August 2006, Maine

By Jason Heron

Today, I wake when I hear my daughter cooing. We are away for a week in Maine, and I rise to my own clothes, and to the responsibilities and privileges of a few days away from home, but with my wife’s family. I wake to these birch trees with leaves shining in the wind, and almost taste salt in the air at Sanford. I cannot hear or see the Atlantic, but know it is close. Thinking of our home in Kentucky, I mark the differences.

Today, he wakes to no child but the one crying within, and puts on the correctional facility’s coveralls, and there are no responsibilities confronting him, and privileges do not exist. He comes to beneath lights burning in stillness, in isolation, without windows, trees, or skies. The only air stirring is around his body, responding infinitesimally to the movements of his feet as they find their way into lace-less shoes on the concrete. Nothing sets apart this day from any other.

I conceive of these morning differences, and I imagine his routine, his day, and his entire life, not through anything he has related to me, but through the little I know of prison from Hollywood and television. He is Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, and Tobias Beecher in Oz. He is also the Cooler King in The Great Escape, and the very Luke of Cool Hand Luke. I superimpose his pale face in Papillon, The Count of Monte Cristo, American History X, Bridge on the River Kwai, Dead Man Walking, and In the Name of the Father.

He is the justly and unjustly imprisoned – the one deserving and undeserving of his upcoming sentence and the possibility of clemency and pardon. And in apprehending him cinematically, I play, pause, and stop as I please. I enter as a camera, because I can immediately satisfy the desire to close my eye and leave. I enter also as a paying customer, attending the theatre of his life when I am unmoved and in need of deep expression – departing when I am too moved, and can no longer bear what I see.

Is he a sadist, and I, a masochist? Why else would I approach in this way? He has something I want, and perhaps even need, and I am a keen viewer, hollowed out by consumptive desire. This is the perfect exchange for the supposedly righteous, or at least the supposedly innocent: one suffers the real consequences of actual actions, while the other gazes in fascination and partakes of a bit of wrong, a skosh of open rebellion against God and person.

From this position, I foist hopes and fears on him at once: the hope that he will find redemption in desolation, and so that I may find it too – the fear that he will not, and neither will I. But who can say? We may both end our days dry and alone on cement floors in different cities of the world, after conflict or peace, in fury or sleep, remembered or forgotten, in some place beyond hope and fear. I rush from this uncertainty, and he becomes the composite of all my naïve expectations.

I cannot get out from behind the camera. He lives through my vision of the first night in the cell, when the veteran inmates are whistling in the dark. (I imagine this even though I know he began his sentence in isolation). He is beaten and raped in my mind, because I have seen beatings and rapes on screen. (I imagine this even though I know he has been in only one fight, and after it, he was removed to isolation once again).

As I write this, he is tunneling beneath the prison wall, only yards away from freedom. If he is successful, perhaps he will write and ask me to come join him in Central America, where there is no knowledge of him or me. (I know a letter will come soon, and it will bear the correctional facility’s address, and the stamp announcing, to anyone who cares to look at the envelope, that he remains an inmate).

Despite the gap between my imagination and his reality, he becomes more real to me – the face of the unknown, of all that is to come. His trial date is not set, and he serves no sentence right now, but waits in a doorway, ready to step into nowhere when he is told to do so. From a threshold he writes that he prefers death, if death is offered to him by the state. I have no way to make meaning out of this, and can only remember that his entire life, he has been bound by a neuro-net of barbed wire and drowned in the insoluble murk of imbalanced chemicals. A few walls and bars will change nothing – life is still unthinkable, whether it is a sentence to roam as the rest of us, or to sit and wait, as prisoners must.

By choosing death, he moves further beyond the pale of an ordered narrative and into the dark of not believing in a beginning or middle – only an ending. He has seen the events of his life, not unfolding, but rising and falling away from view without reason, like so many blank cue cards. Now they lay before him, and with him, on the floor of his cell – excerpts of lines from one thousand roles he never could have played – waiting for some hand to sweep them up and lay them down again as something definable and of worth.

Despite his apparent comfort with the thought of his own death, he is not limitless, and neither am I, when I happen to think of it. We both divine the boundaries of stories we have heard, stories given to us by others, and we feel the hemming action of the camera’s lens, the limits of the character’s arc, the duration of the drama we can leave at any time, and the one we cannot escape. This is how I believe I can come to understand him, and how I learn about myself.

