by James Lewelling.
Our apartment had no windows and only one door. I was standing by the door looking out when Fred came up behind me with his clipboard. That bothered me right off the bat. Granted, I had agreed to let him in. He worked for this company. The company was trying to figure something out by watching us. It was a kind of study. In return for being watched, we were going to get some really nice stuff. I was fairly certain my wife would have agreed to it, but I hadn’t told her yet. I had meant to tell her before Fred arrived. That would have been better than my wife coming home to discover a stranger in the apartment.
But Fred was already in. He came to me from the inside with his clipboard. The next thing I knew Fred was saying things and I was following him around the apartment. I was saying things. This was the first instance of this business of saying things that follow other things, but at the time I wasn’t aware of it. I had assumed we were talking. Fred showed me around, saying things. Then I saw Bill, near the kitchen. He had a clipboard too and was doing the same things Fred was doing: checking things out, making notes. He waved to Fred and me as we passed, and I was thinking, Fred had never said anything about Bill. Also I wondered if Bill was going to spend the night along with Fred.
I had agreed to Fred spending the night. That was part of the study and as such one of the conditions of getting the nice stuff. So I agreed to that. I had been thinking, well, we’ll have Fred over. This will be interesting. I imagined myself and Fred and my wife chatting after dinner around the kitchen table, and then Fred rising and saying, time to call it a day, and retiring to the guest room. (Actually the baby’s room; he would sleep in the baby’s room and the baby would sleep with us). Left alone in the kitchen, my wife and I would have continued chatting at the dinner table, maybe chatting about Fred. What an odd character that Fred is! we might have been saying.
In any case, that would have been OK. One guy over. We had the space. The baby usually slept with us anyway. That would be OK with me, which was why I had agreed to it, and it would have been OK with my wife, which is why I had agreed to it on her behalf, but now there was another guy. That is, there was Bill, nosing around the house, checking things out and writing things down on his clipboard. Bill could not stay the night like Fred.
I wanted to make this clear to Fred, but Fred just kept saying things and I kept saying things that followed from the things that Fred said. This was a bit frustrating. Then Fred waved to Mary, who was checking under the corner of the mattress in the bedroom. I waved too though her presence alarmed me. I had agreed to Fred (and agreed on my wife’s behalf to Fred) staying the night because we had the extra room—actually the baby’s room—and was alarmed by Bill but Bill was maybe doable. He could just sleep with Fred in the baby’s room, but now Mary? She was too much. Our apartment—small with no windows and only one door—could not accommodate Mary. What’s more, while my wife would go along with Fred staying and maybe tolerate the addition of Bill, there was no way she was going to swallow Mary. I was certain I had not agreed to Mary. I felt I should raise this point with Fred as soon as possible but he just kept going on and on, saying things, and everything he said followed perfectly from what he had said before, and what’s more everything he said followed perfectly from what I had said before him—in the rare instances in which I said something—and everything that I said followed perfectly from what he had said before me. It was clear to me then that the topic of the unacceptable-ness of Mary (or Bill, for that matter, I hadn’t yet conceded Bill either) was simply not going to come up in a smooth fashion and therefore at some point I would have to force the issue.
Then Fred was showing me some of the nice stuff they were installing right there in the kitchen even before they had started the study; in fact, as it turned out, all this nice stuff, or at least some of the nice stuff, they were giving us wasn’t as I had thought so much a reward for allowing ourselves to be the object of the study but, in fact, a part of the study itself. The idea was to watch what we would do with it. I found that idea a vaguely disquieting, but I was pleased with the stuff, which was very nice. At the same time, I was becoming more alarmed, because moments earlier I had caught a glimpse of John and a couple of technicians in the living room, and this was really too much. Certainly they couldn’t all be planning on spending the night, but now the group had grown too large even to stay during the day—days?—allotted to the study because one could not function with such a crowd and there was the baby to think of and I never would have agreed to the presence of so many people had I known about it—I became certain that I had been misled at this point; it couldn’t have been a matter of an innocent misunderstanding.
