And you lie on your back in the dawnlight pulled like a gray washrag up out of dumps and poisoned dews, listening to the little hermit thrushes and the killdeer and the meadow lark’s wakeful remarks, a man with a pure knowledge of himself like the philosophers and the alienists wish they could somehow come by, a knowledge gained not through manipulation and secondhand tittering but through means of the simple quest each of these imprisoned men is on, the standard issue of jail life: you are, in the end, only men: in the end you break: in the end you will not be able to hold out against even the least of it.
Here, now, as he moves from the infirmary porch out into the tireless sunshine, Delvin feels the truth of himself like a surplus malaria settling in. It is not all right but it is all right. Now Milo taking his hand — Carl has drifted away — pressing his forefinger down the row of knuckles sweetly and back as is his way, patting the fleshy place at the bottom of his palm. Except for scattered lumps of aching bone he can barely feel his hands, barely feel his arms; his feet have a life of their own and a great delicacy. He wants to lie down in the dust and roll slowly in it. Across the way at House Number 2, from the sterile shade of the overhang, Shorty Willis gazes at him. He’d have come out to knock him to the ground, if he didn’t have the dog. The cons think it is catching. They think all ailments are contagious and shrink from them, wounds, cripplings, maimings as well. In the dining hall they yelp from distant tables that the place ought to be cleared of these infect rats. In the barracks he will generally find his rack in an island of its own, the others shoved away from a teeming nobody wants to touch. Maybe find it in the yard.
