How I became a Criminal
by Trost
Whenever I feel sorry for myself, which is all day long, every day, I remind myself that it could have been worse, he could have died, imagine that, the pathetic excuse for a human being could have cost me years of my life.
My cell is quiet and clean, I prefer it that way, when I was outside I kept my house like that as well, clean and well ordered, I worked hard and provided my family with a stable home and a comfortable life. I am not a rich man and the idea of being rich has never really appealed to me, all I have ever wanted is to earn a decent living and to know that what is mine is mine because I deserved it. I have never stolen from anybody, even during the tough times, and I have been through some pretty tough times, worse than here and now. There are places out in the wide world far worse than prison.
The voices of my fellow inmates reach me through the barred window which separates my small room from the immensity of the blue sky beyond, they talk to each other and sometimes yell at each other and I often have the impression that they don’t mind being here, that they have spent so much time between the razor-wire fences that this has become more real to them than the outside world. This is their society, here they have a place, a meaning, an identity, they are, as the prison director constantly says we should all become when we leave at the end of our sentence, integrated. They were not and never will be integrated outside but here they are fully integrated. I, on the other hand, do not fit in at all, I spend all day alone, reading and writing and sometimes I spend an hour or more just staring at the walls and thinking about my family and hoping that they are safe out there without me. It won’t be soon enough that I am back with them. It would be sooner if I had expressed regret for what I had done but I declared before the magistrate and all present at my hearing that my only regret was that a man couldn’t protect himself and his family from criminals without becoming one himself, that instead of dispensing justice the system inversed it and aided wrong-doers to wreak havoc without fear.
I have only been here for six weeks but it seems like I have already served my five month sentence, the cogs of time click over more slowly when you have nothing to do. Why don’t they make us work? I will never understand why a free man has to work for a living but a prisoner can spend all day pumping weights and wasting his days away strutting around the yard trying to look tougher than the others or planning his next crime with his gang members who, thanks to judicial oversight, are allowed to mingle with each other because they have all been placed in the same section. Surely we can do some kind of work, can’t they teach us what it means to contribute to society rather than making us feel useless, wouldn’t that help us to integrate once we were released. I wish I could communicate my view to the prison director but he isn’t likely to give a damn about the ideas of a no-good scumbag criminal.
I spend as much time as I can writing, at least not being forced to work allows me to write for hours on end, a pursuit which I have never had enough time to enjoy on the outside. My desk faces a white wall where I have hung a photo of my family. The barred window is to the left and looks out over the yard below, from where the voices of the other prisoners come, but I prefer to look up to the sky. Behind me is the door with a flexiglass window which the guards use to check up on the inmates. Larry usually patrols this wing, he is quite a nice fellow and doesn’t give us a hard time if we don’t look for it. I told him my story and he said that it’s an outrage than an honest man like me should be put away for doing what anyone would do, or at least try to do, in the same situation.
‘If it was up do me I’d walk you out right now,’ he told me after hearing what happened. Then he smiled.
‘But you can’t,’ I’d finished for him.
There is a small bed and a toilet in my cell, that’s all. I have a radio on my desk but no television, only the long-term prisoners have one. If you want a television you have to rape, torture or murder somebody.
Now and then I look back through my notebooks, over what I have written, especially my memories of the night of the ‘crime’. I wonder what else I could have done. I reason with myself, and I am sure that I am a reasonable man, and every time I come to the same conclusion, just as I had every minute of every day and night leading up to my trial, that there was nothing else that I could have done. If ever I find myself in the same situation, however, I think I would have to kill the real criminal and to destroy his body, that way he wouldn’t be able to press charges against me. I don’t want to kill but the law forces me to do so, I think there is a problem in that, it doesn’t seem like a healthy state of affairs.
I flick back through my notebook to where the story of the night of the ‘crime’ starts.
It was a very cloudy night and the moonlight failed to penetrate the overcast sky. I was in bed asleep, as I always was at one o’clock on a Tuesday night. My wife was beside me in the bed, and the kids were in their room.
I remember waking up, something had disturbed me but I didn’t know what, it had woken me with a fright. Had it been a crash of thunder? I looked out the from where I lay and although the sky was cloudy I could see that the night was calm. I listened into the silence and after a few seconds heard the faint sound of footsteps on the polished wood floor downstairs. I knew straight away what it was, the kids were up to some kind of mischief. I was about to call out to them to go back to bed when I thought better of it, my wife was soundly asleep beside me. It wouldn’t have been in my interest, let alone that of the kids, to stir that hornets’ nest.
Instead I slipped stealthily from the bed and tip-toed out of the bedroom and onto the mezzanine.
