Читать книгу Vengeance - Zachary Lazar - Страница 9

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My friend Deborah, the photographer, once told me that she distrusts color, because it’s too seductive—it prevents us from seeing what’s really there. She wasn’t speaking metaphorically, she was just explaining why she prefers to shoot in black and white, but in a larger sense she was talking about the rigor of looking, not glancing, not turning away. That first night we spent at Angola, we went outside to view the main prison under lights, the rectilinear massiveness of it, the fences and razor wire. I wanted to walk toward it across the vast lawn but Deborah said no, she’d heard there were snakes, so instead we walked down the road and made out two other camps in the distance across empty fields under the moonlight. I knew Angola was huge, but this was the first real sense I’d had of it. It was its own planet. That night, from the empty space around the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters where we were to sleep, it was like when you’re on an airplane coming into a foreign city in the dark and you see the different grid patterns of lights and gradually make out the vast shape of what’s below. It was as if all the importance in the world had coalesced in those fields—violence, punishment, collision, consequence—all that significance beyond the limits of my small understanding.

We got into Deborah’s truck the next morning and followed the assistant warden, Cathy, from the BOQ past the main prison, then across the fields where a work gang was marching slowly in the glare and mist, carrying hoes straight upright against their shoulders, the angled blades a jagged clutter above their bowed heads. The workers were mostly black men, in cuffed jeans and pale blue shirts or white T-shirts, overseen by white men on horseback with guns. There was something pornographic about the scene, as if it had arisen out of someone’s half-understood fantasies. The fields beyond spread out lush and green, the endless landscape from last night now exposed in daylight. Angola had once been several adjacent slave plantations in central Louisiana. The original slaves were said to have been brought from Angola.

We had come to witness the rehearsal and production of a passion play, The Life of Jesus Christ, performed by Angola’s inmates and their female counterparts from the nearby women’s penitentiary in St. Gabriel. I write fiction, nonfiction, sometimes a hybrid of both, and I’ve tried to understand the impulse behind this blending—to understand that there’s something I’m not seeing that most other people are (and I hope something I’m seeing that they’re not). What I seem to resist is the idea that the real and the imaginary don’t bleed into each other. Perhaps this is because what really happens in the world so often belies any notion of “realism.” It was an implausible coincidence, for example, that had led Deborah and me to this project at Angola. Both of us had a parent who was murdered. Both murders happened in the same city, Phoenix, Arizona. They were both contract killings. I don’t know how you’d calculate the odds of Deborah and I ever meeting after such an implausible coincidence, but many years later, after establishing our separate lives, we did meet, when I moved to New Orleans, where it turned out our houses were two blocks away from each other. You can see my roof from Deborah’s roof. A strange coincidence—transformative, unbidden, like a fire. It seemed possible to me that by collaborating on this prison project, we might force this coincidence to become more than just an unlikely wound that we shared. As I wrote rather grandiloquently in my letter to the assistant warden, asking for permission to visit, I thought that by interpreting this play about the possibility of redemption in the wake of violence, Deborah and I might somehow enact “a kind of redemption of our own.” That word, redemption, strikes me as dubious now, a sign not exactly of bad faith but of something inside myself I don’t trust. That first night in the BOQ, I’d spread a thin sheet over one of the single beds in the dorm room and tried to read in that place usually occupied by guards sleeping between their shifts. The mattress was covered in plastic—even the pillow was covered in thick plastic. I examined my shoes and jeans and socks on the floor in the greenish, clinical light, and I felt within my dread of that place an uncomfortable wish to be there, that place where I didn’t wish to be. Deborah had been there many times, photographing the inmates. They were ambiguous portraits, often beautiful and ugly at the same time. Of course shooting photographs in black and white is not an analogy for “seeing the world in black and white.” On the contrary, the entire interest of black-and-white photography is in the infinite range of grays.

