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The professor is conducting an experiment. One with profound ethical implications. Someone once said that genius is the ability to rationalize anything. Or maybe that's just the voice of corruption. This story is written in a lyric stream of consciousness style that reminds the author of a Robert Browning poem he read some twenty years ago.
The professor is conducting an experiment. One with profound ethical implications. Someone once said that genius is the ability to rationalize anything. Or maybe that's just the voice of corruption. This story is written in a lyric stream of consciousness style that reminds the author of a Robert Browning poem he read some twenty years ago.
The professor is conducting an experiment. One with profound ethical implications. Someone once said that genius is the ability to rationalize anything. Or maybe that's just the voice of corruption. This story is written in a lyric stream of consciousness style that reminds the author of a Robert Browning poem he read some twenty years ago.
I find it useful to keep a record of my proceedings. Or
progress. Should I say progress? Progress is a more aggressive word than proceed. Perhaps more optimistic. Though of course it is a matter of agreement. Words mean nothing without agreement. Or disagreement, which is merely not to, agree that is, which is in itself an agreement. I am prevaricating. Intentionally, I think. I try to notice these things. I am proceeding in a psycho-social experiment of some significance, or interest at least, not earth shattering but of interest sufficient for funding and publication. What more can I ask? Or want? Success is measured by funding and publication, one leading to the other and back again, as in a lucrative circle of professional endeavor. A caucus run. A circle jerk. A mild joke. A bit of crudity. This is the work I've chosen, the field in which I have had some success, leading to a lifestyle of certain accoutrements and emollients without which I would be loth to continue. ‘Loth to continue’, like a Victorian maiden, at least in literature, prepared to vaporize at the mere mention of her virginity wandering astray. I mean only that sometimes my work bores me to distraction, quite literally, as trite as the phrase may be. I allow myself to be distracted, wandering from the path into the underbrush where the trees are fallen and the ground uneven, wet perhaps, damp with fetid growth and creatures unknown to me. Well, if I would know them, that would be my field, as would the stars if that, dark matter and the beginning of time but then, you see, those things would be the path and I, would I then, bored with them, turn into the jungle of the human psyche in hopes of distracting play? You see where this leads, another circle. Though I am mixing and matching here, like a young woman in a discount clothing store, bright, soft fabrics against the youthful, nearly luminescent flesh, for the circle is hard and precise and leads no where while the path progresses and the damp jungle, the forest, well, who knows. I mean to say that it would be churlish to denigrate the structure and requirements of my profession because I sometimes find the process (progress, proceedings) less than as completely enthralling as I would like. I remind myself thusly as I drive my relatively new and surprisingly fast car or turn on my enormous, flat-screened television to watch an admittedly overpaid athlete do whatever he does, kick a ball, or bounce one with absurdly large hands. Envy is equally unwelcome. Or useless. And useless. I am fat and slow and ever was. We must make do with what we have. Which doesn't belie progress. Not at all. I am a professional, to put it simply. If I don't publish, I perish. That is the cliché and whether true or not doesn't matter. For it is true that I make a fine living at what I do and ought to be grateful, which I am, most certainly. That I am occasionally bored is not cause to insult the profession or the process. There is always a price, isn't there? For a car, for a fine dinner, for the company of an interesting companion, and I do not mean a prostitute, clear your mind of such nonsense, but time for time, perhaps, even a student and I do have students, young, beautifully flowered women are fond of the social sciences, unless I listen or pretend to listen, time for time, and price then for a life, we all pay for the life we choose. Or fate chooses. How can 'fate' choose if it is already chosen, the life I mean? I will not continue with such questions. I am not a philosopher and choose not to. Did you notice 'choose' not to? That is sufficient to that question. Whether necessary or not is another matter. My project has to do with choice. It is really a question of choice. Who will make what choice and what does that tell us about them and therefore about us, about humans in the environment we've created, amidst our current thoughts, expectations, beliefs, values, perhaps about humans at any time. That is the intention. The universal is my intention. There would finally be no point otherwise and I will not, at least here, in this record, shy away from the grandeur of my intention. Where once religion and art might have sought this role, they can no longer, weakened, circumscribed, peripheral as they've become, and do not quibble, do not ask if the periphery can be circumscribed, for the meaning is quite clear that only science remains to explain ourselves to the universe and the universe to us. The subject then is choice and the chosen subjects are prisoners, or more specifically men who have been convicted of a crime and are about to be sentenced to prison. I have attempted to make this group as large as feasible and homogenous in some respects though maintaining a hopefully informative diversity. While the subjects form a group in terms of the study, as being then of the study, and as within the parameters of the study, I did not want them otherwise grouped. This limited the size. I wanted personal contact and did not want the members of the group to know one another or to interact. I have, through the Federal Prosecutors Office, obtained access to nine hundred such prisoners. While all are post conviction and pre sentence the extent of the sentence in each instance is known to the