A part of him had
always known that this was prison; but when you're born in a prison
and have spent your whole life there, you'll go to extraordinary
lengths to deny that you are, in fact, in prison.
It wasn't a bad prison,
as prisons go. There was a comfortable bed, and decent food, and only
occasional beatings from the other inmates. Most importantly, there
was a television.
His whole life had
revolved around that television. On television, there were other
places, other lives, other things a person could be. He lived for
that television. Every spare moment he had (and there are a lot of
spare moments in prison), he turned his attention to the luminous box
of wonder and the marvelous stories it told. He lost himself in those
stories. At night, he fell asleep in front of them, and dreamed
himself inside them. His dreams were the best times.
Still, it's not like he
was delusional. He knew that television was television and reality
was reality. All those incredible stories and beautiful places and
different lives – those were mere fictions. Reality was here, this
place he had been born into. These were the cards he had been dealt,
and he would just have to deal with it. That was the mature thing to
do: accept that all of life existed inside prison, and spend it
watching as much television as humanly possible.
Then, one day, a crack
appeared on the wall above the television.
It was the tiniest of
hairline cracks at first, so faint he couldn't be entirely sure it
was there. But, as the weeks and months passed, it grew and deepened.
It never widened much, but it delved deeper and deeper into the gray
stone wall, as if somebody were oh so slowly driving an invisible
nail into the wall.
One day, unmistakably,
a pinpoint of light shone through the crack.
He began spending less
and less time in the television's thrall. Now his hours were spent
worrying at the little hole in the wall with the plastic spoon that
was his only utensil. Each day, he never seemed to have made any
visible progress, but it was undeniable: the hole in the wall was
growing larger.
Finally, several years
after the crack had first appeared, he mustered all of his courage,
approached the hole, and pressed his eye to it.
What he saw astonished
him. Not the bleak, impassable void he had assumed must (if anything
must) surround his prison; but color and wonder and excitement, a
bustling metropolis full of people and noise and smells, a veritable
scene from the television lay all around.
Dazed, he reeled
backward from the wall. His dreams, he realized, the television –
it existed. Not all of it, of course. But some of it. The parts that
mattered.
With new eyes, he
looked around the cozy little prison that was all he had ever known.
He began walking, past the television set, past the comfortable bed,
to the door of his cell. He put his hand on the door. It swung open,
as a part of him had always known it would.
The bright light
dazzled him. Standing on the threshold, he shielded his eyes, and
turned back to take a last glance at everything he knew. My God,
he realized, I have been in prison my whole life.
Taking
a deep breath, he stepped outside and entered his own life.
Wonderful!
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