Where was the baby? I was thinking also because I had put the baby down not long before and hadn’t heard a peep out of him since, but surely the noise and bustle of this large (and growing) group of managers and technicians in this small apartment must have disturbed him and when he was disturbed, he inevitably disturbed us, and yet nary a peep had I heard. I should check on the baby, I was thinking, still listening to the stream of things Fred was saying, each following from its predecessor with perfect fluidity.
I should check on the baby, I was thinking, and this urgency even superseded the urgency of breaking into the stream of things Fred was saying to announce the unacceptable-ness of Mary (not to mention Bill, John and the technicians etc… ) In fact, as things were developing, the unacceptable-ness of Mary (and Bill, John and the technicians etc…) was beginning to seem beside the point; or rather it was becoming a moot point in that they were all here doing what they were doing and removing them within the context of what I had agreed to with Fred or not agreed to with Fred seemed well nigh impossible. One could not modify that agreement at this point, I was thinking. There had either been a gross misunderstanding or I had been misled to a criminal extent, I was thinking. No valid agreement existed, I was thinking. I would have to put an end to all of this, even the notion of any previous agreement soon. I would have to tell them all to leave and cancel the whole thing soon. If I did that, they probably wouldn’t let us keep all the nice stuff, but so be it!
There was no chance my wife would find any of this acceptable as indeed I didn’t find it acceptable myself. We were on the same team now and all these other people were on a different team and this was our apartment and I would have to make that absolutely clear to Fred soon even if I had to tell him to shut up to break the stream of things he was saying that followed perfectly from all the other things he was saying, I was thinking, but Fred had not stopped talking or even paused in his talking and he was leading me to another room at this point and there—it was the in the den—on the couch I saw Nancy bent over her baby—not our baby—and realized things had gotten completely out of control. For while we could accommodate—during the day at least; nights were out of the question—any number of adults, we had never signed on—or rather I had never signed on myself and on behalf of my wife—to the accommodation of the children of strangers, but there was Nancy’s baby right there on the couch with Nancy attending to it in an altogether familiar fashion as if she had been attending to babies on our couch all her life!
The time had come to shout, I thought, but just as I was thinking this—and Fred was still talking; it was truly amazing how much Fred had to say and everything he said followed perfectly from what he had said before—I had another thought, another realization actually—that perhaps the situation and gone past the point at which I could make any protests effective. That is, with the moral force of property behind me—this was my wife’s and my apartment after all, no-one had questioned that—in fact, that it was our apartment and not their apartment formed the basis of their need for it, that is to study it; there was no point after all in them—I was thinking of Fred and crew as “them” now—studying their own apartment or even an ownerless apartment, which they had procured for this purpose—no, they needed us because they needed this to be our apartment and that was why they had agreed to give us all the nice stuff that they were presently installing in every nook and cranny as part of the study to be sure but also after the study were over, I assumed, we could keep it as a reward—that while I could evict Fred with a sharp word or declaration by himself, or with maybe one or two underlings—I could say, Get out! That’s it! for example–but with this whole group here behind him—and I caught a few newcomers wandering about, in fact, newcomers with beards, hauling in equipment—the situation had now passed the point where the moral force of property would be enough, and I realized that I could not evict this entire group with a forceful word. In fact, I could not evict this entire group at all, but, sadly, I realized, I would be forced to endure their presence for as long as they decided to stay.
And I still hadn’t found the baby. And I still hadn’t found my wife. Surely she had come home already during the time which had elapsed since I had abandoned the front door but as yet I hadn’t seen her. I had to accept then that I had failed to warn her of the situation before she would have had to encounter it herself, as I had earlier dearly hoped to do, but still I hoped to catch a glimpse of her as soon as possible so I could see how she was taking it but also to offer my solidarity with her—perhaps with a roll of the eyes or a helpless glance—in the affliction we were both being forced to endure.
