Twin Cells vs. The Cries of the Lone Wolf, or, The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 2
CLP 2's promise of a new relationship... whether you want it or not.

Cover for The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 2 by Eloise G. Morgan.​
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Scratching shrivelled earth with pocket knives, troops that would lose their lives whiled away hours in the subterranean caves beneath Bouzincourt Church: a sanctuary for soldiers at the Somme in World War I. Swift etches struck the chords that chiselled names of couples into deep-set hearts; lullabying souls engraving blueprints for their tombstones. Itching for an exit from their hell, the men chipped at these chinks resembling channels: illusory elusions of the twin-faced coin of death.
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It took almost a century for countrymen to spot their pleas for help.
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Daylight had escaped a fellow similarly twenty-seven years before – except in fiction. Camouflaged by flashing sunrays in a train carriage, Pozdnyshev – the protagonist of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata – confides in shock-stunned listeners the murder of his wife: a woman whose alleged adultery he blames on blasphemy by Beethoven: the sensual feast of Opus 47 in A Major. A plaid lap-blanket blurs the onlookers’ absorption of his eyes as one stands to alight at his reached station. ‘Forgive me,’ the killer implores him in merciful darkness, ‘Forgive me.’
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The cry is not far distanced from the melodrama of real life: its sealed-in individuals crave an ear. A 1990 ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court held that confessions coaxed out of police impersonating cellmates was no longer hearsay but irrevocable proof: a signatory’s blind surrender to admission of his guilt. A so-called ‘voluntary statement’ paralleled the weight of interview room testimony; true avowals born of plastic intimacy.
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Madness mauls the brains of the unlistened. Studies show that penitentiaries’ shared cells are insalubrious and savage; simultaneously most suicides take place in one-man cubicles. Solitary confinement is the greatest punishment of all.
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Despite the eons of electrons’ progress – persistent creeds that posit how far we have come ‘beyond’ our baser selves – we hinge deliriously on ancient means of living clad in new-age packaging: matchmaking services accounting for political orientation, common haunts, and alma maters. Indolence prevails before the dolorous suggestion of transcending the familiar because – why? If ever-faithful neuroscience can explain why someone is conservative or liberal, a homebody or natural-born performer, dangerously daredevillish or risk-averse, why shouldn’t we appoint the internet our middle-man? Clique- click-making enterprises – also known as social media – are based on dull predictability. Neurologists and sociologists are now recruited to be counsellors to sites like Match.com and the (less celebrated) PerfectMatch.com.
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Business is booming from our busybodies’ dosing of these algorithms; a 1990 quote from social critic Camille Paglia bears especial relevance: 'In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships.' Commerce is filling in once-open gaps of curiosity. The search for serendipity seems to be over.
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Grey matter’s role beneath the microscope – for better or for worse – has not informed which prison inmate has the top or bottom bunk. That choice is left to happenstance; its outcomes sometimes veer on lethal. No search engine recommendations can mend fences; no online questionnaires compute who won’t kill whom.
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It may be the sole blind social experiment left to the auspices of fate. In 2001 Robert Chattler – a twenty-four-year-old, adored kid who had grown up in the affluent Chicago suburbs, gone to Hebrew school and been spoiled rotten by a mother who had let him keep racoons and foxes – was sentenced to six years for robbing stores to bankroll his cocaine addiction.
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Encaged beside this cagey rookie was Lee Harris: a forty-something, statuesque, overweight African-American former dope dealer sentenced to ninety years for a young woman’s murder. Lee claimed that fabrication on a cellmate’s part, as well as tell-tales he had shared with officers as an informer in the hope of a reward, as well as one uncertain woman’s tentative ID of him years later had created an entirely false indictment. Robert on the other hand professed his guilt with ease. His only violent act had been a single punch; he was anticipating less time in exchange for good behaviour. Lee’s love of jazz and hip–hop clashed with Robert’s worship of The Beatles; the latter chain-smoked chronically till Lee suggesting switching cells.
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Despite their manifest distinctions this unlikely duo became friends. Lee forsook all of his commissary privileges to fetch his younger buddy shoes and snacks and underwear; Robert looked out for Lee and promised he would fight for his release when out of jail himself.
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Immune to sugar-coated pledges such as these, Lee didn’t take his cellmate seriously. But following his early exit Robert made life comfortable by working for his father’s advertising business; eventually purchasing a ranch rife with horses in Del Rio, Texas. Missives were exchanged and adamantly Robert sought to prove Lee’s innocence. He hired – then fired – a reputable attorney to defend his close friend; he emptied his savings to enlist a new, better one. Seventeen years after being paroled he was still pressuring the state attorney’s office with the help of an online petition, television reporters, YouTube videos, social media pages, and furious phone conversations with legal professionals. He continues striving to this day.
