The Death of Dilly Trimp

The Death of Dilly Trimp

It was 2032. Ham Hamilton knew what it was to be sleep deprived. Not in the ordinary sense of getting six hours of sleep rather than eight. This was sleep denial for days on end. Sleep deprivation as torture. They didn’t call it torture. But it was. Typical lack of sleep caused a certain level of anxiety. An antsiness that was not comfortable. This went far beyond that—into hallucinations and—perhaps—psychosis. He didn’t think he was insane, at least not yet.

To keep him sleepless, the guards used bright lights and loud noises and sometimes resorted to making him stand in a mobile cage within his cell, where there was no room to lie down. They would check on him, and if they found him asleep while standing up and leaning against the cage, they would shake him awake.

This was citizen torture, not military torture. And it was In the US. It would have been hard to imagine this possibility a mere ten years earlier. But it was real. Ham was experiencing it with all his senses. As a former journalist, he had written about torture before, but he had never endured it. The gap between the two was immense.

His thoughts were disjointed. One minute he was thinking about the choir he had joined a few years before his imprisonment. The next minute it was hard to tell what he was thinking about. He couldn’t even string together a series of thoughts that made sense. So how was he going to fight against this heinous crime against his person, and, symbolically, humanity?

He pulled out a scrap of paper he had managed to keep. It was written before he was imprisoned. It was a plea to any rational person in an insane world. He read the paper out loud to keep his sanity. It described how he had protested in 2025, back when street protests were actually allowed in the US. At that time, he had noticed some creepy photographers lurking among the protestors. They were using video cameras and still cameras and concentrating them on protestors for suspiciously long times. Sometimes the photographers would get right up close in a protestor’s face and not say boo about the intrusion. If the subject of the photograph asked about this invasion of personal space, the photographer would not apologize or back off. Instead, he would say smugly: “Afraid of getting your picture taken?”

Plus, the photographers acted like they had a job to do. FBI? At the time, the thought flashed through Ham’s head, but he dismissed it as ridiculous. Of course, that was seven years earlier—what now seemed like many lifetimes. It was before the appointment of an FBI director who was a conspiracy theorist and who denied the results of the 2020 election. Unbelievably, this guy had been confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate. The 2025 confirmation of this conspiracy theorist was among the first signs that something was horribly wrong with America’s government.

Ham had also taken it upon himself to post replies on two social media platforms— Omega and Connect—to all the US Republican legislators whom he identified as possible moderates. Ham tried to convince them to break with Dilly Trimp, the most godawful president ever to “run” the country. Actually, it was more accurate to say “destroy.” Even if Russian leader Igor Pukin himself was trying to destroy the US, he couldn’t have done more damage in less time than Trimp.

Many thought Trimp was a Russian “asset,” someone acting in the best interests of Russia rather than the U.S. Indeed, it was hard to name one Trump move while in office that Pukin didn’t like. So was he doing Pukin’s bidding? Ham thought he was, and that was part of the reason he took to the streets in 2025.

By Ham’s last count in 2025, there had been sixty-eight “moderate” members of the House and Senate who might have been willing to buck Trump. They were primarily identified because of their support for Ukraine, against Trimp’s wishes, back in 2024. But that was before Trimp was elected in November of 2024.

Not confident that he was reaching those legislators through social media, Ham had expanded to direct communications to senators through their websites. Many of them allowed people outside their states to communicate with them. House members, on the other hand demanded a zip code from their district for a person to communicate.

Ham knew his Omega account had been “flagged” by the algorithms at the platform because of “suspicious activity,” but what exactly did that mean? Back then in 2025, an AI search indicated that it meant his account would be temporarily locked, and that happened almost every time he posted. But he passed the intelligence test that proved he was human, entered the code sent to him in an email, and was allowed to keep posting. He knew the visibility of his posts was being restricted, but it was OK as long as the Congressional recipients got them. But did they? He wasn’t sure if they were seeing them or if their aides were seeing them or if no one was seeing them. To increase his odds of having some impact, he expanded to the Connect social media platform and to senators’ web pages.

On Omega, he saw that a pro-Trimp organization was using artificial intelligence to send out replies to Congressional posts, and he sent a post to “brilliant” Omega owner Artemus S. Sedgewick about it. How was an AI allowed to post on Omega when Sedgewick was calling it a site “by the people for the people”? If Ham was being tested to prove he was human, how was it that this AI was everywhere on these Congressional sites? Preferential treatment? Yes, said Ham’s own AI. It could be preferential treatment.

