Exile (the beginning)

1

LJ hurdled over the turnstile, clearing it easily, and ran laughing after K and Dub. The subway was crowded, and the three of them made little effort to avoid knocking into people. In fact, they went out of their way to do just that. If the people they hit fell over, all the better. K grabbed someone's knapsack, Dub snagged someone's bag of groceries, and LJ snatched someone’s laptop. They ignored the shouts of protest, revelled in them actually, and squeezed through the closing doors of one of the cars just as the train started to move.

The three of them claimed half a dozen empty seats. A man in his thirties tensed a little and moved closer to his nine-year-old son. He carefully faced forward, minding his own business.

K rummaged through the knapsack he’d grabbed. Nothing but books in it, which he tossed aside in disgust.

“What you got?” he said to Dub and LJ.

Dub upended the bag of groceries. Apples, oranges, an onion, and several peppers roll onto the seat and then off, onto the floor.

“Nothin', man!”

LJ had opened the laptop, turned it on, and seemed to be pressing keys at random.

K moved to sit closer to the man. “Goin' to the game?” he asked. He used a fake-nice voice, but everything K said sounded like a challenge. Because it was.

“Yes, my son and I, we have tickets,” the man replied, pleasantly enough though he was clearly nervous.

“Oh, yeah? Can I see 'em?”

The man pulled out two tickets and naïvely handed them to K, who promptly pocketed them.

“Thanks, man!” K snickered and moved back to Dub and LJ.

The man blanched with anger. And humiliation. But he said nothing. Did nothing.

“Dad!”

“Shh.”

“But he—”

“Doesn’t matter,” he looked at his son, pleading, begging him to understand the warning in his eyes. The boy closed his mouth, then looked straight ahead, following his dad's lead. The man put his arm around his son's shoulders and squeezed.

“Bunch of files…I dunno… Nothin', man,” LJ muttered to himself.

“Delete 'em,” K said. Then laughed.

The man looked over quickly with alarm, a reflex. K stared him down. The man said nothing, and pointedly resumed minding his own business.

The train stopped. The man and his son got off, quickly. LJ pressed the ‘Delete’ button, tossed the laptop aside, then joined K and Dub, who had also gotten off.

“Later, men,” K said to Dub and LJ, then sauntered off. Dub looked around a little, lost and helpless, then tagged along behind K. LJ turned and headed up the stairs, out into the streets.

Five minutes later, LJ passed a high school. The track team was having a practice. He paused and watched through the chain link fence, a bit wistful, a bit angry.

As he continued to walk along the broken sidewalk, passing an odd mix of scrappy houses and run-down apartment buildings, Mr. Morgan and Mr. Rodriguez continued to work the street, walking behind a slow‑moving garbage truck, picking up the garbage cans and emptying them into the truck. Mr. Morgan stared intently at LJ. LJ happened to glance in Mr. Morgan's direction, but looked right through him.

2

The courtroom looked a little like one of the rooms for rent at the local legion or rotary club, but was, in fact, one of about ten such rooms in the city courthouse. All the pomp and circumstance was expensive and had been dispensed with long ago. It was unnecessary.

There were very few people in the room. Judge Wellington was seated behind a large table at the far end, across from the main entrance. Her assistant, the JA, sat beside her. They each had a laptop on front of them containing the docket and the relevant files. The proceedings were recorded by the room system. Two guards stood at the main entrance, and another pair stood at a side entrance which connected to a hallway leading to an outside door. Just outside that door, a van was parked, its door open and connected to the building with one of those portable accordion tunnels one sees at airports.

Benches filled the main space. On the Judge’s left, several men sat in them as if they were bleachers. Rather than pews. On the right, the benches contained small clusters of people, women and children mostly, family and friends of those waiting to appear before the Judge. Family and friends at a picnic or a park outing gone horribly wrong.

“Andrew William Smith?” the JA called out.

A heavy young man in a crew cut rose and approached the table. He stood before the Judge, his folded hands hanging loosely over his crotch. It was a common posture among a certain kind of man. When he found himself standing in front of a woman.

“Are you Andrew William Kessel?” Judge Wellington asked.

“Yes, m’am.”

“How do you plead,” she glanced at her screen, “to the counts of battery and aggravated assault occurring during the evening of Monday, April 20, 2027 at 17 Young Street?”

