Part 7 (2/2)
”No, there'll be a whole bunch of little questions. They'll be leading up to the big question. I'll tell you when we get there. So, prisons, right? Why do we send criminals to prisons?”
I peered out the window into the darkness. Dark houses, dark streets rolling by in the middle of the night. People quietly sleeping, watching TV, having s.e.x, eating late night snacks. I sat in a car talking about prisons with a crazy man. ”For doing things like killing people in their mobile homes?” I ventured. It was like the grammar lesson in the convenience store. I needed to learn to shut up.
”You're a funny guy, Lemuel. We send them to prisons to punish them, right? But why? Why that punishment?”
”What else do you want to do with them?”
”h.e.l.l, you could do lots of stuff. Let's say someone is a housebreaker, slips into homes, takes jewelry, money, whatever. Doesn't hurt anyone, but just takes stuff. There are lots of ways to deal with him. You could kill him, you could cut off his hands, you could make him wear special clothes or give him a special tattoo, you could make him do community service, you could provide him with counseling or religious training. You could look at his background and decide he needs more education. You could exile him. You could send him to study with Tibetan monks. Why do we use prisons?”
”I don't know. That's what we use.”
Melford took a hand off the steering wheel for a moment so he could point at me. ”Correct. Because that's what we use. Ideology, my friend. From the moment of birth, we are trained to see things a certain way, and that way seems natural and inevitable, not worth questioning. We look at the world and we think we see the truth, but what we see is what we are supposed to see. We turn on the television and happy people are eating at Burger King or drinking c.o.ke, and it makes perfect sense to us that burgers and c.o.ke are the path to happiness.”
”That's just advertising,” I said.
”But advertising is part of the social discourse, and it shapes our minds, our ident.i.ties, as much as-if not more so than-anything our parents or schools teach us. Ideology is more than a series of cultural a.s.sumptions. It makes us subjects, Lemuel. We are subject to it, so that we serve culture rather than culture serving us. We see ourselves as autonomous and free, but the limits of our freedom have always already been delineated by the ideology that provides the border of our tunnel vision.”
”And who controls the ideology? The Freemasons?”
He smirked at me. ”I love conspiracy theories. The Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Jesuits, the Jews, the Bilderberg Group, and my personal favorite: the Council on Foreign Relations. Great stuff. But where these conspiracy theorists go wrong is that they see the result as evidence of schemers. To them, because there's a conspiracy, there must be conspirators.”
”And that's wrong?”
”Dead wrong. The machinery of cultural ideology is on autopilot, Lemuel. It is a force-like a boulder going down a hill. It is going somewhere, picking up speed, and d.a.m.n close to unstoppable, but there is no intelligence behind the boulder. It is beholden to physical laws, not its own will.”
”What about the rich guys in smoke-filled rooms who plot to make us eat more fast food and drink more sodas?”
”They're not driving the boulder. They're being crushed by it, just like the rest of us.”
I took a polite moment to consider this idea, and then I moved on. ”This isn't helping me with the prison question.”
”It's pretty basic, really. Because of our ideology, sending criminals to prison strikes us as inevitable. Not as a choice, one option of many, but as the the thing. Now, let's go back to our hypothetical housebreaker. What is supposed to happen to him in prison?” thing. Now, let's go back to our hypothetical housebreaker. What is supposed to happen to him in prison?”
I shook my head and smiled at the absurdity of it all, playing this peripatetic game with a killer. And it was absurd, but the thing was, I enjoyed it. For the few seconds that I could forget who Melford Kean really was, what I had seen him do earlier that evening, I enjoyed talking to him. Melford held himself as if he were important, as if he knew things, really knew them, and this whole business with prisons might not make sense, but I felt sure it would lead to something, and to something interesting, too.
”I guess he's supposed to consider his crimes and feel miserable about his imprisonment so that when he gets out he won't do it again.”
