It was all in motion well before I was aware of any goings on, but I’ll start on the night I met him. It was fall semester, freshman year, and I had woken up in the middle of the night to take a piss. I climbed down from the loft bed and saw my roommate sitting on the couch under his bunk. I presumed he was fucked up. He looked fucked up, anyways, locked into the couch and staring off at nothing in particular, and it would have made sense given how upset he was earlier that day after his girlfriend dumped him. I told him I was sorry, of course, but we all saw it coming. He was undeniably attractive, had no problems getting attention from women, but he was also a fuckup, and not really too bright. The woman he briefly dated was a beautiful, jesus-loving type from a well-to-do Texas family and she was going to do better. No disrespect, but he didn’t stand a chance.

Anyways, I staggered past his moping in a half-asleep daze and walked out into the hallway. I was caught off guard by seeing the R-A sitting against the wall opposite our dorm room, and when I opened the door he looked up at me startled, surprised maybe. He was a real square and used to give us a hard time about smoking cigarettes in the courtyard. Once, he tried to save me by explaining the power of accepting Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior into my heart. I didn’t like being around him. I asked what he was doing and when he didn’t give much of an answer went to the bathroom down the hall.

Inside, I passed the stalls on the right to make my way to the urinals. The stalls were the style with side walls that only went yay high. You could see the tops of the heads of the guys shitting next to you, which could be embarrassing if you had raucous gas or were blasting out a beer shit or something. The stall doors were all hanging wide open and looked empty, but they weren’t. One was occupied by a fellow who had passed out sitting on the shitter with his pants down. His head was leaning against the stall wall, his mouth open. I didn’t know him personally, but had seen him around. He was a short and athletic guy, maybe 5’2” or 5’3”, and had one of the longest schlongs I’ve ever seen. It looked like an elephant’s trunk taking gulps from the watering hole.

I started pissing in the urinal. I was very self-conscious of my pecker. The sound of my urine stream against the water left me wondering if I had been born with a tight urethra or something. The bathroom door opened behind me and I turned around to look. It was the R-A. He was watching me piss. I asked him if he came in to watch me piss, not in some funny ha ha kind of way, but in a tone closer to the one I used with Chris, the closeted homosexual in the room across the hall, to tell him to stop sneaking peeks of me behind the shower curtain while I tried to wank off. Christ, I thought, this guy’s trying to get his rocks off too. Come to think of it, both the R-A and Chris had taken their shot with the whole Jesus bit. Anyways, I’m not sure what he said in reply, the goofy red-haired bastard, but I gave him the stink eye and washed my hands. He stood right against the wall watching me the whole time. Then he followed me back into and down the hall as I went into my room. I knew he was out there, but I crawled into my bunk and went to sleep. Then the cops came.

Turns out my broken-hearted dumbshit roommate got plastered and decided to spark up a few bowls in the room. When the cops came in, we both had stashes hidden, but his was hidden in his pocket and they found that pretty quick. They never found mine, but they also didn’t believe I didn’t--no, couldn’t--know what he was up to on account of me being born without a sense of smell. I had no idea he hot-boxed the room! Why are my eyes so red? Because I just woke up! Well, it was Texas in the early 2000s and they took us in.

At the clink, they split me and my buddy up and I spent the first part of the night alone until I was joined by a big, fat black guy. Poor bastard was having a rough go of it with some serious gastrointestinal issues and spent the bulk of the evening filling the lidless, seatless shitter in the middle of the room with his liquified insides. There was no half-partitioned wall to hide behind. It was all right there for the both of us to experience (though me to a lesser degree, I suppose), but he was able to conceal at least some of his shame by draping the state-issued blanket over his lap while he punished the metal bowl somethin’ fierce.

Once his colon settled down, we chatted for a bit. Formalities didn’t seem necessary. There’s something special about the bond you make with someone you share a cell with--especially when you’re not worried he’s going to beat or rape you and you’re really just two swell guys that like to have a little fun and the war on drugs and all that. Well, his name was Paul. Paul and I were to became very good friends. That night, Paul told me something I thought I’d never forget.

He said that if I traveled to the desert with purple clouds swirling like fingers in the sky, where the wind blew billows of red and orange sands, and I walked through the dark storm casting night on the land, I would come to a place--a room--and in that room I would find a projector. Not like a projector with a high-powered lightbulb that forces a concentrated beam through a lens behind the click, whirr, and flapping roll of magnetized tape, though I could conceptualize it in that way if it helped, but rather a projector that transported you so thoroughly to a place that you could forget where you came from, who you were. And if that were to happen, well.

He called it the projector of infinite possibilities. But you must be careful, Paul said, for some possibilities may prove too much for one to handle. While they may be your future, without having taken the multitudinal steps toward them (Paul had a great vocabulary), being thrust into that place may leave you in such a state of shock or confusion or emotional overwhelm that you would go mad. Some possibilities, he said, were so fucking far out, so far removed from life as you or I know it, that it would kind of fry your circuits on the spot. No turning back. And while you could turn off the projector, so to speak, you would never, ever be the same.

I let his words sink in in that quiet way where you let something soak in without words, without constructs or preconceived notions. The silence you hope lets something be as it is, as a newborn would experience it, though you know it is no longer possible to know this world. And in that quiet moment, like I had been bonked on the head, something strange happened. I looked around the cell: the toilet Paul had decimated, his pants and boxers jumbled in a corner by the door, the steel door itself with a small window at the top and slot for our three meals a day, the concrete floors and rusted cot frames. The room felt green, dark. Paul sat on his bed, the rough grey blanket drapped over his naked lap. I looked around and around and around and felt afraid. Lost. I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there.

I looked at Paul. He looked at me with some kind of shit-eating grin, like he knew something, like he’d seen it all before.

What the fuck are you looking at?

Paul said nothing. He pulled his legs onto the cot and layed on his back, his mountain of a gut spreading out over and around him. He stared at the underside of the upper bunk and began singing, in a sweet, pure tenor.

Ol’ man river, Dat ol’ man river, He mus’ know sumpin’, But don’t say nuthin’, He jes’ keeps rollin’, He keeps on rollin’ along.

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