A Memory of Mail

Mail call used to be a big deal. As each day neared a certain hour, I would feel anticipation building—a physical sensation like an electrical charge in my abdomen and legs, which got stronger as the minutes ticked by. How much mail will I get today? If I heard the wing door open, I'd clamber down from my bunk and peer into the wing hoping dearly to see a guard with an load of papers, magazines, and envelopes in their arms.

This anticipation wasn't for mail, per se. Sentenced to life without parole at the age of twenty-two and never having felt so cut-off from everything I knew and loved, being forgotten terrified me. Mail, at least, was evidence of a lingering connection; people writing meant they remembered.

I used to get a lot of letters, sometimes seven or eight in a day. Cards came almost as often. There was no question: people cared. I subscribed to magazines, too, but didn't consider them "real" mail. If you paid for your mail, you were cheating. What mattered wasn't the stuff itself but the concepts and the sentiments behind the stuff.

One friend sent a letter from the road, written over a one-week period, on the backs of gas station receipts, concert flyers, and grocery store notices as she road-tripped through Canada. Someone else always made his own colorful stationery out of photocopied collages. Other friends created word art by writing their letters as spirals, mazes, word searches, and other ecstatic surges of mixed-media creativity.

As part of an anti-drug initiative, prisons around Missouri stopped allowing paper mail in 2022. I remember saying somewhere, years ago, that the Postal Service continues to exist solely thanks to Hallmark, distributors of coupon circulars, the elderly, and prisoners. Back then, I questioned the continued relevance of snail mail. Even though I adored the little works of art that used to reach me, I stand by that preference for efficiency. Not that it would matter if I didn't; the whole American penal system is becoming increasingly reliant on digital-age methods.

Today, I scarcely remember how it felt to wait on mail call. E-mail now reigns king in the dark realm of prison no less than it does in the wider world. I no longer need to wait for a guard to deliver letters to the wing. Mercifully, those hours of anticipation are a thing of the past. With just a couple of taps of my finger, at any time of day, I can check for new messages on my tablet. And just like anyone else, I get a little dopamine hit from seeing a friend's boldface name in my inbox, signifying a new message from them. It's cool, even if it's not the same. A high-res photo attachment is simply never going to have the same emotional resonance as a decent 5"×7" print in an envelope, and a friend's words onscreen won't weigh as much as they would on a piece of paper, even if they're typed there.

I'm not complaining or decrying the impersonality of digital communication. I love getting messages more quickly and more often than postal mail used to supply them. Sending out my writing in a conveniently editable format—just a copy-and-paste away from submission—is also a bonus. All I'm saying is that having to rely exclusively on e-mail for my nonverbal communication feels as fundamentally different as flying feels from sailing. Each has its own drawbacks and perks.

My correspondence has been airborne for a couple of years. It feels absolutely normal now. Weird how easily we habituate, how quickly the past, however emotionally resonant, can be set aside. And yes, this is the sort of thought that surprises my mind when I'm gathering myself together in the quiet, dark, early morning.

Two Books I Spent My Fall Reading

In the month of November, my book club chose to read The Plague, by Albert Camus, a book I last encountered seventeen or more years ago, in the 1948 translation. This new iteration, translated by Laura Marris in 2021, felt, for lack of a better word, punchier. Its language seems better suited to the philosophy that Camus espoused, downplaying some of the melodrama of that earlier version. The discussions we had in our meetings this season—about freedom, loneliness, religious belief, human nature, germ theory, bureaucratic inaction, the patron saint of wrongful convictions, Flannery O'Connor's opinion of Jesuits, and quite a few other scattershot topics—lent themselves to some very engaging Wednesday mornings.

Unstructured leisure time is at a premium in my life. The reading I get to do is split in several different ways. The New York Review of Books brings me joy, even though I take weeks to read a single issue and skip many of the political articles. The books waiting for my attention seem to increase in number weekly. (I've come to think of my to-read list as aspirational at best; I have e-book versions of several tempting texts and zero idea of when I might start any of them.) When I do get to pick out leisure reading, it's a special treat.

Recommended by a small host of writers whose opinions I trust, Anna Kavan's Ice proved to be an unsettling little novel. I bought Penguin's fiftieth anniversary edition, with a foreword by the writer Jonathan Lethem, and was floored. Kavan's hypnotic storytelling kept me rapt, chapter after chapter, as her horrific tale unfolded like a fever dream.

The book centers around one man's obsessive chase of a young woman—not motivated by love or even lust, but by an odious desire to possess. His quest leads him around a war-ravaged world on the brink of ecological disaster. Is it science fiction? Yes and no. The story takes place on earth, in a time very close to ours, but under the perpetual threat of "the ice," huge freezing shapes that will soon engulf and smother all life.

