Away from school I worked hard at being the same old home boy everybody remembered, not because I identified with that mask but because I didn’t want youall to discover I was a traitor. Even at home a part of me stood outside, watching me perform. Even within the family. The watching part was unnamable. I hated it and depended on it. It was fear and cunning and anger and alienation; it was chaos, a yawning emptiness at the center of my being.
Once, in Wyoming, I saw a gut-shot antelope. A bullet had dropped the animal abruptly to its knees. It waggled to its feet again, tipsy, dazed. Then it seemed to hear death, like a prairie fire crackling through the sagebrush at its heels. The antelope bolted, a flat-out, bounding sprint, trailing guts like streamers from its low-slung potbelly. I was running that hard, that fast, but without the antelope’s blessed ignorance. I knew I was coming apart.
I could get ugly, vicious with people real quick. They’d think they knew the person they were dealing with, then I’d turn on them. Get drunk or fed up or just perverse for perversity’s sake. Exercise the dark side of my power. Become a stranger, a different person. I’d scare people, hurt them. What I did to others, I was doing to myself. I wasn’t sure I cried real tears, bled real blood. Didn’t know whose eyes stared back at me from the mirror. Problem is, I’m not talking about ancient history. I’ve changed. We’ve all changed. A lot’s happened in the last twenty years. But what I was, I still am. You have to know this. My motives remain suspect. A potential for treachery remains deep inside the core. I can blend with my surroundings, become invisible. An opaque curtain slides down between me and others, between the part of me that judges and weighs and is accountable for my actions and that part that acts. Then, as always, I’m capable of profound irresponsibility. No way of being accountable because there’s no one, no place to turn to.
I try harder these days. Love, marriage, children, a degree of success in the world, leisure to reconsider, to reason with myself, to read and write have increased my insight and altered my perspective. But words like “insight” and “altered perspective” are bullshit. They don’t tell you what you need to know. Am I willing to go all the way? Be with you? Share the weight? Go down with you wherever you have to go? No way to know beforehand. Words can’t do that. Words may help me find you. Then we’ll have to see. . . .
You’ve seen Jamila almost yearly. Since she was a baby she’s accompanied us on our visits to the prison. One of the family. I date your time in prison by her age. She used to cry coming and going. Now she asks questions, the hard kind I can’t answer. The kinds of questions few in this society bother to pose about the meaning, the intent, the utility of locking people behind bars.
How long will Robby be in cage?
In a book about the evolution of imprisonment during the Middle Ages I discovered the word “jail” does in fact derive from “cage.” Prisons in medieval England were basically custodial cages where convicted felons awaited punishment or the accused were held till traveling magistrates arrived to pass judgment. At specified towns or villages within the circuit of his jurisdiction a justice would sit (old French assise, hence the modern “assizes”), and prisoners would be transported from gaol to have their fate determined. Jamila knew what she was talking about We said “jail” and she heard “cage,” heard steel doors clanking, iron locks rattling, remembered animals penned in the zoo. Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, reveal the history buried in sounds. They haven’t forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words—rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition—children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.
Maybe Jamila’s a yardstick for you too. Years registering in terms of pounds and inches. The changes in her body are the reality of time passing, the reality less observable in your outward appearance. People ask, How’s Robby? and I don’t know what to answer. If I say he’s okay, people take that to mean he’s the same. He’s still the person we knew when he was free. I don’t want to give anyone that impression of you. I know you’re changing, growing as fast as Jamila. No one does time outside of time.
A narrow sense of time as a material entity, as a commodity like money that can be spent, earned, lost, owed, or stolen is at the bottom of the twisted logic of incarceration. When a person is convicted of a crime, the state dispossesses that criminal of a given number of days, months, years. Time pays for crime. By surrendering a certain portion of his allotment of time on earth the malefactor pays his debt to society.
But how does anyone do time outside of time? Since a person can’t be removed from time unless you kill him, what prison does to its inmates is make time as miserable, as unpleasant, as possible. Prison time must be hard time, a metaphorical death, a sustained, twilight condition of death-in-life. The prisoner’s life is violently interrupted, enclosed within a parenthesis. The point is to create the fiction that he doesn’t exist. Prison is an experience of death by inches, minutes, hours, days.
Yet the little death of a prison sentence doesn’t quite kill the prisoner, because prisons, in spite of their ability to make the inmate’s life unbearable, can’t kill time. Incarceration as punishment always achieves less and more than its intent. No matter how drastically you deprive a prisoner of the benefits of society, abridge his civil and legal rights, unman and torture him, unless you take his life, you can’t take away his time. Many inmates die violently in prisons, almost all suffer in ways beyond an outsider’s comprehension, but life goes on and since it does, miracles occur. Bodies languish, spirits are broken, yet in some rare cases the prison cell becomes the monk’s cell, exile a spiritual retreat, isolation the blessed solitude necessary for self-examination, self-discipline.
In spite of all the measures Western society employs to secularize time, time transcends the conventional social order. Prisoners can be snatched from that order but not from time. Time imprisons us all. When the prisoner returns to society after serving his time, in an important sense he’s never been away. Prisoners cannot step into the same river twice—prison may have rendered them unfit to live in free society, prison may have radically altered the prisoner’s sense of self, his relation to his family and friends—but the river never goes away; it breaches the walls, washes them, washes us. We only pretend the prisoner has gone away.
We visit you in prison. Here we come. The whole family. Judy, Dan, Jake, Jamila. Our nuclear unit and Mom and whoever else we can fit into the Volvo station wagon. We try to arrive at the prison as early as possible, but with five in our crew competing for time and space in Mom’s tiny bathroom in the house on Tokay, and slow-as-molasses nieces Monique and Tameka to pick up in East Liberty after we’re all ready, we’re lucky if we set off before noon. But here we come. Getting ready as we’d get ready for any family outing. Baths, teeth brushed, feeding, coaxing, the moment somewhere at the height of the bustle, frustration, and confusion when I say to myself, Shit. Is it worth all this hassle? Let’s just call it off. Let’s muzzle these little beasts and go back to bed and forget the whole thing. But we persevere. We’re on our way.
Jamila is the youngest visitor. Five and a half years old, my only daughter, your niece, approximately three feet tall, at the time of this visit, this visit which can stand for all visits. She has very large eyes. Mom’s eyes, you christened them in Laramie; she is petite but built strong, taut like her mother. It’s summer so her skin is tanned a golden-toned beige. As a consequence of prematurity and having her head shaved so feeding tubes could be inserted in the veins crisscrossing her skull, for a long while Jamila was bald. Now her hair is coming in nicely, tending to blond at the wispy edges where it curls