The Long Imprisonment of David Robert Jones

Freedom needs a prison much like hope needs a despair

The Long Imprisonment of David Robert Jones

When he was born, shortly after doctors examined him and determined that he was healthy and whole, he was assigned the identification David Robert Jones and transported to a nearby infant prison where the wardens placed him in a cell, covered him with a blanket, closed the door, and monitored his behavior from another part of the facility with surveillance cameras.

For the first several months of his imprisonment, David Robert mostly stayed confined to quarters. Although his needs were always met, at times he sensed a faint embryonic stirring to escape his captivity.

Naturally he couldn’t articulate his desires except in primitive, instinctive wails, complaints which usually summoned one of the wardens who then sought to quiet him with indecipherable assurances that all the constraints were for his own good, and that one day his term would expire and he would be set free. Of course, as in all infant prisons, the wardens understood well the importance of keeping their prisoner pacified. But they themselves, having lived in various penitentiaries and reformatories of their own through the decades, knew that their promises were false.

One day near the end of his first year of incarceration, after much persistent urging of his custodians, David Robert Jones stood on wobbly legs, extended his arms, and spoke his first words.

Help me, he said.

Eventually David Robert was allowed time each day in the exercise yard to feel the sun on his forehead and gaze beyond the tall chain link where concrete corridors ran between one child detention center and another. As the first few years of his life extended their branches and David Robert grew, he was permitted to visit other children in other exercise yards, but always accompanied by a guard, and only when the stars cloaked themselves in daylight. At night he stayed closed in his cell.

When he was about six years old, David Robert Jones began near daily excursions to a nearby internment camp guarded by men and women with heavy books. They spoke the language of directives and proclamations. They moralized math, and articulated several overlapping philosophies that upheld the societal benefits of compliance. Also, as the blood wardens before them had done, they quieted any restlessness that arose with promises, by now decipherable, that the prisoners would one day complete their sentence and be at liberty to leave.

When a dozen years had passed, his fundamental habilitation complete, David Robert Jones was at last released into the larger surrounding prison made of countries and cities that contained larger, more luxurious cells.

With new choices of detention now available, David Robert entered the offices of an insurance company where he was assigned a job stamping papers with a kind of secular fisherman’s ring. For years he sat in his cubicle and stamped.

What do you think? asked a coworker one day, and David Robert paused for a moment before answering.

Help me, he said.

As may happen at times, his plea managed to tap the bars of the prisoner confined to the other skull. The coworker, who introduced herself as Maria Ella, told David Robert to meet her after work where she would share a plan for escape.

They met in a small cafe, and Maria Ella told David Robert of the breakout planned for the following week. According to arrangements, prisoners from at least fifty other workplaces across the city would step from their cages in chorus and take to the streets to demand the keys to their own lives.

Like many, David Robert was unconvinced that escape from the penal routine was possible, but he was willing to try.

Pain is the decisive element of existence, he said.

Yes, said Maria Ella. It pushes us to pleasure.

The next week, a thousand men and women joined hands to celebrate the death of their internment and the birth of their liberation. They marched and called for the board of directors to conceive each life of each prisoner sovereign. At first it seemed to be going well, but soon correction officers rushed from their barracks. The uprising was quelled.

For the next several years, David Robert Jones wandered from one penitentiary to another, looking for one with fewer walls. In one rural town, far from the larger confinement complexes, he worked in a hardware store, but after several months realized he was still interned in a tight cell. The walls that pressed him weren’t made of concrete or sheetrock, but rather a growing sense that there had to be more to existence than the pursuit of its continuation.

On a city street one day, an old man with craters on his face where eyes usually gathered tapped David Robert Jones with his cane.

They say that color is beautiful, he said.

They say the same of freedom, said David Robert.

We all suffer something, said the old man.

With this short exchange, David Robert understood that freedom needs a prison much like hope needs a despair. Uncertain of the implications, but heeding the urge to follow this realization back to its lair, he quit the city and climbed into a remote highland that looked out over the distant plains of penal colonies which lay flattened by perspective in all their incomprehensible multitude.

And there as hermit he stayed, far from the customary incarceration of civilization. He ate squirrels and pinenuts. He drank lakes.

But despite his solitude and contemplation, David Robert Jones still served his rooted habit of internment. It lingered like the smolder of bound bodies at the stake. Some perimeter of the world itself still fenced him. Emancipation had yet to remove its shackles.

Slow years passed. He searched the wilds for answers. He survived.

More slow years passed. He searched and survived more. His shadow grew smaller. His face sprouted old.

While fetching water one day, he slipped on a rock. As he lay with the pain, he realized that not only the world had constraints. His body advanced them, too. It was a fleshy prison of its own. Wherever he went, he carried his own limitations.

After a few minutes, he stood and limped forward to dip his bucket, slightly changed. He knew he had time yet to discover the freedom he had always sought, but he also understood that as his physical pace slowed and stumbled, time in opposition ran its own clockworks faster for the finish line.

One morning, the final of his imprisonment, David Robert Jones stood on the edge of his last opportunity for pronouncement, and wondered aloud, as he had read long ago, if all truths and wisdom were compressed into an indistinguishable moment of time as one stepped over the threshold of the invisible.

At his feet, an immense waterfall plunged to far churning pools. For David Robert, it seemed to fall from the height of his disquietude to a distant ethereal accomplishment of his quest. In its descent, it gave rise to a set of unsettling and yet oddly comforting thoughts.

If this precipice before him were indeed the last prison wall, freedom needed but one more leap. And yet maybe he, an old man born to the servitude of expectations and grown to the servitude of irresolvable pursuits, was at once both prison and prisoner. As jailer then, he alone could grant himself pardon.

For several minutes, David Robert Jones stood unmoving as the mounting sun warmed his hands and saturated his vision. An element of visceral knowledge stirred within him, and a long obstructed understanding ascended through the hollows of his bones. After a lifetime of forced and false roads, a simple route of escape lay within his reach after all.

— — —

December Letter, 2023

Dear Reader,

Thank you for reading Dynamic Creed. As 2023 winds down, I’d like to say thanks to all of you. I’d also like to reiterate that I hope my stories and observations have the ability to reach inside where our celebrations and doubts live, and that they provoke thought. If so, my work serves its intention.

Lately I’m looking at the world a little differently. Also wondering what’s taking so long and do we ever truly get our act together?

Great questions, right? (here’s where tone of voice comes in but I’m just a note in the email, so maybe this goes bongflub)

This is my last piece for 2023. I’m taking a little time off to enjoy family and to do some work on an online magazine for fiction and prose poetry that I recently founded. But I’ll be back in 2024! Many thanks for taking an interest in what I’m doing! I hope everybody has a good season.

Victor David