How to Disappear Completely (v)
part five (conclusion)
Every twenty days or so; your name is called. You are told to stand among your heaps of loose yellow papers, scribblings and musings, howlings of want and desolation and a dozen abortive starts to the next Great American Novel. Pages are trampled under dirty black jackboots. You are told to turn around. You are cuffed, shackled, fitted with a black metal apparatus—supposedly invented by an ex-con—that prevents you from being able to move your arms.
In chains, you are led down a maze of long corridors to another cell, this one with two benches instead of a bed and desk. You wait there among other men, most of whom seem resigned and almost at ease with this process. Of the eight to twelve of you crammed into this holding cell not much bigger than your own, only a lucky few will actually be escorted into the courtroom on the other side of a nearby door. The rest will wait in vain for their name to be called, then be returned without explanation to their respective housing units, hungry and vaguely traumatized by the ordeal. You will be among this latter group three times, your fears of there being some mistake, some impossible miscarriage—not of justice but mere bureaucracy—that has doomed you to being kept here indefinitely growing more palpable with each iteration.
The days drag on. You doubt your optimism, doubt your capability to function as an independent entity, doubt yourself on nearly every level. You stop filing mental health grievances. Mostly you write, you write like no one locked in a small room has ever written before, binging and purging and spewing all of your dark onto the pages. You write until you have said what you needed to say, and then you stop.
You are summoned to Laura’s office; unbidden. She is all business, waving a sheaf of paperwork pertaining to referrals to care providers in the place you are from. She is oddly curt and even indignant about the release planning process, and you’re so taken aback that you go along with it, answering her questions of place and needs and insurance, until finally you stop answering.
Frustrated, she repeats the question. You wave it off, and say you’d like to file a change of address.
“To where?” she asks.
“To here,” you reply. “General delivery.”
You don’t even know where here is. Not exactly, anyways. Well past the point of no return, the geographical equivalent of manslaughter.
The very next day, as if in answer to the prayers you only recently began casting up and out into the universe, they call your name, bind you, shackle you to other miserables—some praying sotto voce, others boasting loudly of their manhood and misdeeds, still others petrified with unfamiliar fear or trauma or shame and saying nothing at all. Together you are herded into the holding cell.
Only this time, late in the day, when all hope seems once again lost, your name is called. You’re led to an even smaller room, in which your lawyer, reeking of gin and Virginian tobacco, tells you of a magic word, tells you to say the magic word at the correct time. You repeat it, unsure as to its power. He promises you that if this ritual is performed correctly; you will be, in the only way that matters, a free man by sundown. You try it out again; it feels like lead on your tongue, which is thick from dehydration.
“Good,”“ your lawyer says. “Say it just like that.”
In the courtroom, the apathy is blistering. You stand at a mahogany table and wait for the apportioned time to play your part in the ritual.
“Guilty,” you say.
There is a lull, occupied only by the hum of the air conditioning and the clack of the stenographer’s transcription. You wonder if maybe you said it wrong after all; maybe the lawyer meant for you to say “not guilty.” But that would be two words. How could a magic word be two words? You look around the room.
Suddenly, time snaps back onto its normal track. “Guilty,” the judge echoes. He explains the terms of your sentence (time served, three years suspended, three years probation), your supervision (no drugs, no booze, no travel), and how to pay the fines and court costs imposed.
He reviews your release plan, expresses some perfunctory concern, tells you that you will need to report a finite address to the local probation office within seventy-two hours. It will be a challenge, but with access to your own bank account and credit cards it won’t be impossible.
The clerk hands you a business card with a gold star, a woman’s name, and her contact information printed on the front. You thank the clerk, thank the judge, call him “Your Honor” like you figure you’re supposed to. You are a little surprised to be led-still shackled-back into the labyrinth of corridors to your cell with the yellow papers strewn pell-mell. That trauma response, that feeling of dread and Kafkaesque timelessness begins to creep back into your skull but it and you are only there for an hour when the intercom on the wall sounds.
“Pack it up,” the voice tells you.
You do not need to be told twice.
Half an hour later, you are walking down the main thoroughfare in a busy downtown district of a provincial city somewhere in a painted desert a thousand miles from anywhere, a thousand miles from everyone you know.
Well, almost everyone.
It isn’t home, but as you stop and close your eyes for a moment, feel the hot breeze on your sun-starved face, it begins to resemble a place you could one day call home. You open your eyes and take in the edifices, the machinery, the universal placidity and vague optimism of the multitudes in motion. You require food, water, and shelter. It is as good a place as any.