It is very cold in this cell. But not dark. The lights stay on all day and all night, stark, fluorescent, and humming. But still, the darkness is with me here. Inside me. It has not left. If you are unlucky enough to have known the dark as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for darkness is a movable feast.
Paradoxically, I find that I don’t mind the dark. Other things bother me. There are so many things ahead of me, I can hardly wait for them to arrive. I see now that my journey into the light has only just begun. Eugene O’Neill called his autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night. Mine will be the inverse.
Monty tells me that my predicament is the topic du jour. I read the papers and see an out-of-date photograph of myself on the television news. So be it. I know that I will emerge from this unsullied-reborn and new. The process has begun. The stage is set. They have finished with the process of voir dire, jury selection. Monty tells me voir dire is a French expression. It means “to speak the truth.” We shall see, we shall see.
I believe that I am running a fever. My head is hot and my body aches. Dreams stalk my nights. In the mornings, I awake shivering, my thin mattress soaked through with foul-smelling night sweat. And what is worse, I remember the dreams.
They were saying that I deliberately used Albert to kill Rachel. That I used Albert as an instrument of death. That is what they were saying. Now they say I killed her with my own hands. They don’t know yet that Rachel was dead to me for years before she died. And Albert, Albert is my son. He is also Rachel’s son. He is a merging of the two of us. The sum of the parts that does not equal the whole.
I feel the fever on me again; my thoughts grow unclear, confused.