My arms slumped holding the red bound book. Ritcher sat in front of me a bit leaned and arms tucked into a narrow silhouette. The white in his eyes were crazed almost, yellow and veiny.

  “And you’re sure I wrote this?”

  “Yes.” Ritcher said. “No one else could have. It’s your penmanship, in your language, found in your home.”

  “Well, alright. It just doesn’t sound like me.”

  “How would you know what you sounded like?”

  I grumbled. “Good point.”

  “Just read.”

  Again, the pages opened. Thick paper yellowed and faded like dead autumn leaves. I put my finger on the words and drifted down, past the first passage, further into the book.

---

  Virgil Darko

  My Narrative

  To be delivered to Jonathan P. Brooke at Kirkland & Ellis LLP

  March 20 21 22nd, 2018(?)

  By the time you’ve read this, it might have been weeks or months or years since I’ve been trapped in this cage surrounded by savages, J.P. But I’ll write anyway.

  Proper litigations would say that I was unlawfully seized. I think it’s better to say that I was fucked. I was stuck-in-a-forest-village-surrounded-by-animals kind of fucked and there didn’t seem a way out.

  Everything must sound far-fetched, or maybe confusing so let me begin to the moments before and what’s really happened.

  It started a few days ago. Maybe two. While I was still in Australia. Was it two? I’ve crossed the dates out just to keep track but I don’t know anymore. What I do know is that I was on a yacht and I remember that because the whole floor was wobbling and the sea horizon kept leaning left and right like I was on one of those teeter saws or something. And of course, I remember all that because of the vomit. I vomited a lot. Not from sea sickness, mostly from the party the days before at Sydney. So the timeline went a little like this…I partied then while hungover I decided to set sail on the yacht and do a little driving…then during one of these sea trips off the coast of Australia was when the people with guns came. Yeah. It must have happened within a week’s time, ending on with pirates along the coast of Australia. Men with hungry looks in their eyes, with loaded guns and strong arms. Tattooed, gold teethed. They came on dingies and surrounded my ship and went up the damn ladder by the side before I could even move the wheel somewhere safe. By the time I had my hands on it, I felt the gun in the back of my head. Yeah. That’s what happened. I was taken hostage. Why? I don’t remember. By who? It’s still eluding me. My minds a little fuzzy.

  I do remember going overboard after the fact.

  I woke up on shore a few hours later after jumping, I didn’t know which shore. That’s still a problem. I thought still think it was was Australia or maybe some island nearby. Australia has islands nearby, right? That was pretty much the set up of it all. The parties. The yacht driving. The pirates. Then I got thrown overboard and ended up in strange lands. I woke up with the bits of seashells scratched up against my chest and the wrapped seaweed around my feet. It was midday, I think, because the sun was high and straight center in the sky. I got the right idea of walking along the coast to find another ship, following seagulls croaking out into sea. So’s I hiked around the cliffs and high-drops for a stretch of miles. A little after midday, with hours of the heat against me and the sun beginning to set I changed course. Me, still confused, still annoyed and now really thirsty given all the walking I’d done, decided to go inland. It didn’t take long to find the thick of forest and the tall grass and knolls that wound up and up and up. I kept walking until I saw tracks on the floor. Wheel marks - that’s what I thought. There must have been a car nearby, right? There sure as hell was a beaten road at least.

  So’s I followed the tracks for like hours man, I was so exhausted and you must understand that - it’s really important you know how critical that bit is. I was fucking tired. The kind of tired where your limbs feel like they’re about to fall off. The type of tired and wornness you feel down your feet, like your flesh is cracking. To the point where you don’t even sweat in the strong heat anymore, where you just bake and your eyes roast behind eyelids. I got so thirsty I started licking the sweat off myself and the salt just made it worse. It gets your head all dizzy, your vision spinning until you don’t even know what direction you’re walking because it’s all spinning all around. Maybe that’s where I fucked up, in the party-ban-spin movement of mind I took a left on a fork an hour into the road and found my ass in shit-ville instead of heading true.

