Four

Three

Two

16

Given my constitution, I never would have suspected that a wild source of entertainment in my new world would involve another person. And yet it was the unending capacity of big Marcus to tell stories that kept most of us entertained in times when we had nothing else to do, when nobody in our area had brought in anything interesting for us to poke at and play with. And even after a year of living in the same room, he had a myriad of stories to tell, from folklore to ghost stories to tales of his own past.

Typically, it was this last genre that was the most interesting. As time went on, we learned tales about specific events in Marcus’ childhood: When he was six years old, he got in his first fist fight. It was over a girl, he grinned wolfishly. Her name was Mary Lou and she lived three houses down and her mother was named Mary Lou and her grandmother was named Mary Lou and everyone in the goddamn family was named Mary Lou, but big Marcus couldn’t appreciate that that was bizarre until he was much older.

15

The outside world was not faring as well as was we insiders. We heard snippets of news from the newcomers, got newspapers every now and again. As time went on, they started permitting new inmates to fill up the bag we’d been given, to bring things with them. Occasionally we would get a studiously minded little thing that would bring us books, but not too often. I almost regretted not bringing my newspapers, though I made a point to never regret anything. Besides, I could still see every word firmly in my mind as though I were reading currently. Still, I would have liked to have some connection to knowledge. We could only surmise and wonder and predict what was happening in a world that was so very different from ours.

Yes, the government had saved money by turning criminals into kings, but what they had saved wasn’t nearly enough. Somehow the global economy was still floundering.

14

After that, my life changed in a clear and noticeable way. In the old jails, we had been governed by a very precise and careful set of rules. In response to these rules, you did not argue, you did not question, and you did not dare disobey, because in most cases (mine was a notable exception) you could be let out early and regain your freedom again.

In the mornings, we would get up and report to breakfast. We would eat our disgusting paltry meal and then we would wash our own dishes. We would put them away and then we would wash our hands, herded unceremoniously like a herd of unruly children. The men and the women did not eat together and they did not clean up together. Then we would be taken outside to the fenced in yard for a short recess period. We were not permitted to stand idle, and we were not permitted to stand and chat in groups, as the guards feared that congregations like these were potential uprisings or escapes. They would harass us and prod us and threaten us until we at least circuited the yard. Still, it was not advisable to stay in any large groups while walking, as the guards were still suspicious of these.

13

Somehow the new jail reminded me of the right side of my old high school. First there was the entryway, and then a large hall, just like the old cafeteria. The whole left side, with the classrooms and gyms and lockers weren’t there. There were more gates here, with heavier padlocks, than at my old high school , as well. As soon as they got me though the final set of gates, they unclasped my handcuffs. I rubbed my wrists; the right one had been chafed by all the tugging from the irritable guard.

I wasn’t certain if they chose not to check my bag because they knew I was coming from another jail or because they just didn’t care what was inside, but the two monitors at the door, a pair of tough looking old women with pursed lips, just indicated that the guards should bustle me on through, lock me in, and then go get the next prisoner. I was thrust unceremoniously into a large room half full of criminals, and the door clanked shut behind me. Everyone else stared at me with empty eyes, eyes that were used to seeing newcomers. Thus began my stint in the new jails.

12

They moved us in increasing levels of severity: drunken and disorderly criminals that were only in for a night got moved first and then were out so quickly that they hardly had time to meet any others. Then it was the petty criminals, those who only had a few years in. The two wings got emptier and emptier and busier and busier. Once they got to the high-profile prisoners, those like me, the murderers, the rapists, the committers of treason, they started pulling them out one by one.

I was one of the last to go. One of the guards came unexpectedly into my cell, where I was reading my daily newspaper. He slammed open the door waving a club which he thought made him seem important and threw a medium sized sack with all his strength into my chest. I looked inside: my old clothes were there, the ones I’d been wearing when I first went to jail. It was hardly the kind of an outfit you would want to spend a significant amount of time in any jail wearing. For the very reasons my lawyers would have wanted me to dress so for my trial would I have not wanted to be caught dead mixed among the people I had been mixed among for the past several years wearing what I had in this bag.