Nothing doing. No sign of my wife. Surely she was back from work. She must be in the apartment somewhere becoming increasingly puzzled among the growing throng. Perhaps she had found the baby, I was thinking. Surely I would run into her sooner or later as our apartment was not large and Fred seemed hell bent on leading me through each and every room, saying one thing after another with everything he said following perfectly from everything that came before it. That’s it! I was thinking, looking into the talking face of Fred. Now is the time!
Evicting Fred and co. with a forceful word was now completely out of the question, I was thinking, but at least I could find out exactly how long he—and they—planned to stay. If there was a clearly stated limit to their occupation, I felt I could cope and I could help my wife to cope no matter how unpleasant that occupation turned out to be. When I found my wife, I was thinking, I would tell her that it would only be until Wednesday, for example, and as bad as it all was, I could cope and she could cope because we would only have to make it till Wednesday at which time all would return to normal and we could look back at the whole episode as a piece of adversity, galling adversity perhaps, but nonetheless a piece of adversity that we had overcome.
I must find out, I was thinking, when they are planning on leaving or, even more to the point, a time beyond which—plan or no plan—they would all have certainly left so that when I saw my wife—with the baby in her arms, surely she would have found the baby by that time—I could tell her and we could cope. Fred was still saying things. We had come full circle and reached the front door just as I was clearing my throat to demand in no uncertain terms that Fred tell me exactly when all this would be over. The door was open. I fled.
It was still Chicago outside, and not the nicest part of Chicago either. I felt, in fact, a distinct sense of menace emanating from this part of Chicago. This particular feeling of menace was altogether familiar to me. I lived here after all. Along with this feeling of menace, came a commanding impulse, an urgent impulse, an urgency itself, to keep moving. When I had encountered this feeling of menace before—upon finding myself in a “bad” neighborhood, or even a “bad” street, or even a “bad” room—I had always partially ameliorated this feeling of menace by moving. It was possible to pass out “bad” neighborhoods, or streets or even “bad” rooms. One passed out of them by moving through them as quickly as was possible without betraying the slightest outward indication of one’s growing interior panic. A brisk walking pace, nothing that showed any sign of breaking into a run, ought to do it. A business-like walking pace. One had somewhere very definite to go and one was going there. I adopted this pace immediately and soon left the apartment and the block on which the apartment was located behind me but even in so doing—abandoning, as it were, my wife and the baby—I did not evade the sense of menace emanating from the landscape. In fact, if anything, the sensation of menace intensified the further I traveled, and I was soon miles from my apartment. It was at this point that I began to suspect that I had been transported, quite possibly into the future.
The streets and neighborhoods through which I passed—all slates and grays and the sky washed out with the look of impending snow—had taken on the appearance of the future. It was the kind of urban squalor one expects of the future, distinct from the urban squalor with which I was familiar. It was a strange and alienating squalor and all the more menacing for its strangeness. It was through the inspiration of this growing suspicion that I had been transported—if not to the future at least somewhere—that I allowed myself, even forced myself, as it were, to let go of my previous nagging worries regarding my wife and baby—not abandoned to, but rather in the care of—to put a good face on it— the clipboarded throng that had so efficiently occupied my apartment. Something much larger was going on, I began to feel as I passed into neighborhoods even more redolent of futuristic squalor, something that obviated even the most poignant of domestic concerns.
I had been transported, it seemed, into an altogether unfamiliar place or time, transported to the degree that I began to wonder if I had been mistaken previously, wholly mistaken, about my environs and situation. It was a muddle not unlike that one sometimes awakens into in the middle of the night. One awakens into a muddle such that one is unsure of where one went to bed or even when in one’s life one had last gone to bed. One is not sure for several moments of anything: one’s age for example, one’s location, one’s life situation—the lot. One makes guesses then—I am twelve, one might guess, for example, and I am getting up to go to school; or I am in the prime of life, late for work, one might guess; or I am elderly in a hospital, one might guess—but in due time all these guesses recede in the face of an increasingly assertive and rigid set of actual circumstances. So I felt, there hustling through the squalid and alienating landscape, a very particular kind of ebbing as certain circumstances I had believed to be my own leaked out of actuality or maybe it was that actuality leaked out of those circumstances—my wife, the baby, the apartment, Fred and Bill etc…– and into this slate and gray futuristic squalor through which I passed, driven by a sensation of menace that intensified with every street I crossed.