“Guilty.”

“This is your first offence, is that correct?” She glanced again at his file.

“Yes, ma’m.”

“What were you thinking?” She looked straight at him.

“Excuse me?”

“What were you thinking? Why did you assault—” she checked the record before her, “James Everett?”

“He pushed me.”

“But you beat him so badly, he is now in the hospital.”

“Yes.” He didn’t seem ashamed. It was as if that fact had nothing to do with him.

She turned back to the file, and the court waited while she read the detailed description of the battery and assault.

“You had a knife?” Why was she surprised?

He nodded, a single, quick nod, then remembered that he had to speak for the record. “Yes, ma’m.”

She turned from his file, then sighed. “Do you know what a colostomy bag is?” she asked him.

“No, m’am.”

She sighed again. “I’d like you to meet with James, and I want you to listen to what he has to say to you. You will spend three hours, handcuffed, in his presence. You can just stare at each other for the three hours, but I hope you will talk.”

He nodded again.

“Then I’d like—have you heard of the four-step program?”

“No m’am. I’ve heard of the twelve-step program,” he added.

“Yes, well,” she said, with a slight grimace, “we don’t believe in a higher power here. The first step is knowledge. I’d like—and these are court orders—you are to spend one month in an ER learning human anatomy and physiology, specifically what happens to various parts of the body when they are subjected to fists, baseball bats, knives, and bullets.

“Then you are to take a course that will develop your imagination. So even when you don’t see the blood, and torn organs, and shattered bones, you will be able to imagine it.”

Another quick nod.

“Step three is control. You are to work with a therapist to develop self-control. If you can stop yourself long enough to foresee, to imagine, what will happen as a result of what you do, perhaps you’ll choose more wisely what to do and what not to do.

“Lastly, the court orders you to take a course in conflict resolution, so the next time someone pushes you, you might say ‘Excuse me, sir, but I believe I was here first’—”

The man started to protest, but she cut him off.

“—or, better yet, just walk away.” She looked at him, challenging him to come right out and say—something. He was silent. Hopefully mute with the struggle to imagine—just walking away.

“Dismissed.” She banged her gavel—they had kept that accessory—and one of the guards led Andrew William Kessel from the court.

The JA made an entry into the record, closed the file, and opened the next.

“Leroy James Wagner?” he called out.

LJ got up, then shuffled forward to slouch before Judge Wellington.

“Are you Leroy James Wagner?” she asked.

“Yeah. Yes.”

“How do you plead,” she opened the file, “to the counts of illegal entry, property damage, theft, and assault, occurring during the afternoon of Tuesday, April 21, 2027 at the South and Main Subway Station?

“Guilty, I guess.”

She looked up at him.

“Guilty,” he amended.

“As this is your third conviction, you are hereby exiled.”

As the JA made an entry into the record, the Judge motioned to one of the guards, who led LJ out the side door.

An hour later, Judge Wellington sat at a table in the lunchroom having her lunch. Half a tuna sandwich and a nectarine. Judge Rose joined her, holding his tray in one hand, laden with French fries, a burger, and a salad, and a newsletter in the other.

“Have you seen the stats? Down 300!”

“Nation-wide?” she asked, quickly wiping her hands on a napkin, then taking the newsletter he held out to her.

He nodded, settling into the chair opposite.

“New intakes? Per week?” She found it hard to believe and was impressed. She scanned the rest of the front-page article, a report on the success of the new three-strike law. It had been put into effect a year ago, after much debate, in which much mention was made of Australia’s history and the relatively harsh Canadian winters. A surprisingly high number of people supported the new law, the model of inalienable human rights apparently having given way to one in which all rights had to be earned and could be forfeited.

Once a person was sixteen. That had been one of the many issues of debate. Many people thought the age of personal responsibility should have been set at eighteen, but, when presented with the crime statistics for men between sixteen and eighteen, they quickly changed their minds. As early as 2008, research had revealed that over 30% of all men had been arrested for something or other by the time they turned eighteen. It was like there was something fundamentally wrong with men. Perhaps the Y chromosome had mutated so much, the males were no longer homo sapiens. Add testosterone and little or no compensatory upbringing—‘Listen, next year or the year after, something’s gonna hit you like, not like a ton of bricks, no, more like a forced overdose of an incredibly strong constant-release character-changing drug, and you have to be ready to resist, it’ll take everything you have—’ Whoever said civilization was in greatest danger from its fourteen-to-twenty-four-year-old males was right.

