“Do you see?” he asked. “Do you understand where you are now?”
I was so startled at having understood him, I could muster no reply.
He raised a hand, trailed his fingers across the bars of the gate, the sort of gesture a salesman might make to display the hang of a fabric. Assuming that he wanted me to inspect the bars, I stepped around him and bent to look at one. A bit less than halfway along its length the color and finish of the metal changed from rough and dark to a rich yellow. The join where the two colors met was seamless, and the yellow metal had an unmistakable soft luster and smoothness: gold. It was as if a luxuriant infection were spreading along the bar, along—I realized—all the bars of Czerny’s cell.
I am not sure why this unsettled me more profoundly than the rest of the bizarre occurrences I’d met with at Diamond Bar. Perhaps it resonated with some gloomy fairy tale that had frightened me as a child or inflamed some even deeper wound to my imagination, for I had a sudden appreciation of Czerny as a wizardly figure, a shabby derelict who had revealed himself of an instant to be a creature of pure principle and power. I backed out of the cell, fetched up against the railing, only peripherally mindful of Czerny’s attendants. The old man continued to smile, his gaze drifting here and there, centering briefly on my face, and in that broken muttering whose message I now comprehended as clearly as I might the orotund tones of a preacher ringing from a pulpit, he said, “You cannot retreat from the heart of the law, Penhaligon. You can let it illuminate you or you can fail it, but you cannot retreat. Bear this in mind.”
That night as I lay in my cell, immersed in the quiet of the cellblock like a live coal at the heart of a diamond, growing ever more anxious at the thought of Czerny in his cell of gold and marble, an old mad king whose madness could kill, for I believed now he was the genius of the place… that night I determined I would escape. Despite the caution implicit in Czerny’s final words, I knew I could never thrive there. I needed firm ground beneath my feet, not philosophy and magic or the illusion of magic. If I were to live bounded by walls and laws—as do we all—I wanted walls manned and topped with razor wire, written regulations, enemies I could see. Yet the apparent openness of the prison, its lack of visible security, did not fool me. Power did not exist without enforcement. I would have to ferret out the traps, learn their weaknesses, and in order to do that I needed to become part of the prison and pretend to embrace its ways.
My first step in this direction was to find an occupation, a meaningful activity that would convince whoever was watching that I had turned my mind onto acceptable avenues; since my only skill was at art, I began drawing once again. But making sketches, I realized, would not generate a bona fide of my submersion in the life of Diamond Bar; thus I undertook the creation of a mural, using for a canvas the walls and ceiling of an empty storeroom in one of the sub-basements. I chose as a theme the journey that had led me to the prison, incorporating images of the river crossing, of Frank Ristelli, the gray van, and so forth. The overall effect was more crazy quilt than a series of unified images, although I was pleased with certain elements of the design; but for all the attention it received, it might have rivaled Piero della Francesca. Men stopped by at every hour to watch me paint, and the members of the board, along with their entourages, were frequent visitors. Czerny took particular interest in my depiction of Ristelli; he would stand in front of the image for periods up to half an hour, addressing it with his customary vacant nods. When I asked one of his attendants the reason for his interest, I was told that Ristelli was revered for a great personal sacrifice made on behalf of us all and reflecting on the origins of our common home—he had been on the verge of being made a member of the board, but had forsworn the security and comfort of the prison and returned to the world in order to seek out men suitable for Diamond Bar.
Placing Ristelli’s zoned piety in context with the psychological climate of the prison, it was not difficult to understand why they perceived him to be their John the Baptist; but in the greater context of the rational, the idea was ludicrous. More than ludicrous. Insane. Recalling how laughable Ristelli’s preachments had seemed back in Vacaville reinforced my belief that the population of Diamond Bar was being transformed by person or persons unknown into a brain-dead congregation of delusionaries, and fearful of joining them, I intensified my focus on escape, exploring the sub-basements, the walls, the turrets, searching for potential threats. On one of these explorative journeys, as I passed through Czerny’s block, I noticed that the massive oak door leading to the new wing, heretofore always locked, was standing partway open and, curious, I stepped inside. The space in which I found myself was apparently an anteroom, one more appropriate to a modern cathedral than a jaiclass="underline" domed and columned, with scaffolding erected that permitted access to every inch of the roof and walls. The door on the far side of the room was locked, and there was little else to see, the walls and ceiling being white and unadorned. I was on the verge of leaving when I saw a sheet of paper taped to one of the columns. Written in pencil upon it was the following:
“This place is yours to paint, Penhaligon, if you wish.”
A key lay on the scaffolding beside the note—it fit the oak door. I locked the door, pocketed the key and went about my business, understanding this show of trust to signify the board’s recognition that I had accepted my lot and that by taking up their charge I might earn a further degree of trust and so learn something to my benefit. To succeed in this I would have to do something that would enlist their delusion, and I immediately set about working on a design that would illustrate the essence of the delusion, The Heart of the Law. Though I began with cynical intent, as the weeks went by and my cell walls were covered with sketches, I grew obsessed with the project. I wanted the mural to be beautiful and strong to satisfy the artistic portion of my nature, my ego, and not simply to satisfy the board—in truth, I presumed they would approve of anything I did that hewed to their evangel. The dome and walls of the anteroom, the graceful volume of space they described, inspired me to think analytically about painting, something I had not done before, and I challenged myself to transcend the limits of my vision, to conceive a design that was somehow larger than my soul. I came to dwell more and more on the motive theory of Diamond Bar, that the criminal was the fundamental citizen, the archetype in whose service the whole of society had been created, and in the process I came obliquely to embrace the idea, proving, I suppose, the thesis that high art is the creation of truth from the raw materials of a lie, and the artist who wishes to be adjudged “great” must ultimately, through the use of passion and its obsessive tools, believe the lie he is intent upon illuminating. To augment my analytic capacities, I read books that might shed light on the subject—works of philosophy for the most part—and was astonished to discover in the writings of Michel Foucault a theory mirroring the less articulate theory espoused by the prison population. I wondered if it might be true, if delusion were being employed in the interests of truth, and, this being the case, whether the secret masters of Diamond Bar were contemplating a general good and the experiment of which we were a part was one that sought to evolve a generation in harmony with the grand design underlying all human culture. The books were difficult for me, but I schooled myself to understand them and became adept at knotting logic into shapes that revealed new facets of possibility—new to me, at any rate. This caused me to lose myself in abstraction and consequently diminished the urgency of my intention to escape. Like everyone who lived at Diamond Bar, I seemed to have a talent in that regard.