I have certainly been transported into the future, I kept thinking, beginning also to wonder at the miracle that had so evidently taken place. I am in the future now, I kept thinking. The people here, I thought glancing around, are future people. They wore odd clothes, for example, and were short, furtive and feral in a way one might expect of future people. They talked like future people. That is they didn’t talk. I could catch bits and pieces here and there as I passed among them. But these bits and pieces were not bits and pieces of conversation but only words. They were saying things in sequence but not talking. The thought of addressing any of them should the need—possibly urgent need—arise appalled me. I felt mute.
I could not speak; that was certain. I had the feeling that if I said anything at all, it would draw them to me. There were quite a lot of people around, some bigger than me and others smaller, all feral in black clothing but not in uniform. The street opened up, and I found myself on a kind of plaza. It was a de facto plaza. Not intended as a plaza but merely a space that had been opened up in the city or perhaps one that had not yet been filled in. It might have once been a real, intended plaza but now it was merely a de facto plaza and there were knots of people in it. Very temporary knots. People were passing through, each with his own trajectory but in places their paths crossed and in those places, they formed knots, temporarily. Some of these people were children. All were feral in black clothing that did not fit correctly. No one noticed me and I said nothing because I knew if I said anything to anyone or even to no one, it would draw them to me.
They were not nice people; that was for sure. In fact, just as I was experiencing the intimation that all these future people were not nice people, a big future person not far from me on the left, tried to grab a child and a melee ensued. The future child was too quick for the big future person and broke the big future person’s kneecap with a heavy wrench and then ran through his legs and got away. The big future person crouched down and grasped his knee with both hands and bellowed in agony right there where he was crouching.
None of the other future people in the plaza took any notice. Most of them were in knots. In these knots, the future people spoke quickly but they weren’t talking. When a knot formed, the individuals would pause only moments, throw out words in passing and move on. They were saying things but not talking. As for myself, crossing the plaza, I made it a point to avoid the knots. I navigated a path such that I kept a good distance away from any other person. I was careful and deliberate. I didn’t want to run into anyone by mistake. I didn’t know what I would do in a knot. I passed out of the plaza, down a short and narrow street that opened onto a smaller courtyard.
But it wasn’t a courtyard but merely a space. It was not intended as a courtyard. This lack of intension, it seemed, was a defining aspect of the landscape. The future was unintended. No part of this future city was intended or it had been intended one way but was being used in a way oblivious to those intentions. It was a de facto landscape and the courtyard was a de facto courtyard.
Without warning, a white van pulled into courtyard and the back doors of the white van opened and some women bounced out on pogo sticks. I understood instantly that it was their punishment to travel on pogo sticks. Maybe I am a future person after all, I thought now, rather than a past person transported to the future as I had been thinking. If I were not a future person, I was thinking, how would I understand instantly the penal nature of the pogo sticks? The future women on pogo sticks wore white uniforms like nurses might wear with those special nurses’ hats but they weren’t nurses. They were criminals of some sort, guilty of minor but significant infractions, the punishment for which was to travel on pogo sticks distributing chocolates. Would you like some chocolates? they said, to everyone they passed, fanning out across the courtyard, but no one took any–myself included. I didn’t take any chocolates because I didn’t want to become infected with whatever crime had necessitated this punishment. I didn’t want to become tainted by a malevolent chain of events. I felt this strongly and instinctively. I don’t know what the others were thinking but no one responded to the “nurse’s” offers. The nurses looked pained, with forced smiles, constipated actually. To get away from them, I passed through the courtyard, down an alley and onto a broad street.
