s pretty goddamn nice, actually, not having to dig it out every night.”

I look at him to see if he’s playing with me, but his eyes are fixed on the wet steel. He stands up, fits the bit back into his thick plastic glasses, and puts them on. He adjusts the glasses on his hooked nose and, as if on cue, they announce it’s time for lunch.

Lester smiles at me and says, “Let’s eat.”

I don’t like the way we move like cattle out of the block and down through the yard toward the dining hall. I’m jumpy and there’s some twittering, but I don’t know where it’s coming from and no one touches me. I don’t look anyone in the eye. I don’t want to know them. I don’t even want to see them.

I take the boiled meat and the limp vegetables they serve me on a tray and follow Lester to a round seat that juts out from under the table on a metal arm. The tabletop is stainless steel like the tray. Two white men sit across from me. One is doughy with a bald head and a full brown beard.

“This is Carl,” Lester says, nodding toward the dough man. “Carl, Raymond. And that’s Justin.”

Justin is younger than I am-mid-thirties-with dirty blond hair, a ponytail, and a long muscular build. His arms are covered with tattoos. A green-and-orange snake’s head pokes out from beneath his collar with its tongue licking at his Adam’s apple. Part of a claw extends up toward his ear.

“Justin doesn’t talk,” Lester says. “But he’s okay.”

Carl belches and grins like an infant.

“They’re still finding bodies from Carl,” Lester says as if we were talking Easter eggs. “But he wouldn’t hurt a soul in here. He likes it here, don’t you, Carl?”

“Food’s not bad,” Carl says.

“He can’t hurt anyone,” Lester says. “And he doesn’t want to. Makes him feel safe to be locked up, I guess. He’s not the only one.”

After lunch, we go out on the south yard where the weights are. Half a football field of rusty machines and bars with the steel plates welded on so no one can use the bars as weapons. The weights are arranged in a patchwork of square spaces, and each area is painted a different drab color. Lester explains that the faded red weights belong to the Bloods. The yellow ones are for the Latin Kings, the blue for the Sunni Muslims.