The guard entered and told hid coldly: “You should stop complaining, dude! You are not going anywhere! Nobody is waiting for you out there!” The intensity of this comment made some of the words or syllables escape from the small window to the yard where the others were playing football.
“compl…”
“not”
“nobody”
“out”
All the open vowels opened up in audio circles around the pitch, around the ball, around the bodies of the men, around their heads, and inside their ears. But they knew already what was going on at that height of the building, on that side.
“Get me out of here!” was all this man could exchange in dialogue with anybody. As if he was a beast, a gorilla in captivity roaming and grapping on the bars and hitting on his chest. Saliva dripping from the sides of his lips, some dried on his chin, a sign of madness? Uncontrollable fury? Surrendering to the inevitability of captivity?
“Get me out of here!” was sometimes so intense that it would scare all the other inmates to death, as if they themselves did not share the same need for escape from all this psychedelia.
The guard was scared sometimes, too. Struck by the sparkled piercing of his eyes. Dumbfounded by the squeezing of the madman’s nostrils to gather up as much pressure as possible before every next shout.
The jail is madness. It is the idea of madness and the ideal place for engaging in sheer, deliberate, guided lunacy in escapade. In every corner of the building, on every tile, from outside and inside, yard, chambers and cells, riding every sun ray entering from the tiny windows, there comes a schizophrenic hint of misfortune. Passionate urge, pain, fear, anguish, intense bullying, cries, regrets. Insane sounds. Strong, weak, trembling voices, stentorian voices, tragic cries.
But his cry was the mightiest of all cries. “Get me out of here!”
Thameson doesn’t belong in this prison. He does not belong in any enclosure to that matter. He is the least lunatic and the least criminal of all. He knows how innocent he is. His guard tells him he is wrong, that he is guilty but he doesn’t know. His inmates laugh at him. They show him his scars and tell him that no innocent people have scars on their faces! Let alone his crooked nose!
“If I see you with a knife in your hands, will you tell me you are going to the kitchen? Hahahahaha!!!” a tall Chinese man asked him.
Then Asafa added playfully, “if I let my soap fall on the floor in the bath, will you say, ‘oh, he is straight?’”
And everybody laughed and hit their spoons on the table and then continued eagerly to manage to eat their meat with these hateful tools.
He was ashamed to shout “Get me out of here!” when he wasn’t behind bars, because it wouldn’t make sense to the rest. So he shouted inside his skull with every strong bite of the meat. He shouted with his eyes because it would make sense to him, as it wasn’t his cell that bothered him, but the whole idea of jail. Imprisoned for no reason at all. Foucault came to his sleep sometimes and talked to him.
End of part one