At times, I am that elusive hand, ordering the parts of his life into a whole. I shuffle through and consider his mother, father, and brother. The conservative church in which he was raised, and the people surrounding him at the many schools through which he slid, almost unnoticed, the perpetual new kid. The mystery of his biology. The chemistry of his brain. The (un)certainty of his socialization. The influence of substances, thinkers, ideas, even music. As I order them, they remain unintelligible, insensible to me, an outsider. Divining nothing, the lens shatters; the arc breaks at a tangent and is an arc no more. I think of rainbows and decide briefly that I do not believe in promises.

I threaten God with the thought that God has left him in his cell, as under an earth-full of water.

This of course is not true. I believe God is one of promises and redemption. I realize he is the scapegoat for all my frustration with God, hateful desire, fear and loathing, misanthropy, and impotence. But he is also the exertion of my own life force, my psychosocial mercenary, gaining bloody strength out in the world for me by eliminating one more foe, and leaving my hands lily-white. As a gesture of thanks, I sublimate myself and try to identify with him as he takes life. I puncture flesh, and am sprayed with the blood. I crush bone, and chase with lust. I know not what I do.

Forgive me, but I live through him and know the hammer, the knife, the hair, the body, and their weight in hand. I live through him and feel the spike in my vein and the surge in my blood and the opening in my brain against all the gravities of this world and the orgasm of junk and life and death and black sleep and no forgiveness for living through him and then leaving him when I have had enough because I can only move so far beyond the limits of my own story before I am pulled back again by the unreality of entering another’s.

I am not opened and continually opening, but rather closed to him, and continually closing away from him – a dying flower, useless. My casual appropriation of his story is not a dabbling in the fantasy of his sin and crime, but rather a beating and rape all its own. I am unrepentant as I sentence his life and begin to cannibalize it with the ink pen I use to write him letters.

The first one is short and to the point. Most people have said they are praying for him, are saddened by the news of his actions, and know Jesus is watching out for him still, somehow. I forego these almost meaningless/well-meaning sentences and write to him about writing. I cannot order his life into coherency, and I cannot construct a letter that pretends to be anything but what it is: a confession that I do not know what to say, or how to say it.

Every word I write on this first page curves inward and consumes itself until it is almost meaningless; but he writes back anyway, because he understands the way words work sometimes, and he thanks me for not passing him another platitude.

We begin correspondence, and he asks what I think about God, the myth of Satan, and the beginning of time. I ask him about community, Evangelicals, and rebellion. I leave off mid-sentence in order to take a phone call from my brother-in-law, who also writes a letter to him occasionally, and perhaps is leaving off mid-sentence as well, in order to call me.

I return to the letter. I continue. I stop again, because I am hungry, and I lose my pen, and begin again in different ink, highlighting the break, making it glare. I speak to him between these lines, and he hears that I do not have time, energy, desire, or compassion enough to write a letter as though we were in earnest conversation. Instead, the black ink and the blue ink hail him as the child for which the adult has no time. The inks push him further into the economy of my hope, desire, and fear, further into the commoditization of my experience.

Some of my letters are winged. They seem blown by a breeze, because I swipe crumbs of bread from the wet ink, which then flares outward and upward, toward the corner of the paper, in the faintest wisps. At every turn, my haste is revealed. He must know I write while doing other things. Multitasking is what I have been taught to call it. Inattention is what I know it is.

Every thought I have of him is diluted, and so every letter is compromised. Paragraphs crumble as my sandwiches crumble. Sentence fragments. Word splits. Letter flutters. I think of the ripples and horns of sand dunes, and grains torn into the sky by a trade wind. I send him pieces of paper with the flick of my wrist, the swipe of my hand. I send him paper and crumbs of sand.

His letters are urgently written in black ink, with canceled thoughts and false starts struck through by lines that hide nothing. The letters are jagged with the contradictions of his thought and his world, but they are solid, present. The words rush to the ends of themselves, to the ends of sentences, to the ends of the paragraph-less letters. These are composed in his cell, against time, I imagine, on the one book he is allowed. He writes with a borrowed pen – as he is sometimes on suicide watch – but he also writes with attention.