We parked outside the arena, the facility where they hold the prison rodeo twice each year, and I began to help Deborah with some of her equipment, but I could soon tell that she didn’t want my help. Something about stepping outside the truck into the brightness and dust made us fretful, overly alert. It scrambled our signals, and somewhere in here I lost track of what was happening. I saw a camel standing in the dead grass outside the arena’s gates—blond, tall, attended by two men in cowboy clothes, who looked at me without humor. Inside the arena, beyond the brown-painted gates and fences, men in work boots and jeans were still building the stage sets. So far, three wooden crosses bedecked with ropes had been raised on a mound of dirt. Beyond them, amid a few ranks of potted bushes and shrubs and a fake Roman temple made of plywood, a crowd of about seventy inmates was standing around chatting, the men in street clothes, the women from St. Gabriel in jeans and light blue shirts bearing the initials of the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in black letters. Cathy, the assistant warden, was responding to a call on her cell phone. Deborah had disappeared beneath the grandstand where she would set up for her photographs, formal portraits of the actors before a black velvet screen. The person who was supposed to be my escort had already lost interest and retreated far into the shade, texting. There were several animals involved in the production—the camel I’d just seen, some horses that now came charging across the arena at full speed—but the donkey, Cathy was learning now, had been quarantined because he had a communicable disease, and so maybe there would be no donkey this week. A woman who spoke with a Scottish accent was asking a prison employee what kinds of fruit they might find with which to bedeck the table for the Last Supper scene—were there melons, she asked, looking for something large enough for spectators to see from a distance—but no, there were no melons. Grapes? No—no grapes. Apples and oranges, that was pretty much it—apples and oranges, plus some bread. It was dawning on me, as I stood there watching all this, that the men working on the still-emerging sets with tape measures, levels, hammers, and saws were not hired carpenters but inmates. The man standing next to me in the Texas Longhorns cap with the Nikon camera was an inmate. He was a reporter for the prison magazine, he told me, covering the same story I was covering. A man who happens to be the son of God is betrayed, convicted, and sentenced to death. On the third day, he rises from the grave to save the world with a message not of retribution but of mercy.

As I said, I’d begun to lose track of what was happening almost as soon as Deborah parked her truck, and this sensation didn’t stop—I was alone, and began to wander, talking to more and more people on the edges of the action, writing down what they said, although little of it registered clearly. When I wrote down the word murder, for example, it didn’t register much more than if I were a nurse writing the word allergy in a medical chart. The reporter in the baseball cap was a murderer. He’d set his girlfriend’s house on fire then shot her to death. I couldn’t get this past act to match up with his present—in the arena, he was just a middle-aged man, small, soft-spoken, with a slightly sunken-in, sunburned face. Like almost every other inmate at Angola, he was expected to die on the prison grounds. In Louisiana, a life sentence literally means life. There’s almost no parole. The state also has the highest rate of incarceration of any place in the world.

“A life sentence comes with an exclamation mark and a question mark,” one inmate told me. “Wow!” And then, “When this gonna end?”

“Imagine you’re trapped in a barn,” another inmate said. “Now imagine that the barn is on fire. You will do anything you can to get out of that barn. You will do anything you have to to get out of that barn.”

Murder, kidnapping, rape, drug addiction, poverty, abuse, all pointing to the terminus: life in prison. Deborah had told me to come without expectations, to not prepare, and it was true, I didn’t need to prepare, or even ask any questions beyond the most basic ones, but I didn’t know what a burden of information was there waiting for me. I interviewed more than forty people over the course of that week, and what they told me filled up more than ninety pages of typewritten notes. After a while, I became an ear and an eye, nothing else. I found it impossible to go to the bathroom or even find a drink of water much of the time, because on my way to do either I would be interrupted with another story, another tragedy, another life presented for my appraisal.

Imagine you’re trapped in a barn. Now imagine that the barn is on fire.

The inmate who said that was Kendrick King, who was thirty-one, in the ninth year of his life sentence. As it happened, I recognized his face from one of Deborah’s photos—even in black and white, you could sense what Deborah called Kendrick’s “Weimaraner eyes,” a striking glint that in real life turned out to be the product of his caramel-colored irises. He was tall and wore knee-high rubber boots and a baseball cap with its bill folded in a way that made his face look gaunt, slightly spectral. He cuffed his jeans in meticulous folds over the tops of his boots. Because Deborah had mentioned him, and because I’d seen his photo, I’d looked up his case before we met, and that was how I knew that Kendrick King might be serving life for a murder he’d had nothing to do with. I still don’t know if he had anything to do with it. When I tell friends this story, they look at me as if I’m naïve. What I tell them is that almost none of the inmates I spoke to that week claimed to be innocent. Even Kendrick King didn’t make that claim until I prompted him by telling him what I knew. What I knew was what I read from the Times-Picayune of May 2, 2004:

A Jefferson Parish jury convicted a Westwego man for his role in a murder last year despite his claims that police coerced a confession from him.

