One never got wholly free of the stench in the prison clothes. Even when washed—perhaps especially then—they assaulted him with the stink of cheap soap and dirty rinse water, as if the stink was not washed out but fixed by the weekly ablution.
He tried to school himself to identify that new-washed odor as “clean,” but he could not do it. The clothes were filthy. The stench was geometrically compounded by the effort to hide rather than remove it.
“I am too sensitive,” he thought. “Most live with bad unpleasant odors all their lives. Why should I moan because I, for a time, escaped it?”
Pleased with his philosophic construction, he shook out the ash-blue clothes and laid them on the bed.
They were stiff with the laundry starch. He thought, as he did every week, “If I could only wash the starch out, and hang them to dry in the sun …”
His blue clothes … “Not blue,” he thought, “not blue.” White. Not grey. Ash white. Ash grey. Blue only by courtesy. Washed-out blue grey. Ash grey. Perhaps the color of stones on some far-off beach. Uninteresting stones—not those the traveler would remark, but those he overlooked.
“People with eyes this color must be killers,” he thought. “There is such a thing as ‘killers’ eyes,’ that’s true. That’s certainly true. We must not credit the things we read in books. They all are advertisements. We must only trust the things which we have learned.
“Does it always come through pain?” he thought. “Well, those lessons—there may be others, but those lessons are incontrovertibly our education. Those lessons exist beyond the power of anyone to talk us out of them. Like a stumbling against a hot stove.
“Who, however deranged, would do that again willingly? Perhaps nothing less mechanical than this is education.
“But what, now, would I do differently?
“Believe in no one. Trust no one. Do nothing to set myself above the crowd. Confide in no one. Hope for nothing at all; arm myself, kill those who would torture me. Why must I submit to their obscenities in the name of some law? What is the law to me? I thought that it was my shield. When it protected me I ‘believed’ in it. What can that have meant? That I voted for myself.”
He looked at the work clothes laid out on the bunk.
“Not the ‘Negro’ smell,” he thought, “not the fresh washing mixed with sweat. Not the heat of the iron, but clothes as if they’d been boiled in shit.” Exactly as if they’d been boiled in shit.
He shook his head.
Nothing, he thought, will be defended as vehemently as a lie.