The Speechwriter, Martin McKenzie-Murray [distant reading TXT] 📗

you can’t survive in here, he says, it’s because you’re a pissant. There are the frail and the strong — the hapless and the guileful — arranged in a fixed and savage constellation. When abstractly contemplating humanity on the outside, Garry has an abundance of sympathy. But there’s little for those wearing prison greens. Garry can afford to be unsympathetic: he resembles a steroidal boar and, having survived three shankings, has come to believe in his own exceptionalism.

After a recent session on pruno,* I mistakenly thought we’d established a rapport that could accommodate some honest inquiry. So I asked Garry about this contradiction — about the besieged individual outside these walls, and the man of agency within them.

[* Throw peeled oranges, bread, and lots of sugar into a bin bag. Add hot water, close the bag, then allow Our Lord Almighty to ferment. Remember to ‘burp’ the bag after a couple days, otherwise it’ll explode.]

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Well, you contradict yourself, mate.’

‘How?’

‘I think I’ve been clear.’

‘Spell it out, cunt.’

Suddenly, Garry’s face looked like a scrub fire.

‘I think I’ve misread the situation,’ I said.

‘Spell it out, Toby.’

‘I’m not sure I want to.’

‘Well, I’m fucken asking.’

‘I’ve misread the mood, mate. That’s all. It’s the bloody bin juice — it’s gone straight to my head. Thought we had some warm candour going on here.’

‘But it’s very fucken warm, mate. And it’ll be a lot fucken warmer when you finish your thought.’

‘It’s just …’

‘What?’

‘When you describe your crimes, you assign blame elsewhere — genes, parents, bad haircuts. Shit beyond your control. But in here, where you’re an alpha dog, you expect everyone to own their station. Out there it’s sickness, but in here it’s weakness. Which seems …’

‘What?’

‘You know … inconsistent.’

‘Inconsistent?’

‘Please don’t hurt me.’

Before I ran my mouth off, I’d forgotten a cardinal rule: the peace of our cell was contingent upon me recognising Garry’s superiority. This didn’t require mute deference, but I wasn’t allowed to forget that his patronage was the only reason I hadn’t been fatally stuck with a screwdriver yet.

‘Who’s that wizard-looking cunt you’re always getting me to read?’ Garry asked.

‘Walt Whitman.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. And didn’t he say: “Do I contradict myself, you drunk dog? Well, so be it, mate, I fucken contradict myself. I’m a massive cunt — I contain heaps of shit.”’

I conceded that he’d written something similar.

‘I like you, Toby. So I’m gonna give you a choice. I can beat you with a sock full of batteries, or you can help me write a letter to me estranged dad.’

This was a no-brainer, but Garry’s request added significantly to my workload. I was in demand. In addition to the play, I was helping the Governor draft policy notes, as well as ghostwriting two prisoners’ memoirs. While my safety depended upon this labour, I reflected bitterly on how much greater my workload was in prison than it had been in the public service.

‘Okay,’ I agreed.

‘And one more thing,’ Garry said, calmly finishing the dregs of his pruno. ‘I want to look over this book you’re writing. Make suggestions. Maybe save you from that fucken head of yours.’

Garry and I keep up with the news. It helps bond us. There’s a TV in our cell, and a weekly newspaper delivery. Garry once admitted to being thrilled by a Trump presidency — ‘for nihilistic reasons’ — but now accepts it has hastened mass extinction.

Garry and I watched in awe as Trump, aggrieved that Californians weren’t sufficiently offended by his personal boycott, declared war on the state. His tweet was shown onscreen: ‘If my military refuses my Order to invade the Sad State of California, I will fly the bombers myself like I did in the Great War. #MAGA.’

Unfortunately for the Home of the Brave, more of its citizens believe in elves than the merits of psychology, and they’ve refused to accept the profound unfitness of their president. Their renamed penny dropped when he ordered Trump Jnr. to hijack Air Force Two and suicidally steer the plane into Disneyland. ‘Vice President Pence was low-energy … until he was incinerated in jet fuel and patriotic glory. #RIP #MAGA.’ Congress is still split on impeachment.

We have our own nightmares inside, but appreciate that we’re reasonably sheltered from the globally tessellating ones. The Machines are one intersection, though, and an issue of great significance to us inmates. Since PlayStations became sentient, ambulatory, and wildly murderous, the government has — correctly, I think — classified them as an enemy plague undeserving of due process. The murder rate has quadrupled since the console achieved singularity, and if we were ever grateful to be imprisoned, it was when we considered our relative protection from having our skulls stove in by a sentient control pad.

So you can imagine our alarm when we watched on the evening news recently a Greens senator explain a bill to ‘explicitly outlaw the extrajudicial killing of machines that think, feel, and aspire to humanity. They should be charged and tried in a court like anybody else.’

The senator’s remarks were not favourably received in Sunshine. Made anxious by the prospect of sharing a cell with these machines, we rioted. Well, everyone else rioted. I was more insolent than riotous, and lit a newspaper before guiltily stamping it out. Not that it would have mattered. The screws, the public, and the major parties were unprecedentedly supportive of the riot, and we enjoyed three days of violent carte blanche. Unfortunately, a few spoilt it for the many by exploiting this freedom to practise rough justice or purge the place of rivals. I stayed in my cell, trying to read Pushkin. Then Garry returned, breathless.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m trying to read, Garry.’

‘We just torched Pedo Mike.’

‘I am myself the matter of my book,’ Montaigne once wrote. ‘You would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.’

You have to credit his honesty — or is Montaigne’s self-effacement too knowing, too prideful? At least he knew himself better than anything else, and, in committing this