11

At that point in the world, things were in disarray. The country was in a panic over an economic crisis and in a tizzy over the closing of Guantanamo Bay. There was a heavy, precarious pressure weighing on the United States’ penal system. Too much money was going into sustaining the living prisoners, too much money was going into killing the death row prisoners. A new political regime was coming into power.

We heard about it first in the jails, which was uncommon. We got our newspapers a day old, a constant source of complaints for the men who were interested in sports. They couldn’t stand waiting an extra minute not knowing who had won the big game, the World Series, the Super bowl, or any other number of uninteresting exhibitions of so called skill that were exactly like the last.

10

Because I was the last cell on my side of the corner, I could see into the first cell on the other side of the corner, as long as I stood on the right side of my cell and he stood on the left side of his. At first, when I noticed him watching me, I paid him no mind. I was the observer, not the observed, and he would never be able to unravel me, anyway. Over time, though, I realized that he continued to watch my cell for those times where I stood on the far right. And so I began to watch him in return.

He didn’t laugh along at the rude jokes about the therapist when the other men began to make them. He didn’t talk to them and he didn’t join in their bawdy songs. He was as separate from the men as I was from the women. And as time went on, we would just watch and watch silently. He was interesting to me in that I wasn’t sure whether or not I could manipulate him. With his silence, he gave me an unclear, empty impression of his intelligence that could have been anywhere from blind idiocy to brilliance of my level.

9

Thus started my stint in the old jails. At this point in the world, things were bad, but not as bad as they would come to be in the next few years. I had read hundreds of books on topics like these and could have possibly stopped the madness, if I felt like it was something that was interesting, but instead they locked me into a twelve foot by twelve foot jail cell on twenty seven life sentences and forced me to speak (or rather, to sit silently in the presence of) a young, bright eyed therapist who thought she was going to change the world some day.

Little did she know that within five years, her job would become obsolete and she’d be left filing papers at a real psychologist’s office. At the time when I knew her, she had the air of someone trying too hard to contain her excitement, to keep her eagerness within professional bounds. She had all of the emotion I had been fighting to obtain for years, and yet I couldn’t conjure up the energy of passion to hate her for it. Now that I was in jail, my book obtained knowledge of society told me that “should” no longer constrained me. It was no more or less boring in here than it was in the outside world: I read a steady stream of newspapers to keep my brain as occupied as possible.

8

At the trial, they tried to paint me as an innocent, sweet child. I was twenty five then. I wore my hair short and rounded on the ends, used headbands to keep it out of my face. I had a ring made out of a spoon that I had made during the one art class I’d needed to graduate college. It was the only piece of jewelry I wore, excepting a pair of cubic zirconium earrings my mother had given me for my thirteenth birthday and that I hadn’t taken out since. I hadn’t moved them when I’d gotten my ears pierced and the skin had healed around them. It was the last mistake I ever made.

My lawyer told me to look scared, to look young. I was young. I wasn’t scared, but she was scared of me, scared in a way that she wasn’t afraid to admit, because I wouldn’t tell her anything and she didn’t think she was going to win the case.

7

My intelligence led itself not to a conflict, but to an intellectual dissonance: I understood intellectually that I was supposed to feel things. I understood that society considered my lifestyle to be wrong, that most people would frown upon a different man every night and a bottle of booze to accompany it. They would not have approved of a girl who dabbled in illegal substances but was too intelligent to ever get caught or get addicted.

I myself did not feel morality; I did not sense morality. I knew what I had learned from books and television shows and movies. I devoured the media by the handful, by the bucketful. I buried myself in the thoughts and feelings of others to see if I could find it for myself. I couldn’t.

6

It started when I was about twelve. My grandmother died from lung cancer. She’d been an avid smoker, claiming it calmed her jittery nerves, and that any thing that had led to her meeting my grandfather was a good thing. He had asked her, fifty seven years before, if he could borrow a light. They’d gotten to talking and the rest, she smiled down at me, was history. She hadn’t stopped smoking when he’d gotten lung cancer and died, stating that she was too old to change her ways.

