I’m soliloquizing with the light, a luminous breath of air in my brain dispelling dread and fatigue.
Lingering light between the window bars, brown dusk in the cell, brown fumes envelop me on my bunk, overwarm sweat-fuming blankets heavy with death-brown damp from which the death-sodden silence rises, brown as the tobacco of the dead, ethereal, proven as silence only by the soft cautious snores of the frail sleeper beneath me—a twenty-two-year-old, semi-illiterate pedo with a mental age of twelve—who irregularly, laboriously presses shallow breaths from his ravaged lungs, brown breath filled with saliva drops, a wheezing that by morning will have formed a dry, salt-like rim around the fissured corners of his mouth.
The same thing happens every night; in a while my other cellmate will wake up, listen a moment to the sound of the snoring, and then, in a fit of temper, believing it was the soft snores that woke him, lower his hand to the floor to grope for a shoe and slam its heel over and over against the iron frame of our bunk bed, at which the snores, already tentative, will instantly fall silent; without waking, the sleeper beneath me holds his breath a long time, for nearly a minute there’s no sound in the cell; apart from the angry tossing of the roused second cellmate, paralysis and quiet prevail, fear possesses the boy beneath me, it fills his sleep utterly, the heart seems to falter in that puny body. My other cellmate is about thirty, with several previous assault convictions, a burly, coarse-boned figure on oddly spindly bow legs, his long arms, tattooed to the shoulders, always dangling limber and pugnacious; he’s the hero of hair-raising fistfight scenarios, his victories in these brawls constitute his sole, inexhaustible topic of conversation, with wild gesticulations and imitations of his opponents’ cries of pain accompanying his stories, and the little guy below me listens all day long in anxious admiration.
Before my other cellmate dozes off again, loudly gnashing his teeth in his sleep, a ferocious noise that drowns out the little guy’s soon-resumed snores, a noise will emanate from the direction of his bunk—his is the only bunk in our cell equipped with a spring frame—a soft rhythmic creak lasting barely a minute, caused by the nightly round of masturbation knocked off between his first and second sleeps, ending in a painfully suppressed gasp that merges seamlessly into the tooth-grinding of his second sleep.
Later, surely, I’ll encounter astounding numbers of people on the street whom, though strangers, I’ll seem to recognize, with instantaneous, nearly mortal alarm, as the spitting image of one of my two cellmates.
The thin, rachitic body of a far too young, nearly flat-chested mother will display the erratic movements of the pedo; like his, her actions will miscarry from sheer doubt as to the point of them, and nearly always be aborted prematurely, so that glasses, spoons, or playing cards will fall to the ground, grasped too hesitantly or merely brushed; and later I’ll discover in the protruding eyes of a person unfamiliar to me—but rendered familiar by the congruity with my sojourn here, which by then shall lie in the past—a sexual predilection for immature things, botched techniques, devices rendered nearly unusable by their incomplete construction, and though these things will give him grief, he’ll buy them all the same. — Here they give us unbreakable plastic cups to use. — Or, possibly in more people still, in countless people who’ll later cross my path, I’ll find the semblance of my other cellmate, the thug, in the chin, severely shaven and covered with tiny cuts, of a still-young man in a green, tailor-made, jeans-style suit with patch pockets set off by white stitching, greased hair severely parted above his face, cut noticeably askew behind his bare ears; I see him in the supermarket, his powerful hands delicate for a moment as they pick and choose among different tubes of shaving cream…no, that’s not how I’ll recognize him, it’ll be by analogy to the way he walks ahead of me slightly stooped, tilting his head back, during our free time in the prison yard each morning, completing his thirty-three circuits of the volleyball court with arms hanging motionless, slightly bent at the elbows, fists permanently clenched; later I won’t have the faintest notion how that human stride in front of me could have been an inexhaustible daily cause of inarticulate inward screams of horror lasting minutes and mounting to piercing shrillness, how I had to turn away and gaze at the barred, arched windows of the hulking gray building as though at some place I keenly yearned to return to; for that stride in front of me, in those ever-polished shoes, is marked by an indescribably assured, infallible automatism—which in a later Now lacks all description but senseless horror—with steps not an inch too short or too long, an image that keeps tripping me up on concrete free of the slightest obstruction, keeps threatening to make my face collide with the unperturbed backs in front of me; whereas I start to limp after just four or five circuits, my two cellmates walk shoulder to shoulder like a single figure, the separation of their persons discernable only when the big guy hisses an unintelligible word into the other’s ear, at which the little guy, smiling in approbation, turns his head to the inside of that double figure; otherwise their heads look forward mutely, and I know that they’re filled with the most ingenious plans: every Thursday after showering they’ll snag the most expensive, most strongly perfumed cosmetic articles from the meager selection the staff have on offer. — Once I was seized by the conviction that I’d be bound to recognize the bigger of my cellmates buying a television in an electronics store. Paralyzed by horror, I’d inescapably recognize a stranger’s coarse hand, scornfully bent back in pride, with the distinctive split nail of the thumb on the sales slip hiding the index finger; electrified by panic in the wake of that horror I’d bolt out of the store, pressing myself in senseless fear into the niche of the shop window, and the TV sets displayed in that window would stare at me with pupils white-gray from cataracts, but seeing me all the same, mirroring my shrunken image in infinite sequence, all the programs of their sensory innards indelibly recording me, cheek pressed to the wall, plotting to murder the man who’d step out the door a few moments later.
