Butcher - Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder

FROM THE FIFTH-FLOOR WINDOW of the Comfort Suites in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, the State Correctional Institution at Albion is nothing more than a nondescript, yellow hazea fog that curls in the predawn darkness like liquid and settles lightly along the mountains. It is dim, so dim it could be mistaken for a factory, or the parking lot of a grocery store, or some sleepy ski resort where men spread snow across a distant mountain. But of course I know its not. Of course I know exactly what those lights mean: men in watchtowers, roving beams, barbwire so thick and sharp I imagine sea monsters with glinting teeth.

From my place high above them, behind the glass, I can feel the outside air push in, cold against the gauzy window. It is late November, the month Ive long considered to be the loneliest of the year, a time when even the landscape itself turns gray and gnarled with what is yet to come. But in the darkness, there are no trees, no yellowing fields, no twisted roots. In the darkness, there is only darkness, and it stretches out and into the mountains, interrupted only infrequently by the lights of well-lit living rooms and front porch spotlights. They blink between tree branches, and within them, I imagine women setting down casseroles on green linen tablecloths, children racing from darkened dens, family dogs curled beside brick fireplaces as logs first crackle and then begin to burn. I imagine them as if I know them because their peace was once my own, their quiet once my quiet, and because their imagined evenings are far preferable to the reality that is this dawn: how in a moment, day will break, and Ive awakened before it happens so that I might first stand and look toward this dark horizontoward Kevin out there, too, of coursebefore the sunrise rushes in.

Theres nothing to be scared of, I think, and from a distance, that much is true. From a distance, his prison is merely a light: a haze so small and unobtrusive I can hide it by simply lifting my thumb. I raise my finger to the darkened glass and move it in and out of my line of vision. I see first a prison, and then no prison, prison again and then just my thumb.

Now you see it, I think, now you dont, and while I wish I could stand at this window forever