By Joshua Ryan

The line ended at a door that was so important we had to be buzzed through.  On the other side was a wide white hallway with wooden doors on one side and steel doors on the other — and a yellow line on the left, of course.  Finally we got to a place where there were two steel doors with a glass booth between them.  An old officer was seated in the booth.  Officer Collison pulled me over and told me to stand in front of the glass.

“Got one for ya, Pop.”

“Yeah?  Don’t look like much.  But OK, if you say so.  Hold up your arm, boy.  I wanta see that bracelet you got.”

“Yes, Sir.”  I held it up to the window.  He half-rose in his chair and scanned my wristband.

“Nother lifer,” he said.  “Well, welcome to free room and board.  I’ll take him into Number 2.”

He got up and walked to the right, and I heard the door on the right buzz open.  Officer Collison walked me to the threshold, although he didn’t pick me up and carry me over it.  He just said, “He’s all yours,” and left.

“I’m Officer Murphy,” the old guy said.  “And this is Section 2, which is where we’re gonna keep you till they truck you outta here.  Pretty simple: I’ll put you in a box, and you’ll stay there.”

He gestured at the corridor, or whatever you’d call it, that receded behind him.  It was six or seven feet wide, and it was lined with doors — solid black steel doors, with black security bars crossing them from side to side, one near the top and another near the bottom.  “Every other day,” he continued, motioning to two wet, narrow stalls, fronted with bars, “you get a shower.  Every other day, we give you a clean uniform.  Three times a day we feed you.  You get call-outs for meds, if you need em, and a call-out for Psych, which I know you need.  Keep your mouth shut and your head down and you won’t get no call-outs for nothin else.”

He had paused by the showers, but now he was walking me down the corridor.  Every door had its two bars with locks hanging from their sockets, and there were lots of other locks.  There were hatches that could be opened at the foot level, the waist level, and the eye level — all of them equipped with steel covers and padlocks to keep them closed.  The horrible thing was that the hatches at eye level were open.  Each of them was filled with a thick panel of glass, crisscrossed with security wire — and behind the panel was a face, staring out.  You couldn’t see a whole face; what you saw was the scary parts — eyes, noses, mouths.  The noses were pressed against the glass, the eyes were making a futile attempt to follow you, the lips were shouting things you could hear only as meaningless noise.  I remember thinking it would have been more merciful to shut those hatches — at least more merciful to someone like me, who was about to become one of those faces behind the glass.

Every door had a black number painted on the top.  When we reached number 19 the guard pulled a set of keys from his belt, unlocked the two security bars, hauled them open, unlocked the door, pulled it open, and said, “Make yourself at home.”  I hesitated.  “Get your ass inside.”  I stepped inside; the door slammed shut.

I whirled — and saw that there was no handle on that side of the door.  I heard the click of the lock; I heard the bars thud into their sockets.  Then I saw the middle hatch swing back.  A distant voice said, “Put your arms through!”  You never want to put a part of your body into someplace you don’t control, but I knew I would be forced to do it, and that wouldn’t be pleasant.  I put my arms into the hole; the cuffs twisted on my wrists, opened, and fell off.  I heard “Pull em in!”; the hatch closed; I was now locked up.  I still had my arms, but not much else.

He said he was going to put me in a “box,” and that’s where I was.  It was all steel — walls, floor, ceiling — as if it had been built as a module, shipped from the factory, and dropped into place.  Half of it was a steel platform, bolted to the floor.  The blanket on top suggested that this was a bed.  In the rear was a steel sink and a steel toilet.  The sink was equipped with a steel cup, a tiny plastic toothbrush, a tiny tube of toothpaste, and a cake of soap.  The toilet was equipped with a roll of brownish paper, sitting on the floor.  The setup was complete.  The only thing needed to make it operational was the insertion of a prisoner.  I was the prisoner.  I had been inserted.

At that moment I knew for sure that things had gone terribly wrong.  When I heard the door lock, my fetish switched on automatically; my cock returned to the Hard position, but my brain knew — this was not the story I planned.  On the wall facing the bed was a sign in large letters:

Rules For Inmates: Learn Them

I sat down, intending to read the rules; but as soon as I hit the bed, something beneath me gave out a stiff, angry scrunch.  Plastic!  The mattress on the bed was plastic!  In place of a real mattress, they’d given me a sheet of cheap synthetics.  And where was the pillow?  There wasn’t one.  I sat on the “bed,” and I began to cry.

