by Nicholas Diehl
The Window Man
I was a window man for thirty years. Right out of high school, my daddy got me in at the justice building in Abilene. He said it was a good paying job and I wasn’t going to get nothing better, not with my brains. He was a hard bastard sometimes, but I can’t exactly say he was wrong. Eight years in Abilene and then I went to the big justice building in Houston.
In the big cities they’ve got window men working shifts around the clock. I worked nights to start, installing on the first floor. It was hard work, hard on your back. Glass is a lot heavier than most people think.
With an experienced team, guys who’ve worked together for a while, you can get a new window in in fifteen minutes. It’s not like you’re installing windows in a home. You don’t weather seal, it doesn’t have to be perfect. They’re just going to break it in the morning.
I was mostly on the first floor. I heard one time that ninety percent of the windows are on the first floor, which makes sense. First, most crimes are minor, and second, because everybody pleads down to a lower floor if they can. I mean, why take a chance?
The punishment is always defenestration. What really matters is the floor.
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The Defenestrator
When I meet somebody, I tell them I work at the justice building. That’s what I’ve got on my dating profile. All my social media. Nobody guesses that I ’m a defenestrator. It makes sense when you think about it–everybody’s seen black-and-white photographs of the old-time defenestrators. Everybody’s read The Defenestrator in the Rye. Lots of people think that defenestrators all look like weightlifters or something.
They see a 5 foot 2 blonde girl and guess I’m a court reporter. A typist. I don’t mind. I just smile but I’m totally cracking up inside.
I wear a mecha suit. All the defenestrators wear mecha suits—I defenestrate three or four people every hour, you know. It just wouldn’t be possible to do it the old-fashioned way. We’d never keep up.
I like my job. I’m on the first floor. I wouldn’t want to be higher up. On the first floor, you don’t really have to worry. You’re serving the justice system, of course, but you’re also helping people get through their sentence. They’re mostly good people who just made a mistake. People are anxious, so I talk to them for a minute, try to help them calm down and fall safely—cover your head and remember to roll. I’ve had people I defenestrated send me thank-you notes later. It’s kind of funny.
Strangest thing I’ve ever seen? Definitely the party in the private room. You know there’s a private room where they don’t allow reporters, right? Just the defenestrator and the guilty person and whoever they bring with them. Sometimes that’s part of the plea bargain, the private room, sometimes a person rents it. So this one time I was the defenestrator for the private room, and the guy was an investment banker or something. Fraud, embezzlement, I don’t know. He stole millions of dollars. So he’s in the private room with champagne and strippers. He tried to give me a bottle of champagne, but I told him I couldn’t accept it. Professional ethics.
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The Student
I’m completely opposed to defenestration. They say it’s fair. “Everyone is treated the same.” “Equal justice under the law.” Bullshit.
I didn’t used to think that. I was defenestrated when I was eighteen. I don’t know—I’m kind of ashamed of it now, even though lots of kids do it. You know, day before your eighteenth birthday, you do something illegal. Not, like, harmful, you don’t hurt anybody or anything. You moon the police station or spray some graffiti or some stupid thing. You get arrested but you get sentenced as a minor. So first floor. Helmet, padded suit, landing mat. There’s a class where they teach you how to fall. It was like a game or, like, a joke.
What opened my eyes was when I took a class on law and society. The system is basically designed to discriminate. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession. Then they give the police stop-and-frisk powers, and who do you think is five times more likely to get defenestrated on higher floors? It’s racism when you look behind the curtain.
And if you have enough money, you can get a good lawyer and, like, pretty much guarantee a plea bargain down to one of the lower floors. It’s a for-profit system. Money for the lawyers, money for the politicians. Money for the companies that make the windows. It’s so corrupt.
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The Paramedic
I’ve been a paramedic for the high window yard in Memphis for a little over a year now, but I’m getting out just as soon as I can. I fill out applications for other jobs every day just about. It’s terrible. Just… terrible.
Have you ever seen someone get thrown out of a tenth-floor window? Seen what happens when they hit the ground? I have. I don’t watch anymore. I just wait for the sound and then get out there, try to save them.
When I started here, my partner told me you have to put everything aside—turn your feelings off. They just get in the way. That’s not a person out there—just a body that needs to be fixed. Be like a mechanic fixing a car. It’s the only way to stay sane when you do this job, because you patch these people up, they might live, but they aren’t ever going to be the same again. Not physically and not mentally.
We have 5% of the world’s population—but we’ve got 25% of the world’s disabled population, because we keep throwing people through windows. I just can’t see how that’s smart.
The worst thing is the faces of the double breakers. You can’t look at them–the hopelessness, the emptiness. The double breakers—you know, the ones with two or more sentences to serve consecutively. It’s so … I’m fixing this guy up, but it doesn’t matter what I do. They’re going to throw him out of the fifth-floor window again tomorrow.
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The Press Secretary
Senator Colman is proud of his record on crime. He’s a law-and-order candidate, with an A+ rating from the National Union of Defenestrators. And it will be a cold day south of heaven when Senator Colman starts coddling criminals. We need tough laws to handle the big problems—the problems that Governor Arroyo can’t seem to fix.
The senator categorically rejects these baseless insinuations—perhaps the governor is bought and paid for by lawless criminals. Yes, Senator Colman has received campaign contributions from companies in the glass manufacturing industries. He has also received campaign donations from thousands of hard-working citizens who love this country and want to keep it safe. What the governor is calling ‘Big Glass’ is, in fact, your neighbor… your cousin… your childhood friend. The glass manufacturers of America are America.
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Bio:
Nicholas Diehl was born in Detroit, attended Michigan State University (B.A. in mathematics and history) and UC Davis (Ph.D. in philosophy), and teaches philosophy at Sacramento City College. He has published essays on narration, satire, and the relationship of narrative to philosophical practice in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and fiction in Daily Science Fiction, MetaStellar, and previously in Sci Phi Journal. An extremely photogenic corgi lives in his house.
Philosophy Note:
“Broken Windows” presents an alternate society where the only legal punishment is defenestration, told through the statements of some of the people involved with the system. It is a short satire of the prison system of the United States of our world, which runs for-profit prisons and houses 25% of the world’s incarcerated people. In my work as a philosopher of art, I have written about the mechanics of satire and argued that satire is as close as kin to philosophy, if not always kind. Analogical reasoning helps us identify the target of the satire; a good satire has a bit of moral bite to it.
