She led me out the door Larry had just exited from, turning right and walking along that vicious, towering fence. The fence had multiple layers; between each layer was a gate through which we had to be buzzed. She opened the gate, and I stepped in. I looked back over my shoulder at the free world. The next gate buzzed. I stepped through again, wire mesh and barbed metal soaring all around me. I felt fresh, rising panic. This was not what I had expected. This was not how minimum-security camps had been described; this didn’t look at all like “Club Fed.” This was scaring the crap out of me.

We reached the door of the building and again were buzzed in. We walked through a small hallway into an institutional tiled room with harsh fluorescent light. It felt old, dingy, clinical, and completely empty. She pointed into a holding cell with benches bolted to the walls and metal screens over all visible sharp edges. “Wait in there.” Then she walked through a door into another room.

I sat on a bench facing away from the door. I stared at the small high window through which I could see nothing but clouds. I wondered when I would see anything beautiful again. I meditated on the consequences of my long-ago actions and seriously questioned why I was not on the lam in Mexico. I kicked my feet. I thought about my fifteen-month sentence, which did nothing to quell my panic. I tried not to think about Larry. Then I gave up and tried to imagine what he was doing, with no success.

I had only the most tenuous idea of what might happen next, but I knew that I would have to be brave. Not foolhardy, not in love with risk and danger, not making ridiculous exhibitions of myself to prove that I wasn’t terrified-really, genuinely brave. Brave enough to be quiet when quiet was called for, brave enough to observe before flinging myself into something, brave enough to not abandon my true self when someone else wanted to seduce or force me in a direction I didn’t want to go, brave enough to stand my ground quietly. I waited an unquantifiable amount of time while trying to be brave.

“ Kerman!” As I was unaccustomed to being called like a dog, it took her a number of shouts before I realized that meant “Move.” I jumped up and peered cautiously out of the holding cell. “Come on.” The prison guard’s rasp made it hard for me to understand what she was saying.

She led me into the next room, where her coworkers were lounging. Both were bald, male, and white. One of them was startlingly big, approaching seven feet tall; the other was very short. They both stared at me as if I had three heads. “Self-surrender,” my female escort said to them by way of explanation as she started my paperwork. She spoke to me like I was an idiot yet explained nothing during the process. Every time I was slow to answer or asked her to repeat a question, Shorty would snort derisively, or worse, mimic my responses. I looked at him in disbelief. It was unnerving, as it was clearly intended to be, and it pissed me off, which was a welcome switch from the fear I was battling.

The female guard continued to bark questions and fill out forms. As I stood at attention and answered, I could not stop my eyes from turning toward the window, to the natural light outdoors.

“Come on.”

I followed the guard toward the hallway outside the holding cell. She pawed through a shelf filled with clothing, then handed me a pair of granny panties; a cheap nylon bullet bra; a pair of elastic-waist khaki pants; a khaki top, like hospital scrubs; and tube socks. “What size shoe are you?” “Nine and a half.” She handed me a little pair of blue canvas slippers like you would buy on the street in any Chinatown.

She indicated a toilet and sink area behind a plastic shower curtain. “Strip.” I kicked off my sneakers, took off my socks, my jeans, my T-shirt, my bra, and my underpants, all of which she took from me. It was cold. “Hold your arms up.” I did, displaying my armpits. “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue. Turn around, squat, spread your cheeks and cough.” I would never get used to the cough part of this drill, which was supposed to reveal contraband hidden in one’s privates-it was just so unnatural. I turned back around, naked. “Get dressed.”

She put my own clothes in a box-they would be mailed back to Larry, like the personal effects of a dead soldier. The bullet bra, though hideous and scratchy, did fit. So in fact did all the khaki prison clothes, much to my amazement. She really had the eye. In minutes I was transformed into an inmate.

Now she seemed to soften toward me a bit. As she was fingerprinting me (a messy and oddly intimate process), she asked, “How long you been with that guy?”

“Seven years,” I replied sullenly.

“He know what you were up to?”

Up to? What did she know! My temper flared again as I said defiantly, “It’s a ten-year-old offense. He had nothing to do with it.” She seemed surprised by this, which I took as a moral victory.

“Well, you’re not married, so you probably won’t be seeing him for quite a while, not until he gets on your visitor list.”

The horrifying reality that I had no idea when I would see Larry again shut me right down. The prison guard was indifferent to the devastating blow she had just dealt me.

She had been distracted by the fact that no one seemed to know how to use the ID machine camera. Everyone took a turn poking at it, until finally they produced a photo that made me look remarkably like serial killer Aileen Wuornos. My chin was raised defiantly, and I looked like hell. I later figured out that everyone looks either thuggish and murderous or terrified and miserable in their prison ID photo. I’m proud to say that, against all odds, I fell into the former category, though I felt like the latter.

The ID card was red, with a bar code and the legend “U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons-INMATE.” In addition to the unflattering photo, it also bore my new registration number in large numerals: 11187-424. The last three numbers indicated my sentencing district- Northern Illinois. The first five numbers were unique to me, my new identity. Just as I had been taught to memorize my aunt and uncle’s phone number when I was six years old, I now silently tried to commit my reg number to memory. 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424.

After the ID debacle, Ms. Personality said, “Mr. Butorsky’s gonna talk to you, but first go into medical.” She pointed into another small room.

Mr. Who? I went and stared out the window, obsessing about the razor wire and the world beyond it from which I had been taken, until a medic-a round Filipino man-came to see me. He performed the most basic of medical interviews, which went quickly, as I have been blessed with more or less perfect health. He told me he needed to perform a TB test, for which I extended my arm. “Nice veins!” he said with very genuine admiration. “No track marks!” Given his total lack of irony, I thanked him.

Mr. Butorsky was a compact, mustachioed fiftyish man, with watery, blinky blue eyes and, unlike the prison staff I had met so far, of discernible intelligence. He was leaning back in a chair, with paperwork spread out in front of him. It was my PSI-the presentencing investigation that the Feds do on people like me. It is supposed to document the basic facts of one’s crime, one’s prior offenses, one’s family situation and children, one’s history of substance abuse, work history, everything important.

“ Kerman? Sit down,” he gestured, looking at me in a way that I suspect was much practiced to be calculating, penetrating, and measuring. I sat. He regarded me for several seconds in silence. I kept my chin firm and didn’t look at him. “How are you doing?” he asked.

It was startling to have anyone show the slightest interest in how, exactly, I was doing. I felt a flood of gratitude in spite of myself. “I’m okay.”