24

The thing about transitions was this: they never went smoothly. There was no exception to this rule. You always tripped putting on a new pair of pants, your new haircut, always had to grow out a little before it looked quite right, and victims always spluttered and coughed before they died.

Transitioning between the new jails and the old jails was messier than dying. Ultimately, it was even messier than my own death, which was of a particularly sloppy nature.

I found something slightly ironic in the fact that they were planning on changing the old jails into schools, on leaving up the bars and covering them with cement to make walls and doors, and sending America's youth into their hallowed halls to become the future of tomorrow.



The criminals got a new building.

The whole event was a very big to-do, over dramatic and gauche. In the old jails we had a fairly reliable access to newspapers, which I read for lack of anything else better to do. Typically one or two copies was passed from cell to cell, and eventually the women's wing learned to pass the paper to me last. When I was done reading, I ripped it to bits.

Everything was so boring here.

It was the newspaper, not the guards, that told us our day of transport. We were being moved by city, then county, then state, and citizens were urged to take care on the days their areas were being transported. The Massachusetts State Penitentiary was October 26th. As prisoners, we were told to be ready to move at any time, that our date wasn't yet scheduled, but that we should pack our meager belongings now, because the date would soon be upon us.

We didn't do anything until five minutes before lights out, October 25th.

And I did nothing at all. There was nothing from my past or my present that I wanted. I would have (and in the new jails, did) killed for an unread book or newspaper, just to fight with the unbeatable ennui of prison, but the few things I had--the Bible the therapist had given me in case I wanted to repent, the watch with the dead battery, the locket that had belonged to my great-grandmother--weren't objects that killed boredom. I had already read the Bible. It was an okay book, but I did not begin to understand why everyone loved it so much.