Kendrick King, 22, will spend the rest of his life in prison, the mandatory sentence for second degree murder.

That first time we spoke, we stood in the shade and he told me his crime (murder) and his sentence (life without parole) and his roles in the play (Man in Crowd, Shepherd Three)—answers to the questions I asked everyone, which usually led to them telling me their whole life stories. As we talked, it came out that Kendrick’s mother was from Saint Lucia and that he’d spent a part of his childhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and so we made small talk for a while—the carnival parade in Crown Heights, the beef patties and the colorful flags of the different islands, the soca music and the reggae, those big vines of grapelike fruit whose thick skin you peel back to reveal the delicately flavored plumlike innards. Guineps. Ackee. We talked for a while like this, Kendrick bemused that I’d heard of any of these things, and then we compared cities—he’d lived in New York, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Castries, New Orleans. I’d been to all of those places, including Castries, St. Lucia, so we traded some memories.

“I have to tell you,” I finally said. “I know a little bit about your case. I mean, what was in the newspaper.”

He looked at me, then examined his fingernails, his hand down by his waist.

“I guess what I’m trying to ask you is, it sounds like maybe you were pressured by the police to tell them about something you didn’t do,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything. I never confessed to anything.”

He stood with one of his feet against the wall, a hand braced on his bent knee, as if about to elaborate, but he seemed blocked by a sense of futility. Perhaps he’d told the story so many times that it no longer had a beginning or an end, only a series of entry points, and so there was no obvious place to start. The phone records that showed he was at his girlfriend’s house at the time of the crime. The Mazda that his girlfriend had with her at work all day. The pair of shoes at his mother’s house. I’ve since come to learn all the minutiae of Kendrick’s case. When I try to explain it, I feel blocked myself—blocked and hopelessly unpersuasive.

“You saw the paper,” he said. “There’s a lot of the story in there, but it’s confusing. That’s always the problem. I could have pled out and got years, not life, but I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to lie. My own attorney told me we should just go ahead, go to trial, say the truth, but the truth was too confusing. Many people in here have that story. Many people in here had the same problem in one form or another.”

“But if you weren’t involved, it’s not confusing, it’s simple.”

“There’s nothing simple in the legal system. You know that. Especially not when you’re a young man who looked like I did.”

I hadn’t told him anything about myself yet. I hadn’t mentioned my reason for being there, or raised the possibility that I wasn’t precisely the kind of person I might look like I was. There were obvious differences between us, and beneath them there were hidden, more mysterious differences, but there were also things we both understood. I don’t want to sound wistful, but I think part of what kept us talking was that the fundamental problem of what we didn’t and couldn’t know was understood.

He had a tattoo on the inside of his forearm, dark green against his brown skin. It was a Star of David, or at least it was a six-pointed star, and because I wanted to change the subject, I asked him about it. I wondered if it was a Rastafarian symbol, knowing his Caribbean background, but he said no, it was a Theosophical symbol. He’d studied Theosophy in Angola, among other things, in his nine years there. The tattoo represented the male principle in balance with the female principle, one triangle for each. It was also a Seal of Solomon, he said, used to drive away demons. The biblical King Solomon had worn a ring with the symbol, half of it made of brass, half of iron; he signed commands to the good spirits with the brass side, to the evil spirits with the iron. I wrote all this in my notebook—star of David tattoo is really Theosophy, 2 pyramids joined, Male/Female, good/evil, Eileen Baker in Pasadena, CA, was Theosophy instructor for K., Theos Society gives free books to inmates—glad to have moved on to something other than the story of what had brought him here.

“I don’t know how you deal with the day-to-day of this place,” I said.

“There are ways.”

“Bible study.”

“You asked if they coerced me, the police, yeah, of course they coerced me. They had me detained for almost ten hours. There’s nothing to eat, no one to talk to, even when you tell them what they want, they put you in handcuffs. ‘You saw this, right? Isn’t it true that so-and-so pulled a gun?’ They put photos in front of you, leave you alone with photos of someone’s head blown open. They do that for ten hours. Say they know you’re guilty, they have witnesses saying you’re guilty. Then it’s, ‘We can make it easy for you, or we can make it hard for you.’ It’s not torture, but it’s a kind of torture.”

