Chapter 16: Evening reverie—Escape!
The battery of fluorescent lights pops off in an every other one sequence. Jared scrunches his face as the darkness slowly blankets his vision. Quietly, immobile, he lies for several minutes. Then he carefully adjusts, fine-tunes his eyes to the dim night aura of the dorm. The inner Yard lights throw an indirect glow to the far side of the room. On his side of the dorm a similar hue is created by the exterior wall’s spotlights.
Jared has trouble sleeping in total darkness, always keeps a night light on or a candle burning in his room, so he welcomes these intruding lights, is actually grateful for them, these tufts of comfort, no matter how accidental. This is the sole comfort he’s found in the Institution. Everything up to this time has been . . . well, fucked. “Prison is fucked!” He says it to anyone, everyone, and often during fierce inner monologue.
Fucking boring! is a truer sentiment.
Jared is a thin shade away from endlessly screaming and yelling and physically resisting every fucking thing. He’s pissed, but even more pissed at himself. I’m so fucked up!
The fit he had that first night in Seg still bothers him. What possessed me? Who was I then? Would Gandhi have acted out like that? Bonhoeffer? George Jackson? Other war resisters? Let’s not even think about Jesus peeing on the walls!
Jared would almost have welcomed the sight of the Torturer, that medieval public servant who poured molten lead into the raw joints of drawn and quartered convicts. There’s something about the sensational with which the human can grapple. During the anti-war days there was the spectacle—the mass rallies, the card burnings, the sit-ins and hootenannies, all that public touch and feel. It’s the trivial, the small of scale, the microscopic, the itch and the scratch that drives humans to madness. Bored to death!
He writes to Char, “What I have is a patch. Just like the Little Prince. The tiniest of tiny. The minimum of minimum. My shadow at times is larger than all of my space and possessions. My bunk is but a wrap around my flesh. My stash is all contained in a three by three by three steel cube. That’s it!”
Prison is “institutionalized violence.” Sean likes that phrase. Not Jared—for him the border between violence and nonviolence gets slenderer with each day. “What isn’t violence? We’re accepting being here. Doesn’t that make us collaborators? Good soldiers?” Am I imprisoning myself? Am I my own hack? Wacky thoughts, but gut wrenching. The Canada of his dreams returns—escape!
Escape. The thought keeps coming back. Right from the start he wanted to bolt and run. He heard “five years” and his gut instinct was to sneak into Canada. It’s been a long internal battle ever since to obey and comply with the conditions of his sentence. How little his brothers and sisters knew about his own detailed plans for escape to Canada. How he had grown not to trust anyone, even them. He knows that this is the greatest sin against nonviolence, this not trusting. Trusting others to do good, to act morally, to seek justice is what defines the core heartfelt emotion of his belief in nonviolence. The raid itself was an act of trust in the moral goodness of those whose draft cards he destroyed. A guy whose card was destroyed became invisible to the system—there were no back-up files, amazing as Jared found that to be. He trusted this “invisible man”—who was now given a second chance—to make the right moral decision and not re-register. Father, forgive me, for I know not what I do.
The raid was an act of freedom. But here he is, accepting the shackles of imprisonment! “God, I hate . . . ” and a rush of images. He despises the man who took his pen to write his name on the first report at the County Jail. He hates the guards who come by with such nonchalant regularity to take this inmate out, bring that one in. He hates the fool who hands out their censored mail, unperturbed by the violence of his deletions. He hates the invasive eyes that peer at his every move while in the visiting room. He hates the thoughts the hacks have as the slaves hunker around the Yard, chattering to the clanking of their spectral chains. He hates the stupid priest who reads his breviary as he strolls the Yard as if it was a garden conservatory. He hates the cons who are here with him. Hates them more than he hates everyone and everything else because if they hadn’t acquiesced, if they hadn’t slunk into the cowardly posture, if they hadn’t flung away their escape plans, he would be alone—and then have only himself to hate, whom he hates beyond definition.
He hates himself. He has wanted to escape from the moment he entered the first remote-controlled gate. Something deep within yelled, “Don’t go in! Escape!” Why didn’t I run? Why have I submitted? Isn’t this a blatant admission of guilt and defeat?
Christ, he’s never been able to settle that question. Can he now? Every time it lunges at him, it staggers him. With great effort he wrestles himself back into docile submission.
But of course, Jared reasons to himself, it isn’t submission. He bends the word, convinces himself that what they call submission is actually his triumph. Surely his actions are the actions of the stronger man, the moral man, the unbeatable foe.
“Fucking-A yes!” he yells back to the depths within himself. “Fucking-A, I am free therefore I can submit. I’m not afraid. I can withstand all your evils, all your violence, all your prisons. Chain me and shackle my body, but you cannot defeat me!”
This inner dialogue recurs a hundred times a day—occurs at each clank of a key in a cell block lock and every night when the lights are put out by an unseen hand.
Lying here in the bottom of a double bunk, being dorm-caged with seventy odd men, he is forever one with the rejects and outcasts of society.
I came, but I don’t have to stay. How to escape this place? A plan is seeded.
The noise in the dorm has abated. The meandering conversations in the darkness have all but subsided. There’s an occasional spate of snoring, a belch, an extended fart, a garble of sleep talk. Jared yawns, begins to fade, slumbers in the Canada of his dreams.
As the Wheel turns, inmate 8867-147 starts to dream the most ancient dream of the captive—escape.