Punishment by Linden MacIntyre Page A

appropriated by the purpose they’ve obtained. Penitence and punishment. The false promise of redemption.
    So what caused this sudden sense of abandonment? Perhaps the way it all ended—a marriage, a career. So much untruth, so much misunderstanding, so much unfinished business. Strickland’s futile gesture said it all: How deals get made; the convenience of the system; the perversion of justice.
    I unlocked my door. It sticks, still unaccustomed to frequent opening and closing.
I’ll have to get somebody to look at it
, I thought, but then realized there isn’t anybody. Everybody useful to the place has gone out west. Heartland of prosperity and anger. Years and years resentful of the east’s prosperity; now prosperous, but angry still; resentful of resentment. I felt a smile on my face but nowhere else.
    Tea maybe. Too early for a meal. I thought court would eat the day. There was a musty smell, ooze from the muddy cellar. Something else to fix.
    When did I start longing to be liberated from the prison world? I remember it was fairly early on, before Anna. Ten years at least before Anna, I’d become disillusioned with all the platitudes about the potential for “correction” of deviant behaviour. Then Anna opened up another life, a healthy life I thought, insulated from the violence and hypocrisy and hopelessness I saw around me every day. I could go to work each morning with a smile, look forward to her comfort and perspective. I could, for long periods of time, forget the reality of where I worked, with whom I worked, forget that work had once been a vocation.
    Somewhere in the remnants of my early, optimistic life I still have the book the sociology professor was reading aloud the first time I noticed Anna in the classroom:
The more effective any individual or group of individuals is in getting the categories of deviance and crime imputed to others, the more effective he is in getting the categories of morality and law-abiding citizen imputed to himself
.
    The professor let the words sink in, pacing back and forth, index finger buried at the page. I realized that I was staring at Anna. She caught my gaze, held it for a moment, smiled and winked. “There you have it folks,” the professor said dramatically, “the Manichean motivation for our justice system. Classification, depersonalization. Good and evil, black and white, them and us.”
    Then, staring out the window at the sunny day, sunlight on his face, he said, “At least the Manicheans were honest—theybelieved in killing anybody who didn’t fit the proper category. We isolate and dehumanize them, and then we turn them loose expecting them to act like normal humans.”
    He turned full face to the room: “And it doesn’t. Fucking. Work.”
    Light tittering agreement.
    “What did you think?” I asked Anna afterwards.
    “I think he’s on the right track,” she said.
    After that we always sat together.
    I stared into the glare of the refrigerator. Too much empty space. Too much shelving, bare and shiny, too much light in there. Remembering the fridge at home in Kingston. Things piled on top of things. The cottage-cheese tubs stacked. I must remember to get cottage cheese for moments like this. Kingston freezer jammed with steaks and chops. The frozen vodka. Deli drawer neatly packed with cheese and spicy meats. Nothing in my deli drawer but a hard plastic piece of cheddar, stored too carelessly. At the back of a shelf, six cans of Keith’s. Snapped one. Stood, staring at the emptiness.
    The wind was rising outside, snow or hail or sleet or all three ticking on the windows, damper scraping in the oil stove, wind bumping in the stovepipe. I closed the fridge, not really hungry anyway. In the living room I went through the CD pile she left for me. Rachmaninoff. She couldn’t stand him. She’d complain about his heavy hands.
“Moody Russians, dark and tragic.”
Flicked through the titles. Some Bach, perhaps. Nothing heavy or morose.
“Anna Moroz