“So you said what?”

“I said what I had to say. That’s what people do. That’s what everyone does.”

They were rehearsing the crucifixion scene behind us as we spoke. The previous night I’d had thick dreams that left me disoriented and vaguely anxious, and now before me, as in one of those dreams, a group of four men in oversized white T-shirts was overseeing the torture of a man playing Jesus whom they led down a staircase toward the cross. Seventy or so onlookers were pretending to weep or jeer or stare in awe. One of the prison guards was laughing at something in the distance. My escort was, as usual, not around, though she was supposed to be monitoring my questions. I wasn’t supposed to be asking questions about the inmates’ cases. I watched as Jesus, now bearing the wooden cross, was hounded around the dusty arena by a mob of persecutors casting fake stones. On the dirt mound to one side, the two other crosses had already been raised up on their hinges and two other men playing thieves had been strung up, sagging there from the gibbets.

“Imagine that you’re in a barn,” Kendrick was saying now. Now imagine that the barn is on fire . . .

He was being pulled away to go rehearse—along with his bit part in the play, he was one of the singers in the chorus, the Shepherds. I was a little relieved that we could stop talking for a while. As we both moved farther into the arena, toward those three crosses on their mound of dirt, he asked me if I’d call his mother when I got back to New Orleans. I wrote her number down in my notebook and told him I’d think about it. Or maybe I didn’t even say I’d think about it. Maybe I just said I would, or at least that I’d try.

I saw Deborah sitting at a picnic table near some inmates beneath a huge plastic tent as I stood in the line for lunch. She looked exhausted, her sunglasses on, not even noticing me. I said before that I could hardly get away for a drink of water or a trip to the bathroom, and that was true in one sense, but in another sense, it could not have been true because I sometimes managed to sneak away for a few moments of privacy, smoking a cigarette outside the arena, alone, trying to absorb what I’d heard. There was a blue brick cube designated inmate restroom, all of its walls decorated with a cartoon of a po-faced convict in prison stripes, a ball and chain around his ankle. There were boarded-up concessions stands for the rodeo:

Camp “C” Concept Club

Boiled peanuts $3.00

Hog cracklins $5.00

Pig tails $1.00

Lunch was a pile of gluey rice with yellow gravy and some starchy vegetable the same color. Deborah had been joined by a few women prisoners when I sat down with her. They were talking about St. Gabriel, where in the past Deborah had been to shoot pictures on Mardi Gras and Halloween, the women in costumes, and on Christmas, when their children came to visit the decorated prison. The budget had been slashed since then—no more Mardi Gras, Christmas scaled back to almost nothing. One of the women said that last year all the kids received the same boxed Christmas gift: a ball, a tiny toy truck, a plastic cup. Her son had looked at the cup in particular and said, “It’s a cup,” uncertain as to how it could be construed as a gift. “Why can’t they give one Xbox game for the same money?” she asked, for she knew that her son had understood the stigma of the cup.

I was seated a little ways down, across from a woman named Mary Bell, who was pretty and who was being eyed this whole time by virtually every man under that huge plastic tent. She was sending out secret gazes to a million points behind me, very discreetly, her eye movements almost undetectable, though she was constantly looking, constantly smiling. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a face move the way Mary Bell’s face was moving that day, taking in all that attention after so long with no attention.

I’d been hungry, but now, after eating about half of my food, I was sated, overly full, though I felt ashamed at not being able to finish. There was the pile of rice, gravy, that colorless vegetable. The inmates left, their plates clean. I looked back over my notebook at what Kendrick had just told me and I thought about telling it all to Deborah, but every time I recounted such stories they lost their weightiness and became mere anecdotes. Instead, I put my pen away and looked back down at my plate.

“My next project,” Deborah said, “is kittens. Color photos of kittens.”

“You’re tired of despair?”

“Kitties in sweaters. Santa suits.”

“There’s always hopelessness. You could try that.”

“How do you like it so far? Are you adapting to prison life?”

“I don’t think so. I think I’m at a total loss so far.”

She smiled, her eyes hidden by her sunglasses. “Well, that doesn’t sound very good.”