But what if he writes at a table with another man, in a room with guards and cameras, with the knowledge that someone will read the letter before it reaches its destination? What if he writes to me because he hopes to hear back, and this active hope precludes his breaking the pen and slicing his skin as he has sliced so many times before?

And what if he begins to recognize that pattern of my letters, their disjointed nature, the interruptions of my free and easy life? What if he infers that I stroll to the mailbox, and that, whether his letter is there or not, I stroll back home again, nearly unmoved?

He may, in a short while, understand that I attend to his life and his cares, as I attend the theater – with anticipation and intention, but also with complete freedom of choice. Because I am freer than he, I feel I can live outside apprehension, especially apprehension by one so far away and removed. He does not know my story, and I mistakenly believe he will not know it unless I tell him.

I believe in the illusion of my grandeur, that my pretense is really concern, and that my vanity is compassion. I assume a position of privilege as a mobile, autonomous storyteller with an eager audience of one; but I too am at his mercy, and he may choose to write others, and to erase me from his experience, and think not of my memory nor of my present condition, and so not of me, or my story, at all.

To span the distance between our minds, I speak to his mother. She talks on the telephone with him regularly, and has stood by his side always. When I see her, I am moved by her tired face, which ages exponentially with the peaks and valleys of her son’s disorderly mind and troubled heart, and with the uncertainty of his daily life. She thanks me for my letters, and my diligence, and for how I have “taken up his cause,” in the way she knew I would.

I feel no pang of guilt, mostly because I enjoy feeling this way about myself. Yes, I think, I have taken up his cause, as Bob Dylan took up the Hurricane’s; as protestors take up death-row prisoners’; as the entire world took up Mandela’s and Gandhi’s; and as Christ takes up the world’s.

It is good, what I am doing. Out of the lonely business of writing letters, I seek the company of the compassionate. In the solitude of pen and paper, I feel at one with those seeking justice and mercy in the world. But I am not at one with anyone, and neither do I write to him the lonely letters I would like to imagine I write. Rather, I carry the spiral-bound notebook around with me, and I fit paragraphs in here and there, and occasionally I speak with his mother, and she thanks me once again, for my titanic expressions of love. Little by little, I see that justice and mercy are the true rhythms of the world, and I am out of sync.

What is wrong with me? I start small and think of my name and the space it occupies at the end of the letters, the name I sign, but also the name I leave out. My signature reads Jason Heron, and at times, documentation turns up with my middle initial, A. This is my family’s new scarlet letter, a brand even, a mark of Cain, or a hex on our house – neither story nor mark is adequate, though, to the task of signifying the change a name can make. His is my middle name and mine his first name, and so we bear the traces of one another wherever we go.

I cannot say my name without his coming into my world, if only for a moment, to introduce himself in my life with others. He is always with me, and I am always with him – but do we know this, and if we do, what difference does it make? Rather than existing as some distant relative or some lost person from my childhood, he resides squarely in the middle of the most basic element of my identity. Our shared name is the incongruity in the ostensible symmetry of my being – six letters silently writhing between the five staid letters of my first and last names – the occurrence of that which I cannot limit, control, or fit.

We cannot escape each other. When I think of his life, when I write him, and when I listen to his mother, I make believe that I am carrying a weight for him or with him, and I feel gratified, even righteous. But in reality, away from the theatre, page, or conversation, I carry only the weight of six letters, only the faintest ounce of one I have not known before death.

Without previous relationship, ours is now defined by his sentence and my freedom, and I cannot divorce murder from his name, which I must say with my own. My name signifies that I am, and together, he and I have brought death into the equation of my being. He bears that guilt forever. I bear something airily related to it only when I want to, and even then, feebly.

God, forgive me, for I separate myself from the prisoner, though I must utter his name daily as my own. I keep him at a remove, for I cannot bear what he has done. I send him into my own repression for fear that he will expose to me my own guilt and maybe even, my sin. He is not my evil twin, and he is not my enemy – we are barely friends, and formally, only cousins – and tonight he will be the one I send into outer darkness, as I fall into forgetful sleep.

Jason A. Heron is a 26-year-old husband, father, bus driver, theology student, and writer living in Wilmore, Kentucky.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, March 26th, 2007 | Email This Post

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