A few hours later, I woke in the fetal position, with my head on the blanket.  I sat up, bewildered.  My plastic “shoes” were lying where I must have kicked them off, but my body was still wearing its orange prison costume.  I looked around and realized that there wasn’t a window, there was just a hole in the ceiling that pushed in a lazy supply of air, and another hole with a lightbulb inside it.  Both were covered with steel mesh, to protect them from me.  I tried to go back to sleep, but I was too stunned to make it.   I lay on my mattress till the hatch on the bottom of the door opened up and a steel tray came through.  It was food.

Years had gone by since I’d seen mac and cheese.  I’d never seen the vegetable mash that came with it, or the strange hard bread that represented the third course.  I was so hungry I could have eaten the tray, but in a few minutes a voice came through the hatch saying it was time to give it back.  By that time, I’d eaten all of the “food,” and it was enough to give me the shits.  I retreated to the toilet — and my ass came down on bare metal.  No seat!  Why spend money on some criminal’s butt?   Clearly, however, no money was being saved on electricity.  The light stayed on all the time — until, sometime at night, it simply went off, and the box was lit only by a faint greenish light leaking in through the top hatch on the door.  I managed to fall asleep again, then bolted upright at a nightmare vision — a face was staring at me through the hatch!  It was a guard, of course, checking to see that I hadn’t managed to escape.

The next day was rough.  There was nothing to do — and how long can you sleep?  Time was broken only by “meals” thrust regularly through the hatch.  Let’s just say that they were all substantial.  They had abundant supplies of grease.  The toilet was in frequent use that day.  My other activity was to read and LEARN the Rules for Inmates.  Whoever wrote them had a taste for irony.  The conceit was that inmates had asked to be locked up and must return the favor by obeying commands to Respect Your Officers, Keep Your Quarters Neat and Clean, and Maintain Your Uniform in the Condition in Which It Was Issued to You. There was an emphasis on stating unpleasant facts: “You have committed a criminal offense and have been sent to this Facility to begin your punishment. You are now a convict and must be treated as such.”  But that isn’t true! I thought.  I never committed any “offense”!  And I never asked to be here!  Then I remembered.  I did ask.

The hours crawled past.  I couldn’t even tell if they were hours.  Already, my sense of time was going.  No cell phone, no watch, not even a clock on the wall; I waited for my food for what seemed like days, then was surprised because the next meal came so suddenly.  I was scared I would see that face behind the glass, watching me, but there were moments when I panicked, wondering what would happen if they forgot me and left me to starve in my box.  Like those faces that had scared me when I came down the corridor, I now spent hours peering through the hatch, hoping to see something happen.  Just somebody walking past.  I was at the window when three new inmates were paraded in, dressed in their orange shirts and orange shorts and orange plastic footwear.  I imagined that I heard their shoes clattering on the concrete and heard the officer telling them where to go.  But what I heard wasn’t real.  When one of the prisoners looked my way, I knew he was feeling the same fear and disgust that I had felt when it was me on the other side of the glass.  We were the same — dressed the same, handled the same, boxed the same, for as long as they wanted to box us.  Sleeping the second night was harder than it was the first.

Things changed on the morning of the third day.  After food (I can’t call it “breakfast”), the door opened and the old officer told me it was shower time, strip off, hurry it up.  I stripped off, and he took me down the corridor, locked me in one of the showers, and turned on the water.  It was hot this time — so hot that I wanted to escape.  I banged on the bars, but nothing happened.  I guess that’s what bars are for.  When he let me out, I got to dress up in a new suit of clothes — identical to the old suit of clothes and identical, I was sure, to every other suit of inmate clothes. There was an electric razor attached to the wall, and he told me to shave my face — not so easy, when you haven’t got a mirror.  But I shaved.  In prison, you’re expected to care about your appearance.  Then back to my box.  But not for long.  The middle hatch opened and a voice said, “Put your arms through.  I’m gonna cuff you.”  Fuck!  Cuffs again?  What had I done?  Something in my sleep? Maybe I was being taken some place to be “disciplined” — a word that the sign on the wall had taught me to fear.

