“Did you ever see the green flash,” she asked him after class, “down at Ocean Beach?”

He had not, he told her. She explained that it was an optical effect at sunset, when rays from the top of the sinking sun turned green. She had never seen it either, she said.

“Are you sure it isn’t a story cooked up by the Irish drunks who live out there?”

She laughed. They were standing outside the school trailer. It was a June evening when the sun sets late. The light was gold from valley haze and low, slanting into her eyes, filling the irises.

Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.

“Move it, Hall!” an officer yelled. It was time for evening count. “Move your ass, now! I said go!”

Whatever space Geronima would have needed to find a way to face what she had done was not provided in prison. Prison was a place where you had to be strong to get through each day. If you thought about some awful act you’d committed, every day, in graphic detail, enough to prove to a parole board that you had insight, the proverbial insight they wanted, needed, to let you go home, you might lose your mind. To stay sane, that was the thing. To stay sane you formed a version of yourself you could believe in.

And if she did show insight, tell them what was on her mind the day she killed her husband, why and how she did it and what she felt after, excitement, guilt, denial, fear, revulsion, if she showed the board how honest and precise she could be in her knowledge of her crime and why she committed it, if she spoke openly about the impact it had on her victim and on others, on society, if she trotted out the whole horror of it, she would, at the same time, freshly reactivate for the parole board all the reasons why they had wanted to lock her up. You could not convince them. There was no way to win.

Our Lady of the Valley smelled like the lining of an old woman’s purse. Our Lady’s Pocketbook, which had been collecting powdery makeup residue and mold spores for decades. Gordon had no religion, though the idea of mercy, offered by churches, a Christian god, but never the state, had been in his thoughts. He sat down at the end of a row of pews. On the other side of the aisle was a confession booth. The sinner’s side had a screen for talking to the priest. The screen was a metal plate randomly hole-punched. It looked like a road sign riddled with bullets.

Wind was moving through the church, from a single propped door in the back. Papers somewhere lifted and flapped, suggesting presence, but then again not. Suggesting wind stirring papers, and no one present, except Gordon. He stared into the vents, from his seat on the pew.

There were real, epistemological limits to knowledge. Also, to judgment.

I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.

There’s a pizza place up Irving, Hauser said. They spin the dough in the windows.

I saw everything. The stretching floury disks that collapsed on the hands of the dough makers in their chef’s hats, fists working the disks around, dough growing in girth, orbit, then back up in the air. I saw the huge wreath of flowers that hung from the closed entrance one morning, announcing the death of the old man, the pizza patriarch. I’d never seen a wreath that large. I was eight or nine. Not yet into trouble. I linked flowers with death. That huge wreath connected them for me.

I saw the shining lid of the ocean from Irving Street, the way it rose, on a clear day, like something that breathed, that was alive, down at the end of the avenues.

Hauser had a lost quality. He wasn’t someone who seemed to have much happening outside work. Not that he discussed his life with us. He did not. At Stanville, he was an oddball to the rest of the staff. The guards made fun of him, mostly as a way to make fun of us. Go teach those dumb bitches to read, Mr. Hauser. Teach those cows two plus two. They thought what he spent his life doing was pointless, not a worthy endeavor like watching us on security monitors or masturbating in a guard tower.

There was a prisoner named Lindy Belsen who had been convicted as a juvenile and had her sentence commuted by the governor. She was famous at Stanville. A team of volunteer lawyers had gathered around her. They built up her case as a story of human trafficking. She’d shot her pimp in a motel room. He’d groomed her for prostitution from the age of twelve. It was a sad story, and maybe she deserved to go free, but the way her lawyers positioned her as an undisputed innocent was difficult for the rest of us. Lindy Belsen was an ideal face for free-world activists who wanted a model prisoner to fight for. She was pretty, and spoke like an educated person. But most important, she could be depicted, convincingly, as a victim, not a perpetrator. A lot of people in the prison resented Lindy Belsen, because what did her story, the story her lawyers told, say about the rest of us? Few were happy for her when she left.