  Shit-ville.

  That’s…not it’s name. I don’t think this shit-ville has a name. So yeah, I found a village following those tracks. I call it a village but it’s more like an unfinished landscaping project. You see, walking into this village I noticed half of it was embedded into the forest, right in or on top of the trees, with roots and trunks and branches growing out or into the building walls. Buildings built with cheap-looking beige clay that seemed flimsy enough for me to punch a hole through. They looked like wasp nests, over sized and latched onto the body of the tree. In constant shade.

  I got there. The gates were wide open and me thinking they’d just accept any stranger. To be honest, I thought it was a joke. Still do. It was kind of medieval looking, man. Some Lord of the Rings type of shit at least when it came to the village houses on land. Kind of reminded me of like those jousting places you go to, you know, the ones that make you pretend you’re king. Where you sit on your little shitty wooden throne and have the people bring roasted chickens to your ass and you watch two minimum wage losers stab each other with long sticks on horses. That shit, right? I thought it was one of those places. A Renaissance fair or something. ‘Cause I saw horses everywhere. And the people weren’t exactly contemporary looking or anything.

  The fashion was so outdated I couldn’t even call the things people wore clothes as much as rags, I’d seen homeless in New York with better drapes that these bozos.

I mean, I guess they had that Oscar de la Renta style? Eugh. That slouchy looking drab wear…ah... So’s I came up on the mainstreet of this city, I was thirsty right? I found a nice little rectangle of water and what I believed to be a fountain. I stuck my head in deep and drank. When it came back up I found everyone around me laughing, most of them. Some, looking in disgust.

  Then I heard the neigh, then the breath down my neck and right around the corner, there it was waiting with that stupid blank expression, a horse. I looked down, there were bits of food and hair inside this little fountain of water. A trough. My head slumped and I cursed, the flies coming off the beast’s lazy eye. God I was so heated.

  The people laughed even harder. I spat out the water but the taste of horse saliva remained, something bitter and salty and mucus-textured I can’t believe I did this. I scraped my tongue with my nails, it didn’t do much. So’s I was doing all that and there they were, the laughing group growing even bigger, laughing even harder as they looked at what they perceived to be a fool drinking horse water. All laughing. All of them.

  And you know how I get.

  My face went hot.

  “What are you looking at, shitheads?” I looked around. Some laughed, some angled their heads in confusion. It looked like I was speaking some alien language, them trying desperate to understand. No, they started talking some weird shit. So’s I got to thinking. I mean, they speak English in Australia right? So this must not be Australia, right? So’s I thought, well, they must be aboriginals. That was the impression as I looked around the laughing crowd, the primitive looking people.

  But on further inspection, I realized none of them were dark and not to be racist or anything, but aboriginals are kind of…dark, right? And these guys were as pale as dried shit. Wrinkled, even the fucking the kids. I could see the stress on them. So’s I figured they were pale from all the shade the tree’s gave em and stressed from the fear of having those trees fall on their asses.

  I stood in the middle of the street cursing beneath by breath at the half-civilized people. I walked down, cutting into the group, the water dripping from the ends of my clustered hair. My eyes looked left and right to the buildings as I carried my wide stride through the streets, eyes that wandered high up. It looked right out of a Lord of the Ring movie-set. The houses inside the husks and hollows of giant trees, shade from these aforementioned trees that blackened half the city. A city, going up and down from the peaks and valleys. The further I walked into the city, the less I saw the tree houses. There were more sensible configurations approaching the middle (I assumed it was the middle) of the city. The people started wearing boots, shoes. I saw thatched roofs and windows n’ shit. I saw belts and pants and men with armor. It must have taken an hours walk to get there but it felt like it happened so quickly. I stopped when I approached a sidewalk of wooden boards, I’d been walking through dirt this whole time. A horse neighed in my direction from the middle of the street, it blew out it’s cheeks and flashed its teeth and the woman riding it smiled and dug her heel into the hind of the gross thing. Then it walked by, and I looked back at the horse’s ass and behind where I could see clearly the waves of the village, where hills ended and started and the ragged people looking outside from their sliding wooden doors. Fuck them. And their troughs. And their rags and miserable looking faces. I was glad going in further into the village, where there were fences and walls of stone. Where brick replaced wood, where concrete replaced mud. Further, deeper out of the forest and into a flat plane - I like flat things. Fuck trees. Fuck hills. Fuck mountains. Fuck cliffs.