Someone tackled me from behind. I was on the ground and this person was on top of me shoving his hands into the big pockets of my overcoat. I was thinking, I have nothing. I have nothing. I’m lucky I have nothing because I cannot then be robbed. This person will not want to kill me as he would after robbing me. He will have done me no wrong and feel no need to erase the evidence. I was right! He got off and wandered away. I got up again and kept walking. That was a close one, I was thinking. If I had had anything, I surely would have been dead now. Robbing is a bad thing, and only bad things can follow from it. But in this case, I was not robbed and no bad thing followed from it. I passed through knots of people.
I covered quite a lot of distance. The city all gray and slate rectangles continued wherever I went. Then I sensed someone behind me, some distance, following. I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to look back to know he was there. I thought, as I walked maybe a bit more quickly, this guy is going to get me certainly. This guy is following me. He means me no good. Having someone follow you is a bad thing and surely only a bad thing could come after it. I kept walking. I was thinking, if I do not acknowledge his following, his following might not exist. It is after all possible that he is only going the same way. He might be going the same way as I am but behind me. If he is going the same way, that is not a bad thing and no bad thing could come after. I came to the wall, looked up and forgot all about the man following me.
Something marvelous impended in the sky. For a moment this marvel erased completely the increasingly intense sensation of menace I was absorbing from the landscape. But then only a moment later, the sky seemed to imply: this thing that is impending though marvelous is not good. There were several extremely large and dark objects up there, each so large that you could not see both ends at once. These objects made you look up. They were barges like the kind you see on rivers but these were in the sky and much, much larger. This is what this wall is for, I realized, standing there looking up. When you get to that part of the city, you stand by the wall and look up at the enormous sky barges in their line trailing across the sky. Everyone when they reach this point stops and looks up.
The sight was mesmerizing. It’s a miracle anyone gets past, I was thinking, looking up. Still, one does. You tear yourself away and let the barges float by over your shoulder and once you have escaped the vista, it’s safe again to look at the horizon–or safe, anyway, from being perpetually mesmerized by the sight of the sky barges; not safe absolutely because nothing about this city implies safety. All its snug defenses, intended for other things, offer no protection. You can worm your way down to the deepest of sub sub basements, and yet you will still be exposed. Being exposed is a defining characteristic of this de facto city, I was thinking. All of its comforts and protections were designed for something else, something that no longer applies. Moving only takes the thinnest wedge off the edge of exposure. It takes only the burning tip off the dread and still the dread is there threatening to impale you.
The man who had been following me caught up, was, in fact, upon me but he didn’t get me instead he passed right by to stand beside me at the wall gazing up at the sky barges. So he wasn’t following me after all! It was a coincidence just as I had hoped. He was only going the same way as me. What luck! Another close one, I thought. Then the man turned to me. He had plastic bonds. He applied these to my wrists before I even understood what he was doing. You’re caught, man, he said, and led me away.
It was a relief to be caught.
It was a relief in that the sensation of menace was no longer being diffused equally from all directions but became noticeable concentrated, projecting now to me in the shape of a cone—and I could see that cone in my mind—from whatever place the man was taking me. This concentration allowed me to differentiate, according to the degree of intensity, the sensation of menace emanating from our destination from that wafting, as it were, from every feature of the landscape. In this way, I was relieved to some degree from the sense of menace emanating from every feature of the landscape, knowing now that it was indeed less menacing than whatever awaited me in the place the man was taking me. I might even put forward that I felt to some small degree protected by the man who had caught me from the menace wafting from every feature of the surrounding landscape; though at the same time, with every step bringing us closer to our ultimately menacing destination, I felt increasingly threatened by the man who had caught me. Nonetheless I followed. Like a dog, I followed.
That’s how I ended up here.
II.
