The Jacket
Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin for murder, defies the will of prison officials who try to break his spirit with "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to tortuously compress the whole body. To survive, Standing discovers how to enter a trance state in which he walks among the stars and experiences past lives.
Approx. 103,299 words.
lled my fellow professor. The court records show that I did; and, for once, I agree with the court records.
No; I am not to be hanged for his murder. I received a life- sentence for my punishment. I was thirty-six years of age at the time. I am now forty-four years old. I have spent the eight intervening years in the California State Prison of San Quentin. Five of these years I spent in the dark. Solitary confinement, they call it. Men who endure it, call it living death. But through these five years of death-in-life I managed to attain freedom such as few men have ever known. Closest-confined of prisoners, not only did I range the world, but I ranged time. They who immured me for petty years gave to me, all unwittingly, the largess of centuries. Truly, thanks to Ed Morrell, I have had five years of star-roving. But Ed Morrell is another story. I shall tell you about him a little later. I have so much to tell I scarce know how to begin.
Well, a beginning. I was born on a quarter-section in