True, many men had made huge contributions, to society, to civilization. But no doubt women could have too, given the same sorts of chances. Maybe, with so many men out of the way, that would happen…

“Still thinking of resigning?” Judge Rose asked, taking a forkful of the salad. He’d made a deal with himself that he couldn’t start on the fries and burger until he’d finished the salad.

“I am,” Judge Wellington replied.

He chewed, thinking of arguments that could change her mind.

“How’s your docket?” he asked.

“My docket’s fine,” she smiled. “I’m getting a full forty-five for lunch.”

He raised a forkful of salad in salute.

“And the wheels of justice are turning faster, I’ll grant you that. No one spends two years in prison anymore just waiting for their day in court.”

“But then—”

“And there aren’t any more frequent flyers. I’m not convinced it’s working as a deterrent, but if they’re not here, they can’t—”

“So…” he looked at her questioningly.

“It’s too simple,” she said.

“Occam’s Razor,” he returned.

“He was referring to explanations, not solutions,” she said. “Even so, this is not what he meant by ‘simple’ and you know it.”

“True enough,” he conceded, taking the first bite of his burger.

“Three thefts-under will never equal three rapes,” she stood up and began to pack away her reusable lunch things, “Of your ten-year-old daughter.”

He chewed as quickly as he could, swallowed, then belatedly called out after her. “It just needs to be tweaked a bit.”

That was certainly true, she thought. And possible. Even likely as time went by. But in the meantime…

What about wrongful conviction? It happened. Maybe not three times to the same person, but if it happened just once, out of three times, the person would have been exiled for two, not three, strikes. And though she hated to admit it, race and class had to do with that likelihood.

And where was motive? That was another one of her concerns. What about all those people who, in one way or another, had no choice but to do the things they did?

Over two thousand years, and they had yet to figure out what to do with bullies. Despite the innocuous label, they remained perhaps their greatest problem. On every street. In every neighbourhood. In every country. Men bullied others to do their dirty work, with threats they would be all too happy to follow up on. Sell these drugs, beat up this person, forge these documents, get your testimony wrong—or you’ll have an accident. Or maybe your kid will disappear one day on the way home from school. Exile was a perfect solution, she thought, but at the moment it cast too wide a net.

3

LJ was slumped in a chair across from a uniformed woman who was quickly tapping on her keyboard. They were in a plain, functional office. LJ looked at the nameplate on the desk, which was no more informative than the sign on the door.

“So you're an ‘Escort Officer’”? he asked, mockery mixed with mild curiosity.

“That's correct,” she said as she pressed ‘Enter’, then opened the next file, which was LJ’s, and quickly scanned its contents.

“What's that, the new word for ‘Parole Officer’?” he asked.

She looked at him then, first dully, then with some disbelief.

“You don't know?”

“Don't know what?” he asked, a little belligerently.

“This is your third offence, is that correct?” She looked again at her screen.

“Yeah, so?”

“Do you have somewhere to go?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you found a society that will accept you?” she rephrased her question.

LJ laughed. “What, I have to find my own prison?”

“You're not going to prison,” she said flatly. “This is your third time.”

“Yeah…” What was her problem?

“You really don't know, do you?” She stared out the window.

“Don't know what?” LJ asked again, annoyed.

“You haven't a clue as to the consequences of your actions,” she murmured, then turned back to face LJ. “Well, that's just one more reason.”

She could see his anger, his incomprehension, simmering on his face.

“Look,” she explained then, “the first time you break our laws, the laws of this society, we try to rehabilitate you. Make you understand, and, hopefully, change.”

“Yeah, that was a joke.”

“Obviously,” she said dryly. “Second time, you got punishment. You were sent to prison.” She looked again at LJ’s file. “Served two years. And yet here you are again.”

He opened his mouth, but she didn’t give him a chance.

“Third time, well, given your inability or unwillingness to follow the rules of this society, you should live in some other society, yeah? If you have found a society willing to take you, we will provide escort. If not, we will escort you into exile.

“What do you mean?”

