The Freer Captive

Incarceration isn't the only kind of captivity

There is a particular cruelty in the universe’s sense of humor, and I say this as someone who has had considerable time to reflect on it.

I am, at present, incarcerated. My days are structured by bells and counts and the smell of industrial cleaner applied to surfaces that will never, by any philosophical definition of the word, be clean. My movements are catalogued. My choices, such as they are, fit inside a vending machine. By any reasonable measure, I am the one deserving of sympathy.

And yet.

My best friend, Sandra, has returned to her childhood bedroom at fifty-five years old, after an expensive divorce, and when I tell you I pity her, I want you to understand that I am not being glib. I am being precise. We talk when she can, which is to say when she has escaped to a corner of the house where the television, always on, always loud, tuned to something that seems engineered to induce a mild dissociative state, cannot drown her out entirely.

The house is hot. This is a feature, not a malfunction. Her parents, very affluent, but children of a particular American generation that survived enough to become aggressively frugal, have conducted a thorough audit of every expense, and the porch light did not survive the review. Sandra mentioned she likes the light left on when she comes home at night. This was received the way most of her preferences are received: as an interesting opinion from someone who does not pay the electric bill.

I pay nothing here. The lights, such as they are, stay on all night. I had not previously considered this a luxury.

The first time she called from her childhood bedroom, I heard her father in the background. It was eight-thirty in the evening. “It’s late,” he announced. “You still on that phone?” I waited for her to explain that eight-thirty is the time when most adults are considering a second glass of wine, not being reminded of bedtime. She did not explain this. She has apparently made a separate peace with certain realities, the way one does when one is trapped somewhere and the terms are non-negotiable.

I recognized the adaptation immediately. It takes about three weeks on the inside before you stop explaining yourself to people with authority over your physical space.

The Rice-A-Roni situation deserves its own consideration. Sandra’s mother, a woman of firm convictions, has noted that the box specifies four servings, and she intends to honor that guidance with the commitment of someone who has found religion late in life. The box says four servings, and there will be four servings, distributed to four people, in four portions that the Rice-A-Roni corporation, in its infinite wisdom, has deemed sufficient. Sandra is a grown woman who has, at various points in her adult life, made her own grocery decisions. She selected her own quantities. She ate until she was full and then, presumably, stopped. Those days, for now, are behind her.

I eat what is served at the time it is served, in the amount that is given. Sandra and I have this in common, though she would have to drive to a store she is no longer sure she can afford to replicate the experience.

The shower situation confirms what I had begun to suspect, which is that surveillance does not require walls or guards or any of the infrastructure we have collectively agreed to associate with confinement. It requires only someone who notices. Sandra’s mother notices the shower. She does not understand why it takes so long. A shower, in her estimation, has a purpose and therefore a natural endpoint, and anything beyond that endpoint is, at best, self-indulgence and, at worst, a commentary on the household’s water bill.

I have seven minutes. I have learned to find this clarifying. Sandra has no such hard limit, only the hovering awareness that someone is aware of her, timing her in the way people time things they find suspicious.

Her father, eighty years old and apparently unwilling to leave any thought unspoken, offered her counsel recently on the subject of sexual desire. Women, he informed her, can buy things to take care of themselves. This was his way of discouraging remarriage, delivered with the confidence of a man who has never had to decode his own subtext because no one in his vicinity has ever asked him to.

I will say this for prison: when the men offer unsolicited advice, at least we can curse them out. Can’t curse out your dad. Or, can you?

People ask me, sometimes, what I miss most. They expect answers about freedom in the abstract, open skies, unmonitored afternoons, the simple mammalian pleasure of going somewhere because you decided to. These are fine answers, and they are true. But lately when I think about Sandra, wedged back into the room where she was once a teenager, eating her precisely portioned Rice-A-Roni in the heat, being asked about her shower, being warned off romance by a man who raised her, padding to a corner of the house at eight-thirty to talk to me before someone wonders why she’s still on the phone, I think what I miss most is the ability to leave.

We both lack it. The difference is that my situation comes with a release date.