I wonder what it will look like when it is closed, on it’s cliff over the sea. I can’t help but to wonder.
Will they lock the doors, cell by cell, or will the doors hang open and slowly bend to the floor, groaning in metal’s native tongue?
What will the do with the keys?
Will they clean the blocks one last time with Pinesol? The guard shacks, the interrogation rooms? All of that dust. It is not like them to leave it dirty.
I imagine it would be eerie to hear the ghosts of the 650 ruined men who had begged what was left of ourselves there for toilet paper in a wrought iron grid of dementia and forgone or pending conclusions of guilt.
What would one make of silence in such a place?
To be honest, I cannot picture it empty and I cannot imagine what it would be like to walk it again, my footsteps echoing that lonely and familiar sound, past places where men had hung by threads that were but as they scrambled for the only exit in the place.
Where I had talked with bomb builders and innocents, bigots and zealots, preachers and professors, mules, hitmen, family friends and the man they called “the General.”
What would it be like without my confusion? I will never know.
When it closes, one mile up the road towards the bars and the movie theatre, there will be a white house, TK22, and in the room to the right at the top of the stairs there will be a broken ceiling fan which has been amateurishly repaired and the ghost of who I used to be gnawing on my self under pictures of porn stars.
And I don’t know how to feel about that.
The Paper Trail 