“We're kicking you out.”

4

“No pack?” the escort guard asked LJ the next morning as he was brought toward the waiting van. “You’re allowed.”

“What?” He had no idea what she was yammering on about. Yesterday, that woman, the ‘escort officer,’ had gone on and on about how he was allowed twenty-four hours and access to CTs. Communication technologies. He didn’t care. She could talk at him all she wanted, he didn’t care.

“Never mind,” the guard said then. The answer to her question was obvious.

“Just the one?” she asked her partner as he secured their transport then closed the door.

“Yup.”

Hm. At this rate, she thought, she might soon be out of a job.

Her partner pulled the van out of the lot and into traffic. They were quiet as they moved through the city, following the route provided by the onboard computer. They didn’t know until they were on the road which route they’d be given. Or to which door they’d be directed. It reduced hijacks.

LJ watched the city pass by. Good riddance, he thought.

After about twenty minutes, they were on the expressway out of the city. Ten minutes after that, they were out of the city.

LJ leaned forward to look. He’d never been. Out of the city.

“So, have you been an escort guard long?” she asked her partner, settling in. It was going to be a long drive.

“Yeah, I guess,” he kept his eyes on the road. “I transferred from MaxSec shortly after the ThreeStrike.”

“Really? What was it like? I mean, do you think the ThreeStrike is better? I read that it’s unfair because—”

“Don’t believe everything you read. Yeah, all crimes count the same. And yeah, maybe that’s not fair. But from my point of view, ThreeStrike is better. Way better.”

“What makes you say that?”

“MaxSec is—was—inhumane. What it does to the prisoners. What it does to the guards.”

She waited for him to continue.

“Imagine what it would be like to be locked up in a small cage—essentially, they are,” he insisted, noticing her slight protest, “even though they can move around some. They get to do that only a few times a day, and every step they take is policed.”

He glanced in the rear view mirror to check on his transport.

“So imagine what it would be like to be locked up in a small cage—and know it’s for the rest of your life.”

The navigational system indicated a turn ahead. He looked in the side mirror before making a lane change. Guess they were taking the scenic route, he thought.

“Have you ever seen those movies,” he continued, “about what it would be like if it were the last day on earth? Some people just end it early, because they’ve got nothing to live for anymore, they’ve got no future. And the rest of them just go out and party hard, hard as they can, wrecking stuff…

“That’s what it’s like for people who are in MaxSec for life. Suddenly they’ve got no future.

“And yet, they are alive the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that. They’ve got years ahead of them, but they can’t have any plans, any goals. They’ve got no hopes, no dreams. There’s no point.”

She was starting to see the problem.

“So they go crazy. Literally.”

He stared ahead at the mostly empty highway.

“And the ones that were crazy to begin with get worse.”

“Didn’t the ones with mental illness get treatment?”

“No.”

She waited for him to continue.

“I’ve seen men—eat themselves.”

She looked over quickly. He was absolutely serious.

“The mentally ill ones weren’t supposed to be there in the first place, I guess, but maybe there wasn’t room for them in the hospitals. There certainly weren’t enough psychiatrists to go around. Guys had to wait months for a half-hour session.

“And in any case, as I say, a lot of them became crazy after they arrived. No one could stay sane in a place, in a situation, like that.”

He paused, remembering. Again, she waited.

“Especially if they get Solitary. If you’re in Solitary, you get one hour of fresh air every day. You get one shower every two days. The rest of the time, twenty-three hours of twenty-four, you’re in a concrete room barely bigger than the average bathroom. One guy was in Solitary for two years. When he came out, he—he wasn’t even human.

“Eventually almost all of them want to kill themselves,” he continued. “Except for the ones having too much fun trying to kill everyone else.

“And I mean that literally. They’d kill each other, or try to, over nothing. And then laugh as the other guy lay dying.

“It was a way to break the monotony. Entertainment. Sure, they could watch TV—”

“And be entertained by more killing,” she said wryly.

He looked over and nodded.

“It was probably also a way to do something, to have some control, some power, to make some difference, in their lives.

“You understand these are people who— It’s not like they could amuse themselves inside their heads or make a difference by solving the mysteries of the universe.”

They watched the bleak landscape go by.

“No wonder so many wanted to just end it all,” she said.

