George Higgins - A change of gravity

Nothin': that's the whole of it. Just that you're young, and you'll always be young so half of what you know is shit.

"I see it in my clients. That's how almost all of them got off to their start. Knowing two things for dead-certain sure, and at least one of those things was pure shit. Time they get to me, they've found out which one. Most of them probably were as strong and tough and smart as they knew they were; that part was true. But now they know that the rules did apply to them; the idea that they didn't was shit.

"The way that they found out was very hard. When it finally dawned on them they were locked up in the can, watching the years of their youth drain away. Like piss hissin' down onna white mint onna strainer, and all they can do now is just stand there holdin' their dick in their hand, watchin'. They've found out their lives've been like something they happened to be around for, like a big game and they got tickets, while the years were going by. Their whole youth and middle years; not lived, just gotten rid of, discarded by somebody else they don't even recognize, that guy standing next to them. By the time they get to me, all that most of them can do is just continue to stand there and watch, while the rest of their lives go away on them. Some day, they know, their life will finally disappear, like something that's never been here at all. All they have to hope for's that the instant when it runs out they'll feel a little better, because at least it'll be ending, whole process of watching it go.

"They look at me like I've got answers, some of them, when they've just gotten out and it's begun to register on them that the years they spent inside're really gone. Never get them back. They come in and see me, when they first report, sit there and look at me as though they're thinking maybe hoping might be more like it that maybe I can do something important for them. If they're nice to me, I could get their years back for them, all the years they spent inside. Maybe there's a secret way, and I know where it is.

"Those're the most painful cases. These're hard men, very hard men, dangerous and violent and cruel; they've done terrible things. I know it sounds silly to say it, but this's the way I feel. I hate having to be the one who disappoints them. It's nothing personal. They happened to draw me, so I'm the guy who has to tell them what they hope for can't be done. Simply can't be done. Randomness's all it is; I'm the guy picked to do it. That's just the way it is. But sometimes I think: "If I could do that for him, maybe he would reform now." I often think that a guy with no hope may not see much reason to start behaving himself; he may decide he's got nothing much to lose now, if he doesn't what can he possibly lose? Fear, that's all, that we'll do it to him again, as indeed we will, because that's all we've got left now, to make him obey the law. That's not a good threat; I don't know anyone who'd mind losing fear.

"This I think is what accounts for the successes that the chaplains and lay preachers in the prisons and on the outside, too sometimes make of these thugs. No one can get their lives back for them. But the preachers can tell them that if they start playing their cards right for as long as this game continues, they'll get a great deal inna next one, in the afterlife. Not all those conversions that lots of us laugh at are the fakes we think they are, scams to con the parole board. Some of them are the real thing. Some of the born-agains may've met Jesus, or Muhammed, and some of them may just be too desperate to care if He was out when they called, but many of them really do believe. There's a terrible emptiness to knowing you've pissed your whole life away; you know it when you see how hard it hits these guys, meaner'n vipers themselves.

"There're days when I wish I'd done something else with my life, but on the absolute worst day I ever had I've been better off than my clients."

He had spent almost forty years on the job, ever since he'd seized the opening almost immediately offered to him after he won top grades on the Civil Service exam. "That, you see, I'm not really stupid, when I put my mind to something. College: I couldn't convince myself that what I was doing had any connection to any life I'd ever lead. The Civil Service exam was the only way I could get to live a life I wanted. So even though I was young, I could see it was important, worth preparing for."

Merrion knew this about him: he had spent all of his workdays earnestly talking with and about guys who had a sense of crippled-up irony that he'd never gotten, and therefore he had never really understood them.

It affected the way he thought about information that he got from Sammy, how he weighed, filtered and interpreted everything Paradise told him, complete with the irony and bitterness the people who had said it to him had come by the dishonest hard way, had had a lot of time to think about, in prison. They had refined it and worked it over in their minds, so that ever afterward it distorted everything they said through a sharpened, crooked smile. The mocking smile that never altogether went away told what they really thought when they saw men and women and their children, the conduct and possessions other people valued and took care of: they saw that they could turn those values into vulnerabilities. Weaknesses they could use to enrich themselves, and demonstrate that they could destroy anything they didn't want and would, to please themselves.

It was the dialect of real evil, a silent language that they spoke and Sammy didn't. The words were the same in each one but the connotations were different. Not opposite; trickier than that — off-center, skewed and distorted. When they thought a guy who had some power over them was nice enough so that they could be friendly with him which meant take liberties with him; 'you know, like fuck with his mind a little; don't mean the guy any real harm' without really risking anything, it had to mean that he was kind of an asshole, a jerk. Weak, if he wanted to be arms-length friends with them. The kind of guy you'd always have to be putting something over on, kind of laughing at, taking advantage of, to show that you knew he was weak. He'd never been one of the boys, and he'd never be one of them either.

They would always do it to him because they would always see it as a part of the duty to be cool. Merrion would be several miles and days away in Canterbury, when they saw Sammy down in Springfield, sat down and talked to him, just as earnestly and soberly as he talked to them, but later when Sammy talked about his clients and what they'd said to him, Merrion without ever seeing them would know exactly what had been going through their heads, like lethal gas, while they fucked with Sammy's mind real good for the Hell of it, for something to do in Hell, to pass away the time: contempt. And Sammy as he talked earnestly to Merrion would still not know what had happened to him. Reciting it to Merrion after the fact, completely unperturbed Merrion listening to him, hearing what the hard men had been thinking in the discordant music underneath the words that Sammy was repeating Sammy still didn't know, any more than he had known while the words were being uttered, what evil there was in them.

For Merrion it was like being compelled to attend a delayed broadcast of a sadistic procedure, knowing in advance what had already been done to the victim to degrade him, unable to do anything about it. It was as though he could communicate in his mind with evil men he had never seen and would not recognize on sight, but would know them for what they were, by instinct, if he ever saw them, and know beyond a reasonable doubt the nature, not the details, of what they had done. He understood them. You did it even though there was nobody else around to see what you were doing; you still had to do it. It was your moral obligation. So in case it did turn out that there had been someone looking, you wouldn't look like you'd been taking him seriously. And the perfect cruelty of it was that you hoped he hadn't gotten it, and wouldn't ever get it.