Who builds inside of hills anyway? Into a fucking hollowed tree with the worms and shit?

  The strange houses, the hill-homes and tree-coves and all that weird shit kind of gave way to flat roads, where the animals didn’t have to work so hard to get through and carts rolled freely by. Oh and there were so many horses. A few stray cats too hanging by the cornices of weathered storehouses, extending their palms out and stretching their spines to find comfortable spots to sit on their belly and stare with sharp eyes at me. Dogs in alleys where curtains of drying clothes hid their starved and bony forms. This was a richer part of town but not by much. Everything still looked cheap, kind of old, like a polaroid photo of the place; a little blurry and a little messy and plenty dirty.

  My stomach growled. The sun approached the horizon.

  I may or may have not gone into a store, a little small shabby place where the windows were smudged with black finger prints and strange lettering and where the flooring was covered with creaking wood. I may or may not have gone through the spinning door, having alerted a bell and flung a little red sign above the door frame with even more strange lettering. Whatever language these people used was weird. The door settled behind me. Horses ran past outside, their sounds muted from within the building. The movement shook the ceiling and sent white particles down to the stalls and little tented fruits that made up the aisles of the place. It was nice hearing some quiet. The man behind the counter put two lazy eyes on me, raised his head and then set it back down to a book on the counter top. My stomach grumbled. Down in my pocket I looked for what I still had. A wallet, good. A phone, even better. Except it was dead. Water had gotten in it. I still had money though, plenty of that.

  Just grab and go, just grab and go. That’s what was in my head.

  I walked down the aisle, getting the piercing eyes off from the people on the streets. It felt like finally coming out of an iron maiden after a two week long vay-cay if you know what I mean.

  I walked through corners of the stores, my profile low with all kinds of assortments of bright colored prickly-spiky-spotted-soft fruits before me. Or vegetables. I didn’t really care. I picked them out at random, picking faster as my stomach growled louder and fiercer at me. Red foods that looked like strawberries, clumps of beads that looked like small tumors off a vine. I gulped them all down. A little tart, a little grainy and prickly with seeds. But they weren’t half bad and in a place full of bad, that was something to admire.I thought, at least.

  So’s I got these cancerous strawberries, and a few midget raspberries that were all dried and leathery. They tasted like orange and blackberry. Almost like… fruit roll ups. Holy hell, I’m salivating just remembering. Not the fruits - fuck the fruits. I’m talking about the roll ups. I loved those, especially when Nanny Nancy used to shove them in me to shut my crying up whenever she tried teaching me some shitty algebra or something.

  That’s not important. Sorry.

  So I got the cancer strawberries, the budget fruit roll ups, some prune looking things too.

  I picked ‘em, just put in my folded hands and carried as much as my palms and forearms could before they tumbled down like an avalanche off my chest. I went up the front, let the guy count them and he just gave me this awful look, started saying some shit and gestured with his fingers. I recognized that expression, his half-awake expression with his hands out and folding in. It was the universal gesture of someone who wanted money. Dad taught me that look a long time ago.

  So’s I took out my cards. I started getting a little shivery with the people looking outside from the windows, children screaming and laughing and running when I looked back. They all had looks of curiosity, of hostility, of disgust. Those freaks who looked like they were just cast onto Game of Thrones, looking at me like that? Holy fuck I felt my cheeks light up and my nose go numb. So I rushed into my pockets. Hands slipped. My credit cards flew out on the floor. I laid my berries onto the table, going; “I got you, don’t worry.”

