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No Freedom
by Dai-en Bennage

Al was coming to zazen regularly at one of the major federal prisons in the Northwest. He then started coming early to help us set up. I saw a constancy in him that made me feel hopeful for him. One evening, before the others came to joins us, he told me, “I almost died when I was a kid.” He was one of many siblings in a city with a renowned medical center. “I was playing on a balcony with my brothers when one of the spindles under the railing broke and I fell through the opened space onto the asphalt below. When I sat up, the spindle came up with me; its spike had stuck in the back of my head when I landed. Someone pulled it out and I lost consciousness and was in a coma for months, I guess. Then, with therapy, I was all right again, but heck, I later ended up here” I saw a possibility for Al to blossom and watched him further in his practice. Then, one day, I said “Al, you know how lucky you are. People in that great hospital with the lowest paying jobs worked 24 hours a day to keep you alive, turning you over to avoid bed sores, washing you, seeing to your feeding tubes, changing your pants. And because they wanted you to live, you made it. But now you’re here. But also some day you are going to get out of here. What are you going to do with this new lease on life?”

Remorse filled Al’s face. “I wanna write a letter to that hospital-maybe somebody who helped me still works there. I want help to write that letter to say thank you to them.”

We planned for his lay precepts ceremony. On the day of the ceremony, Al was radiant; I had never seen him so self-possessed. Guests had come, some of his inmate friends, and one of my students who came from his city and who by interesting coincidence, was the wife of the Dean of Medicine at the medical school where he’d been taken and who had just told him that his letter had reached its destination. The Ceremony had come to its climax when the prison bells and sirens announced lock down time. We all scrambled to put away the altar and Al had to leave. He smiled proudly and waved grandly as he stepped into the hall – with his newly received uojsa around his neck. Guards were on him instantly. “That’s contraband!”

The prison called me the next day asking me to resign. “Our job is to warehouse these individuals and keep the men low. That way, we are safe and they are safe.” I knew what he meant, having seen the cheap mini-guanset hut shapes of cement meant to be grave markers in the prison cemetery where I’d held a funeral for one of our mediators.

Another scene came to mind in the basement of the prison one day when I was being led to a facility to have my annual urine test for drugs. Sirens went off, elevator doors closed behind me, a rattling gurney grew louder coming up behind us. I was pushed into a small side room; “Please wait there a minute” came a fakely light-hearted sing-song voice.” Then, in the same way, “you can come OUT now.” At the end of the hall, double doors were open. Beside an empty gurney stood someone in a white coat redder than a butcher’s apron.

Al was later transferred from solitary to an out of state federal prison. His crime had been to become a free man. Everyone in the prison knew it and it was unbearable. I don’t know where Al is now, or if he’s out yet. But I’m hoping that previous seed has remained alive in him and that the day will come when he can be free both inside and outside.