The “discipline” was, that I was taken out of the Section and down the big hallway to an office behind one of those wooden doors, where I would be given my “Psychological Counseling Session.”  My guide was another young jerkoff, a plastic name tag called Officer Rodriguez.  This one was very punctilious about keeping me on the inmate side of the line.  He had evidently been a busy man that morning, because he had already got three other inmates lined up in cuffs and hooked to rings in the wall next to the door, guarded by another name tag, Officer Domchek, who patrolled the hallway, talking into his phone.  From time to time he pretended that one of us had been talking and came over to remind us to shut the fuck up.  Otherwise, he was busy worshiping his device.  Things seemed to be running slow.  There were four inmates hooked up behind me when I was unhooked and admitted to see the Counselor.

If you’ve been to college, you’ve probably made at least one visit to a professor’s office, and if it was about some confusion in grading, the professor is likely to have been a guy like the Counselor — young but dumpy, with a bad haircut, a spotty tie, a big desk, and lots of books on his shelves, as if he came into work just to do his reading.  One shelf was cleared so it could exhibit his diplomas — in this case a B.A. from some place in South Dakota and an M.S. in Marriage and Family Counseling from the East Florida Technical University, displayed in an enormous frame.

“And you are … Meres.  Is that correct?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Let’s see your wristband.”

I extended my right arm, which at the moment was cuffed to my left arm, so he got them both.

“Step back.”

I stepped back from his desk.  I was wearing handcuffs, but he had the additional advantage of several feet and a desk between us.  In case I attacked him, he would have time to yell for help.  He turned to his computer and read for a while, eventually seeming confident that Meres was Meres.

“Now, Meres, I am Mr. Pearce, your counselor, and this is your psychological interview.  It is an important — some say, the most important or the only important [chuckles] aspect of your orientation to the Department of Corrections.  I want you to feel free to say anything that’s on your mind.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“I see that your occupation is listed as ‘writer.’  Some of our greatest women and men have been writers.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“What do you write?”

“I write stories and novels.  Sir.”

“Not much money in that.”

“No, Sir.”

“So tell me, Meres, what have you learned from your incarceration?”

That was a good one.  You can imagine all the answers that went through my head as I stood with my hands chained in front of me and he leaned back in his thickly upholstered chair.

“I think I’ve learned … That I should have stayed out of here.  Sir.”

“You think you don’t belong here, Meres?”

“I guess I belong, Sir.  Because I’m here.  Sir.”

“I would encourage you to avoid that sense of inevitability.  That sense that your life is pre-determined, that it couldn’t be any other way than the way it is.  What happens to you is your own responsibility, Meres.”

“I’m finding that out, Sir.”

He looked at me with satisfaction.  “I think it’s particularly important to speak in this way to offenders like you, who can look forward to spending the rest of their lives with the Department of Corrections.”

What!

“I know that can have a rather … grim sound, but it’s important to face facts as they are.  I confess that when I looked at your record, just now, I was … surprised that the starting number was so lenient.  ONE year to life. But these sentencing problems have a way of getting solved.  I need to warn you that only some extraordinary adaptation to the institution will result in your release at any foreseeable time.”

What?  What was he saying?

“Nevertheless, you have a target to shoot for, Meres.  Don’t give up hope of a better life, wherever you are.  That is my advice to you.”

Then he asked me cheerfully if I had “any fear of retaliation or harassment from anyone currently committed to the Department of Corrections” and explained the Department’s zero-tolerance policy toward racial discrimination in all its forms and to sexual harassment of or by any staff or inmates, instructing me to “immediately report any instances of harassment or discrimination to the officers assigned to your supervision.”

“Yes, Sir.”  What did he mean by that shit about “foreseeable time”?!

“Well, Meres, I think there’s nothing more to say.  Everything has been laid on the table here.  I am pleased to tell you that your medical reports are in, and you are as healthy as the proverbial horse.”  He smiled at his little joke.  “So on the basis of that data, and of the data I’ve collected in this interview, I am certifying you for admission to the correctional population.”  He reached up to his computer screen and wiggled his fingers across it, obviously signing his name.  “The next step is assignment to your permanent institution.  Fortunately or unfortunately, that is not my responsibility, but the Assignments Group of the Department of Corrections is very active, and I anticipate that your place of residence will be decided very soon.  Is there anything else, Meres?”

“Uh … No … Sir.”

He picked up his phone.  “I’m through with this one,” he said.  When Officer Domchek came through the door, the Counselor was telling me, “Remember what I said: from now on, your life is what you make it.”

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