Ham had been heartened at one point—back in an early stage of innocence in 2025—because of the massive turnout of five million people in more than twenty-five hundred cities and towns across the US on June 21. It had been called No Czars Day, and the protest in little Greeley, Colorado, for which he had volunteered, had produced more than eight hundred sign-ups and an estimated two thousand people who showed up. He speculated at the time that it was the largest protest in Greeley since the Vietnam protests of the 1960s and 1970s.

Right before that protest, Trimp had started federalizing the National Guard and using military force against protesters. He used the justification of quelling violence, claiming violence from the protesters when there was often none. Trimp’s use of the military against peaceful protesters had started back in Oregon in May of 2025, and it had accelerated by the end of the year. Tens of billions of dollars were added to the budget for Immigration and Customs Killers, or ICK, to tackle an immigration “crisis” that did not exist. But it gave Trimp the ability to expand that agency and create something like his own private army—masked men without uniforms in unmarked cars who whisked people off the streets and “disappeared” them. At first these were supposed to be alleged gang members, who, even if they were gang members, should have been given “due process”—notice and a hearing—but they weren’t, thus displaying Trimp’s contempt for the Constitution. He kept at it even after the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that due process had not been provided and thus these actions were unconstitutional.

Then the outrageous “disappearance” of people was extended to any protester who was not a US citizen. Next it was extended to labor union leaders, businessmen who wouldn’t cooperate, and even members of Congress who were opponents. Finally, it was anyone.

Republican members of Congress who wanted Trimp stopped were too intimidated to intervene. It was clear that any Republican legislator who voted against Trimp’s wishes would be attacked in at least two ways: One, in the next Republican primary for that seat, Trimp allies would launch a campaign against the incumbent and for some pro-Trimp newcomer. Two, Trimp allies would threaten physical danger to the “traitor” and his family; the threats were possibly bluffs, but possibly real. And Trimp would not supply any extra security from the Secret Service or FBI to answer these threats because he wanted those legislators to be physically intimidated and fear for their families. Fear translated to legislators voting for whatever Trimp wanted, no matter how ridiculous or harmful to their constituents. It was as simple as that.

In addition, Democrats had shot themselves in the foot. By 2028 the Democratic Party had split in two. The new party was made up of “Progressives,” which was ironic because that was the formal name of the Bull Moose third party that Theodore Roosevelt had established in 1912. This new third party did more harm than good in terms of ousting Trimp.

The split of the Democrats meant the incumbent Republicans were likely to keep their seats as long as they didn’t lose in the primaries to other Republicans. To avoid being “primaried”— which meant being ousted in the primary, typically by billionaire business interests that worked hand in glove with the president—those Republicans had to stick with the president.

And who was the president? By 2032 it was Trimp but not Trimp.

Trimp had talked about running for a third term, but technically it would have taken a constitutional amendment or a very weird ruling by the Supreme Court to make that happen. Both options were messy, so Trimp simply had his son, Dilly Trimp Jr., run in his stead. Trimp Sr. made it clear that he would still be running the show, and the philosophy of meanness and brutality would prevail under his son’s administration, just as it had with his. Trimp’s mental capabilities had seemed to be declining rapidly in 2025, but somehow he had rebounded and still held enough mental capacity to operate.

Thanks in part to the rise of a third party that had split the Democrats, the son won the presidency in 2028, and it looked like he would win again in 2032. Despite the unpopularity of son and father, the voting processes in all the states had been changed to such an extent that the poor and minorities had been disenfranchised, and the billionaires had a huge influence on the country’s politics, flooding the populace with falsehoods about how wonderful the administration was. That billionaire control had been made possible by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. The Court opened the floodgates for big money by ruling that certain monetary maximums on political speech were unconstitutional.

At the same time, election rules had been changed. Gerrymandering of congressional districts had given Republicans an advantage. Plus, Republicans introduced laws or rules that made it difficult to vote and, and if a person did vote, it was difficult to get the vote to count. Many of those most likely to vote against Republicans were disenfranchised.

Trimp Jr. had already proven that he was controlled by the same interests as his father: Russia’s Pukin, antidemocratic billionaires such as Pietro Talmadus, and racist billionaires such as Elihu Madrigan.

Plus, the Trimps had concocted investigations and arrests of their political opponents, including those most vocally opposed to them and most likely to run against them. Trimp-appointed judges didn’t allow bail for those political opponents, or they made the bail so high that it couldn’t be afforded. The idea of judicial integrity, or actually any kind of integrity, was scoffed at in the age of the Trimps. Those political opponents who were jailed canceled their campaigns since they didn’t see a chance of winning if they were campaigning from jail.

