I had only just handed the orange to Tim when he, carefully peeling its flesh, began to cry. It had been over thirty-seven years since he’d had one. There is no fresh fruit in the Alabama Department of Corrections, or anything approximating it. Now that he was out, Tim could again wander up and down the aisles of the grocery store. It was the same as it had been, and it wasn’t. He could handle the objects there—a razor, a glass bottle, a lighter—without anyone’s permission. At the same time, it was difficult for him to believe this, difficult to believe that no one in uniform would emerge to correct him, difficult to feel free from the sense that consequences would soon come for him.
And he could have an orange, yes, but before Tim was able even to taste it, the bright scent of the fruit had filled the air and brought to mind another world entirely—a place which did not seem any longer to be. I watched him lower his head and weep. What could I say to this man? What could I do?
When, toward the end of his final volume, Proust writes of “time” which, “in order to become visible, seeks bodies and everywhere encounters them, seizes them, to cast its magic lantern upon them,” I’m reminded of Tim, who went in as a very young man and sat for decades, waiting for his life to resume. Many people in prisons, perhaps for their own sanity, view it this way: their lives merely paused and awaiting their return. Their friends, their families, seem often to make the same mistake in reverse, imagining that, once their loved one is released, the incarcerated can go back to being the person they were before.
But the body, if nothing else, reveals the reality—the cast of the lantern. Tim did not even need to look into the mirror now; he could see it in the eyes of his family, could see the way that, as Proust puts it, “colorless, incomprehensible time had materialized itself in him.” It seemed irreconcilable, the gap between the self which he expected still to be there and the man he instead presented to others. “Puzzled by others! Alas! We ourselves puzzle them.”
Tim had never had a cellphone before. Now here he was, in this world of ours—the “free world,” as they sometimes call it inside—overwhelmed by the buttons on the coffee maker, afraid to use the electric stovetop, unwilling to ride the city bus, which now had an accompanying app. He had never used a debit card. It was my job to help him adjust. If he had only to orient himself to the trivial logistical hurdles of day-to-day life, that would be one thing. But Tim, as with Proust’s narrator in Swann’s Way, had also to reckon with “the anesthetic effect of habit being destroyed.” He had trained himself, among other things, to distrust his agency, to let his will go slack against the undercurrent of incarceration.
Of course, I meet people like Tim every day. They are, imperceptibly, all around us. U.S. prisons seem never to have enough beds to keep up with our voracious sentencing, and every day more “long-timers” are released to make room; at the central bus station in Birmingham, for example, someone like Tim is regularly dropped off by an ADOC van with nothing but a five-dollar bill in his pocket—no job prospects, no place to stay, no connections. It’s no wonder almost one in three experiences some form of homelessness in the first year of their release.
This, after decades warehoused in a place of constant terror (warehoused, very literally, with more than three hundred beds to a room) and in rooms so unsafe that the guards are unwilling to enter, where Tim saw men kidnapped and their families extorted for money, and where, because of insufficient medical services, he also saw inmates performing surgeries on one another, cauterizing incisions with knives heated over open flames, while sewage sometimes ran at their feet.
That we should all be so ignorant of this world is likely not an accident of society but a feature. It’s not unlike what Time Regained presents early on, in the Parisian salons during the First World War, “where the exclusion of the mournful preoccupations of the moment…and the substitution of cheerfulness and brightness was the order of the day.” In Proust’s wartime Paris, denial is dressed in a superficial, euphemistic, and impersonal sense of moral deference; the high society “did not forget it was their duty to rejoice the eyes of those combatants,” and thus maintained their decadence, thinking, as well, “of combatants in the trenches who dream of more comfort and coquetry for the dear one at home.” When this is no longer possible, a hellish reality is sometimes made palatable simply by its remoteness, just as worlds today—the prison, the neighborhood, the encampment—are se-questered from perception, “at any cost, to avoid sorrow and sentiment.”
A society can learn to live for a while with the rhythms of certain catastrophes. It’s not only Tim’s habit, but ours, collectively, which have the “anesthetic effect.” Inevitably, though, the cast of the magic lantern is soon enough upon us, too, and then there’s nowhere else to look.
Grey Wolfe LaJoie, the author of Little Ones, worked until recently with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Program.