”Okay, sure. Punishment. Go to your room for talking fresh. Next time you want to talk fresh, you won't since you know what'll happen to you. Punishment, yes, but also punishment as rehabilitation. Take a criminal and turn him into a productive citizen. So, when you take a housebreaker and you send him to jail, what do you think happens to him? What does he learn?”
”Well, I guess in reality he doesn't really rehabilitate. I mean, it's pretty common knowledge that if you send a housebreaker to prison, he comes back an armed robber or a murderer or a rapist or something.”
Melford nodded. ”Okay, so criminals go to prison and learn how to become better criminals. Does that sound about right?”
”Yeah.”
”You think President Reagan knows that?”
”Probably.”
”What about our senators and representatives and governors? They know?”
”I guess. How could they not?”
”Wardens? Prison guards? Policemen?”
”They probably know better than most.”
”Okay, are you ready for the big question? Everybody knows that prisons don't work to rehabilitate. If, in fact, we know they do just the opposite, which is to say they turn minor criminals into major ones, why do we have them? Why do we send our social outcasts to criminal academies? There's your question. When you can answer it, and you know the answer is right, I'll tell you why I had to do what I did.”
”What is this? Like a riddle?”
”No, Lemuel. It's not a riddle. It's a test. I want to see what you can see. And if you can't at least try to peer past the gauze, there's no point in knowing what's on the other side, because no matter what I say, you won't be able to hear it.”
Melford made a left onto Highland Street, where b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Karen had made their home up until the time of their murder. We cruised about halfway down the block, and I wondered if he was planning on stopping right in front of the trailer. Probably not, I decided. Just casing the neighborhood first.
That turned out to be a smart move, since when we drove past we saw that there was a cop car in the driveway. We almost missed it because the lights were off. No headlights, no blue and red flashes of strobing disaster. In the darkness, with no car lights and no porch lights, a policeman in a brown uniform and a wide hat stood talking to a woman, one hand on her shoulder. And she was crying.
Chapter 9.
COME ON,” Melford said once we made it safely past the cop, who didn't hop in his car and come chasing after us. He didn't even notice us. ”What did you expect? They had to find the bodies sooner or later. You can't be surprised.” Melford said once we made it safely past the cop, who didn't hop in his car and come chasing after us. He didn't even notice us. ”What did you expect? They had to find the bodies sooner or later. You can't be surprised.”
”I was hoping we could get the checkbook,” I said, my tone shrill and nearly hysterical.
”Right. The checkbook. Well, the check wasn't written out to you, was it? It was written out to a company?”
”Educational Advantage Media. That's who I work for.”
”Holy cow. You've got to love their shamelessness. So, how will they know you were the one providing the educational advantage?”
”I was the only one working that area. Plus my fingerprints are all over the trailer. If they sample everyone's, they'll come up with a match for me. f.u.c.k,” I added. I pounded my knee with the palm of my hand.
”Doesn't prove anything. So, you went there, you tried to sell them some books, it didn't work out. You have no motive. If you just sit tight, you'll be fine.” Melford placed a hand gently on my shoulder.
Great. Now the gay a.s.sa.s.sin is going to make a pa.s.s at me. ”That isn't my idea of a solution. Sitting tight and being acquitted.”
The hand, mercifully, went back to the steering wheel. ”It won't get past the grand jury.”
”Wow, that's comforting. Next you'll cheer me up by promising me a sentence of nothing more than time served. Just a few minutes ago, you were talking about how unfair it would be for me to even be arrested.”
”Okay, okay.” He held up a hand as if I were his nagging wife. ”I'll think of something.”
Melford parked the car, and for the first time since we saw the police cruiser outside Karen and b.a.s.t.a.r.d's trailer, I examined my surroundings. We were outside a bar or something like a bar-a run-down-looking shack of a building with peeling white paint and a couple of dozen vehicles, mostly pickups, parked out front. The parking lot was an empty patch of land, pounded down by the weight of tires and drunks.
It wasn't exactly like the music screeched to a halt when we walked in, but it might as well have. Men looked up from their beer. Men looked up from the pool table. The men at the bar craned their necks to look. No women that I could see. Not a single one.
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