Congress had emasculated the courts with a provision that took away the courts’ rights to hold an official of the executive branch in contempt. The law was clearly unconstitutional under any previous holdings by other Supreme Courts, but this Supreme Court was different. It had little regard for precedent and tended to give the executive branch immunities that were previously unheard of. Sometimes the Supreme Court seemed to be willing to buck the president, but many times it seemed to rule in favor of his outrageous actions. In this instance, it seemed that so long as the Congress was agreeing with the president, the Supreme Court was agreeing with Congress.

By bombing Iran in 2025, Trimp had laid the groundwork for further expanding his executive powers unconstitutionally. When security issues were at stake, civil rights tended to take a back seat, so old tension between freedom and security was reawakened, and the call for military action and greater national security strengthened Trimp’s hand in doing what he wanted.

After all, weren’t Japanese-American citizens unconstitutionally sent to internment camps during World War II? The Supreme Court said in 1944 in the Korematsu case that it was a “military necessity,” but Congress issued a formal apology in 1988 and subsequent members of the court were critical of the decision. In 2032, it seemed that in too many instances, the Supreme Court had backed Trimp’s assault on the separation and balance of powers within the three branches of government and had allowed him to tilt power toward the executive branch.

Part of Trimp’s rise to power was due to the biased “reporting” and opinion pieces from Wiley Triche-owned Fixed News. Triche was an old conservative whose mantras for living were, like the Trimps, quite simple and odious: gain money and power. That gain came at all costs, and those ends were justified by any means: lies, cheating, bullying, sensationalizing and slanting news coverage, and the ruination of the integrity of others. Triche used Fixed News as a public relations outlet rather than a news outlet, almost as if it were a state-owned propaganda machine in Russia or China.

Starting with his first protest days in 2025, Ham had written to Triche and his four children in an attempt to persuade them that a free democracy, most particularly a free press under the First Amendment, was in their best interests and that Trimp threatened a free press. Trimp constantly attacked the old-time broadcast behemoths verbally and on social media and through lawsuits, and he also used the once-independent Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission as attack dogs on those who dared cross him. Basically, the two agencies acceded to his personal wishes, which were largely founded upon hatred and grudges.

The big broadcast networks were still operating, but on an intimidated basis, and they had come to be known as “legacy media,” with nowhere near the impact they once had. In addition, they were owned by large corporations that would tend to lean toward their stockholders rather than editorial integrity when push came to shove. The executives tended to know nothing of journalism and treated their news outlets as nothing more than profit and revenue sources, no different from their other holdings.

Plus, the executives of those corporations had been intimidated by lawsuits brought by Trimp Sr. and tended to settle rather than defend the integrity of their journalism in the face of a monetary attack—regardless of the frivolous nature of the lawsuit. Gone were the days when a publisher like Kateline Grundy of the Washington Standard would stand against corruption regardless of the potential costs. Still, a few old-timers remembered what it was like to take pride in their profession and the content they produced.

At one point immediately before he went to prison, Ham had actually received a response from Katana Triche, the one daughter of Triche and the only one of the children who had at times voiced her independence from her father. She said in a voice mail message from a pay phone that she believed her email account was being monitored and that Ham should stop sending messages there. The message was left at 3 a.m., so it was obvious to him that she didn’t want to talk to him and that she was counting on voice mail to relay the message. She didn’t say who was monitoring her emails. Her father? The government?

The implications of the message told him two things: He might have an ally among the Triches. In fact, he might have even more than one since Francis, one of three sons, had broken with Auri, the son who had editorial control, about the editorial integrity of the operation. The third son, Dolion, refused to have anything to do with the family. The second thing was that Ham needed to find another way to communicate with Katana. He still hadn’t figured out a way by the time he found himself in prison.

In general, most of the public did not know about the torturing of political prisoners within the US. Others heard about it but didn’t believe it, or even if they did believe it, they figured these were “criminals,” “other” people unlike themselves. By 2032 a free press had been absent from the US for years. Ham’s warnings had proven to be on the mark but had not been heeded. The Triches still had their Fixed News network, which continued to make money, but the content was controlled by the Trimps. Any slip-ups that might portray the Trimps in a bad light could lead to an investigation by the Justice Department, endangerment of the broadcast licenses of its affiliates, and more. A few independent media outlets reported on torture, but they were underground outlets that operated almost as if the US was controlled by a foreign power.

