The judge looked at me. “Take your hand from the Honesty Regulator and rise and face the court.”
I took my hand out of the Truth Hole and stood.
“How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” the judge said.
No longer having my hand in the box, I could have lied. But then I supposed my hand would be put back in if I said “not guilty” and we proceeded to have a trial. And, indeed, I have found out from another prisoner here that that is exactly the case. Almost everyone pleads guilty.
I looked at the judge and said, “Guilty.”
“The court commends your honesty,” the judge said. “You are sentenced to six years in the North American Penitentiary, at hard labor for the first two years.” The judge lowered his head slightly and looked at me sternly. “Come forward,” he said.
I walked up to his chair. He rose, slowly, and then reached out his arms. His large hands, one still with the green stain, grasped my shoulders. I felt something stinging my skin, like a drug in-jection. And I went unconscious.
I awoke in this prison.
That is all I can write today. My writing hand and arm ache from what I have already written. Besides, it is late and I must do physical work tomorrow.
DAY NINETY
My room—or “cell”—at the prison is not much bigger than a small thought bus, but it is comfortable and private. I have a bed, a chair, a lamp, and a TV wall with a small library of recordings. The only recording I have played so far is of a dance-and-exercise program, but I did not feel like dancing and took the BB out of the holder before the program was finished.
There are about fifty other prisoners in identical cells in the same building; we all leave for work together after breakfast. In the mornings I work in a prison shoe factory. I am one of fourteen inmate inspectors. The shoes are made, of course, by automatic equipment; my job is to examine one shoe out of each fourteen for flaws. A moron robot watches over us and I have been warned that if I do not pick up a shoe after the man on my left picks one up, each time, I will be punished. I have found that it is not really necessary to
Since I am trained at Mental Arts it is easy for me to spend much of the shoe-inspection time in gentle hallucinating, but I am dismayed at times to find that there is one aspect of my hallucinations over which I have no control; images of Mary Lou will come, with shocking vividness, into my mind. I will be trying to amuse myself with hallucinated abstractions—colors and free-form shapes—when, without warning, I will see Mary Lou’s face, with that intense and puzzled stare. Or Mary Lou sitting cross-legged on the floor of my office with a book in her lap, reading.
When I was teaching, I used to make a little joke during my hallucinating-to-orgasm lecture. I would say to my classes, “This would be a good technique to learn in case you are ever sent to prison.” It never got much of a laugh, since I suppose you have to be well-educated in Classics—James Cagney films, for instance—to understand the prison reference. Anyway, that was a joke I used to make. But I do not now hallucinate to orgasm—even though I am expert at the technique. At night in my cell I masturbate—as I suppose the other prisoners do. I want to save my most intimate thoughts of Mary Lou for when I am alone at night.
We are given two joints and two sopors with our evening meal but I have been saving mine. After supper I can smell the sweet smell of marijuana in the big prison dormitory and hear the music of erotic TV coming from the other cells, and imagine the synthetic bliss on the faces of the other prisoners. Somehow the thought of that, writing it now, makes me shudder. I want Mary Lou here with me. I want to hear her voice. I want to laugh with her. I want her to comfort me.
A year ago I would not have known what I was feeling. But after all those films I know what it is: I am in love with Mary Lou.
It feels terrible. Being in love feels terrible.
I don’t know where this prison is. Somewhere by the ocean. I was brought here unconscious and woke to find myself being given a blue uniform by a robot. I could not sleep the first night, wanting her with me.
I want her. Nothing else is real.
DAY NINETY-ONE
In the afternoons I work in a field at the edge of the ocean. The field is vast, with about two miles of shoreline; it is full of a coarse synthetic plant called Protein 4. The plants are big ugly things, about the size and shape of a man’s head, purple-green in color and with a rancid smell. Even out in the sunny fields, the smell is sometimes almost overpowering. My job is feeding them individually with chemicals that are prescribed by a computer each day. I have a little squirt gun that is loaded with pellets by a computer terminal at the end of each long row, and I hold it to a little plastic mouth that is imbedded in the yellow soil at the base of each plant and squeeze a pellet in.
It is backbreaking to do, under the hot sun, keeping up the fast tempo that is created by the constant music in the field. Forty of us work there, with a five-minute break each hour. We all perspire constantly.
Ten moron robots could do this work. But we are being rehabilitated.
Or that is what the television we must watch during our after-lunch social time tells us. We are not allowed to talk during social time, so I do not know if the others feel as angry as I do, and as weary.
Two robots in brown uniforms watch over us while we work. They are short, heavy, and ugly, and whenever I look toward the one who has beaten me he seems to be staring at me, unblinking, with his android’s mouth hanging slightly open, as if he is about to drool.
My hand is still so tired and sore from squeezing the trigger on that pistol that I cannot write any more.
Mary Lou. I only hope that you are not as unhappy as I. And I hope that you think of me, from time to time.
Mary Lou
ONE
Reading gets to be a bore sometimes, but every now and then I find out something that I enjoy knowing about. I’m sitting in an armchair by the window as I write this, holding a board in my lap to write on, and for a long time before starting I just sat and stared at the snow coming down. Big, heavy, clumped-together flakes falling straight down from the sky. Bob has told me to take it easy so I won’t get a backache from carrying around this stuck-out belly. So I watched the snow for a long time. And I began to think of something I’d read a few days ago about the water cycle, about how the whole elaborate business of evaporation and condensation and winds and air really works. I watched the snow coming down and thought about how those white clumps had recently been the surface water of the Atlantic Ocean, turned to vapor by the heat of the sun. I could visualize clouds moving together far above the water, and the water in them crystallizing into snowflakes, and those flakes falling and clumping and falling further until I could see them, outside this window in New York.
Something makes me feel very good about just
