"The way that they found out was very hard. When it finally dawned on them they were locked up in the can, watching the years of their youth drain away. Like piss hissin' down onna white mint onna strainer, and all they can do now is just stand there holdin' their dick in their hand, watchin'. They've found out their lives've been like something they happened to be around for, like a big game and they got tickets, while the years were going by. Their whole youth and middle years; not lived, just gotten rid of, discarded by somebody else they don't even recognize, that guy standing next to them. By the time they get to me, all that most of them can do is just continue to stand there and watch, while the rest of their lives go away on them. Some day, they know, their life will finally disappear, like something that's never been here at all. All they have to hope for's that the instant when it runs out they'll feel a little better, because at least it'll be ending, whole process of watching it go.
"They look at me like I've got answers, some of them, when they've just gotten out and it's begun to register on them that the years they spent inside're really gone. Never get them back. They come in and see me, when they first report, sit there and look at me as though they're thinking maybe hoping might be more like it that maybe I can do something important for them. If they're nice to me, I could get their years back for them, all the years they spent inside. Maybe there's a secret way, and I know where it is.
"Those're the most painful cases. These're hard men, very hard men, dangerous and violent and cruel; they've done terrible things. I know it sounds silly to say it, but this's the way I feel. I hate having to be the one who disappoints them. It's nothing personal. They happened to draw me, so I'm the guy who has to tell them what they hope for can't be done. Simply can't be done. Randomness's all it is; I'm the guy picked to do it. That's just the way it is. But sometimes I think: "If I could do that for him, maybe he would reform now." I often think that a guy with no hope may not see much reason to start behaving himself; he may decide he's got nothing much to lose now, if he doesn't what can he possibly lose? Fear, that's all, that we'll do it to him again, as indeed we will, because that's all we've got left now, to make him obey the law. That's not a good threat; I don't know anyone who'd mind losing fear.
"This I think is what accounts for the successes that the chaplains and lay preachers in the prisons and on the outside, too sometimes make of these thugs. No one can get their lives back for them. But the preachers can tell them that if they start playing their cards right for as long as this game continues, they'll get a great deal inna next one, in the afterlife. Not all those conversions that lots of us laugh at are the fakes we think they are, scams to con the parole board. Some of them are the real thing. Some of the born-agains may've met Jesus, or Muhammed, and some of them may just be too desperate to care if He was out when they called, but many of them really do believe. There's a terrible emptiness to knowing you've pissed your whole life away; you know it when you see how hard it hits these guys, meaner'n vipers themselves.
"There're days when I wish I'd done something else with my life, but on the absolute worst day I ever had I've been better off than my clients."
He had spent almost forty years on the job, ever since he'd seized the opening almost immediately offered to him after he won top grades on the Civil Service exam. "That, you see, I'm not really stupid, when I put my mind to something. College: I couldn't convince myself that what I was doing had any connection to any life I'd ever lead. The Civil Service exam was the only way I could get to live a life I wanted. So even though I was young, I could see it was important, worth preparing for."
Merrion knew this about him: he had spent all of his workdays earnestly talking with and about guys who had a sense of crippled-up irony that he'd never gotten, and therefore he had never really understood them.