In addition, the Trimps had ensured that once political prisoners were “disappeared” from the streets by masked men, they would no longer have contact with anyone from their old lives, including family members. It was hard to believe. Yet the first signs of it had appeared as far back as 2025, when hundreds of people were rounded up on the streets of Portland because of their brown skins and disappeared without due process or ability to contact their families. White American citizens did not heed the warning that “this could happen to anyone” until it was too late.

Back in the 2010s and 2020s, Ham had heard about people disappearing from within China under Liao’s regime or from within Syria under Aswad. No one would know where “the disappeared” had gone or why. One minute they’d be there, and the next minute they wouldn’t. But as late as 2025, even though he had become an anti-Trimp activist, Ham didn’t for a moment imagine that the US would be enveloped in a similar dark, suppressive cloud of evil. By 2032, however, his innocent naivete had evaporated and been replaced by a strong determination to gain freedom for himself and for his country.

Sleepless Reality

Ham became too tired to read further, and his thoughts became unfocused. They were dream-like thoughts with ideas about running for Congress, characters he had never met, nonessential random phrases, hymns from stints with the Catholic choir, memories from childhood summer camps, and on and on. In meditation circles this was called “monkey mind,” but in a severely sleep-deprived state, Ham thought of it as “bull mind.” He tried to focus on the present, but his sleep-deprived mind was a rampaging bull he couldn’t control. Some of the words were not even words, just a combination of consonants and vowels that made no sense.

A part of the Catholic liturgy floated by. His years of meditation training had helped in the beginning of the torture, but sleeplessness had won out. Unconnected snippets ran through his mind: The “Fountain of Glory” hymn. Torture like this could—do what? He couldn’t complete the thought. Due process first. He thought of his teddy bear as a child. Horsey, he called her. Pull a Baby Ruth. Was his mind working sort of like Trimp’s? Crazy cross-associations and rambling “bull mind”?

He had an almost insatiable appetite. But was that real? Was he really hungry? Or was it just the thought that he was hungry? He used to put his head on, on what? He couldn’t complete the thought. And on Earth peace to people of goodwill. Trimp should look at Father Pham praying the Our Father. Staying awake takes focus. Some calls by the refs were terrible. Location and his house. Con man. Did they have enough to impeach? Trimp in a Tesla. Like a chimpanzee in front of a computer. Isometric exercises. Trimp—a limp wimp. The random snippets of noncoherent thought continued. Yes, it was like Trimp’s mind.

The Note

He started reading his note again. It focused his mind. What was it about sleep deprivation that was so torturous? There was an anxiousness about it. A lack of calm. In the early stage of sleep deprivation, he would catch himself holding his breath for no reason and tensing up. Just the struggle to stay awake was constant, and he ached to simply put his head on a desk and sleep away, as he had often done in college while “studying” at the library. At some point, the ability to rationally think had disappeared, and rational thoughts were inundated by random symbols, words, and images that had no connection and made no sense.

He knew that some Zen monasteries used sleep deprivation to help generate a liberation experience, but he didn’t see how one could lead to the other. Some sort of destruction of the ego, or “the self,” through sleep deprivation? He supposed that asceticism could be considered a sort of voluntary torture in some cases, but the Buddha had called for taking a middle way. Thank goodness for that.

Ham had an ingrained sense of outrage about torture. It showed that civilization had not advanced much. Yes, it was outlawed internationally, but nations did it anyway, and, to its shame, even the US had done it even before the Trimps. Former Republican President Porgy M. Bramble had played cutesy with words and definitions, just as George Orwell had predicted, but he never convinced anyone that waterboarding was an “enhanced interrogation technique,” and that by calling it by that softer name, or “euphemism,” US officials could argue with a straight face that they were not torturing people. So much for the pinnacle of civilization.

Waterboarding had been a favorite torture tool of the CIA since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 had killed more than three thousand people in the twin towers in New York. Waterboarding created the feeling of drowning. The prisoner was stripped naked and put on a board with his feet higher than his head. Water was dripped onto a cloth covering the nose and mouth, and that caused the prisoner to choke and stop breathing. As far as Ham knew, the world record for waterboarding was probably held by Abdul Ali, who had been waterboarded 183 times. The CIA had destroyed ninety-two tapes of people being tortured at CIA “black sites” after 9/11, and some of them had included people shrieking and vomiting.