individual prisoner. This is important, and equally important that they are pre sentence. After sentencing the individuals in question become the parvenu of the Bureau of Prisons, an altogether different and I have heard, a much less cooperative bureaucratic entity. My contact with these prisoners is on their part completely voluntary. The only reward to be offered is possible participation in a special program while incarcerated that may affect the nature of that incarceration but will not diminish or prolong it. I can't offer them that which I don't control. My grant is certainly not sufficient for me to pay them. Which I am reluctant to do anyway. I have never found paid subjects of much use, fallen as they are into a category of such blatant need; the sort of people who, if offered, will take drugs of unknown side effects for cash in hand. What can that tell me but that they are willing to do or say or be anything to assuage their perceived need Prisoners may have challenged society and been found wanting but they have not in most instances abrogated their dignity. To advertise and pay, or to offer payment for participation through the prosecutors office, and hence through the various defense attorneys, would be to draw from the plasma clinics, the soup kitchens, the denizens of doorways and public libraries searching there the internet for places willing to pay cash for their souls and minds and perhaps body parts. Dreamers of the last resort, you might call them, the dreams becoming nightmares, but slowly, subtly, nightmares that seem enticing until it is too late. I don't want to consider that. To discuss such people. To think of them. The findings would be uncertain. If I were to pay. Or base my understanding, the knowledge I hope to gain, to contribute, on a source so bereft of choice or consequence. The prisoners, wounded certainly, their world unwound, have a vested interest yet in their sentence, in where and how they are to spend this time excluded from society as punishment for the violations of that society’s precepts. They have yet to gain or lose more than the last few dollars of a day's sustenance. They have life still, time of consequence to themselves and their families, which open them to legitimate decisions of meaning and value. These are the decisions I would know from them. The program I am to offer them is, of course, fictional. But they will not know that so the information gleaned will be of real significance. And it will be published. And will not have cost me anything but the time and motion to gather the harvest, like picking corn, like picking tomatoes, in orderly fields of careful planting. The basic ingredient of my premise is time. It is the sine non-qua of our lives, the essence of our being. We are born, we live, we become aware and our most significant awareness is of death. Our time is finite. The ultimate cliché. I have spoken of clichés, written here of clichés. This one, this unrelenting scarcity of time, these few years, sixty, eighty, even a hundred, a mere nothing to our minds that can imagine nearly to infinity and pretend to know a past of many thousands, will not change however in our lives we choose to ignore it, claim it of no consequence, at best an object of quiet resignation. Time is the soul of our fanciful and colorful religions, promising in one way or another that eternity that we imagine but can never have. What will you do for time when time is constrained, or at least your use of it, to have it gone in an instant perhaps if the moments as they pass and are to pass are not to your liking? To have it gone quickly, unknowingly, if in going it remains. And what of family, of relationships, what call have they absolutely on this finite time we have? Each of the prisoners I am to interview is to be sentenced to at least fifteen years in prison. The sentence is in each case a certainty. Some are confronting much longer sentences but fifteen years is the minimum. None is to receive a life sentence. I felt that dealing with life sentences would be to introduce a factor that would unbalance the human equations with which I am to calculate whatever understanding is to be had. There is an emotional and psychological weight to the very concept of a life sentence, especially and most certainly if in fact an unmitigated 'life' sentence, prison actually until death. The concept is fraught with a cold horror greater, I think, than a capital sentence. For it is the same, is it not, life constrained, bound, bordered, controlled, cold steel, thick glass, unceasing demands, commands, on where to be and what to do, what to eat, what to read or not, to watch on television, when to wake, when to sleep, when to work if work is to be had, until death. Finally to death. I did not wish a life sentence to be part of the equation, though of course it is, how can it not be. Look in the damn mirror sometime and tell me it is not. A factor. At least a capital sentence, if honest, would have a definite end. A time, a place when I would know I could finally stop. Wouldn't that be consoling? In a way? In a sense? Which is, contrarily, nonsense, for this isn't about me, nor is it a convoluted attempt to justify capital punishment or explain the possible attractions of suicide. It isn't about a particular person, however dear to my heart, but about humanity and knowledge. And it would be absurd, really, in terms of the study, an equation completely out of balance. I will present to each of these individuals the opportunity to participate in a new program begun by a private contractor to the Justice Department. There are already in place and operational corrections facilities owned and run by private corporations, so the concept is not new. I mean of privatization. I've written of words, well the word 'privatization' is one of the darlings of recent times, child of the conservative resurrection in the latter years of the last century. The concept was quite simply that a private corporation would always be more efficient than a government bureaucracy. Whether that has proved to be correct or not is of no concern to my research. It merely provides a cover. It is believable. My thought, personally, is that while profit is a great motivator, any large organization of humans entails a bureaucracy with all the concomitant strengths and