We had been close when she’d been alive. She had taken care of me after school when I was a child, and my mother kept saying things that told me her illness ought to be hitting me hard, but I never really believed she would die. My grandmother had been a hale woman, had climbed up on chairs to reach tall shelves, could always be found out in her garden, mowed her own lawn every week.

5

All the news shows predicted that mine would be the trial of the century. They showed the same pictures of me over and over: one standing at the gates of my college on graduation day, one of me at the front of my kindergarten class, and one of me entering the courthouse. That day I was wearing a red scarf and a skirt with a simple pattern of flowers on it, the one that my neighbors had once laughingly told me was every inch the kindergarten teacher.

For a while, I was the topic of countless human interest pieces, as they were, perhaps debates. Various acquaintances throughout my life wanted to believe that a girl like me, a young girl from a good family with a good education and a nice home, with a steady job, who helped her neighbors unload their groceries and taught five year olds to tie their shoes—nobody wanted to believe a girl like that could be a killer. Only my political science professor from my sophomore year of college pointed out that although he remembered me being very polite, my quietness had a sense of coldness to it, too.

4

The thing my lawyer, hired by my mother, never realized was that I didn’t get caught by accident. She, always clad in pantyhose that wrinkled around her ankles and a suit that was a size too big, didn’t appreciate my brilliance, and was far too stupid to understand the complexities of my brilliance. She showed me clips of myself on the news, as if this would prompt me to speak to her. I rewarded her with more silence. I would give her nothing.

In truth, I had grown bored even of killing. After twenty seven murders and not getting caught twenty six times, there was hardly an element of surprise. There was hardly an element of success when the police didn’t come knocking down my door. I had killed men and women, young and old, of every color, creed, race, religion. I had been careful not to let a clear method of operation emerge. I had poisoned, stabbed, strangled, and beaten. I had carefully dismembered and burned twenty six bodies beyond recognition, strewn their pieces in all four cardinal directions. I had tightly bound my hair at murder scenes, worn gloves, kept me and them separate so as to keep myself safe.

3

I saw it all coming before anyone else did. An objective observer, I noticed the commercials switching from promising the best quality to promising the most for your money. It no longer mattered whether or not this was the best television; it only cost a few hundred dollars. Nobody cared that this was the best-tasting mac-and-cheese; you could feed your entire family for only a dollar. News shows started to discuss financial crises more and more and more, showing more and more dramatic prognostications until the budget was cut and all they had were their words.

At that point in my life I taught kindergarten, because no matter how brilliant I was, I never could predict the actions of five year olds. It was almost interesting, the constant game I had to play with them: I had to remember when they would expect a smile, had to remember when to be stern. I had to learn how to offer comforting words when they needed them, taught them how to tie shoes and zip zippers and write their own names.

2

After I killed the first time, I went to the funeral, just to see if that would make me understand. Books told me that killing was wrong; movies told me that killing was wrong. People, newspapers, the news—they all told me that killing was wrong. I went to the closed-casket funeral with his crying family members and his crying friends and a eulogy that was too long and too boring about how he’d been such a great man and all that other nonsense.

There was a luncheon afterwards, and I sat amongst a knot of friends, some from work, some from college, some from childhood, who all exchanged boring stories about how great their dead friend had been. They assumed that my silence spoke for grief, not that I could barely remember his name. For a while I sat by his widow, with his children. The smallest one offered me a cookie, which was pretty good.

1

Every single one of us in this room was a criminal. With varying severity, we had each broken the law, some with tiny fractures, others shattering it into hundreds of pieces. I played Cat's Cradle with an arms dealer in the corner. Funny, but it was always the petty criminals that fought. A thief had an embezzler in a chokehold. Marcus, the treasonous clerk, raised an eyebrow at me. I could have stopped them if I wanted to. There was a knife at the small of my back.

Those of us that knew violence knew it was pointless in here. In here, an elaborate murder didn't save your sister, and it didn't give your country the upper hand. It didn't stop another killer and it didn't prevent a dangerous disease from spreading. The only thing murder did in here was murder. They'd fill up the dead man's spot in a day or two, anyway.

One

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