The Island

It was right there all along. I saw the sea, and the twinkling lights that stood for the spot where land ended, where the boundary between things vanished whenever you zoomed in. It was December, no one was at this end of the island. It was the kind of island people forgot was an island at all. There were too many rooftop bars, penthouse apartments, tall office windows where the lights never went out; and then down on the other side of things there were gutter villages, temporary cities of sleeping bags and dogs, and markings on the underground walls that you let you know it was possible for life to drag you down there. There were places you couldn’t get into, and places from which you couldn’t return. I thought of all the bodies, beautiful or unloved, in various configurations and contortions. None of them were here tonight. I breezed in the sea and it became me. I breathed out and for a moment I was gone; I had evacuated myself; I was free.

*

They were closing the prison. The prison was an experiment in an alternate form of society, and it failed. So the prisoners were going to become prisoners in other places, smaller prisons, scattered across the island. Inside the prison were places for solitary confinement; inside that were men inside prisons inside prisons; inside them were thoughts, feelings, and impulses, which is how life happens — by which I mean, how God muscles out intention from the dizzying electrical ocean of neurons fire in the brain; how the brain collaborates with the gut, which itself is another brain left over from when each of these men were still in the womb — when their bodies were folded in themselves, and the matter the became the head pulled from the center and left neurons wrapped around the gut, which will continue thinking for the rest of their lives, no matter what spaces they are enclosed in, no matter if they ever go outside.

*

“I like your tattoo… what does it mean?” he said. She winced. “Ohhhh-kkkay there…” She froze me out. He felt belittled. He felt small. He tried to joke. “You don’t know what it means?” She said nothing. He left the store and waited. Her shift was the last one. When it was over, it was easy to follow her into the subway. It was easy to take the car next to hers and watch when she got out. The city was full of places to hide. She didn’t get her keys out in time and that was that. He knew in the long run, he couldn’t get away with it. But the system breaks down if you don’t think in terms of the long run. He left her contorted in a position she never knew in life. He thought about that when he went underground. Suddenly everything was possible. There was no way to know the boundaries of the world until you pushed on them. Some walls were doors. Some people still left their windows unlocked.