weakness inherent therein. Frankly, I don't care. I don't have need or access to such an organization. Any difficulties I may have will be purely imaginary and I would hope easily dealt with. Though in that instance I would, proverbial, be the last to know, wouldn't I? This privately run facility is to offer, at a significant financial cost to the potential inmate (this is an important factor) the opportunity to pass the term of incarceration in a state of suspended animation. The inmate will enter the institution, be sedated and essentially not wake again until the term of incarceration is at an end. On waking the inmate will be free to leave, constrained only by the period of probation dependent on the original sentence. It will be explained very carefully, for after all, I shall do the explaining, that health will be monitored and maintained, feeding intravenous at more than optimal vitamin and nutritional needs, exercise provided by electrical stimulation, massage and physical therapy. Since the environment will be completely controlled a near perfect level of fitness and body mass will result and be consistent throughout the term of incarceration, very likely leading, as I shall present it, on awakening to a greater sense of well being and longer life expectancy than otherwise might have been attained by the individual. Of course I can't promise the latter, as I shall readily admit. Now whether this is even possible is quite beyond me. I suspect not, but I'm not a medical doctor, a physiologist, a nutritionist. And frankly it doesn't matter. The essence here is that it be believable. It is quite possible that a person so treated physically would after a number of years become a mental and physical vegetable. I suspect so. There are numerous studies indicating that human intelligence is a use it or lose it commodity. In fact, and no one likes to speak of this with our clearly aging population, with age we lose it mentally no matter how assiduously we use it. There may be old mathematicians and scientists, but none of any real use. And physically. Spend a week in bed and you lose bone mass. What would become of a human body after fifteen years, unconscious, in bed? I don't know. I don't care. It doesn't matter. I am not testing or researching methods of incarceration, whether for profit or not. What I am considering here is human choice. Why do we choose as we do? And what do we do with a choice that looms quite large and won't be divided into the more easily digested incremental? We choose constantly but rarely on such a scale or with such finality. It is not unlike a choice of suicide. It might be objected that these subjects, men confronting prison, have already had experience of such irreversible choices. They have committed crimes that have led them to prison. How very simple is that? But however the law-abiding citizens of a society may consider the issue I would think it axiomatic that the criminal does not contemplate, plan and execute a crime with the expectation foremost in mind of being caught and sent to prison. However the issue may loom in mind it is diminished and softened, like gauze over a harsh light, like a mist of warm air rising from the dark water of a swamp early in the morning, by the very incremental division I have just mentioned. We will take this step and then the next, each on the way to this choice we have made, but each small, nearly incidental and easily turned from, easily revoked, while the grander choice of which it is part, is not so readily unburdened. It might be agreed that no choice of thought or action is truly revocable, that cause leads to effect without end, nothing comes unburdened or leaves unburdened. Well that is all very well, nicely philosophical and perhaps on a cosmic level absolutely true. On a quantum level as well, if level is even the correct word for such things, words again, big, little, not words but cosmic and quantum where the choices you think to make may not be quite as they seem in a setting of strings and bubble wrap. It hardly matters. It does not matter. I am speaking of prisoners here. And the perception of choice. Each will be asked to decide whether or not to participate in this program. I did mention cost. It is a significant factor. Money, as I have mentioned, is a great motivator, whether as profit or loss, inlay, outlay, earned, unearned, stolen, by us or from us, we hate to lose and love to get it and love even more to spend it with a visceral, atavistic pleasure as long as we value what we get in return. That is the key, that we value what we get. A man buying a new car always loves the car he has got and always, always thinks he has got a rare deal. He has spent thousands and has lost thousands merely driving from the car lot but is happy because he gives value from his soul to that car, all with the color of money. The subjects in question, what is the question now, do not lose sight of the question, words, words and words and words, would not value the program if there were no cost. I have taken the federal poverty level for a family of four and multiplied by half of the given sentence, both in years. A substantial sum. Or that is the tentative figure. I suspect it may be too low and may change the multiplier to the full sentence. The amount does not matter except to give this abstract sense of value. The prisoners are not actually to pay. At least that is my initial thought. It is open to further consideration, of course. Until I've begun I can change whatever I like, even after I've begun, a good plan can perhaps always be improved. But it is important to maintain consistency in my contact with the prisoners and in my presentation to them. I will be using a standard script throughout though the prisoners won't know this. I shall even wear an invariable costume. So the payment question must be answered finally before I begin. I don't need the funds to create and establish a facility for this suspended animation. There is no such facility. Is such a facility even possible? Is the process even possible, a sort of extended winter hibernation for humans, as if they were bears or toads, or that fish, whatever it is, that buries itself wrapped in mucous when the creek or pond dries out? What a shock to find such a thing, digging about in the dry dirt and there's a slimy fish. Would