  My magnet wallet kind of broke in half, all my shit was on the floor. So I was stuck collecting cards and stuffing them in my pockets. I felt the sweat down my forehead, my ears began to pulse with hot throbs.

  I sighed. My black credit card, it’s the thing I flash to have all my worries taken care of. The jail out of free card. The one that shuts people up with fuck-you money. That’s what my friends called it, at least.

  I flashed it at him.

He looked at the card, then up to me, sniffing his nose. Didn’t even blink. He just kept gesturing, the give-me-money gesture.

  My stomach fell. It was a black Chase credit card. Was he stupid or something? Machine broken? I looked around, there was no machine on the counter. Just a bag of coins. I breathed heavy. Flies came off the man’s face, buzzing and flying close to his eyeballs like the horses outside. He looked just as stupid as one too, with his long, narrow face. So I waved the card in front of his face again, because I thought maybe he just didn’t see it for what it was. He nodded his head and knocked my hand away, saying some shit in a voice growing more frustrated.

  The blood left my face. I’d like to say numbness is better than hotbloodedness. That’d be wrong though.

  “Do you have a tab?” I asked. And he went.

  “Gortha shi no yu’ut.”

  “What the fuck does that mean, man.” I said.

  It sounded bad, whatever he said. It sounded like Gortha-just-fuck-my-shit-up. Was it Finnish or something? Nah, I couldn’t be close to Finland.

  So's I kept saying - explaining, “I’ll pay you back, double.”

  He repeated the same thing. This time, his hands animated and balled into fists.

  So's I went; “Do you know who I am? I’m Virgil Darko.” I told him that, straight up. “Son of Henry Darko, CEO if Darko and Hegle Industries? The energy and modern ballistics manufactures, right? Rockets and stuff. Know them? They’re a big deal.”

  And he just…had nothing of it. He started rough-talking, loud and deep. The numbness spread out from my neck to my chest and the flies kept buzzing and the children looked outside the window laughing so loud that I could still hear the low and muffled heckle. A horse neighed. Hooves clapped, boots tapped.

  My FUCKING stomach grumbled again.

  I can’t stress this lightly because it’s imperative that you understand; things were just not going well and I was starving, man. And I figured, well, I’m fucking Virgil Darko, man. They know where to send the bill! I’d never had to sit down and pay once in my fucking life. I’ve always been the type of guy to just leave restaurants - bars, anything with the knowledge that the owner would know exactly who to send the bill to (with twice the pay in return, might I add).

  It’s jut the norm for me. Alright? I had every intention of paying. So I got the berries and I straight up said, “I’m Virgil Darko. Here’s my card. Send me the bill.” And I dropped my business card.

  I picked up my berries. I was stinky. Tired. Pissed. I just wanted some shade, some food and a phone. That’s it. I didn’t want much. Well, some nice bubbly would have been killer. Perignon would have been the best. By that point, I’d take any kind of champagne. Even water. God, some water would have been great.

  He pulled me by the cuff of my shirt, dragged my torso to him and readied his fist. I would have blocked but I had food in my hands. I dropped it all, I put up my hands. Too slow. He decked me straight in the face. Getting punched isn’t fun, J.P. Your senses get all fucked up. You get blurred vision, your noise drips and your eyes water. It’s really, really, unfun.

  And I wasn’t going to let some old fuck with a horse face do that to me.

  So what I’m about to tell you counts as self-defense, right?

Like, especially if you lose, right? Not that I did.

  Well. I punched him, straight in the right cheek, it slide and got the rest of his slobbering mismatched teeth. His long white noise-hairs brushed against my knuckles. One clean hit, knocked him the fuck out. He fell, hard. The old horse-face with his tongue out and his receding hairline slicked back towards the floor. The planks were raised where his body had landed. He was hefty and considering we were four weight-classes apart, I think I did pretty good.