Looking over the railing I distinguished little in the darkness below. A faint green glow caused by the digital clock on the microwave was sufficient to show the outline of the couch and the coffee table. The television wasn’t on and I couldn’t see any light flooding out across the living-room from the refrigerator, so what were the kids playing at? I shuffled along to the children’s bedroom and peeked in, despite the darkness I could see their forms under the blankets. Maybe I had imagined the noise after all, or perhaps it had come from further away, out in the street. I decided to go back to bed.
I tip-toed away from the children’s room and back towards my room but on the way I glanced again over the mezzanine and down onto the living-room.
My stomach turned inside my body when I noticed a movement, it was the first time I had ever felt such a strange sensation. At first I didn’t recognize what it was but when I distinguished the form of a person, a fully grown adult, walking from the kitchen into the living-room I experienced two simultaneous reactions, I wanted to shout out in anger but my lungs froze in fear. I felt my hairs prick up, both in anger and fear and for a moment I simply watched without moving, barely breathing. The figure moved further into the living-room and out of my field of view. Still I didn’t move, I thought about my wife and kids, as long as he was downstairs and they were up here there was no immediate danger. I heard a few sounds, only barely, then the man appeared with something big in his arms, it was my wide-screen television which I had bought only a week before. The thought suddenly struck me that he must have known that I had recently bought a new and very expensive television, but how could this be so? The next thought that struck my mind was the indignation that he believed he could just walk off with my new wide-screen television. I had been putting money aside every fort-night for seven months in order to buy that damned TV and this character thought that instead of working for what he wanted like everyone else he could just smash a window or pick a lock and walk off with it.
‘Like hell you do!’ I yelled at him without thinking about what I would do next.
My body was shaking with rage and I could almost feel the adrenaline being pumped into my bloodstream like the water from a fireman’s hose into a burning house, except that instead of putting the fire out the adrenaline was making it stronger.
Before I knew what was happening I found myself downstairs, wearing only my boxer shorts and unarmed against an almost invisible opponent about whom I knew absolutely nothing at all. He dropped my television and although I couldn’t see much I heard its wide-screen shatter. I groaned in outrage and all of a sudden I saw something metallic glowing against the greenish light which came from the microwave’s digital clock. The black-clad form before me held a knife in his hand, and I was next to naked. I saw him smile, his teeth greenish like the knife. He laughed at me and I got the impression that he was drugged out of his mind, pumped up on some kind of trashy street toxic. I backed away, towards the kitchen, my brain triumphing over my rage and indignation.
‘I’ll fucking kill you,’ the creature whispered at me, I’ll never forget those words, a chill went up my spine. This wasn’t a man, it was a senseless and desperate monster.
He sprang towards me. He could have just left the house, accepted that this was one burglary gone wrong, but he decided to attack me.
It all happened so quickly. I had retreated all the way to the kitchen. I ripped the cutlery draw open and before the figure had a chance to stab his glowing green knife into me I lashed out with something, I didn’t know what it was at the time and I couldn’t see where I touched him, but it sank into him and he sucked in air like a brand new vacuum-cleaner. He turned to run back into the living-room with, I suspected, the intention of escaping via the sliding doors but after just a few strides he fell to the ground and lay moaning in pain not far from where my wide-screen television lay broken.
I felt for the kitchen light switch and flicked it on. Everything suddenly became more real, more substantial. The man lay squirming with a stream of blood trickling slowly but steadily onto the polished wood floor. He looked at me with pleading eyes but I knew that if I got too close to him he would try to kill me. I couldn’t see where the knife was, he had one hand over his wounded chest and the other was hidden behind his back, the knife was nowhere to be seen, I had to assume that it was held in the unseen hand. I looked up at the mezzanine but didn’t see my terrified wife or kids, they must have continued sleeping despite the commotion. I did the only thing that any decent person would do in such a situation, I made my way over to the telephone, without turning my back on the injured man writhing on my living-room floor and called for an ambulance.
So he survived, I’m glad of that, not because I’m incapable of wishing death upon another human being but because if he hadn’t survived I would have been condemned to much longer than five months in the big house. I don’t know what will happen to me afterwards, whether I will be able to go back to a normal life. There is a high possibility that I won’t be able to find another job, and perhaps my relationship with my family won’t be quite the same as it was before. Worst of all is the fear that this creature will come back one night, once he has regained his strength and after he has served his sentence. Perhaps it will be in a year or two, one night when I least expect it. He will be prepared and armed, an evil plan brewing in his drugged up mind and I will be sleeping, unsuspecting, because you can’t be on your guard all the time. If this happens again the result will be more dramatic than the last time, neither of us will have any pity for the other.
This is how I became a criminal.