it squirm and slither about, looking for water, or merely lie still, eye unblinking, unable to move. Do fish blink? Why would I be digging about anyway? Perhaps to bury an ex wife. There is a word for animals that hibernate, a good and proper scientific word which I don't know but shall look up. It will come in handy, I think. And there is a difference between animals that truly hibernate and those that merely become seasonally quiescent. A seventeen-year locust. Now there's an interesting creature. Although is it hibernation or simply a part of the life cycle? And what would be the difference? While I don't know it's important to remember that it is irrelevant whether I know or not. As I've said, pure suspended animation is most likely not possible for humans. Jet would in effect be a long-term induced coma. That certainly can't be good for you. It is believable and that is the crux of the matter. We live in a culture dominated by media content, television, film, even books, where such far fetched events are presented as a realistic norm, where cars explode gloriously from being shot at and human bodies shot and shot again, and knifed and exploded, heal quickly· and easily with no long term lasting damage if the story requires that there be none, and we, each in our own story always postulate that there be none, nor any hindrance to, in a startling beautiful or intensely stark setting, having invariably earth shattering sex with a newly met male or female as the case may be, as we freely choose in this world of diversity and free will. Hah! Free will. There it is. The ghost at the door. Well, slam the goddamned door! My point again is that I don't need money to start an institute of suspended animation. I don't need a prospectus and a business plan to present to a consortium of venture capitalists because I don't need the capital. I have nothing to start, except a study based entirely on the hypothetical. Still the question remains, if I have included the use of payment to give value to the concept from the subject's point of view, don't I strengthen the process by actually demanding and taking the funds, temporarily as it would be? That is an interesting question and I must decide. Yes, I must decide. The prisoners, after my presentation, will be given two weeks in which to make a decision. I will have explained to them that while their term of incarceration will pass as if in a night's sleep and that they will awaken unaware of time's passage, healthy, alert and ready to resume life, that time will indeed have passed. They will be older and the world will have continued with its attendant and often-unforeseen leaps of progress, or what passes for progress in a culture demanding a positive attitude. Most importantly, while they have slept, their families will have done without them absolutely for however long it has been. There will have been no calls, no emails, no mail, no visits, nothing but the passage of time for them suspended and for their families with life continuing without them. I want this aspect of the process most clearly understood for it is, from my point of view, the key to the decision I have presented to them. I am asking them a simple and direct question, though not the one I seem to be asking, for I have no interest in their thoughts on the varieties of experience to be encountered with suspended animation or the cost or how to pay for it. I am asking them if they are willing to completely abandon their connections to family and friends in order to ameliorate their awareness of the incarceration. It is a question of selfishness, really. It might be said that these men have already demonstrated a lack of regard or consideration for their social connections by engaging in criminal behavior. I think it would be prejudicial and erroneous to work from that assumption. There are too many factors about which I have no information, presuming a clear and apparent distinction between legal and illegal work, that does not perhaps appertain. What then is work becomes a question of structural necessity. Thence the field seems to open in all directions at once, leaving every question without boundary or focus. I can't have that, can I? I'm a scientist. There is no point asking a question if I don't suspect or imagine the answer. The question is not even possible, or at least not meaningful, if the answer is not inherent, hovering about like an intrusive relative. Mixing again, mixing and matching, I know, I am aware, words upon words, inhere and hover, as if, really. I might well present the question as a hypothetical to non-prisoners, if you were in prison, etc, but I suspect it would lose its edge of pertinence, becoming rather like a love or sex or lifestyle test in a magazine. If I need to choose to I certainly can, flesh the entire concept into a juicy bit for a popular science publication, perhaps with a shot of ambition into a popular science book, with colorful charts and photographs and glib pronouncements on the nature of selfishness in our modern society, avarice lives, the ugly old bitch, and I might indeed do such a thing with sufficient advance. And, of course, I could do the talk shows. Oh, la. Wouldn't that be fun? But I am distracting here, dancing away. The question remains that I will have asked, of selfishness, of how completely will a person given the choice abandon society not abstractly but most personally to avoid the inconvenience of being incarcerated and aware? What is the essence of loss, the loss or the perception of loss? If the tree falls, slowly, seeming like a dancer, dark grey in the silver shaded light, the falling snow silently silently in the cold winter morning, the branches, the trunk twisting, slowly, and the snow does perhaps whisper, but no one hears, and no one hears the tree heavily to the earth, like a giant struck, wounded now dead, did he howl in pain before falling, when no one is there to hear, this dancing giant, now dead, waiting to decay where in the spring, in all the springs to come, mushrooms will grow. The question is, will these men sacrifice their families in order to make their incarceration easier. Will they, as a further step, accept the void I might say, the circles descending even from this slough of despond, since I am demanding payment, require their significant others to