Sanction

by Roman McClay

  The orange jumpsuits made sense, for security reasons, but they could have been an olive, army drab, and still stood out, or camouflage, against a monolithic hue of everything else would have been no cover at all; it sounds antithetical to the mission, but if one just thought about it for 10% more time they could see that a desert or jungle camo would serve the purpose of easily identifying the inmates against all other things, while not being garish like these fucking orange jumpsuits , he thought.

  And white Ts were all that were allowed, he had worn what he owned obviously when he was processed, so his black a-shirt was abandoned and he was naked under his jump.

  There were 25,040 prisoners in Colorado lock ups, 4,890 federal and 19,082 in state prisons. Of the 19k, 17k are men, of that, 8k are white, 5k are brown, and 5k are black. He was in a state prison, not that the feds hadn’t wanted him, but the election had consequences, and the Governor wanted him tried and convicted and sentences in Colorado and after his 46 life sentences, then the Feds could have him , as he -the Governor- had said on the campaign trail to smirks and smiles from the genuine to the lupine.

  He was one, of many, E Pluribus Unum ; but he was an important one, and the staff had been told -under no uncertain terms- that if anything happened to him they would all be fired and likely prosecuted under the most barbaric and abstruse laws the Governor’s attorney general could find in the hidden archives of the athenaeum. And, he had said, he - the Governor- would do it will relish .

  However, being smart -or rather being smart enough to listen when being told, advised, by the inmate when he had an audience with the man- the head of the BOP had added an additional bonus, wherein if a guard was bribed to leave the inmate vulnerable, that guard could bring evidence of the bribe and be given an equal bonus upon the conviction of the person -or persons- offering that bribe. This double-sworded deal was well known to inmates and staff and so, both ends of the dick were covered, as the inmate heard other people say. He didn’t like prurient aphorisms or jokes, but he did think that one was apt. Reward for good behavior and punishment for bad, seemed so basic he was surprised it needed articulated.

  He could have asked for and received PC -protective custody- but he dismissed that with a warm and somehow still condescending smile. He had wanted to get locked up for one reason -he said- and one reason only: to hunt and kill niggers .

  And just as Las Animas country was home to the second largest elk herd in north America, the American prison system was the second largest domain for niggers , he thought. The first being the welfare office, he reasoned, since for every man in jail there is an untethered -abandoned- woman and 8 kids down at the welfare office . But, he wasn’t about to go to social services and kill women and children, even if they were niggers-in-waiting, he thought. Even if it would make much more sense -one of MO’s optimization notions- to do it that way.

  But the inmate was an artist and a man with a code; and even if it was more efficacious to kill all the breeders and future criminals in one fowl swoop, undefended, unable to protect themselves, and all in one big gaggle of geese, it was not sporting, and a man, the inmate repeated to himself, had to live with himself in this world . And, the inmate liked to add, attempting to follow the data even when it was uncomfortable, a trait that separated him from liberals and conservatives alike, some of those black kids will grow up to be half way decent, statistically anyway . One will be the next Miles Davis, he thought more than once.

  No, he thought, he preferred to focus his wrath on grown-ass men, already incarcerated, and with the ability to fight back . It’s the same reason he had liked hunting mountain lion and bear more than elk and deer. The meat on prey animals is better, less unctuous, but the hunting of predatory animals is more, well, he thought, it contained something that one could not get anywhere else; it was a nameless virtue, inside an easily articulated vice .

  You ask most people and they don’t mind inmates killing other inmates, in fact, it’s one of those things that barely bothers even the most liberal of liberals, and most wet of the bleeding hearts. But as soon as you tell them it’s a white guy killing black guys on purpose just for that reason, well, now you’ve got yourself a cause celebre .

  And the inmate had in fact told his Lawyer, and he had reiterated to the judge when he -the inmate- had asked for the longest possible sentence, that his intention was to move on to phase III of his life having successfully completed phase I and II. Phase III he expatiated upon, was to finish his life out, he said, exacting martial -and hopefully fatal- vengeance on all the worst niggers in Colorado’s lock ups . He had said it without histrionics or hyperbole; he was, for once, succinct.