Despite the high concept at play, Ice is decidedly "soft" sci-fi, verging on Surrealism. Kavan gives us a phantasmal tale that doubles back on itself, revising as it goes, like a nightmare or a bad trip or a spell of amnesia. You think it's headed one way, until it picks up at another point, ignoring everything you just read. The girl dies, then she's alive again. Then something else is undone and done again, in a different way. Events aren't undone so much as un-done. Further confusing matters, the narrator's protean account continually shifts perspective. He describes impossible-to-know events and changes identities at the blink of an eye. The whole time, you hate him, but he gives you a window into this story that you can't help but stare through, mute and aghast. What a book!

In the months to come, I'll probably pick through a textbook, devour some Gothic horror, and ingest some philosophy—if I can make time amid my various commitments. Where there's a will, there's a way.

New Digs

For weeks we'd been hearing scuttlebutt about the prison's plan for a massive set of house-to-house cell swaps. All of the good-conduct wings will supposedly be moved from their current unit and scattered across ERDCC, one wing per house. Although the entire population stands united in the opinion that this is a terrible idea, institutional amnesia is real. (I need to say here that administrative hubris is real too.) In any event, the plan completely ignores history.

When it was enacted five years ago, the houses had nothing but problems. When a different warden tried it a couple of years after that, it met with failure yet again. The current powers that be think things will somehow be different under their watch.

I happen to agree, just not for the reason they'd like to hear. I think this go-round could turn out worse.

ERDCC's general-population units have descended into anarchy. A person only has to overhear the radio traffic to know how many medical emergencies are called for "unresponsive" residents ("unresponsive" being the most neutral euphemism for a drug overdose) and how many physical assaults take place here on a daily basis. Putting wings of calm, well-behaved people into housing units where chaos and violence are the norm won't make the guards' jobs easier, nor will it create in-house role models for the hooligans to emulate. This plan merely puts at risk those who follow the rules.

The one bright spot is that people who have a job and live in an honor dorm will soon be moved to the same housing unit. Once all of the workers are in the same house, the Recreation Director, will push to give that house outside rec seven days a week, for as long as there's daylight. Being on the opposite side of the facility, with a yard accessible exclusively to our housing unit, would keep us relatively clear of prison's least agreeable elements.

My cellmate, Bob, works in the canteen. I work in the recreation building. We know we'll have to move to 3-House if the warden's idea becomes reality; the concern is whether or not we'll move there together. After two years, Bob's shown himself to be one of the better cellmates I've had, and neither of us want to go live with some rando. "Better the devil you know...," as they say.

Relief washes over me when the call comes over the intercom for Bob and me to pack our stuff. Having kept ears on the ground amid the past few days of swirling rumors, we're halfway prepared. Little-used things have been boxed up, pictures and other unnecessary whatnots have been taken down and stowed. All that remains is to strip our bunks and pack the few things we use every day.

Someone's wheeled a couple of canvas-sided laundry carts into the wing for us to use as transport. Bob loads twelve years worth of carelessly accumulated property—"the hoard," I call it—jammed into totes and boxes and bags. After nearly a quarter century of minimalist living, my own cart's just half full, but Bob's won't accommodate all of his crap. I let his excess hitch a ride with me and don't complain that it hinders my view as I push. 

We wheel past a couple of 3-House residents on the walk, and I hear the guy mutter to his buddy, "Damn, dude's got a lot of shit!" It's tempting to tell them that a third of what I'm pushing is also Bob's.

The new cell, when we get indoors and enter our new abode, is exactly what we hoped it wouldn't be. The prior occupants apparently had the most popular spot in the wing to smoke up. Grimy, yellowed walls tell that story well enough. A search gets underway. We turn the desk upside-down a find more abandoned paraphernalia than I've ever encountered in an empty cell: a lighter kit, stripped electrical wires for sparking flames, bags of tobacco, and strips of "deuce." This is why you check everything when you first move in: possession is nine tenths of the law.

Drugs discretely disposed of, we get to work, scraping countless strata of soap of the walls with a plastic dustpan. Soap is how people without glue or tape hang shit on their walls. It's ingenious; unfortunately, no one ever cleans it up before they move out. Bob gets a piece in his eye. At some point this cell was apparently sprayed with mace that soaked into the soap. Our scrapings have pulverized and made the aggravating substance airborne. Within minutes, Bob's eye turns bruise purple. I start coughing. We keep scraping. Within an hour we're sweating. Bob offers me a can of 7-Up that I immediately drink halfway down.

Hour two is no less intense.

Once the scraping's over, it's time for wipedowns. After years of experience with moving into nasty cells, I know that three rounds of wiping usually do the trick. Fortunately, we brought a bunch of throwaway cloth rags. We start from the concrete ceiling and work our way down and around. Only after every surface has been scoured, scrubbed, and sanitized, four and a half hours after we set out from 6-House, do we start hauling our stuff inside to set it in order. 

Moving is always stressful. In prison, it's no different. At least this move is over now. Bob and I have toiled and sweated to bring the room back to habitability, and now it almost feels like ours. But of course it's not. The administration could hit us at any time with another relocation order and we'd have no choice but to obey. All we can do is make the space tidy and conducive to sober living, and make the best of the time we spend here—a decent metaphor for life in general, now that I think about it.