Why the Laugh
Frederick Pollack
Insane within a minute of being locked up,
he gazed at a ceiling corner and thought how each of its three vectors reached to infinity, the only heaven, which, the more you pursue it, pares the present dungheap. He was glad he had looked there first, not sought, as he often did, some trace of decoration however accidental or cliché: a molding, a finial. Even in chambers devoted to lethal injection (everyone has seen them) the floor tiles are arranged in squares, pale green and white around a black, some eight or nine of these around the drain. Here there would be no such amenity. Words scratched in walls didn’t count. Perhaps in time, from a distance, he might listen to the minds of former inmates; but always he would sit beside a bubbling fount of serotonin, happy he hadn’t used it up. Meanwhile, memory would be made to serve. Eyes of a lion pursuing a fawn on Animal Planet, the effort focused, the gaze not. |