The Enchanted

I retreat from my bars, wondering why people who live outside choose such ugly words. Maybe that is what happens when you are outside, and the world clangs and barrels and shouts twenty-four hours a day, from your radio your television your wife your neighbor the lawn mower down the street and the scream of airplanes from the sky. Maybe then you use ugly words to tell life to shut up.

Death was his safety net. It was the answer to all the inner confusion, to the secret knowledge of the unspeakable harm he caused others. It was his way out of whatever hell he lives in.

I remind myself I am not dust, but I should be. I tell myself I am made of the same cells as life itself even if I am a mistake.

The infirmary is a place where they pipe in poisoned air, hoping you will die. No one wants to waste money on psychiatric medicine here, or cancer treatments, or any treatments. The taxpayers don’t want to waste their money saving the lives of killers, and I don’t blame them. The infirmary wards are filled with men yipping with the late-stage pain of cancer or bleeding through their bowels or raging in diabetic deliriums.

As much as I love books, I have never read one that tells what it is really like in a prison. In the books, the baby killers and rapists are hated inside prisons. That is not the truth. The truth is, it doesn’t matter what you did on the outside. If you like to take it by force, if you want to beef up on the pile, you, too, can grow taller than the tallest tree in the forest. You can be the worst baby killer or rapist and still beat and rape your way into power inside.

Everything was sacred when nothing was taken for granted, she thinks ruefully.

The outside is one wild circus where people and ideas clash.

The Advocates raised the money to hire decent defense attorneys, and the attorneys hired the best mitigation specialist in the state, all to save the life of a man who had decided to die.

The books brought brilliance to my life, and they brought an understanding: Life is a story.

I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?

I read my favorite books over and over again and each time found new things inside them, as if the writers had put it new words in my absence.

Each time she failed, her client was executed. She waited each time to feel grief, but it never came. She felt sadness, and that was all. She knows too well how much pain these men caused others to feel true grief herself at their passing. The sadness she feels is more about a failed life.

I can accept your shame, she thinks. Can you accept mine?

People think clocks tell them the time. They set an alarm for work and wake up to a blinking light that says six a.m. They look to an office wall to tell them if it is time to go home. The truth is, clocks don’t tell time. Time is measured in meaning.

Whether heaven or whether hell, I will never escape who I am.

When I am dead, I will be put in the oven and burned and shoveled into a can like Striker and the others. I am okay with that. I will be no more than ashes. It would be better if I were less, but a can of ashes is okay.

How sad it is that we remember the killers and not their victims.

When a man like York says he feels no remorse, I believe him. How can men like us really know what that word means? We hunt around inside ourselves like squirrels trying to find nuts, picking up each emotion and asking ourselves, “Is this remorse? Is this guilt?”

When you don’t have a soul, the ideas inside you become terrible things. They grow unchecked, like malignant monsters. You cry in the night because you know the ideas are wrong—you know because people have told you that—and yet none of it does any good. The ideas are free to grow. There is no soul inside you to stop them.

Men who have not been violated don’t understand what it is like to have the edges of your body blurred—to feel that every inch of your skin is a place where fingers can press, that every hole and orifice is a place where others can put parts of their bodies. When your body stops being corporeal, your soul has no place to go, so it finds the next window to escape.