make sacrifice in aid of their abandonment? If you did love me you would do this for me, sell your house, your car, your well being, perhaps your life, or comfort at least, the easiness, moments of easiness as few as they have been, so that I may sleep awhile and awake refreshed. What would I say if I were the prisoner? What indeed. Sign me up. Have you a brochure I can show the wife, the lover, mom and dad, the children, young still but they might understand. I had thought to go a step beyond. I am not lacking in imagination. Suspended animation is a fine idea. It has cache, a flash of modernity. Don't we have the well heeled dying making arrangements for their bodies to be frozen and reanimated when a cure has been found for whatever is killing them, even if it's old age, especially if it's old age, for old age's days are limited, Ponce de Leon rides not again but still, or their heads at least, at a cut rate I suppose, though what then is to be done when the moment for the cure arrives, for a body, I mean, what to do for a body when only the head remains, though I suspect that if the money has held out the body found will have a stench of poverty about it, unless we have progressed so far across the plains of la madura, that stem cells are planted and a new body from the old body, that of the dearly deheaded, has been grown. A bit of induced coma, fifteen to twenty years of suspended animation, seems jejune in comparison. And yet that step beyond, and I do not mean offering to cut off their heads and freeze them. After all, what if the power goes out, and with global warming it is not the moment to make a sales pitch based on refrigeration. Unless it is. Unless. If our earth, blue and emerald jewel of the solar system, the galaxy, perhaps the universe, whether six thousand years old or slightly older, is to become in the sadly foreseeable future Venusian, is it not, equally fair, a moment to corner the market in air conditioners? Not my thought. Not at all. But it does take to the realm I had considered, a step further, or rather a leap, artistic and profound, of true imaginative genius. Space and time. For they are the same. Of course. Of course. The cliché of our time, or of our space. With poster photos of Albert Einstein on the walls of the rooms where adolescents live. The inventor, the spinner of the tale, mathematical two step, six beats to the measure, as good a story as any for the moment. The language is self-consistent. Isn't that what matters? That we agree to agree and disagree. So if I fly, if flying it can be called, be flying if called can, Joyce is not the only one who can play with language, making literal translation from bad Latin, high art we say, or innovation at least, to the end of the galaxy and back again, as fast as fast as ever I can, pushing the speed of light, getting so close, ever so close which is fast beyond which there is no faster, or so the story goes, Albert, remember him, crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue, look, mother, he's just like us, a genius and just like us, a regular guy, it makes me feel so good, and when I have returned after this journey of a year or two or three or so, returned to earth, why many years will in fact have passed, earth facts, as the earthlings see them, the years I mean and other facts, those six thousand years and a loving god, and all those friends and relations will have died, unless we've frozen them and now upon return wake them to joy and happiness no matter how warm it is outside, eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit but no one counts in Fahrenheit anymore. Now the calculations are not precise, in fact they are non-existent but I assume they can be made, time and distance and velocity, ever so close to C, and with hard numbers, cold convincing numbers I can present to a given prisoner his sentence, say fifteen years, as given here, and now, by an earth bound judge, an older man or woman I envision, somewhat lacking in flights of fancy, and the prisoner so glum, so very glum, well who wouldn't be, and I tell him, sincere as a hatter to a dormouse, that those are earth years well and good, a just sentence after all, you aren't here for having been so well behaved, but if you sign on with me and the traveling prisoner express, for a goodly fee, or more, I'll whisk you into the distant corners of the universe, lickity-split, oh lickitiest of all splits, and have you back in a year, no more, no worse for wear, a year for you, not so bad, and lo the fifteen years are gone and your sentence done, a free man, though your children are grown, or grown old, and your wife a harridan, she always had that potential, and that other husband, one or several, is just a stop gap, and you are free and home again home again, jiggety jog. What do you suppose that will be worth to the sorrowful soul staring at a dime and a nickel as they say, talk thereof for a full fifteen, and no hope for parole, and none for commutation, for let's be honest, what politician will risk his career on setting a con free when he might in recompense rape the pope and sodomize Mother Teresa's decaying corpse? Have I gone too far? Is it too soon? For jokes about Abraham Lincoln? The point is, of course, that the traveling prisoner express takes my concept to an altogether more elegant place. And be advised that elegance has a place in science, that very place I seem to have found, astride Ockham's razor and sliding gleefully to a consummate finale. He bows, he curtsies, gushing blood across the stage, victim, as he smiles, of his own vaunted cleverness. The sapper as sap. Where did I put that petard? Mixing and matching in the bargain basement of too smart. Boom. Or silence. Does one hear a sound when sitting on a device that flings from off the mortal coil the self and all attendant beings? I suspect not. Lost applause is none at all, the tree again full fallen. I had considered the express. But it seemed too fanciful. Not that I think convicted prisoners lacking in imagination. The whole underlying premise of my study is that whatever the result these prisoners are reflective of society as a whole, or the male half at least, leaving the female to another time and place, though I do not initially think the results there will vary much. These prisoners are the society, after