Silent Terror

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Dusenberry’s estimated body count was low, and Warden Wardlow’s stone metaphor only partly accurate. Inanimate objects can yield blood, but if the transfusion is to take, the letting must be sanctioned by the object’s deepest and most logical volition. Even Milt Alpert, that eminently decent expediter of literature, had to cloak the announcement of our collaboration with justification-heavy sloganeering and words I never said. He cannot accept the fact that he will be earning 10 percent of a valediction in blood. That I feel no remorse and seek no absolution is incomprehensible to him.

A more farsighted person in my situation would seize this narrative opportunity and bend it toward the manipulation of the mental-health profession and liberal legal establishment — people susceptible to cheap visions of redemption. Since I have no expectations of ever leaving this prison, I will not do that — it is simply dishonest. Nor will I cop a psychological plea by juxtaposing my acts against the alleged absurdity of twentieth-century American life. By passing through conscious gauntlets of silence and will, by creating my own vacuum-packed reality, I was able to exist outside standard environmental influences to an exceptional degree — the prosaic pain of growing up and being American did not take hold; I transmogrified it into something more very early. Thus I stand by my deeds. They are indigenous solely to me.

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