“But they couldn’t,” he said angrily. “That was part of the problem. We weren’t allowed to let them to. They’d beg— And that’s just—”

“But suicide is legal,” she looked over, surprised and confused.

“I know! That’s what’s so sick about it. But our job was to ‘protect’ them. So we were supposed to stop them if they tried. We were supposed to make sure they didn’t have access to anything that they could use.”

“So you’d have hundreds of—”

“Thousands—” he corrected. “They’d pace. Back and forth, back and forth, just like animals in a zoo.”

“No wonder you transferred.”

He nodded grimly.

“It got so bad—some guys don’t take the job home with them, but how can you not take that shit home with you?” He looked over at her, as if genuinely wanting to know.

He continued. “You come to always expect the worst. In people. In life.”

“That would be a rational response. You always see the worst.”

Again, he nodded.

“And you yourself—you start becoming just like them. There was a young guy once, the boiler was acting up, there was cold air blowing into his cell, and he kept asking for an extra blanket, but none of the guards would give him one. The kid was so fucking cold he couldn’t sleep. This had gone on for three days before I got on shift. And then they all started calling me a fucking Elizabeth Fry for giving the kid an extra blanket. And I thought, what the hell is wrong with people?

“I mean, sure, the kid deserved to be in prison, they all do, no question. The shit they’ve done, most of them have no respect whatsoever, but—”

“Are you familiar with Zimbardo’s prison experiment?” she asked. “The one done back in 1971?”

He nodded. It was a standard in Psych 101.

“But it’s not just the cruelty. It’s also the…vigilance. You start watching your back, all the time, because you’re always expecting—

“Because you’re locked up too. The only difference is it’s for tenhours a day, not twenty-four,” he grimaced.

He stopped to listen to the navigational system again and turned at the next sideroad.

“So, at least with the ThreeStrike,” he nodded to the back of the van, “if LJ here ever decides he’s had enough, he can do something about it. He still has his dignity, his autonomy.”

A couple hours later, they stopped to trade places. They had passed the occasional town, several very long stretches of forest, and one or two rivers. They’d even seen a few lakes in the distance. It was pretty country.

An hour after that, following the navigational system’s directions, the escort guard slowed and drove onto the shoulder of a long stretch of highway. There was nothing but scrub on either side. She turned off the ignition and put the vehicle in park.

LJ woke up. He had no idea where he had been taken, but he wasn’t too concerned. About anything. Which was, of course, his problem.

In fact, he’d simply been taken north. When the States had annexed Canada, they’d designated chunks of northern Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan as exile. ‘The First Nations’ll stop ‘em,’ everyone said. Forgetting how successful that had been back in 1492.

The guard got out and stood by the back door. As soon as her partner joined her, they opened the door and helped LJ manage his cuffs to exit the vehicle. He stretched then stared at the bleak landscape.

The guard got out and stood by the back door. As soon as her partner joined her, they opened the door and helped LJ manage his cuffs to exit the vehicle. He stretched then stared at the barren landscape. Then he noticed a car parked in the distance. For a second, he thought it might be K and Dub, but it looked like Mr. Morgan who was standing beside it. Which didn’t make any sense.

“This way,” the guard said, looking at the electronic device she held in her hand and leading her partner, who had a firm grip on LJ, to a spot about thirty feet off the road. She swung the device to the right and then to the left, confirming her position.

LJ looked around him, then noticed that something wasn’t quite right with the view. A long stretch to the left and to the right of where they were looked fuzzy.

“There’s an invisible wall surrounding exile,” the guard explained, when she noticed the puzzlement on his face. “It sort of reflects the view.”

LJ nodded, not really understanding. Or caring.

“This is the door,” she said, as she deactivated that portion of the wall. Her partner walked LJ toward it.

“Escort officer said this wasn't a prison,” LJ said then. Starting to put two and two together.

“Oh the wall isn't here to keep you in,” the guard handling him said. “It's here to keep you out. We don't want you.”

LJ looked at him, inexplicably a little hurt.

“Hey, only because you so clearly don't want us,” he said. “Right?”

LJ ignored the question.

“So what do I do in there?” he asked.

“Whatever you like,” the first guard answered, as her partner took off LJ’s cuffs and nudged him forward. “Isn't that what you wanted?”