Ham felt shame for Southern Baptist University and Waco, his birthplace, for hosting a museum dedicated to Bramble. Did it have a room depicting all the forms of torture—uh, “enhanced interrogation techniques”—that Bramble had authorized? He didn’t think so. What it should have, he thought, was a demonstration booth offering any visitor the opportunity to experience waterboarding first-hand. That could be preceded and followed by surveys of whether the person would support torture to gain information or whether that person opposed torture under any circumstance. He suspected that support might turn to opposition once torture had been experienced. A man had a duty to himself to oppose it, sort of like Kant’s position on lying.

Ham knew that people considered sleep deprivation mild in comparison to waterboarding. That’s what he had once thought. It was indeed slower than some other forms of torture, but it was torture for sure. He had heard of some prisoners forced to stay awake for 180 hours, or seven and a half days. Hallucinations were inevitable.

Sleepless Reality

His mind left the note. He himself was hallucinating. He heard faint voices, as if someone were broadcasting a news show. He heard the voice but could not make out the words. This had happened to him long before he was ever tortured. He didn’t know if it was tied to his decades of meditation. He would hear the voices when he was about to go to sleep or had awakened for some reason. He was sure that an ordinary person in the physical world wouldn’t be able to hear those voices, so he typically would turn over and go to sleep. He didn’t know what else to do. So he heard the voices. But he also saw a light shining out of the corner of his eye. It seemed rather comforting. Again, he knew it was subjective. And he heard a sound. It was the sound of the universe. He supposed it could be labeled as hallucination because the average person standing in the same place wouldn’t hear it. It was a subjective sound. His meditation teacher had called it the sound of the universe and referred to it as “nada” in Sanskrit. It was a comforting sound, and Ham was convinced that it was the sound he would hear as he was dying. It sounded sort of like a stream, not of water, but at a high frequency, like cicadas but higher. He turned back to his paper.

The Note

The human mind is creative enough to invent an infinite number of methods of torture. Just because certain tortures were not in the UN handbook didn’t mean they weren’t tortures. The CIA had implemented a number of torture techniques after 9/11: forcing a prisoner to stand for days or be shackled to a ceiling for days. Exposure to extreme cold, exacerbated by being drenched in cold water. Rectal feeding and rehydration. Confinement in small boxes with limited breathing and movement. And even outright beatings, such as “walling,” which involved the use of a collar to slam a prisoner’s head against a flexible wall. Sexual humiliation and abuse were also part of the picture. Putting naked men on dog leashes, making them form a pyramid of naked bodies that were the subjects of humiliating laughter and photographs from guards, and on and on. That was the legacy of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq under Bramble. All torture. And all characterized by Bramble and his cronies as “enhanced interrogation techniques” in order to get around the prohibition against “torture” in international law.

Was there something in the Republican Party that made meanness and cruelty seem attractive? Was there an element of machismo associated with a “torture-prone, tough guy” image? And would such a “tough guy” image be soiled by kindness? And would that kindness be characterized as effeminate by Republicans?

If so, the irony was not lost on Ham when he thought about Trimp, who preened and primped like a woman, applying makeup to make him appear tan and paying inordinate attention to his hair. And, like some women, he focused inordinate attention on the appearance of others, leading to derogatory remarks for some and cabinet positions for those with looks he liked and flattery he craved.

He also seemed to have an obsession with sex, sexual innuendo, and the objectification of women. Sexual assault claims clung to him like barnacles, and women in general took particular offense to his political popularity. In the 2024 election, Trimp won the male vote by 12 percentage points and lost the female vote by 6 percentage points—an 18-point gender gap.

Ham knew he was painting with a broad brush, but it just seemed to him that corruption and cruelty seemed to come more frequently and naturally from Republicans. Why? Take former Republican President Slick Rick Dixon, for instance. Mean and a liar. Part of the Republican DNA. A friend of Ham’s had told him that the meanness had all started with Bacillus Hafley in the 1960s with her support for Harry Silverwind and later opposition to state ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

With all that said, Ham had to admit to himself that he had once voted for Republican Bramble for president—the first time around. He did that because Elbert Slaughter, the vice president under Darnell Quinton and Bramble’s opponent, hadn’t challenged Quinton when Quinton was obviously lying about his sexual escapades. For some reason, Ham detested lies from politicians, and it didn’t matter what party they belonged to. So he voted for Bramble, only to discover that he was a liar too.