I was struck the first time I saw a man in a cage. I knew men were put in cages of course. That was common knowledge. But somehow I had escaped seeing one until that day. I was young before I saw it. I was older afterwards. There the man was in the cage suspended high in the air. He was being moved. The crane made grinding noises and the cable creaked. I wondered about the man’s anxiety. To be dropped in a cage is a horrible idea. Certainly from that height, in the event of a fall, the man could not but be crushed cage or no cage, but nonetheless, it would be worse to fall in a cage and be crushed than, for example, to be tumbled out and crushed. He was far away in a vertical direction when I saw him and then his figure became obscured by the floor of the cage as it rose. Then it was just a cage—no man to be seen from that angle. And the cage was slotted into its spot in the tall building. This all took some time, but I had become entranced and watched till the very end. My father took note of my distraction but he neither interrupted my observation nor said anything when it was done. He didn’t even sigh. He waited with me, and when the cage had been slotted into its place and there was nothing further for me to see, we both continued on our way, wordlessly.
At the time I had thought, my father should say something, but now I think, there was nothing to say and so saying nothing was what he should have done and what he in fact did. I credit my father’s silences now whereas before I credited only his utterances.
I woke up this morning with that in my head. It was a dream but the man in the cage was not a dream but a memory in a dream. That is, in a dream, I remembered seeing the man in the cage and now, awake, I remember that dream. Oddly, also, I didn’t have this dream last night. Usually when you wake up remembering a dream it’s a dream you had just had when you were asleep. But this morning I woke up remembering a dream I had had long ago. Some time ago anyway. And now, here I am at my desk, remembering this morning, when I remembered the dream I had long ago, and in that dream, I was remembering seeing the man in a cage as a youth with my father, and I was also remembering, in the dream, the silence of my father.
III
We built cities for the dead. The dead were altogether reasonable in every other matter except their insistence that we construct these cities for them to inhabit. It was not at all clear where we would go once these cities were completed but pretty much everyone preferred not to think about that too much.
Of course one could not continue day after day in the completely absorbing and at times backbreaking task of constructing these cities for the dead without the question one’s own future habitation being addressed in some fashion. It could not be answered to be sure—no one really wanted it to be answered; in fact, truth be told, we all feared that it would be answered or rather we feared what the answer might be—but nonetheless, for us to go on and on without being crushed by the increasing mass of that unknown, the question had to be addressed in some fashion. One happy speculation held that in some other place, not far away but far enough that word of it never reached us directly, the dead were busy at work constructing cities for us just as we were constructing cities for them, and that the plan was that both these sets of cities would be completed more or less at the same time such that at the very moment of completion, we and the dead would merely switch places. That was a happy thought if not pursued too far. If you left it at that is what I mean. Because of course in continuing that line of speculation, one would have to consider just what those cities the dead were constructing might actually be like, whether they would be to our tastes etc… and such speculations, given what impressions we had of the dead, aside from their general reasonableness, tended to be pessimistic even, it must be admitted, morbid and horrible.
Still, one soldiered on, as it were. After all unlike the dead, for whom we toiled, we were alive and enjoyed the pleasures of life. In fact, the very act of eating out our lifetimes in the construction of dwelling places for the dead, if anything, enhanced and sharpened our perceptions that we—unlike them, the dead, the thought of whom could never be banished even momentarily from our minds—were in fact not dead; and there was quite a bit of satisfaction—nay inspiration even—in that. It spurred us on in fact. For example, although, as was only right and appropriate, most of the specifications of the city we were constructing were imposed upon us by the dead themselves, who after all were to inhabit it once it was completed, our position as constructors—on the scene as it were—allowed us a little more leeway for the pleasures of creativity than at first might be supposed. In details, for example. For example, the size of a door might be specified but not its shape; and in other cases, one could not deviate even one iota in the matter of shape but was given a virtually free hand as far as size went. In certain cases, instances in which the specifications provided by the dead had been left virtually blank, perhaps due to an oversight on their part, enterprising individuals would find themselves in a position to design entire structures or even, as in my case, entire classes of structures. This was how I can to invent the door-less prison.
Of course the dead needed prisons as much as the living if not more so. Just as among the living, there existed among the dead a certain class of incorrigible individual who felt a strong negative compulsion regarding law. In some cases—just as among the living—this negative compulsion—even need—to thwart the law—was felt even more strongly by these individuals than the compulsion to abide by the law was felt by everyone else. Accordingly among the dead, prisons were required to constrain the movements of criminals, even more so than among the living as, in the case of the dead, capital punishment, for obvious reasons, was ruled out.