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Another combination naturally uncomely to AI is that of E.J. Levy – a sapphic scribe and literature professor – and her spouse of now over a decade, a male astronaut. The two had come to the same bar haphazardly for dates with other women when their eyes met. This guy happened to be a lofty, well-built fellow who enjoyed his share of lion-hunting, mountain-climbing and space rocket-building. Levy’s friends felt shocked and some, betrayed. ‘He is a sort of Freudian projection of a man,’ she wrote afterwards, ‘and I am a lesbian.’ Levy is loath to switch identities – so such a match would be beyond the zaps of well-used dating apps.
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Silicon Valley nonetheless is not at fault. Conscious is that which robs us of reality: the very premise of free will serves as an opiate. An experiment by neuroscientist John Dylan-Haynes scanned fourteen volunteers’ brains as they set about a task: one of two buttons would be pressed to signal different onscreen letters. Neuroimaging laid bare the frontopolar cortex’s activity almost ten seconds prior to participants’ awareness of their choice: an eerie spectre just below the forehead holding all our cards. Neurons and gene-markers and hormones are ahead of us – which puts them miles before the triumphs of AI. ‘There’s not much space for free will to operate,’ declares the comparably prescient Haynes.
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Stanford biology professor and endocrinology researcher Robert Sapolsky is currently writing his next work: Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. In his previous opus, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, he argues that the region of the hippocampus in the brain reintroduces yearnings unlearned years before. 'Suppose an alcoholic has been clean and sober for years,' he writes. 'Return him to where the alcohol consumption used to occur (e.g., that rundown street corner, that fancy men’s club), and those potentiated synapses, those cues that were earned to be associated with alcohol, come roaring back into action, dopamine surges with anticipation, and the craving inundates.'
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He likewise tells of once-revered West German journalist Ulrike Meinhof: a former reporter turned terrorist/plane hijacker after the slipshod excision of a benign brain tumour. Relics of surgical scar tissue had been left on her amygdala: the centre of paranoia, aggression, destruction.
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Some people carry certain genes that make this core more active. Others risk the whirlwind of a vicious cycle of distress – as Dr. Madhumita Murgia details in a video on unabating anxiousness. With every worry the brain’s HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis loosens cortisol: a hormone racing to enwrap us in an ever-crueller clasp of shackles. This sends the amygdala on even more adventures – and begins to shrink the potency of our impressionable hippocampus: the concentration, memory and learning centre. In turn the newest, most evolved part of the brain just at the forehead – the prefrontal cortex said not to mature till our mid-twenties – starts to recede.
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Awash in wavering confusion, dates dissolve; emotions wander off. We are held hostage by a gang of faceless captors.
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For this reason and a host of others the idea of ‘free will’ doesn’t entertain Sapolsky – who avers in one discussion, ‘when you look at the number of influences on behaviour – from what your brain was doing one second before and whatever the behaviour is to sensory cues that you’re not even consciously aware of, to what hormones that morning have to do with it, to what your childhood was like – what your foetal life was like; your genes, the culture that your ancestors invented, the evolution of us as a species… the notion that there’s some… magical little homunculus man in our heads… made of some kind of non-biological stuff who at the end of the day makes all the decisions about what we do – that’s mediaeval thinking.’
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Cells. The kind with bars that ring like tinnitus. They’re metaphorical: they don’t have to be real. Their holds lax only with the promise of a shared entrapment: a pining for the ‘one’ or ‘ones’ whose characters will to a point, somehow, to an extent still inascribable to science, suggest long-term compatibility.
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Little can pose a guarantee. In the second volume of The Crooked Little Pieces Isabel sinks even more into herself, while Anneliese’s task of psychotherapy instils her in the confines of a doctor’s practice. Being forced to listen is a chore imposed by reading – a ‘chore’ because no text concurs with all of our grey matter. Striving to entwine the tenets of our beings – or what we think to be the tenets on that day, or in that hour – till the New Year, perhaps – or till that person said that thing and the whole world was capsized – we fling our thoughts at the narrator: someone far or dead or wilfully anonymous. It’s an attempt to reach out and be understood.
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It's all that I can offer you.
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Sources​
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1 C. Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 2
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2 T. Marlan, ‘Cellmates,” The Marshall Project, 2 November 2018. Accessed here.
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3 R. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst: Vintage, p. 71
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