He came with a punctuation that would put clocks to shame, a little late into the evening before the sun was fully set and among torches just about to dim and when the guards started their second round of night patrol. Fecund air filled the prison, the moss growing to the side felt spongy against my hand and the rainwater poured poured the cracks above with a flush so loud as to almost mute the coming steps of Ritcher. A whole fleet it seemed, I didn’t count but I saw their forms in the growing dark, the passing shadows and the cold drafts they carried with them. They passed me, guards who - after setting up the chair and the bag and a lantern - Ritcher saluted off into the corridor and disappeared past my view of the cell. I stared at the furniture, my eyes heavy. Ritcher looked down at me a bit, and sat.
“I see you still have my blanket.” He said. I clutched it closer to my waist from my legs.
I licked my chapped lips and it made the cuts feel worse.
“Helped me sleep.”
“Did you eat today?” He asked.
“Ate pretty well for once.”
“Why do you look frustrated then?”
“Ever get the feeling like things happen to you that you don’t deserve?” I asked.
“I’m of the belief that everyone gets what they deserve.” Ritcher said. “If a man refuses to work. He becomes a tramp. If the tramp turns to stealing and killing, he gets his head on the block. Terrible fathers raise terrible sons. Things have a natural order and people often ruin themselves.”
“Thieves are pushed to steal. Poverty and starvation push them. Kings take too big a cut of their taxes. You believe in that sequence?”
He smiled.
I stared. My hair down past my eyes, my body succumbed to the blanket.
“What do I owe myself to this hostility?”
“Ever feel like there’s a catch to good fortune?"
“I figured you’ve been hurt enough.” He said. “So I gave you a blanket. What’s a little good in such a bad place?”
“Did you bring the book with you?” I asked.
“Of course.” He poked the leather satchel with his foot.
“You mean to offer me that book, still?” I asked.
"Finally got smart on me?"
He took it out and stuck his hand out through the bars and all his armor clanked.
“Easy as that.” His hand was stiff, a lanky creature bemeath the baggage of loose fitted armor. Ritcher, sickly looking and gaunt yet smiling, yet eager with his tongue in the corner of his lips.
“I didn’t say I was going to do it, did I?”
“You still playing games?” He asked.
“We’re all playing games here.” I said. “I don’t mean to win it, I just mean to enjoy it.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means there are things I want.” I said.
“Like?”
“I want to know how much pull you have that you’d be able to get Gunther and Hannibal off my back for two evenings to talk to me. ”
“Maybe I do have some pull. Why am I obliged to answer you?”
“You're obliged to answer me because if you don’t I’ll piss on that book and you’ll sail across wasting all your precious time. And I have a feeling your time is much more precious than mine.”
Ritcher pulled back. The chair creaked.
“Yes. I have some pull, orders from some nobles who have decided to expedite the costs of this trip and our little, meetings. I’m no puppet master, though.”
“I don’t need you to pull all the strings. Just one.” I said. “Every fifth day of the week I am made to walk up the steps of this terrible place, up to the third floor two stories above me to be reduced by lashings and beatings. Sometimes worse.”
“What kind of worse?”
“The worse that I don’t even want to talk about. Things so bad I wish I could forget them with all the rest of me.” I said.
“You’d like some rest from your torture."
"Thats right." I runned scars across my thighs.
"I can’t do that forever.” he said.
“You can do it once or twice. I know that. I know you know you can do that.” My eyes narrowed. “I’ve got no illusions about my place. I will be here forever. But so long as there’s something to gain, I’ll take it. I’ve got no ambitions but to lead as easy as a life as I can.”
“An easy life as a tortured criminal. That’s the first I’ve heard of that.”
“We don’t choose the games we play.” I scratched at some moss in the corner of the floor and my markings appeared as streaks of white against the green.
“That it? Then it’s a deal. I can offer you two breaks. Two. You hear me?”
“No deal. Not yet. One more thing.” I stood up close to the bars and the book that he drew back. I held to one end.
