But not for long.
I found that I could suspend animation by the exercise of my will, aided mechanically by constricting my chest and abdomen with the blanket.
Thus I induced physiological and psychological states similar to those caused by the jacket.
So, at will, and without the old torment, I was free to roam through time.
Ed Morrell believed all my adventures, but Jake Oppenheimer remained sceptical to the last.
It was during my third year in solitary that I paid Oppenheimer a visit.
I was never able to do it but that once, and that one time was wholly unplanned and unexpected.
It was merely after unconsciousness had come to me that I found myself in his cell.
My body, I knew, lay in the jacket back in my own cell.
Although never before had I seen him, I knew that this man was Jake Oppenheimer.
It was summer weather, and he lay without clothes on top his blanket.
I was shocked by his cadaverous face and skeleton-like body.
He was not even the shell of a man.
He was merely the structure of a man, the bones of a man, still cohering, stripped practically of all flesh and covered with a parchment-like skin.
Not until back in my own cell and consciousness was I able to mull the thing over and realize that just as was Jake Oppenheimer, so was Ed Morrell, so was I.
And I could not but thrill as I glimpsed the vastitude of spirit that inhabited these frail, perishing carcasses of us—the three incorrigibles of solitary.
Flesh is a cheap, vain thing.
Grass is flesh, and flesh becomes grass; but the spirit is the thing that abides and survives.
I have no patience with these flesh-worshippers.
A taste of solitary in San Quentin would swiftly convert them to a due appreciation and worship of the spirit.
But to return to my experience in Oppenheimer’s cell.
His body was that of a man long dead and shrivelled by desert heat.
The skin that covered it was of the colour of dry mud.
His sharp, yellow-gray eyes seemed the only part of him that was alive.
They were never at rest.
He lay on his back, and the eyes darted hither and thither, following the flight of the several flies that disported in the gloomy air above him.
I noted, too, a scar, just above his right elbow, and another scar on his right ankle.
After a time he yawned, rolled over on his side, and inspected an angry-looking sore just above his hip. This he proceeded to cleanse and dress by the crude methods men in solitary must employ.
I recognized the sore as one of the sort caused by the strait-jacket.
On my body, at this moment of writing, are hundreds of scars of the jacket.
Next, Oppenheimer rolled on his back, gingerly took one of his front upper tooth—an eye teeth—between thumb and forefinger, and consideratively moved it back and forth.
Again he yawned, stretched his arms, rolled over, and knocked the call to Ed Morrell.
I read the code as a matter of course.
“Thought you might be awake,” Oppenheimer tapped. “How goes it with the Professor?”
Then, dim and far, I could hear Morrell’s taps enunciating that they had put me in the jacket an hour before, and that, as usual, I was already deaf to all knuckle talk.
“He is a good guy,” Oppenheimer rapped on. “I always was suspicious of educated mugs, but he ain’t been hurt none by his education.
He is sure square.
Got all the spunk in the world, and you could not get him to squeal or double cross in a million years.”
To all of which, and with amplification, Ed Morrell agreed.
And I must, right here, ere I go a word further, say that I have lived many years and many lives, and that in those many lives I have known proud moments; but that the proudest moment I have ever known was the moment when my two comrades in solitary passed this appraisal of me.
Ed Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer were great spirits, and in all time no greater honour was ever accorded me than this admission of me to their comradeship.
Kings have knighted me, emperors have ennobled me, and, as king myself, I have known stately moments.
Yet of it all nothing do I adjudge so splendid as this accolade delivered by two lifers in solitary deemed by the world as the very bottom-most of the human cesspool.
Afterwards, recuperating from this particular bout with the jacket, I brought up my visit to Jake’s cell as a proof that my spirit did leave my body.
But Jake was unshakable.
“It is guessing that is more than guessing,” was his reply, when I had described to him his successive particular actions at the time my spirit had been in his cell. “It is figuring.
You have been close to three years in solitary yourself, Professor, and you can come pretty near to figuring what any guy will do to be killing time.
There ain’t a thing you told me that you and Ed ain’t done thousands of times, from lying with your clothes off in hot weather to watching flies, tending sores, and rapping.”
Morrell sided with me, but it was no use.
“Now don’t take it hard, Professor,” Jake tapped. “I ain’t saying you lied.