I know a man. He works as a janitor. He told me he used to work at the county jail. He said there was a room on the second floor where they hang all the handcuffs and shackles. He said each handcuff and shackle has a number, and when they all hang together on the wall—at rest in a kind of still life of justice—it is a beautiful thing. That’s how he put, “a still life of justice…. A beautiful thing.” I try and picture the wall where all the handcuffs and shackles hang. I try and picture looking at this scene every day. I try and picture me saying, “This is a beautiful thing.”
I am sitting in the county jail. I have no complaint. I refuse to say I don’t belong here. I know where I belong. A jail is as good a place to live as any. I am learning what it means to despair. We should at least know the meanings of the words that pass our lips.
I am on the sixth floor. Four floors below me, there is that room with the shackles. Right now it is night. They turn off the lights at ten. I don’t know how long I’ve been lying here. Hours maybe. I am thinking of the room, how no one is there—how it is a still life of justice in the darkness, and no one is in the room to admire the cuffs and the shackles. I wonder what it’s like to be a keeper of the gates, a keeper of the keys, a keeper of the shackles. It does no good to think about these things, but I think them anyway.
I think sometimes that it doesn’t really matter where I live. Because, really, where I really live is in my head. My home is my head. Not in this room where there is a man sleeping below me, on the bottom bunk. His name is Henry. He is from Alabama, and his eyes are charcoal gray. Two days ago he killed the woman he once loved. Six feet across from us, on the top bunk, a guy named Freddy is snoring. “Anyone wake me because I’m snoring I’ll kick his ass like it’s a goddamned soccer ball.” Below him, Angel is thinking something. He watches. He doesn’t know a word of English. He looks at me like he wants to say something. I look back at him so that he will understand it is better to say nothing.
Our cell block is full tonight. Four cells, four men each. Each cell opens into our living room. That’s what one of the men called it. “Our fucking living room.” Another guy just laughed. “It’s a nicer place than the pigsty I grew up in.”
I don’t live in this room. I don’t live in this jail. Dave says I’ll be out tomorrow. Where will I go then? Where will I live? Dave will have a plan. The living, that’s what they do. They plan.