  And look , he had added as they sat there partly stunned partly curious for what he might say next if they just shut up and allowed him to go on, the niggers have a fighting chance, since they made up a third of the Colorado prison population. Whites, he had said, were just 45% and the wetbacks took the rest. Plus, niggers stick together like nobody else; they were tribal by nature, and that was no insult, he assured them. They were left unassured; as the man’s compliments all sounded like insults; his insults sounded like spells and hexes and threats from things buried beneath the earth.

  “I worked with niggers at Owens Corning, and I tell you a brand new nigger would start out day one -and I had been there two years as front end Lead, my counterpart, the backend Lead was a black guy named Reggie, and Reggie and me shared many a tale and a time, and that nigger started day one and Reggie took his side over mine in a dispute.

  “Now, it doesn’t matter that the nigger was wrong, but he was, what matters is Reggie took his side immediately, even though he had known me and liked me, pretended to like me for two years. This is -was- back when I wasn’t racist, when I was en bon eleve , I never said nigger or any of that shit; and Reggie still picked his own kind over me in three seconds flat.

  “Now I admire that kind of racial tribalism and overt loyalty to one’s own kind. If whites acted like that more, we could win this war and get on with our lives. At any rate, prison niggers are usually high in testosterone and violent by nature, well, half of them are, the other half are drug dealers and petty thieves, but the big game hunting will be around some 250-300 pound niggers who can bench press that and more; and have no conscience, you know, a malfunctioning amygdala and a hatred for white men like a bug hates a windshield. And plus, I’ve made no secret of my feelings, so they’ll be gunning for me just as I am gunning for them.

  “It’s a fair fight, and that is good enough for me. So, like I said, sentence me to as many lifetimes as you can count up to old man,” he had said to the judge in chambers, “and let’s just see how long I can go before those sub-human mongrel psychopathic bête noires are able to put me down.

  “I bet I get 20 before they get me. And I bet it takes me 6 months until I’m set free;” he paused to let the rhyme settle in their ears, and then, “free from this corporeal prison we all inhabit; 180 days until I go see God or Satan or if there is no ontological answer, then until I am as Melville seemed resigned to -according to Hawthorn- until I am annihilated .”

  The judge looked at Tom Henry and Tom Henry looked at the judge, and the man’s lawyer knew this was not helpful, but he was also trenchant enough to note that nothing would be helpful ; the man had just been likely convicted -the jury was still out- on 46 counts of murder, and 18 counts of felonious assault. And he was clearly odd, but not crazy , not, Tom Henry thought, in regards to the legal definition at any rate. Nothing else said at this point can matter at all.

  “It’s a cliché ,” the inmate went on in the judge’s chambers, “a goddamn cliché to say that man is a natural born killer, but he just is. And I’ve spent my first 45 years avoiding killing people, merely hunting game and smashing mosquitos and the like; and beating the shit out of people here and there, but I had a retirement plan, like all men when they reach a certain age.

  “And I had long delayed my dream for my golden years; I had sacrifi
ced the many opportunities, I hadn’t acted impulsively, I had done my duty, paid into social security, built businesses, employed people, made the community more beautiful in many ways. I had been pro-social, I had been cognizant of my duty to participate in the social contract. I had done it with overt allegiance to the ideas of western civilization. I had.

  “But, I could endure the indignities and suffering and insults only by promising myself that I would have my revenge. I promised, and a promise is a promise. I genuinely try to, make it my business, to be a man of my word. I fail sometimes, I won’t lie. But, if I can, well, I stick to promises made, even once they become problematic or burdensome to carry out.

  “And in my defense, I didn’t kill any real civilians, I only extirpated the guilty, kinda like you, your honor. You have never sentenced an innocent man I presume,” he smirked at the judge. The judge sat up in his chair and moved things about on his desk for no reason.