Now, I thought musing absently amidst some mundane chore I had been called upon to complete—I was gathering up bits of debris after an explosion, I believe—the problem with pretty much every prison lies in the seeming impossibility of perfect efficacy. No matter how a prison was designed, it seemed that a few of its inmates would always devise some method of egress. In fact, up until that moment in history so far as I was aware—and granted my research into the matter had not been extensive—no prison had yet been constructed that could boast a record of perfect success. In light of this fact, mankind, up until this point in history, had naturally but sadly given up the quest for perfection in the matter of prisons, settling instead for near perfection in some cases but most often, sadder to say, perfect mediocrity.
We have been missing something, I was thinking as I chucked bits of debris from the recent explosion into a large receptacle. We have been missing something basic in our conceptions, I was thinking. After all, in other technological endeavors a perfect efficacy was everywhere achieved; why should prisons be any different? It’s a matter of putting in and keeping in, I thought. You have your criminal; you insert said criminal into the prison, and after that, the prison ought to do the work of keeping him there. It’s the one-way transition that is key. Achieving singularity of direction was at the heart of the matter. I puzzled over various types of cells, cages, traps and pits and entangling devices. I thought about ropes and belts and manacles. Then it struck me. The scales fell from my eyes, as they say, and the world became a different place.
The error in all previous conceptions of prisons, I realized, lay in the almost exclusive focus on ways out. One was always thinking about blocking up possible exits but no matter how many exits one blocked, the enterprising inmate always found one that had escaped one’s notice. What should have been considered, but had not—as far as I was aware—was eliminating entrances. After all if there were no way in, there could certainly be no way out. The prisoner had to already be in, as it were. The solution was simplicity itself. Accordingly, I dropped the last bit of debris I had collected into the bin, hurried away from the site of the explosion and applied to the relevant authority for a change of assignment. Taken by my enthusiasm—though perhaps a bit fuzzy on the content of my discovery—that authority was easily persuaded, and I set about the task of designing prisons for the city of the dead the very next morning. As chance would have it, the dead had left no specifications whatsoever in the matter of prison construction except vague suggestions of where said structures might be located. What luck! My hand was completely free!
Although certain practical difficulties prevented me from implementing a pure realization of my ideal (that is the impossibility of identifying dead criminals in utero, as it were, such that they might actually be born into the prison; or the mutual impermeability of matter which precluded the use of solid cuboid masses) I think the final, imperfect but still creditable, implementation successfully realized the root of my conception. Basically, I designed and built cages but instead of employing the conventional method of building the cage first and then inserting the criminal into the cage—thereby necessitating a door of some sort through which the criminal must pass—I prefabricated the parts of the cage first (door-less cage) with the idea that the cage itself could then be assembled around the criminal. Once encasing a criminal, these cages were to be hoisted high in the air into cage-sized slots built into large and vertically articulated frames that looked like nothing so much as the frames of office towers or residential blocks though without—aside from the slots—any interior space whatsoever as the cages had no doors through which such spaces might be accessed. Of course, I knew I never would get to see my scheme carried out (though we did try a few mock runs with willing volunteers) since the need for the buildings and unique method of populating them would not arise until the rest of the city were completed and the dead—including the dead criminals—arrived to take possession, before which time—everyone assumed anyway—all the living would have been evacuated. But I was nonetheless rewarded with the ample satisfaction of constructing the elements for a sufficient number of cages as well as constructing the large multistory structures into which they would, when the time was ripe, be slotted and of course in writing detailed instructions for their use.
This was ample satisfaction, but truth be told, even this satisfaction was tainted with the melancholy that tainted all of our efforts on behalf of the dead. That is the certain knowledge that we would never really see the results. Poised on the ridge, I looked down into the valley of Canaan (a Canaan that I had helped build no less) knowing I myself would never enter there. Ah Life!