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.

At this point in my life, I lived in the very last women’s cell in the block; around the corner was the men’s hallway, and I could hear their conversation at the times when we were all locked in our cells. They were all sent to see the therapist, too, sometimes in groups, sometimes individually. When she sat alone with you, a barren metal table alone to divide you, she thought it an apt technique to lean over the table, to bring her closer to you. It is as though she thought that leaning across the table was leaning across the impossible barrier that divided us: excitement from boredom, good from bad, freedom from captivity.

What she didn’t realize was that in leaning over the table, she gave her patient (most specifically the lewd men from the next block over) a clear view down her shirt. The men all joked and laughed about it after their sessions each time. It was the closest they’d come to a woman in months, years in some cases. I wondered idly how long it would take her to realize, or how long it would take before one of the night guards to tell her. But they never did. They hated her lurking presence as much as the men did, though probably not as much as the women did. In the women's eyes, she didn’t even have the bonus of considerable assets to make her sessions worth the time.

She told me I had antisocial personality disorder, told me that it wasn’t my fault, and told me that jail was really the best place for me. I stared at her. She wasn’t necessarily wrong. Here, staying alive was a game similar to the one I had once played with kindergartners: I had to remember details about everyone, know who I had to intimidate, who I should align myself with, who to avoid. I knew who and who was not worth my time. As I built this skill I was able to learn more and more quickly the details about people by simple observation. But unlike with five year old children, the people were constantly changing, bringing in all new kinds of dangers. Even I did not know at that point that this was the skill that would give me an empire in the new jails.