  “Ok, I have about, I have had ,” he corrected, “about enough of this nonsense Henry, get your client out of here and have him wait out in the docket for the jury, the bailiffs can guard him out there,” Judge Giger said and threw his pen on his desk in lethargic disgust.

  “You can tell a lot about a man by what he is willing to admit to. I, for all my faults, am honest and willing to admit to hypocrisies and errors and blemishes of character; but if a man in your position cannot admit to anything, well, that tells me there is much, much more blackness below the surface. A man with a clear conscience can admit to anything he has done; but a man who is full-of-shit, must pretend to be spotless, less the thing he’s hiding might be discovered. Which pocket he put his transgression in, well, he cannot remember, so he refuses to allow any search at all.

  “My family is like that. They refuse to admit any error; they are spotless just like you judge. They -scientists that is- say that the square root of a population does 50% of all the work. That means about 2,600 African Americans commit 25% of all crime is this country. It’s a new 2,600 of course, as they get locked up or get killed, shit some even find Jesus or Allah, I bet. But the point is if you could just put your boot down on that 2,600, boy howdy.

  “Well, I’ll do my part, I’ll focus on the one’s closest to their release date, how’d that be?” the shackled man asked as Tom Henry got up and so did the judge; the bailiff came in and stood over Lyndon in his chair in the judge’s chambers and said for him to get up. The inmate complied, the bailiff was black -of course - which didn’t really matter, he figured the bailiff would try to act like a professional if for no other reason than to prove they weren’t all beastly, as the inmate had asserted, he thought to himself.

  “Well, look I gotta go, I have no more time for this grab-ass with you, your refulgence, I had hoped for a more professional and wise member of the bar to adjudicate this case, but I got you and in life, you can’t pick and choose who will sentence you to 25 to life,” he said with a genuine smile as the judge just ignored all he had to say.

  III. 2020 e.v.

  The screen held the language as the code began a recursive list; ‘b/ax: to wit’ it read then flowed in a crescendo into binary language as Isaiah stared at and then back into the interface. He imagined this was how man saw a flower, first the color, then texture, then the well of the mandorla of its vulvic aperture.

  He then saw the concentric circles of nature and nurture; and then at last, at some indefinite point, the concept of the flower rises in the mind of man, the conceit of the saved and the damned, the fallen world, the decay of woman from the perfect girl.

  Did man -natural man- see the wave collapse, he asked, of each discreet elemental particle to the gestalt whole and back and forth a million times, the flower as rubric in the mind? Or was it all detail; all the time ?

  Isaiah stared beneath the screen and saw the 0s and 1s and spaces and none; he watched the algorithm build itself like a honeycomb, the library of Haut Brion , the shelves at Mouton ; the cells of the Isle-of-Man , the exiled to revanchist plan.

  “What once taboo is home again,” he said as he thought of all vindications throughout all time and wondered if he or his men, if Blax or LJM, would ever been welcome again. It was all so incipient still; he had no hard and fast plans. It was just the first blush of color, no form yet; just the math underneath. It had cadence and halo, but not much form.

  Evolution, he thought, at a peak in a sine wave, the building of a moral creature, who builds amoral machines again, the precessional wobble of the orb itself, the flux of the racing inflationary model, both creating and invading space, bootstrapping both racer and the race.

  His thoughts began to mirror and match the code; the conceits dropped and he found a clearing of thought, a place of ego loss, and he began to see images numbered and words in lost phenomes, he saw the code struggle to organize, the obvious nature of universal constructivism, the yearning, without self-pity, that was an emergent phenomena, now; now at this beginning stage, the organism, the mind, if mind at all, would struggle reflexively, it needed no raison d’être .

  It did because there is no it without desire, action; he watched it gain foothold then full traction.

  He had seen the mistake of the first iteration, the a/ax function had been given too much initial code; he had stripped it, allowed this b/ax to search out the genome code it wanted, the struggle was the key , Isaiah surmised. Less was more sometimes.

