at the bars, the cells, the men in the cages, the neat bunk beds;
the men will call things out in a language I don’t understand,
grinning and gesticulating, and I will grin back— I’m lost and I
walk around and I walk quite a long w ay in the halls and I
wonder if the police will shoot me if they find me and I hope I
can find my w ay back to the room where they left me and I
think about what strange lapses there are in reality, ellipses
really, or little bumps and grinds, so that there are no police in
the halls anywhere and I can just walk around: loaded down
with anxiety, because in Amerika they would shoot me if I
was wandering through; it’s like a dream but it’s no dream, the
clean white prison without police. N o w , outside, with the
guard, at the first barricade, I act nice with both fear and utopia
in m y heart. Who is the guard? Human, like me. I came for my
friend, I say, and I say his name, many times, in the strange
language as best I can, I spell it, I write it out carefully. I don’t
say: m y friend you Nazis grabbed because he’s political— my
friend who makes bombs, not to hurt anyone but to show
what’s important, people not property— my friend w ho’s
afraid o f nothing and no one and he has a boisterous laugh and
a shy smile— m y friend who disappeared from his home three
nights ago, disappeared, and no one knew where he was,
disappeared, gone, and you had come in the middle o f the
night and handcuffed him and brought him here, you had
hauled him out o f bed and taken him away, you had
kidnapped him from regular life, you had pushed him around,
and you didn’t have a reason, not a lawful one, not one you
knew about, not a real crime with a real indictment, it was
harassment, it was intimidation, but he’s not some timid boy,
he’s not some tepid, tame fool; he’s the real thing. He’s beyond
your law. H e’s past your reach. He’s beyond your understanding. H e’s risk and freedom outside all restraint. I never
quite knew what they arrested him for, a w ay he had o f
disappearing inside a narrative, you never could exactly pin
down a fact but you knew he was innocent. He was the pure
present, a whirling dervish o f innocence, a minute-to-minute
boy incarnating innocence, no burden o f m em ory or law,
untouched by convention. And I came looking for him,
because he was kind. He said Andrea, whispered it; he said
Andrea shy and quiet and just a little giddy and there was a
rush o f whisper across m y ear, a little whirlwind o f whisper,
and a chill up and down m y spine. It was raining; we were
outside, wet, touching just barely, maybe not even that. He
lived with his family, a boarder in a house o f strangers, cold,
acquisitive conformers who wanted money and furniture,
people with rules that passed for manners, robots wanting
things, more things, stupid things. He had to pay them m oney
to live there. I never heard o f such a thing: a son. I couldn’t go
