I ’D READ A lot of books about incarceration, isolation, and torture. In the kind of novels I liked, isolation led to the light and torture, to the reappropriation of the body. In youth detention centres, torture doesn’t exist and isolation is a relative thing. I might have been a political prisoner, but I was shooting pool with small-time delinquents and strong-arm guys who had neither words nor dreams. I should have gone after the cash register at McDonald’s. Mario had “done” three corner stores. Partly for his mother, but mostly to buy coke. Coke because life isn’t fair, and when you’re high, you forget that. You forget what? “That life isn’t fair, fuck! How many times do I have to tell you?” Mario was cross-eyed, and you couldn’t meet his gaze. He stalked the premises silently like a hyena trying to scavenge leftovers. He got along all right, running a business for nickels. “Life ain’t fair, Claude.”
“There are laws and lawyers and courts, Mario.”
“Not for us there aren’t.”
I didn’t learn anything about myself in prison (and I did like the word “prison”), but I did learn about Mario, who was a petty criminal and, if God gave him enough time, would become a true criminal. “Claude, when I get out of here, I’m going to knock over a bank and buy my mother a house.” His revenge against life would be understandable, and easy to explain, but would it be fair? It wouldn’t be legal, but maybe it would be justified. The trainers talked to us about reintegration and accepting the rules of life. And what if reintegrating and observing the rules and the way life ran meant you had to accept injustice? Our isolation made us ask too many questions, and when it came to cross-eyed Mario, he cried every night—I knew that for a fact. Mario wasn’t a bad sort, just one of those bottom dogs that needed help getting back on his feet.
He knocked over his bank and got ten years.