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.
The world was doing their best to get their feet back under them, but fear prevailed: the men and women of the world were afraid. And because they were afraid, they saved their money, hoarded it, saved it under mattresses and in coffee cans buried in their back yards. It was a cruel, vicious cycle. The more they saved, the worse the economy got, the more frightened they got, so the more they saved. Someone had, at one point, brought in an economics textbook, a thousand pages long in tiny text. I read it cover to cover, but the tone was so dry that I was the only one who bothered to read.
When we were finished with things, we gave them back, so we didn’t fill our room from floor to ceiling with bodies and stuff. So after we had turned someone’s iPod on full volume so everyone could hear to the full extent of its battery and after we had played the tinny video games—we had no service, I supposed so we couldn’t commit treason or organize a breakout—on cell phones to the full limit of their power, we sent the rejected, useless pieces back out with our dishes from dinner. Either they couldn’t bother to send us back our things or they were told that anything that came out stayed out or maybe they too didn’t want to see us all suffocate from piles of old and useless junk, but they kept the trash.

So the economics textbook was lost after the first reading, after a thousand new pages were shoved into my head for safekeeping, for knowledge that I tried to apply to an outside world that I knew nothing about. Eventually someone brought in a volume of American history and I looked at the patterns. That was always my best academic ability, taking knowledge from one subject and applying it to another. I looked at the Panics and the Depressions of American history and looked at all the things that caused them to stop. I wondered how the American public would feel about it when they realized that the only thing that would save them from fear was fear and dead bodies; I wondered how the American public would feel about it when they realize the only thing that would save them from losing more and more of their own money was war.

It was something like ironic, but inside the jails were really the only places that were safe. We were guaranteed three meals a day without working a second for it, so we never had to worry about unemployment or going hungry. We didn’t have to worry about losing our jobs or having banks foreclose on our mortgages. We never had to worry about finding a roof over our heads, never had to worry about not having clean clothes or running water or a place to sleep at night. We only had to fear pissing off the wrong person, saying the wrong thing just to make someone a little too angry so that we’d be killed in such a way that the government approved, smiled upon it, and rewarded the murderer. In fact, if a person were not passionate about his privacy, he might have even preferred to live in the jails with we killers and rapists and slanderers and maniacs to living in the crazy, harsh world with its predictable patterns that were inescapable unless you were as immune to fear as I was.

At this point in time, the entire world was in turmoil, but we kept the innocent ignorance of childhood in regards to our surroundings. Bombs could have been blasting outside our doors and we might have confused the noise for thunder. We were utterly oblivious.