If the subject of torture was raised with Trimp, arrogant paragon of cruelty that he was, he dismissed the victims as criminals or terrorists and said that the torture was justified for the security of Americans. After all, hadn’t Bramble done the same thing after 9/11? Trimp said that those who claimed otherwise were in the pockets of Democrats or were themselves terrorists or criminals. Those who were tortured were part of “the other,” and therefore average people in the U.S. went about their business and didn’t think about them much when Trimp spewed hatred and cruelty and made sure those words were translated into action.

But Ham’s firsthand experience regarding himself and other protesters confirmed that Trimp was putting average people in jail; if they disagreed with his policies, they were branded terrorists and a security risk. Trimp’s entire life had been based on lies and fraud, and somehow people kept believing what he said—even when his false pronouncements reached the highest rungs of society.

Trimp admired other autocrats around the world, and he took note when China’s leader, Liao Li, had China’s leading businessman, Open Sesame’s Qian Jin, arrested and tortured. Liao showed that even billionaires were not exempt from governmental power wielded by an autocrat, and Trimp was attracted by that particular tutelage from Liao.

Everyday life seemingly continued in the US. It reminded Ham of a play about a scrapbook kept by a German officer at Auschwitz during World War II. It showed German officers and their female secretaries partying and generally enjoying themselves while millions of Jews died at their hands. It also reminded him of the torture of Syrian detainees under Aswad—made public in documentaries in 2025. Those who tortured had one excuse: If they stepped out of line and tried to save a detainee, they themselves would be executed. In other words, they justified their inaction by thinking of their own survival first.

Was it true that everyone breaks under torture at some point? Maybe not, thought Ham. After all, many a Buddhist monk had set himself on fire. Isn’t that going into a realm of “happiness independent of conditions”—even if the condition is fire burning your flesh? That degree of independence had long been a goal Ham had unsuccessfully sought to reach. He wondered how long a Trimp or a Pukin would last under torture. Not long, he thought.

Ham had not been allowed to speak to his wife or a lawyer since he had been branded a terrorist. At least he was still in the US. He knew of political prisoners who had been transferred to hellholes in foreign locations and never heard from again. He turned from the note to his sleepless insanity.

Sleepless Reality

He thought of his wife’s horse trailer. Then the horse. The dog. Barking. Treats. Training. Time. How could he get it to go faster? Rocking back and forth. Joe in high school. Joe used to do that a lot, and Ham didn’t know why. Maybe now he knew. It was to relieve suffering. Something about the rocking made suffering diminish a bit. At least for a few microseconds.

A guard entered his cell. Or was he hallucinating?

“Look. All you have to do is sign a paper. And this will be over,” said the guard.

This was no hallucination.

“A paper. Saying what?”

“What difference does it make? You sign it, and this stops. Simple.”

“What does it say?”

“That you were in a movement to violently overthrow the government.”

“No. I won’t sign.”

“We can make it worse for you. Much worse.”

“I won’t sign.”

“OK. For now, get some sleep. And remember how good the sleep was the next time we come. You’re lucky. You’re not high-profile. You have it easier.”

The guard unlocked the cage within the cell, turned off the lights, and left. Ham collapsed on his cot.

Mental Freedom

He was in prison, but his mind was not. That was partly because meditation had brought him freedom—regardless of where he was. He was interested in teaching meditation on a broad scale in prison. What better environment? People needed to do something all day, and meditation meant a person was never bored—even in prison.

In fact, his old teacher’s “do nothing” technique was a form of meditation. Even a regular person on the “outside” could find times when the car was stopped at a light or there was a long line at the grocery store and make those times useful with meditation. If that was true on the outside, how much truer could it be on the inside? It was an ideal opportunity for prisoners to take advantage of the inactivity forced upon them.

His roommate, Paul, was a Christian, but he was not opposed to meditation or even ideas of reincarnation. He had been an alcoholic and had attended AA classes, and he had learned what The Big Book in AA said about believing in a “higher power.” It was that belief in a higher power that had led to Paul’s political activism. And that political activism had led him to political imprisonment and the sharing of a cell with Ham. The belief in a higher power helped him cope in prison.

Ham suggested that he and Paul might meditate together. Meditation was not pinned to one religion, he told Paul, and it did not contradict Christianity and could be taught in a secular manner—thus including as broad a potential audience as possible. Indeed, Christian mystics such as St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila had experienced mystical awakenings similar to what Buddhists described as “awakening” or “liberation.” And Emmet Fox, a Christian who was the spiritual godparent of Alcoholics Anonymous, had written booklets about reincarnation and directly experiencing God.

Paul liked the idea, and he and Ham started to meditate once a day. They would eat a quick meal and then disappear to a storage room for the balance of the half hour allocated for each meal.