“There’s something called Heavenberry wine in the mainland, right?”
“What?”
“Heavenberry wine. Do you have it in the mainland?”
“Sure?” He turned his face to its side. One eyebrow was larger than the other.
“Get me some of that wine.”
"You want to get drunk?"
"I want to enjoy life." I said.
“It’d worsen your condition.”
“Worsten? Than how I am now?” I said. “If I’m going to read the random writings of a long forgotten fool, then let me at least be drunk. Get me some Heavenberry wine and my fifth days cleared.”
“And you’ll read?”
“I’ll read hymns if you want. I’ll sing. I’ll dance.”
He raised the book up.
“Are you really aware what you’re getting yourself into?”
I plucked the book from him.
“When you’re making deals, don’t give the other guy a reason to back out.” I said.
His eyes softened, he brought his hands onto his lap with what was on his face I thought was a smile but was too hard to see save for the shadows in the craters of his dimples “That’s alright then. Go on, see…see if you can even read it.”
“Why wouldn’t I be able to?”
“Just take a look.” He said.
The book sagged my arms and pulled me forward when I lifted it. I checked the sides, there must have been a thousand pages stuffed and loose, of different shades glued or stitched onto the book spine. I walked back to my corner in the room and sat, both legs crossed and laying on their side.
Ritcher leaned his body against the back of his chair and the legs compressed under his weight. And he waited. And waited.
“This supposed to be it?” I said. "Looks a little…dingy. Cheap.”
"You're one to talk."
My palm rubbed against the book surface, feeling every worn scar and blemishes that ran across its corrugated top.
"My dead past." My heart beat fast. My eyes twitched, fingers shook.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. We live in it’s shadow.” Ritcher said. He set a jug of water down and slid it through the bars with his foot. “I just hope you can read it. I believe it’s in some kind of code or second language.”
I turned to the first page and looked it up and down rubbing my fingers across the pen-scratches and ink blotches on the paper.
“It’s not code. It’s English.” I said. “I remember that.”
I turned to the back of the book, the final page.
It read:
Was it worth it, Virgil? Five years of blood for a rosebud. Damnit. You fucking idiot.
Rosebud? Five years?
A bit before the last page; more notes. Random words, names of cities (were they cities? They sounded like them. Corne…Alder’s passing. Merv? What?). The longer the book went, the more tapered off the details seemed to get. So by the time it approached it’s end there weren’t even notes, just random scribbles and fading lettering. I read, the letters still made sense. But the events...the words themselves, conjured no feeling or image. Not at its end at least, where the writings were just mental graffiti from an alley in time lost to new construction, new relocation, new avenues.
“I thought I could just start at the end.” I told him. “But there’s so much missing and I can’t fill it in.”
“Not yet.” He said. “Let’s start from the beginning. I have time. As do you.” His eyes fell and his head slumped from the chair. “Getting it right…is important.”
I leaned back on the hay and looked up to Rotcher. To the copper colored under lids in his eyes enlarged by his wide stare. The torch behind him flickered twice and spewed some ember then subsided to gentle murmur.
“Alright. From the beginning then.” I said.
I opened the book. Two things fell, a pressed blue rose trapped in glass and a sailboat made out of paper. I laid them to my side.
I kept turning through the torn and rough-rooted pages half-way out the spine. Past drawings and random blurts of curses and letters. Then finally, I came to what appeared like a proper title.
The first page. Uneven words went across wrapping around the sides of the paper like a python encroaching upon the fat paragraph, forming an almost spiral of wavy, shaky scribbling. I turned it to it’s side just to read.
The words, in what looked like chicken scratches, went like this.
My Narrative
To be delivered to Jonathan P. Brooke at Kirkland & Ellis LLP
March 20 21 22nd, 2018?
“Yo, J.P. I know I never write you man. I know you're a corporate lawyer, but I think I need help. Like, I think I’m kind of fucked. Like, really fucked. Like, surrounded by savages type of fucked.”
Announcement