Just before the voice of the outside light at the window fades, the human voices inside the prison’s body seep away as well, though for a long while the walls, like sponges, let every sound flow through their pores…in the lengthening evenings all the channels of a pretrial detention center are filled by sentences with no ends that one’s compelled to spin out endlessly…the vast, desecrated body of a monastery seems to have silently closed its doors to shut in every sound of the Black Masses and infernal processions unfolding inside that walled organism; all the fragmentary stirrings that a moment previously had disclosed the most inward, secret things, before all the listening windows, to one single waiting ear in some unknown cranny of the organism; all of it subsides into a silence in which, from now on, ideological devilries brood in each fate-cell, severed even from the adjacent fate-cell that by day had dwelled in vague familiarity. On the surface the silence is suddenly transformed into the outside, the noise of the town, so close, but insurmountably walled off from us, the taunting honks of the cars, the dexterous silencing of their transmissions followed at once by the ruthless revving of engines at the intersection that’s close but invisible from the window; the distant but rapidly approaching sirens of ambulances or police cars: too laaate, too laaate; laughter, it takes a long time for sleep in the cells to overcome the outside.
Before this silence falls—as its prologue, lending it meanings that, though inexplicable, instantly begin their long work in all the minds: loud fragments along the building façade, the information exchange necessary for the organism’s individual cells: one two here Cocker got you by the short hairs…in a pig’s eye…how much…three tobaccos…fine how much…petition Hans two Steve one six buddy one four aaappeeeal…shut your face…dig in…
At intervals, laughter…I’ve never heard laughter as often as in this organism…at intervals, it must be a very distant cell, a braying unmelodic chant consisting of one endlessly repeated line: I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more…the voice tries to bray the word farm like Bob Dylan, truncated and slurred, and it sounds like some unfamiliar word called faamn…faamn…
Amid the organism of this world, of this time, a language fit for human beings can consist only of unended sentences.
Freedom to find your own end is something that even the most felicitous system cannot guarantee, and beginning early in the morning you’re forced to resist the linguistic processes that seek to dispose of you…an aaapeeeal for the words.
When my interrogations came to an end, and the affidavits incriminated neither myself nor any acquaintance not yet arrested, I knew that sooner or later I would be set free.
With my two cellmates, who knew nothing of these conclusions in my mind, I sat on a stool at the folding table that morning, after breakfasting on the leftovers of the previous day’s cold supper, supplemented at a certain hour by a round of coffee; we smoked our arduously procured, lethal tobacco from the only pipe we owned, waiting for the words free time, which, at a moment we could not anticipate—no one in prison ever learns the time of day—would come indistinctly through the peephole to dictate the imminent twenty- or thirty-minute march around the grassy volleyball court…but nothing happened except the measureless light of summer lancing through the cell from the barred windows, the summer reaching its zenith outside the building; the acacias, crazy unpruned street trees that some distance away thrust their sprawling loads over the yard’s barbed-wire-topped walls, had turned a visibly darker green with the slowly waning days; we sat and said nothing, and nothing happened—sitting on the fourth stool or lying on the free fourth bunk was death, whose perpetual presence we’d barred from speaking, who didn’t dare challenge us to a gambling match—we were ready to jump up, to embrace each other with cries and tears, but were prevented by the conclusions in my head, which would end the sentences we spoke here; meanwhile the light was so strong that it blanched the rising plumes of tobacco smoke, and our bodies dried out, our smell of shit and urine, food and pomade burned off; paper and a pencil lay on the table, but we wrote nothing and said nothing, knowing that a single, random sentence would turn us into raging beasts, we’d lunge to tear each other apart tooth and nail; the proof of all words was lost…I sought a simile in the light’s unnameability, I sought to compare it with the light of the evenings that often took so long to melt against the window bars, but now it remained nameless and measureless, a light that seemed to illuminate our corpses, to sever our brains from us, and it remained answerless until it turned toward the blood-hued fire of sunset; the beginning of my thoughts was the middle of the year, the time of midsummer, St. John’s Eve, with divinely short nights that were full of promise and preserved the sun in the center of a liquid twilight, the beginning…the long-drawn-out sound of a rare, remote madness encompassing the thoughts that have fled…in which the hills glow in magical fires and the tombs are opened when the lower world utters its sentence, interrupted by shards of blood-soaked shrouds, whose earliest words I, cut off, but I, have heard, be free, I repeat, be free you who are dead, I greet you, I greet you all, you earth-sodden bodies, I’m going, faamn, catch fire at last, don’t work, don’t ever work no more in the yards and the gardens of authority, I must turn away and walk until I’m recognized in the streets of the angry towns, mistaken for another, stricken down, as the stranger who has long dwelled within me, recognized by an innocent gesture and murdered, for the sake of the fatal recognition brought by a forgotten sentence that cheated you of the last of your tobacco, I will go, for the gates of that stone body will open up before me, so that I may step out to face the end, the end of sentences, so that an authority shall cheat me of the next sentence, of the perpetuation of an endless choir, I greet you all, don’t forget to collect your watches on the way out…