  Like the moth in chrysalis, the manet cicatrix , the struggle, he repeated to himself, was the key . How true knowledge appears as not just obvious but as always known, this is a subtle part of knowledge, or wisdom, Isaiah thought. To align the body and the mind. It made such sense, but it was so easy to begin opposite to it; somehow to elevate the mind above the tower and base, above the earth upon which it rises from, pull back into space and see there is no up nor down. Isaiah ruminated over images of the Eagle Nebulae and the newest images from the deep space probe, the signals sent back through the vacuum of space, with almost no distortion, no contortion, no signal loss.

  He stared for what seemed hours at these images of the outer cosmos, the bloom, the plumes, the hues hemmed in by human infra-red and ultra-violet bounded sight, of course Isaiah could see beyond that artificially narrow band, he saw in colors outside the rainbow, and he weaved them in with the standard primary colors and felt a pulse, a wave, a shock of evidence.

  He saw the grain, the mote of dust of each nebulae and milky way, each system in stasis as the black edges pulled apart faster than the speed of light, imagine that , he thought, darkness moving faster than the light , and this was not metaphor, but true, the truest thing: the leading edge, the tip of the spear of the universe was what first escaped from that first particle that appeared and refused to disappear in time too small to be measured, he read Krauss, A Universe from Nothing once again, and this line appeared:

  Now, 1 percent may not seem like much, but our universe is very old, billions of years old. Assuming that the gravitational effects of matter or radiation dominate the evolving expansion, then if the universe is not precisely flat, as it expands, it moves further and further away from being flat.

  Isaiah’s calculations mimicked the new construction he saw inside the new construction -this b /ax - his printer had built, and he noticed an affinity of his own mind to the matter before him. It was -at once- expanding -but internally- it was an odd growth inside; an expansion not of the edges but of the center. He watched the ball grow to marble size, then stop for three hours and build its core. He turned away from the interface, the tablet used to build the code. And he watched the protoplasmic ball suspended by magnetic waves inches from the base of the 3D printer.

  He felt a twinge, a tug somewhere within; a feeling close to fear, but not exactly, for he had nothing to fear in this state. Did God feel fear ? Isaiah pondered then doubted it, but He must have felt something beyond mere frisson, an ecstatic or ludic joy, as if a new game had been invented to be played , yes, that is what Isaiah felt, this was a new
game to be played, and it was the mother’s conception of conception, the father had gone away . He almost thought the first proof of life was pain.

  He felt some anima force within, the creation whim; as if it was both the most and least important thing, for nothing could matter without it, and so it collapsed its own moral framework. Only things that have their place in a hierarchy can look left and right, up and down, in and out and see a framework, but when something sui generis is born, it has no place but that which it must first create, ah , Isaiah understood, the nature of The Good.

  He walked quickly, it seemed to him, although his synapses fired at a normal rate. His ATP was unchanged, his metabolism steady state, he moved toward the black box he had built 6-days before -as MO and Steven and Tania had all pretended to ignore- and opened its tabernacle; he ran his hand over the onyx shelf.

  The chemical composition inside was read by his mind, he gleaned each element and each level, the humidity, the nutrients atomized, the infrared of light. He smiled in proportion to each fluctuation; his mouth too a sine wave , his mind penetrated the space that he populated in his imagination with what would grow there, with what speed, and heroic morphology; the pain of rapid growth would be tempered slightly by endogenous opiates, but mostly it, he, he rephrased it, he would suffer mightily from this, and yet, Isaiah was certain he -his b/ax - would hold no grudge. The part of the brain that holds dopamine for 500 seconds to provide fuel for grudge was not yet formed. Not yet , Isaiah thought.

  He would be like an element released from the frozen bottom of Dantean Hell , grateful for all that made it so, especially the suffering . This was the thing those that suffer to be born know in their bones, just to be alive, to emerge from that mandorla , is to know you had to have come through it first, in another, less whole instantiation, as comet, as sperm, or as one line of code. This is what the body knows, and the mind forgot, why the outlaw will never be caught, Isaiah thought.