language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.
Maybe Jamila’s a yardstick for you too. Years registering in terms of pounds and inches. The changes in her body are the reality of time passing, the reality less observable in your outward appearance. People ask, How’s Robby? and I don’t know what to answer. If I say he’s okay, people take that to mean he’s the same. He’s still the person we knew when he was free. I don’t want to give anyone that impression of you. I know you’re changing, growing as fast as Jamila. No one does time outside of time.
A narrow sense of time as a material entity, as a commodity like money that can be spent, earned, lost, owed, or stolen is at the bottom of the twisted logic of incarceration. When a person is convicted of a crime, the state dispossesses that criminal of a given number of days, months, years. Time pays for crime. By surrendering a certain portion of his allotment of time on earth the malefactor pays his debt to society.
But how does anyone do time outside of time? Since a person can’t be removed from time unless you kill him, what prison does to its inmates is make time as miserable, as unpleasant, as possible. Prison time must be hard time, a metaphorical death, a sustained, twilight condition of death-in-life. The prisoner’s life is violently interrupted, enclosed within a parenthesis. The point is to create the fiction that he doesn’t exist. Prison is an experience of death by inches, minutes, hours, days.
Yet the little death of a prison sentence doesn’t quite kill the prisoner, because prisons, in spite of their ability to make the inmate’s life unbearable, can’t kill time. Incarceration as punishment always achieves less and more than its intent. No matter how drastically you deprive a prisoner of the benefits of society, abridge his civil and legal rights, unman and torture him, unless you take his life, you can’t take away his time. Many inmates die violently in prisons, almost all suffer in ways beyond an outsider’s comprehension, but life goes on and since it does, miracles occur. Bodies languish, spirits are broken, yet in some rare cases the prison cell becomes the monk’s cell, exile a spiritual retreat, isolation the blessed solitude necessary for self-examination, self-discipline.
In spite of all the measures Western society employs to secularize time, time transcends the conventional social order. Prisoners can be snatched from that order but not from time. Time imprisons us all. When the prisoner returns to society after serving his time, in an important sense he’s never been away. Prisoners cannot step into the same river twice—prison may have rendered them unfit to live in free society, prison may have radically altered the prisoner’s sense of self, his relation to his family and friends—but the river never goes away; it breaches the walls, washes them, washes us. We only pretend the prisoner has gone away.
We visit you in prison. Here we come. The whole family. Judy, Dan, Jake, Jamila. Our nuclear unit and Mom and whoever else we can fit into the Volvo station wagon. We try to arrive at the prison as early as possible, but with five in our crew competing for time and space in Mom’s tiny bathroom in the house on Tokay, and slow-as-molasses nieces Monique and Tameka to pick up in East Liberty after we’re all ready, we’re lucky if we set off before noon. But here we come. Getting ready as we’d get ready for any family outing. Baths, teeth brushed, feeding, coaxing, the moment somewhere at the height of the bustle, frustration, and confusion when I say to myself, Shit. Is it worth all this hassle? Let’s just call it off. Let’s muzzle these little beasts and go back to bed and forget the whole thing. But we persevere. We’re on our way.
Jamila is the youngest visitor. Five and a half years old, my only daughter, your niece, approximately three feet tall, at the time of this visit, this visit which can stand for all visits. She has very large eyes. Mom’s eyes, you christened them in Laramie; she is petite but built strong, taut like her mother. It’s summer so her skin is tanned a golden-toned beige. As a consequence of prematurity and having her head shaved so feeding tubes could be inserted in the veins crisscrossing her skull, for a long while Jamila was bald. Now her hair is coming in nicely, tending to blond at the wispy edges where it curls loose from whatever style her mother chooses to bind it in. She is a beautiful child, I think. She moves with an athletic grace and economy. Jamila chatters incessantly and makes friends easily. A blithe, fey quality attracts people to her. Already she’s aware of the seductive power of her enormous, curly eyelashes, the deep, brown pools of her eyes. She’s remarkably sophisticated in conversation, in her capacity to listen and concentrate on what other people are saying. She grasps abstract ideas quickly, intuitively. Her early flirtation with death has without a doubt stamped her personality. She’s curious about graveyards. Keeps track of them when we make trips. When we go to the beach, Mom, there’s three. Like her brother, Jake, whom she resembles in skin tone and features, she possesses the gift of feeling. One of her good friends, Vass, resides in the Laramie cemetery. Jamila picked up this buddy by reading his name on a large headstone visible from the road and greets him cheerily whenever we drive past the clutter of tombstones abutting the fence on Fifteenth Street.
Jamila, tell me about going to see Robby. What do you remember about going to visit him?
Usually when we go there, when we go there . . . the visiting place . . . he eats an apple. And he wears braids. Or sometimes he would . . . got that? . . . get Doritos instead.
Yes, I got that, smartass. I’ll write it down. You just try to remember what you think when we visit.
Looks like Stevie Wonder.
What else?
I remember him being sort of happy . . . happy to see us.
Why sort of?
Well, because he was sort of happy to see us and not happy he was in jail.
Anything else?
I think about him getting out of cage.
Should they let him out?
Yes. Because he wants to see people and be around other people and have life outside of him and jail.
Do you remember anything he said?
It’s nice to see you. I remember Robby saying that. And the activity place. Crayons and stuff. Telling the names of characters up on the wall.
Do you talk to people about Robby?
No. It’s sort of like a secret. It’s a secret because other people . . . why would they be interested in it, because they don’t see him and they don’t know him and it’s not none of their business.
Would you talk to anyone about him?
Maybe one of my special friends like Jens. He would know what I’m talking about. Even though he’s the youngest of all of us in Open School. I know Jens would understand more than anybody else because he would understand more. Like if I told Claire she would just say, Oh. She wouldn’t know what I was talking about, but Jens he would tell me a different story and I would know he would understand.
Anything else you can remember?
One time when we went there and we were finding out we couldn’t see him that day, I heard him call and say come back another time.
Why’s he in jail?
So that he doesn’t go out and do the same thing again. They’re keeping him there till they think that he won’t do the same thing again.
When everybody’s finally ready and in, I back the Volvo station wagon down the steep, cobblestone street to the intersection of Tokay and Seagirt.