all, there are so very many of them, more than enough, more than an adequate sample, the caveat being that they've been caught and convicted and thus the sample is weighted toward the less affluent. Not the destitute. I haven't, or don't plan to sweep the shelters and soup kitchens, though again I doubt the result would change, poverty alone does not addle the mind or scramble the human genome, but the sample would be less tidy and more difficult to manipulate and I mean by that arrange to test and interview without implication of anything more sinister. Science is not the enemy here. Science is knowledge, look it up, it is intrinsic, philology at its best, and our hope and future, all the very goody things god used to be in a simpler age, with, may I remind those dreaming, new age, new wonder, of lost elysian fields, the same poverty and economic disparity and a great deal more infectious disease. The sample is the key and the sample is pure, like hens in a coop, rats in a cage and no vivisection required. But finally the express, the Einsteinian fillip, seemed, while clever and very pretty, a step beyond, onto the black ice, to where the water might yet wash, though solid, cold, hollow ringing beneath my feet, a song for the dance of my imagining, I could dance as well more safely though with less reverb to my tingling ears close into shore where the ice white with scarring would thunk and clunk and bear my turning safely. It is a matter of belief. Faith. In the scientific method. Would the prisoners believe the more fanciful express? I do not doubt that they would, that with a slightly greater effort the process could be sold. But the end desired here is an agreement to separation as an absolute, or the question as to whether or not that will be chosen. How many? What percentage will choose selfishness? To burden the consideration of that choice with thoughts and concerns of a near science fictional nature, with additional questions of safety and feasibility seemed to invite confusion and uncertainty into what should remain a simple process. I admit the choice becomes more stark, more blatantly selfish with the space time variation, the prisoners then choosing to abandon their significant others not only for a given time, but for a final complete correspondence of life. If you leave your loved ones at twenty-five and return at twenty-six and yet have left them for twenty years and they, having waited and aged, are twenty years older and you are not, then you have most absolutely left them. When the prisoner returns there is no return, he has died and comes back a memory, a ghost. One further caveat that I did contemplate, I admit. The cost I might charge, the fee to add meaning and importance to the choice, would be more readily accepted, I assumed, in the purchase of something as extravagant as space travel. Finally it seems just too extravagant. Had our space program advanced at all beyond the moon and a space station, or simply returned to the moon and stayed there, with longer excursions, more deep space imagery with man involved, humans there, it would have made the sale of a fictional space trip more readily acceptable as a challenge to my study. Let me not forget that this is about the study. So I choose to keep the process simple, less fanciful, apple pie a la mode rather than peaches melba, a sitcom, a play, a standard television drama with strict intervals and carefully gratified expectations, not modern opera of dissonant music, odd music, and confused imagery. It does not matter if the chairman dances if no one will watch him or listen or dance or leave whistling a happy tune. Knowledge is the key. Again. Still. I am a research scientist after all, not an impresario of ornate real life dramas for those of criminal convictions. What shall I make of this cost then? I have thought of it more carefully, convinced as I am that for the process to be taken seriously the prisoners must believe that they will be required to pay for it. Money gives a hard edge to the concept that it might otherwise lack. And if that is true for the belief that they must pay, how much strength is added if they indeed are actually required to pay? The expectation of payment and actual payment are not equal factors. I begin to believe that it is essential for actual payment to be made, which will require an addition to the process, a means of billing and receiving payment, an escrow account to hold the funds while the study is underway, a means of disbursement when it is complete. It has occurred to me that there might be a certain degree of resentment attendant upon the completion of the study. These prisoners will have expected an amelioration of their sentence for which they have imposed on their families and paid the fee, whether exorbitant or not for I haven't really set it yet, have I? While funds are returned the resentment may well accrue not solely from a return each to his sentence unmitigated but also from the clear exposure of the choice in each instance that will have been made. This suggests a follow up inquiry to perhaps determine the effect of that choice on the nature of the relationships involved. More problematic would be vestiges of anger directed at the study and at myself as originator. It is something to be considered. The quest for knowledge is often fraught with danger though certainly we have come far from Galileo and the Inquisition. Far, indeed, but not completely away. The patrons and protectors are different, where once kings and queens and lords of the realm, we now have universities and tenure. God bless tenure. But the university I rely on, all the universities upon which any of us rely for funds, for protection, for our very lives, whether public or private, are dependent on public funds and therefore susceptible to political suasion. God bless tenure indeed. It is in reality only as secure as any passing political event, safest in the shadows of obscurity and most fragile in the glaring light, the ice melting then, you see, not black and hard, but soft and easily crumbled. These are not violent criminals with whom I shall be dealing. Such resentment as there is should not manifest itself in any sort of physical danger but the political aspects are to be acknowledged. Although it is true that such a grouping does not elicit a strong