STORY

What an adventure, from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night, a life spent behind enemy lines, you might say, but if he did, he would say it with such a smile as to disarm any enemy, as to leave them intact but thinking, introducing them to their own country, already having accepted that they are the last to know, that they are the last to know about a prison cell in his country, about a prison cell in all the countries like his. It was all an adventure, because no place where he could find himself was any place he would've guessed as a boy in prison. I'm here on the ground with you, he could say to anybody, but I'm up in the sky too. On the ground, he could lose them, but from up in the sky, he could see them walking home, going to their own bed at night. They just didn't know, the ones he talked to in office buildings and parent-teacher conferences and neighborhood association meetings, and their ignorance was not the same as the torturer's lash, as the executioner's guns, but it was only because he had that view from the sky that he could see that.

It was an adventure because in the middle of driving to an appointment or calling a client, he could pick out anybody and he could speak to them as though he were speaking from a prison cell. It was what they wanted to hear, wasn't it? Because they loved being part of the world, didn't they? And he wouldn't have said one word about himself and what he went through - he did not even talk about that with his children, who were of this country but of his heart - he just wanted to be able to speak from prison, because there were feelings there that could have shaped a world. What he would tell them would come from the heart of a prisoner, who had come out of prison with his body weakened and his heart absolute. It was a kind of speaking that he could not do without a smile, because he would be remembering men who had looked at death and greeted it like it was a child. They had lived there in prison in a way that they knew that death was inside of them. It became something to greet like a child because what they were really greeting was life.

And he was doing that living now in a country where that death was kept very far away. It was kept far enough away that he had learned very quickly that they did not want to talk about it as though it bore any connection to them. That was fine, it just meant that he could not talk to them about life either. All that was left was floating, floating between the ground and the sky, and a man floated precariously when he first began floating, but it was a beautiful feeling once he began to gain some mastery over it. It was a very stable kind of floating because he knew better each day how right it had been to have been a boy in prison. If one country had so much and another country had so little, at least he had once been where he had had nothing, nothing except a kind of brotherhood that was unimaginable anywhere but prison. They had not had any doubt about succeeding, because they had already succeeded by being there.

And so anything he wanted to tell them now - the people around him - was not for himself but for them. He just had to float as he told it, because they were going to feel like they were losing everything if they really listened, and he had to float so that they would know that there could still be music and love after losing everything. And he had to float in their language, which was a very funny part of the whole adventure, considering that the only thing he had once known how to say was to tell them to go home.

He was in their home now, and he had to be a respectful guest, but it was awfully respectful of him to just float, to be ready to speak from a prison cell or not, and the truth was that at the end of the day as he lay in bed, he did not doubt that every word he had said came from there, in his own language or in theirs, every greeting and every parting, and it did not matter if there was a single listener who had known that his words came from there. If they thought that that prison cell was not inside of them, they were mistaken. If they thought that a prison cell many years ago in a country halfway around the world was not inside of them, they were mistaken, and their mistakenness was nothing to dwell on, but it did bring enough humility to the night to let him think of the night as his own, at least his small part of it.

And that was a lot in a world that had kept right on building prisons, and would keep on building them after he was gone from it. It was a lot to think of night with even a little of the sweetness of nights in prison, when men who would do anything for each other would be trying to do so until the last moment of wakefulness. The night had been so alive that it had felt no different from daytime. It was all just work, and the darkest night was better than a sunny day if a man knew and loved his work. And he had learned since then to look at any work as that work. It was all the work he knew and loved just by being work, and doing his work with the same earnestness was the closest thing to a boy in prison, even if it was the work of buying and selling, a kind of work that he had dreamed in prison would be gone from the world by now, at least in the way that it left out poor people and poor countries. There was adventure in operating in that buying and selling with principles he had learned in prison, and nobody needed to know where those principles came from, because when he remembered them, it was not just him remembering them. It was men who had not had a chance to learn the adventures they would have past prison. They had been with him the whole time, so that his adventures were theirs. His smile was theirs too, the way it could come out all by itself, because they would have been smiling at the whole thing too.

A wife and two children, he would have told them, and now I am in the country where our torturers were trained, where our king was paid. Can you imagine anything funnier? It was laughter because they would have known that his heart had not changed, that his struggle had not changed. And that laughter had not come out to them, but he had never stopped carrying it with him everywhere he went. There was nowhere he went that he was not talking to someone in a prison cell, after all. It was just a question of whether they saw the walls around them. When two men who did speake to each other, there was laughter in the most serious of their expressions. But most of the time, he had to provide the laughter. He had to provide it because the people were not used to being greeted as a fellow prisoner. They were not used to thinking of prison as anything other than something so far away from them that the last thing they could do there was laugh. They were certainly not used to thinking of it as home.

And that was the craziest part of the whole adventure, that a boy in prison would be the one to grow up to tell them about home, to tell them about their home because of his intimacy with it, an intimacy he had not asked for, but which he had found from seeking an intimacy with life. If there were going to be prison cells, then the only thing he had known for certain as a boy was that he was not going to make his life an effort to stay out of them. He would be thinking of the men in there either way at night in his bed, he had figured he might as well think about them with some intimacy. The important thing had been to take that dark night as a truth, because the darkest night became sunshine when it was faced by two men together. And after facing it had become who he was, he could take that sunshine with him anywhere and to anybody, and they did not always know where the sunshine they felt in themselves came from, but he could have told them if they asked, he could have told them going all the way back in memory, a man's memory and a country's, and if it led to a dark night inside them to hear it, he would still be there to tell them that there was something beautiful that followed.