By Joshua Ryan
That afternoon I collapsed on my bunk and began to think. I thought about what a fool that counselor was and about how he must be wrong, how he must have been talking to some imaginary Steven Meres who was going to spend his life in prison. I thought about how much I hated him for saying those terrible words to me, and how many things I’d like to do to show him that I had a life and he didn’t. Every time I looked down at the childish orange clothes they’d put me in, I saw how much he and “the institution” had on their side.
But … I needed to come to my senses. After all, I was there to write a book. I should be remembering my observations, collecting my story descriptions … I tried, but I couldn’t focus on that. It all seemed like thoughts in some other person’s mind, the mind of somebody who wasn’t locked in a steel box.
On the morning of the seventh day I was cuffed and taken out of my box and marched to the end of the big hallway, where there was a door that led to a loading dock. Standing on the dock was a cage with bars on its top and all four sides. It was a very large cage, and I was put into it with about 80 other prisoners. The officer who put me in pointed to a small steel toilet next to the bars. “You need to use the can, use it now. You’re goin on the chain bus.”