That night, I stayed up until two o’clock while Deborah slept, transcribing the day’s notes onto my laptop. Most of them would be meaningless after twenty-four hours, single words that triggered paragraphs of associations as I typed them out. When I finished, I did another Internet search of “Kendrick King” and found the old Times-Picayune article, then I pulled up a court record that was eight pages of blurry single-spaced text. After five hours of transcribing the shorthand in my notebook, I couldn’t penetrate much of the court document. There were two other people, a man and a woman, who were almost certainly involved in the murder that Kendrick was imprisoned for, but what Kendrick’s role in it all was I still couldn’t say. I went outside for a cigarette break and the cigarette break reminded me of freedom—I knew it was a cliché, but I felt it powerfully. I was free to think about Kendrick’s case or not to, though that wasn’t really true: I kept thinking about it. Above me, the night sky was full of stars—Orion, the hunter, and a white moon like a desiccated slice of lime.

That whole week, Deborah and I didn’t talk much about why we were there, though we spent a lot of time together when we weren’t working—driving to dinner, having a drink in our rooms. It was as if to put in words what we were investigating would dissolve whatever it was we were both privately trying to see. I was trying to see everything clearly, but I realize that I missed at least as much that week as I took in. On the morning of the first dress rehearsal, for example, they were all getting their costumes on in the warren of livestock chutes beneath the arena’s grandstand—I remember that. I remember Vernon “Vicious” Washington, the superheavyweight boxing champion of Angola, walking comically out of the makeshift dressing room in full biblical dress and a white headwrap, but no shoes on his enormous dust-covered feet. (“They run off with the props,” he’d said, explaining the lack of sandals.) I remember the actress who was playing Mary being nearly thrown off the back of the donkey, who it turned out had not been quarantined after all and who was braying with a rich, horn-like call that sounded like a Jewish shofar, only louder. I hadn’t been able to figure out who was blowing a horn until I finally went out to look and saw it was the donkey, bucking and rearing, the actress trying to hold on in her biblical tunic and veil, her posture one of helpless resignation. I remember that after everyone was dressed, there was this poignant vision: a long queue of men in one chute, a long queue of women in another, separated by brown bars, waiting for the sound technicians to fit them with their microphones, while in their outlandish costumes they talked in pairs across the bars all down the line—one-to-one, man-to-woman, without exception—as if involved in some sort of Bible-themed speed dating. It reminded me of Mary Bell at lunch the other day, sending those almost imperceptible smiles to the men behind me. I remember an excitement and focus to those conversations that was reminiscent of high school. I remember all that, but what I missed was some fracas in the distance, a scuffling that was over almost as soon as it began. I learned later what it was. It was two actors, a man and woman, who’d been detained by the guards for embracing each other too long. I heard a rumor later that they were husband and wife.

So you see, I often missed what really happened, even as I was trying my best to assess everything for what it really was.

I found Kendrick two mornings later behind the arena, barefoot and in the hooded robe that was his costume, sipping coffee by himself on a wooden bench. It was not just the monk-like robe that made him look baleful—his mood that day was different, menacing and closed off. It seemed to take him a few seconds to even recognize me. He looked off to one side, down a line of large blue plastic barrels full of bottled water, perhaps ashamed of some things he’d told me earlier. The day before, he’d claimed that he knew who’d really committed the murder he was incarcerated for: it was a young man who was only twenty at the time. He said that he would never divulge the man’s name, that he couldn’t put someone like that in prison, even if it meant getting out himself—he knew too much now about what it was like here, no one deserved to be in a place like this. He shared this with me on a set of crowded bleachers, in everyone’s view (in prison, unless you’re in solitary confinement, there’s almost never any privacy), and he looked straight into my eyes, his own eyes moistening in urgency and embarrassment by the end. He looked straight ahead at nothing for a while, then finally raised his chin at another inmate, not in friendship or greeting but in something like simple acknowledgment. It occurred to me that life there was an unending performance shaped by the constant gazes of other people. It was impossible to know what to believe. Self-deprecation, self-awareness, ironic distance—these traits of sincerity can be faked but can they be faked beyond detection? If Kendrick was a liar, then he practiced the art of lying at a preternaturally subtle level that I’ve seldom seen matched in any other art form, which is to say that the performance contained no trace of artifice.

