Red Sky: Chapter 3
The next time Stone arrived I was prepared. It was a week later. I think it was a week later. He made loud conversation with the guard down the hallway as he approached. I made sure to scramble and claim a place on the bed before he reached me.
“You have a visitor,” the guard announced as he unlocked the cell door. Stone was behind him, a thin wooden chair in his right hand. Stone carried the chair into my cell and sat down across from me.
He was humming a tune I didn’t recognize. He seemed in a remarkably good mood. His broad face grew broader as he studied the left cuff of his suit. There was a loose thread hanging, barely visible. He played with the thread, starting to pull it and then stopped. This went on a little too long. He was waiting for me to say something.
He brushed lint from his right thigh and the humming stopped and he cleared his throat. He looked at me. I had been staring at him the entire time. He looked above my head to something at the top of the wall behind me. I can’t imagine what it was, there was nothing on that wall except cheap paint.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re innocent.”
Something in my character made me want to contradict him.
“Is anybody innocent?”
“That’s what a guilty man would say.”
“I’m not guilty.”
“You didn’t kill her?”
“No.”
Stone rocked back in his flimsy chair. I could see one of its legs bow under the pressure of his movements. He looked confident.
“How could you possibly know you didn’t kill her when you have no memory of that night?”
I looked sideways to hide my surprise, which I suppose showed my surprise. How did he know I couldn’t remember? Had I told him on our first visit? Had I ever told anybody? Did I talk in my sleep? Was he reading my mind, my dreams?
“Like I said last time, judges don’t like to be lied to.”
“I haven’t seen a judge.”
“You won’t.”
“What?”
“You won’t see a judge. I took care of that.”
“What did you take care of?”
“Your trial. You’ve been convicted.”
“There was a trial?”
“It’s over.”
“How?”
“I saved your life.”
“I wasn’t allowed to testify?”
“It wasn’t needed.”
“Or make a statement in my defense?”
“The evidence was overwhelming.”
“Aren’t you suppose to defend me?”
“We avoided the death penalty.”
“What if I am innocent?”
“You’re not.”
My feet shifted on the ground. I wanted to stand up and run. To escape my cell and my prison and my judgement. Stone started to talk again, I looked to the other side, to the guard standing at attention outside the bars of my cell. He was listening to our conversation. I can’t remember his face. I turned my entire head to look at him. In my memory he has no face. He was staring back at me without any eyes, with no mouth, with no nose or any features at all; a blank face, a ghost or a shadow.
I turned back and looked at Stone my lawyer, my savior. His broad face was still broad, so broad he was almost smiling. And then his face started to disappear. His eyes were the first to go as they sunk deep into his head followed by his eyelashes, both swallowed by the skin of his cheeks and his brow. His nose shrunk to the point it was hardly a noticeable bump. The creases and lines and wrinkles in his face stretched and smoothed until the only thing left was his mouth, which was still moving, still describing everything he had done to save my life. All of the clever arguments, all of the people he had persuaded, all of the sacrifices he made for me.
I focused on that mouth as it kept talking, its teeth disappearing and then the tongue disappearing, only the lips remained as he said his final words to me.
“You have been sentenced to five years of hard labor on a distant moon colony. After those five years, you will be allowed to return to Earth and serve out the rest of your sentence. It’s a good deal, a fair deal, a better deal than you deserve.”
And then just like the guard’s face and Stone’s face and all of the details of everything I had ever believed I had known or seen or thought or felt, my previous existence disappeared.
I would spend the rest of my life trying to get it back.