Free Save Johanna! by Francine Pascal

people briskly making their way home from the day’s work, it came to me. I’m an old New Yorker, and you can’t fool me easily. I said to myself, OK, where are they? What have they done with the poor people?
    That night I found the answer. They ship them across the bay to Oakland. After that, San Francisco ceased to be amazing. Anybody can do it that way.
    Since I’m not that anxious to be here in the first place, and the interviews are certain to be difficult and I still haven’t figured out whether I should see Sephra or not and that’s bothering me, I decide to be very kind to myself and go directly to the Cleft Hotel. It’s a lovely hotel, small but elegant and a little too expensive for me, but I figure I’ll only be here for three days so I can splurge a bit.
    My room is probably half the size of something comparably priced at the Holiday Inn, but it’s furnished with the charm and style of a good country inn-cum-Plaza Hotel, and there are people who turn down your bed at night and a towel warmer in the bathroom and windows that open to catch the gentle breeze that always seems to blow in this city whose weather is the perfect combination of the freshness of spring and the energy of fall. Whatever it costs, I’ve already unpacked, so I’m certainly not checking out.
    My plans are to hire a car first thing tomorrow morning and drive up to Northern State Prison about forty miles north of here in time to catch the morning visiting hours. My first interview is with Swat. I can’t see Imogene until the following day. I’ll spend most of tonight going over questions for Swat’s interview. I have to find the right approach because even though we’ve never met, she’s very hostile to me. I’m not going to bring up the letter she wrote to me, and I’m going to try to keep the conversation out of the present. My object is to find out why she allowed herself to be taken over so completely by Avrum. I heard her at the trial, and she sounded smart and strong-minded, an extremely independent woman and probably very much of a loner. She was all these things except when it came to Avrum. That’s what I want to know—why and how did that happen?
    Though I feel tired, when I finally get into bed it’s hard for me to fall asleep. I’m nervous about tomorrow, I can’t deny that. I’m going to be dealing with someone who’s been openly antagonistic toward me, and that’s unnerving. Add to that the fact that my sister is right here, maybe twenty miles away, an uncomfortable element that I can’t bring myself to deal with. Finally, David doesn’t want me here at all, and that bothers me. Still, strangely enough it isn’t any one of those real difficulties that is keeping me awake. My overriding emotion isn’t fear or loneliness or dread of tomorrow. It’s quite the opposite. It’s a high pitch of excitement that keeps my mind racing too fast for sleep, the anticipation I feel at plunging into that netherworld again, that place so foreign, so unbelievably different from anything I’ve ever known. And so fascinating.
    The profile I did on Maheely gave me my first hint that such a world even existed. In the beginning I dismissed it as some aberration scraped off the underbelly of humanity, but as I moved in closer I began to see that it had a pattern and a structure to it. All the codes I’d ever considered moral were bent and twisted out of shape until they became virtues for evil. And Maheely used the very nature of those changes to unify his followers and give them the power of defiance. As I studied them at the trial, I intuited that if I hoped to reach any true understanding of them I would have to withhold my own ethical judgments, set my moralities aside for the moment and allow theirs to unfold like life on another planet. And with my own moralities temporarily suspended I experienced an unexpected freedom. It was a new sensation, a new experience, and somehow, as I progress through the book, I know