It was the day of the first performance when I found him on that bench in his robe with his coffee. Along with his costume, he was wearing a wristwatch he liked to wear, its band a braid of white plastic, its thickly bezeled face vaguely nautical. I asked him if his mother was coming—there was a free bus from New Orleans he’d mentioned before—but he said he didn’t think so, he hadn’t heard from her, things were not good for him right now.

“I ain’t seen my daughter in nine years,” he said then. “She’s twelve now. You have kids?”

“No.”

“No kids?”

“We didn’t want any. It was by choice.”

He became scientifically neutral, assessing this. “I was hoping my daughter would come out today,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you can’t do nothing for me. I understand that. You’re not a lawyer. That’s not why you’re here.”

He said he was done with the courts anyway, done with filing briefs—his appeals process had been exhausted years ago. He said that his one hope now was that someday he might get legal asylum in Saint Lucia, his mother’s birth country, where he qualified for citizenship. That was his last chance—if they weren’t going to give him parole, then maybe they’d at least let him go to Saint Lucia, where his family came from.

I said I hoped so. I hope so. I meant it in good faith, but given where we were it was impossible to say it without at least a trace of bad faith.

I wrote down his DOC number in my notebook and said I’d send him a letter when I got back to New Orleans. I didn’t know yet that he wouldn’t be permitted to receive it.

The day of that first performance was bleak, the sky the color of soot, the forecast predicting storms. There were maybe a hundred and fifty of us in the audience, about two thirds of whom were inmates, watching in the cold as a line of actors and actresses in shepherd’s robes, including Kendrick, took their places in the center of the arena. Their garments were sand-colored, with rope belts and hoods that resembled those of desert saints in some early Renaissance painting. They began singing some minor-key phrases, their voices dirgelike and plush, a sound of grief, and before they could finish the first verse the sky erupted in a heavy rain that engulfed them. From my place in the grandstand, the downpour was like a white scrim obscuring everything before me. Beneath the awning, out of the weather, an inmate was doing sign language to a group of fellow inmates who were deaf. The narrator was delivering a prologue, telling us that his name was Luke, that he was there to tell us the story of our dear Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, while across the aisle from me a woman who must have been an inmate’s mother held up a digital camera, as if by continuing to film the play she could prevent it from being canceled. The singers’ voices were beautiful and they were beautiful in their beige and white biblical costumes, but the rain was so strong that you could hardly pay attention to anything else. The Virgin Mary hunkered in her salmon tunic as the archangel Gabriel announced to her that she would soon have a miraculous child. Despite the rain, the actors were staying in character—it was what they were there to demonstrate, their ability to maintain self-discipline—but it seemed almost certain that they would have to call the play off in another minute or two.

As if in response, the Shepherds broke into full-fledged song, a gospel standard in a minor key called “Mary, Did You Know?” They had worked out the harmonies themselves, wide, surprising chords that flirted with the edges of atonality, Kendrick’s deep bass undergirding it all. Mary, did you know, the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dead will live again. Their singing was almost casual in its flawlessness, even as the rain lashed down on them. The juxtaposition of those two facts seemed to suggest that this situation was not so different from any other day in their unluxurious lives.

I saw the play many times, but in that first performance, begun in the heavy rain, something happened that reason tells me was mere coincidence but that the spirit of the day made seem uncanny. It was still raining. John the Baptist had just been charged with blasphemy, a mob had formed, and at the moment they were about to attack him John looked up and saw Jesus approaching in the distance. It was His first entrance. Suddenly the rain stopped—it didn’t wane, it ceased completely. It was implausible how tranquil the weather became at the moment He appeared. The sudden lull resulted in a chorus of birdsong—so many birds started singing at once that you could barely hear Jesus’ first words over the PA system. John baptized Him in an artificial oasis, then the actor playing Jesus did something I hadn’t seen in rehearsals, so it surprised me. He pulled from beneath his green robe a live dove he’d been hiding in his hand. When he released it, it flew out above the grandstand—all those singing birds and then a live dove escaping from His robe.

I hope so, I’d told Kendrick about his dream of asylum in Saint Lucia.

I hope so.

It’s easy to lose track of yourself. I don’t mean in an existential way, I mean in a way that impinges on other people’s lives.