sympathy from the society as a whole. Out of sight, out of mind, and if they are there they very likely deserve to be so and why should we, the body politic, give a damn, a thought, even a glance of interest. Still only the wealthy, the truly rich, are free of such concerns. This is my living, the car, the condo, three ex wives who never seem to grow beyond the need of support. Publish or perish, another thought, another study, manipulating people and numbers in the pursuit of knowledge. And what is that? What is knowledge? Well, I won't consider that. I know. You know. We all know. More and more. And the more we know, the more carefully we can consider and decide. This and that. Knowledge is power. Knowledge will set you free. And in this instance lead to yet another grant and new car next year and college for the children who will not cease growing to college age where they can begin the minuet and seek knowledge in their turn. But not the glare. It is best to avoid the glare. And why, even in the shadows, safe as I am in the shadows, do I not feel free? It has occurred to me that if I were less than a scrupulous man this study might present an entree to a very lucrative situation. Several of them actually or two at least, depending on my' frame of reference. Time is the determiner. Time again. Albert. Who must surely have been an insufferable bore in his later years, like so many of these maths and physics people living forever off a few moments of insight in youth, often very young, nearly children, idiot savants most of them. The question is of term, length of time. Questions for a tenured professor. There are now federal prisons run by private enterprise. I have no idea how successful the field is though it must be heavily burdened by bureaucratic resistance, as aren't we all. It doesn't matter. That is not my thought. This concept for the study is feasible. Not the extreme, not whisking across the universe, squeezing time like a ripe orange. But suspended animation is viable, or to be more accurate, scientifically, for this is science after all, a person so suspended remains viable, alive, revivable, like Lazarus, and therein lies the concept. Victims of head trauma are, when it is deemed necessary, put into induced coma. It is then palliative. It has been done for weight loss. So it is possible and acceptable. It's on the books. There have been papers on it. Therefore the concept lives. Now if I were to establish a company, a corporation, the American dream, incorporation, this nearly more than human entity, with more legal protections than all but the richest of humans, to embody the concept, to give it salability, then the sluice gates might open, the water deep and richly flowing, let the ice melt then, let it melt. If I market the concept as a means to satisfy the judicial system in terms of punishment as well as to the inmates as amelioration of that sentence on a pay per basis then I have given true value to the idea. I need only create the beginning. Isn't that the way now? No need to actually do it, at least not to profitability, but simply to imagine and plan, bait the heavy money, the venture capital, perhaps even as far as a stock offering. I may be a professor, a salaried tenure man, but I'm no fool. I know where the money is. It's everywhere and needs only the bait, the call, and once there, gathered, I need only cut and be done with it. It is the idea that matters, the imagination as value, added and added again, and I have had the idea. What can a journal paper mean in the face of such possibility? The field is enormous, in this land of opportunity, of free enterprise, of easy easy money, think of the jobs I'll create, oh yes, the payroll, the taxes I'll pay, a few years down the sluice when there are profits to be taxed, and most importantly as a focus for drawing the venture money, this land of endless incarceration, state and federal, county and town and city, there is no end of prisoners and each prisoner is ultimately a potential client. And then what becomes of publish or perish, of a required class each and every godforsaken semester of dunder- headed students without the Drains or training or interest of a fourth grader from fifty years ago, or from France or from Italy or England or anywhere on mother earth where it is not considered normal and necessary to send every idiot's child to college. The young women, now, the young women I might miss from time to time, they are so fresh, so flowerful at that age. But a rich man, this aging professor as a rich man would have no lack of young women willing to console him. And no need, in the stark glow of pure cold money, no need then to feign a wise man's interest in their thoughts and aspirations, ever the same, ever mundane and pathetic, devoid of imagination, of thought. I am hateful, this rich man I could become, with effort, a little effort, from this study in selfishness, will the prisoners, the convicts, sacrifice family to ease the pain. Who cares? Do I care? Does anyone care? Should anyone in the whole history of the universe give a damn? Frankly, Scarlet, I sure as hell don't. Now that I have purged myself, let fly the fable of who I pretend to be, I may as well proceed into the grater, more darkly spinning depths of my fervid imagination. In this study, this concept for a simple paper, a grant, perhaps two, but nothing extravagant, is the seed of a marvelous creative idea. All ideas are creative, aren't they, unless stolen, or plagiarized? One of the banes of professorial existence, so many papers, so little time, even for the vicious, the most blatantly criminal. An imaginative mind can't help itself, really, as life must breath, as sex drives us to process in continuation our DNA, so such a mind must, must create. It is an imperative. And where that creation takes one is not always an easy or pleasant place, but to deny it is to deny life. I wax philosophic, nearly Nietzschean and that will not bear scrutiny, not logically, but what has logic to do with humanity, with creativity? Or money? What has logic to do with money? How did I even come to such a question? It is irrelevant. Math is logic. Of a sort. And the math is quite simple. In determining that to require an alleged payment from the prisoners if they chose that available option in the study, suspended