I moved past him without breaking stride or looking at him: Polsen had constituted himself an enemy, and right now the only defense I could come up with was to pretend he didn’t exist.

The problem had really begun over my fight in the shower: he’d been watching on the monitors and felt cheated by my taking out my assailants before anything serious got under way. But his hostility was exacerbated the night after I got my camera, when I was running a load of laundry. The laundry room lay beyond the rec room, so I was watching TV with some of the women while I waited on my clothes.

Polsen was one of the CO’s on duty. He abruptly called Dolores out of the room. The sudden slackness in her face and her dragging posture as she obeyed made me get up a few minutes later and follow after her into the laundry room.

Polsen was behind the door trying to pull down her jeans. Dolores was struggling to keep them up, hissing, “No, please don’t do this, please don’t do this, I’ll tell the lieutenant,” and he was laughing and saying she was dirt, no one believed her lies, but that if she did say something, he’d see she got into segregation so fast it would make her head spin. I had been practicing with my wristwatch and used it now, wishing I could tape him as well. Polsen looked up and I turned quickly and moved my clothes out of the washer. He let go of Dolores, who ran from the room back toward the prison wing. Polsen gave me a look that liquefied my hamstrings.

When I returned to the common room, the women in front of the television shrank from me: they all knew why Polsen had called Dolores away, and they had watched from the shadows the byplay that took place when I went into the laundry. None of them wanted Polsen to think they supported me.

Back in my cell I wrote down a verbatim account of Polsen’s language and what I’d seen, with the date and the time. I interleaved the pages with a copy of Cosmo, which I’d bought at the commissary as a cover for my notes. When Freeman’s intern came out the next day to tell me my trial date was set for the last week in September, I managed to slide the magazine to her in a flurry of exchanging documents. I asked her to take the magazine away with her and keep it for me. I wasn’t sure what use I’d make of my notes, but I didn’t want to leave them in my cell—we’d already been locked down twice for searches in my short time at Coolis.