  What fucked me up was the other douche bag who cleaned me in the back of the head. Yeah. Yeah. Had no honor, that one. Don’t ask me for his name though. Never asked, couldn’t remember if I did. Didn’t even see his face.

  Yep. Yep. That’s how it happened, one hundred percent. Self-defense for trying to buy some food.

  All I remembered was I was dragged out the store, kicked in the ass onto the wood and conrete. That was about the time I got real tired of this Renaissance fair shit. I struggled to stand, my head still a haze.

  Some tin head, budget iron-man looking fuck came around. He grabbed me by the arms (my shoulders still hurt. That’s a police brutality thing, right?) and threw my ass into a scaffold. A scaffold, looked like something out of a gimp sex-dungeon.

  Oh boy. I’m telling you, it’s true. A scaffold. That’s a human rights violation. We can clean these fuckers out. It’s not enough I get their heads. I want the heads of their kids, the heads of their dogs, the heads of their mailman. You reading this, J.P?

  They put me in a fucking scaffold. The cold metal choked and I got the prickly pain all across my limbs like thumbtacks dragged along my body. It was like that for two hours, my nerves getting choked. My back hurt from the ninety degree angle they had me stand in. I was there, a public show forced to keep my legs up while my neck and arms were locked and sealed in that thing. Couldn’t move, couldn’t do much but grit my teeth and watch people.

  ‘People’ is too good a word for these animals. Animals, laughing at me. The potato sack wearing fucks. Speaking crying laughing whatever gobblety-gobble shit language fuck fuck fuck them

  They publicly humiliated me, a Darko. They threw food at me. Rotten food. That’s a bio-hazard. You could smell the sickly-sweet scent of it, those strawberries and prunes and midget-raspberries. They pooled around my feet black and white and sludge-looking, like offal left to ferment in the sun for days. The type of shit even vultures don’t eat. I looked like a waste dump with the mountain growing underneath me.

  It was hours in this thing before they took the chains off the side of the scaffold. The thing lifted. My stiff neck and wrists ached and from the corner of my eye, in this little plaza (that’s where the scaffold was, an intersection at the heart of the city) with all the stands and carts and horses and buck-teeth fucks with their heads pulled back in laughter - amongst this crowd, a little pudgy shit was bent over holding his gut. He had a rotten fruit in his hand.

  I’d just come out of this thing after hours, my body painted like like a Pallock all white and red and yellow and blue from fruits and this little freckled prick, this pig-nose shit head with beady eyes so small they looked like buttons was laughing. This kid came up to me, couldn’t have been no older than fifteen years and spat right on my shirt.

  It was already fucked, why’d he have to make it worse? My Louis Vitton. The black and gold one, my favorite shirt.

  I loved that shirt, man.

  And this black mop head kid spat on it.

  So’s I picked up a handful of slop of white fuzzy fruit. I threw it. Right in his pig face. He looked at it for a moment, down on his rags. He lifted his hands and started rubbing his eyes. He cried.

  I heard metal clinging behind me. My stomach dropped. Those fucking iron-man cosplayers or whatever, they grabbed me.

  I kicked my feet. They held strong. One of them hit me across the face. I looked at him, he had just an empty look on his face, worse than the horse or the old man, like his eyes weren’t even looking at a human. His big, brown eyes, faced the horizon right past me. Like I wasn’t even there.

  My head was dazed, I couldn’t push me feet into the floor. I was still seeing doubles. Blood trickled down the side of my head, I mumbled. “I’ll sick J.P on your ass.”

  And then he went across the plaza, past a fountain. I was practically lugged on his shoulder the whole time. Metal creaked, something opened. He threw me in the cell. The bars surrounded me from four sides, inside a little cage. Like a bird.

  The floor was full of hay.

  I found a corner and looked across. There was a looney there, screamin’ shit at me.

  And this is where things got worse, J.P. They got much, much worse.

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