Plus: recent graduates go on the record about participating in Hank Battle’s secretive—and feared—group of student advisors.

He tells her what it’s like watching the children of the guards, who live on the plantation grounds, grow up, and how strange it is to see young boys who once called “Hey, nigger!” to him as he worked the fields become guards themselves—yes, that much time is passing—with rifles in their hands and toothpicks in their mouths and absolute power over where he rests his eyeballs. He tells her he is losing his grasp on time, losing his ability to count, in a way; how during his first four years of imprisonment, at Caddo Correctional, time was still solid, still the bedrock of his reality, each day marked by a beginning and an end linked by a continuous line of being, but how at Angola, a place that cannot possibly be real (can it?), he has learned that a man’s grasp on time is like his good health— something taken for granted until it dissolves. He tells her about the way a cell becomes a kiln in the summer, the air void of motion, 110 degrees at two in the morning, the way he will take a tin cup and splash the brown water from the tap onto the concrete floor, then lie in it face down, spread-eagled and naked, his nose and mouth filled with the ever present shit-stink bubbling up from the drain, his ears filled with the baboon shrieks of men whose consciousness has been reduced to the purely physical, saying to himself over and over, for hours on end, I will not die in Angola.… I will not die in Angola.… I will not die in Angola.…

Read it. And weep. Download it, print it out. Read it on a bus. Read it out loud to your girlfriend. You know what to do.