By Joshua Ryan
A month later, on a dead Sunday afternoon, I was lying in the cell when I was told that I had a visitor. The idea was incomprehensible. No one had written; no one had come. Why would they come? And why would I want them to come? For what? To view an exhibit of the once promising author who was now a convict? To laugh at me in my bald head and my convict suit, and go back and pity me online? Basically, the only visitors willing to come that far were the ones smuggling some “business” in or out for some convict, and that wasn’t me.
But now I was being taken to the Visiting Room. It’s a place in that Victorian castle that juts out from the front of the Pen, and it looks like it hasn’t changed since the 1890s. There’s a high ceiling, marble floors, big windows, and a large collection of cast iron bars. In the center there’s a long, wide table, and in the center of that is an ironwork grille running up to the ceiling. Visitors and prisoners sit on separate sides and enter from separate doors. Visitors sit on chairs with arms; prisoners sit on little wooden stools. On that Sunday the room was unusually full. Ten or twelve people on each side. I mean, ten or twelve visitors on one side, and ten or twelve convicts on the other. During the time I’d been at Maskawa, I’d never heard a convict being called a person.