animation, personal, selfish amelioration, would add a weight of serious reality to their consideration and thus to the study, I speculated that a reasonable amount might be related to the federally established poverty level for a family of four. I don't have that figure at the moment, as I sit here in the fading light of the afternoon, my imagination and I, rain falling softly, muting the sounds of the world around me. But suppose, just suppose, for the sake of interest, that the figure is given as $25,000 per year. Not an unreasonable figure. And suppose, as all of this shall be, just supposition, thought, fiction, imaginative consideration, that each prisoner opting for this choice is required to pay that figure in advance to begin the process, to begin say, and for the first several years, whatever number works, one, two, three, who yet knows, and further if out of the nine hundred prisoners to whom I have access six hundred choose to proceed, and why not, two thirds, a 67% positive response is not without precedence, and really is it possible to overestimate the pure selfish ego driven soul of the average human, from the very depths of Greek myth until, who was it, who, an ancient, aged couple asked if either would give a life, the last feeble remnant of life left to them to save their child, for Hades would have a life, oh yes, and neither would make the sacrifice, now, and nothing has changed, we have not changed, so I do not doubt that percentage, and then when cash must flow, real payment, payment now, borrow it where you will but not from me, not from your purveyor for this is science and science, knowledge, can't be worried about non-payment, would I not have five hundred left, cash in hand? It is not very much. Twenty-five thousand. I have more outstanding on credit cards, that colorful array of plastic I carry like a sacred talisman. What have we then? In cash. But $12,500,000. A tidy sum. Nothing to the truly, exorbitantly wealthy. A mere blink to the government. But a tidy sum for a tenured professor, if put into perspective. And I must, mustn't I? Perspective. For I have eyes to see, haven't I? A life to live and calculate, counting, always counting the years I have or may have yet, the papers to write, the classes, oh sorrowful, sad, boring classes I must teach with only the soft flesh of a young friend now and then to ease the burden, and why, I ask myself, why do they bother, I am old and fat and it is a profoundly third rate university, but there they are, god bless them, in the front row, Perspectives in Social Anthropology 101, perspectives indeed, I am speaking of perspective. With my salary, if I paid no taxes and spent no money I would have twelve million dollars after a mere one hundred years. Now that is a round cold perhaps inaccurate coupling of figures. I do pay taxes. And god knows I spend. These young female students are rarely adverse to fine dining I have noticed, and the opera and the symphony and monstrous coffee table art books. It is expected. I am a professor. And to be fair, to be accurate, I am ignoring investments and the miracle, as they tell us, always, ad infinitum, of compound interest. Had I a simple million to begin with compound interest would set me right, wouldn't it? How quickly, how at all, who knows, compound away, like yeast puffing up a loaf of bread. A hundred thousand, ten thousand, anything to start the compound ball rolling. The problem here, quite honestly, is that I haven't ten cents to compound into a quarter. Nothing at whatever interest compounded by the second begets nothing, and with debt, for I have that, with debt the ball rolling turns quickly and the compounding of interest, capitalism's gift to humanity, gathers and gathers until bearing down on me unrelentingly I am crushed like a bug, like a kitten, like a stray weed in an avalanche of hard, cold stone. Is that what I want? Is that the chosen end of the tenured professor? For I ought to remind myself here that no choice is a choice, that decisions are decisions even when there are none, for silence means nothing, means yes, means no, means all the above and back again, like some of the ornate, overly clever psychological tests my colleagues and I seek to fashion, for another paper, yet another paper, so there can be another class, another maturing child trading sex for affection, hopes and dreams for attention and pretension. If I sit here, the rain still falling, the light faded, and let these thoughts pass like day dreams, like nightmares, as meaning1ess thoughts of an afternoon, I have chosen the class, the dim uninterested, uncaring students, the young woman, I can see her, hear her voice, they are so alike, white bread, brown bread, bread in a sterile wrapper, and the paper I will write for a report, a publication devoted to my profession, that no one will care about one way or the other, we are selfish, it is proved now scientifically, the imprint of our current god, revealed knowledge that I have helped reveal and therefore partake of this god, of the flesh, of the blood, In nomine Patris, and who will care then? Why should caring even be a factor? It remains a choice. And nothing is chosen, emptiness chosen. I can as easily walk out the door into the rain, it is still falling, did I mention that the rain is still falling, and never think of these prisoners again, ignore the grant, the paper awaited with stifled yawns in fervid anticipation, the students, the repetitious curriculum, the subtle lure of suspended animation, of flights to distant stars, twelve million dollars and the spiral of decisions on decisions that would bring, no more than ever, no more, no less. Walk away. Cease. Therein to choose. And I am not speaking of free will. I am not an absolute fool, an aging pollyanna in the tattered robes of academia. This is not a myth. Urban or otherwise. Spontaneous combustion of the elderly. I did not burst thoughtless, unbidden, a flame in an empty universe. Cause. Effect. I know where the bread is buttered. I don't ignore the young women when they so desperately want hackneyed words of wisdom. The question is, what shall I do? I must do something. For nothing is something. It saddens me. Not the rain. The rain is life. The rain is death. And perhaps the rain is simply rain. But the choices sadden me and I am weary of them.