Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

46

THE MONTH BETWEEN WEDNESDAY, April 27 and Friday, May 27 was the most horrible month of my life. In the first place, I was in prison.

Well, I hadn’t been before. I’d been a visitor, a roomer, hardly a prisoner. But starting the twenty-seventh of April I was a prisoner, and no mistake.

What does a prisoner do? He gets up at seven-thirty in the morning and cleans his area. He eats breakfast. He exercises for an hour on the yard and spends the rest of the morning in his cell. He eats lunch. He exercises for an hour on the yard and spends the rest of the afternoon in his cell. He eats dinner. He spends the evening in his cell. He goes to bed. Much later, he goes to sleep.

What else does a prisoner do? Once a week he gets permission to go to the library and get three books. If he has full privileges he works at a job somewhere in the prison, but if he only has partial privileges he at least gets to wander around much of the prison area during the day and he gets to see a movie once a week and he gets to sit down in the library and read a magazine. But if he has no privileges he sits in his cell and tries to read his three books a week very, very slowly. No movies, no wandering around, no job, no nothing.

It is all extremely boring. Boredom is a horrible punishment, just about the grimmest long-term thing you can do to somebody. Boredom is very boring. It’s very bad. I don’t know how to establish this point without becoming boring, and God knows I don’t want to do that.

The only respites I had from boredom were the occasional attacks made on my person by good God-fearing friends of Father Flynn. They were potentially dangerous, since they usually came after me in bunches of ten or twelve, but I quickly learned that whenever a tightly- massed group of mesomorphs moved toward me I should move toward a guard, so they never managed to do much damage. However, it was the one time that my belonging to the gymnasium tough guy group didn’t protect me from the violence endemic to a prison situation, and if helped to make me feel even more remote from my former existence.

I had little opportunity for practical joking, and in any event no desire. I was too depressed. I lived for the occasional verbal message from Marian passed on to me by Max-a written note would have been too dangerous to carry around-and every morning I woke up hoping that today another note would be found: today, today, today.

But it never was. The bastard had stopped again. Day after day went by, and no messages, and every day without a message was another day for the warden to become more convinced that I was the guilty party after all.

Until, on Friday, the twenty-seventh of May, Guard Stoon came to my cell to escort me once more to the warden’s office. Feeling suddenly alive again, I said, “Did something happen? Another message? Is that why he wants me?”

“No,” Stoon said. “Nothing’s happened, no more messages, and it’s been a month today. That's why he wants you.” And there was a grim satisfaction in the way he said it.