Lights flickered in the basement, casting a dim, yellow hue. A lean man sat beside a table. His left
eye was hollow and bloodshot, and the other was nothing left but a hole of
tissues and scars. His skin was as wrinkled as an aged man's, yet looked
far worse with its sickly tone and collection of long scars and purple bruises.
In the man's right hand he clutched a cheap, plastic ball point pen, and
in front of him, on the table, was a piece of blank paper.
The man sat there and remained motionless for a long
time. Every once in a while, he would press the pen against the paper,
hands trembling, but at the last second he would withdraw as if struck by new
thoughts. Tears welled up in his eyes as the man remembered.
Finally, resolute, he cursed and started writing:
Dear Mr. Devans:
First, thank you for your hospitality. You are very generous to allow me to stay in
your house for this night. So few
understanding people like you exist today, and it shames me to think that I
have deceived you earlier today, when I said that my name was Robert Watson. I did so because I fear that I may startle you
with my real name, as it did many others.
My real name is Robert Clemens.
Please do not startle at the sight of that
name. Much of what is said about me is
untrue. You probably know me as a cold-blooded
murderer, but I’m not who the media and through it, James Carter, say I
am. However, everybody believed the news,
the televised information, and the billionaire who just lost his innocent son. William Carter, in fact, was not that
innocent, at least, less innocent than I was.
I once lived a peaceful life, contrary to
popular belief. I did not draw pictures
of corpses and blood when I was primary school; I have never used drugs; I did
not obtain my first job through bribery, and I most certainly did not design
the Nelson Bridge with the intention for it to collapse.
Twenty years, six
months, and three days ago, I was a young engineer with ambitious dreams and a
bright future. I joined the team of
experts who were designing and helped constructing the Nelson Bridge along with
several of my close colleagues. Near its
completion, we held a great party, and we drank. The champagne wasn’t enough to make us fools,
but it did cost me dearly.
I was walking home
sometime after midnight when I passed by a small road. Street lights were dim and orange and it
started to rain lightly. While I was
walking by a quiet road, I heard arguing voices coming from a dark alley. I tried to keep my distance. However, no sooner than I walked to the other
side of the street did a red sports car shoot out, zipping past me. Its side windows were rolled down, and the
driver, a woman with tears rolling down her eyes, was shouting to a drunken
young man behind the car. From the bits and
pieces I heard, the man seemed to have had an affair with the woman and
recently broke up. But who the woman was
is not relevant. It was the man behind
her, William Carter, who ruined my entire life.
With his ruined tuxedo reeking
with the smell of alcohol and vomit, he sprinted forward, but the car had sped
up. He yelled after her, calling her
names in obscene language. Then, the
brat noticed me and swung around, his left hand holding an expensive bottle of
liquor. “What are you looking at?” I could feel his frustration and anger heightened
by alcohol. His eyes were those of a madman,
wide and blazing with fire.
Under normal
circumstances, I might have backed down and left, but I was bold from the drink
earlier, and looked at him with slight amusement. “Nothing, just what’s there.” I replied with
a hint of a smile on my face.
He froze in disbelief,
as if he was unused to someone who dared to mock him. Then the fire returned. He growled, and screamed at me: “Y’a think
this is funny? I’ll show you what’s
funny!” Suddenly, he charged at me with
the glass bottle, and swung it at my head.
I could only defend myself, and attempted to block the bottle with my
left hand. The glass shattered against
my wrist. Pain shot through my body, and I could feel my bone crack. Anger swelled up. I lashed out with a furious kick that caught
him square in the chest. “Get off me,
you drunk lunatic!” I shouted back.
He hollered in pain, and
charged at me again with the strength of a wild beast. He took my punch on the shoulder, but hit me
twice in the stomach and knocked me onto the ground. He pressed his arm against my throat, and
pushed downward, his eyes wild and bloodshot, his hair a dangling mess of brown
and yellow. “Laugh again! Go, laugh!” He
snarled and pressed harder with his elbow.
My right hand, between my chest and his arm, struggled helplessly
against his weight. I couldn’t breathe,
and the pain in my throat was unbearable.
I could no longer see clearly, and the darkening world started spinning
on its axle. Desperate, I ignored the
lesser pain in my left hand and scrambled around. The second I got hold of something solid, I
picked it up and smashed it with all my strength against the side of his
head.
When my consciousness returned,
I noticed a heavy weight on my body – a corpse.
William Carter was dead. In my
frantic reach for a weapon, I had grasped a glass shard from the William’s
liquor bottle and drove its edge into his temple. The realisation of a killing dawned over me,
and I scrambled up and left the corpse of William Carter, whose name I didn’t
even know at the time.
One day later, I was
confronted by the police and was charged with the killing of the son of one of
the richest and most influential man in the United States of America. Two more days later, I was brought to
court. James Carter, of course, had
probably the best lawyers money could hire, and, from what I know now, also threatened
any potent lawyer who might dare to assist me.
Of course there was a lawyer for me during the trial, but he was next to
useless. He acted like an incompetent
fool, stuttered frequently and made unconvincing arguments as directed by James
Carter. In the end, I was charged with
manslaughter, and was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
I was almost glad. It seemed like a miracle that Carter wasn’t
able to convict me of murder and sentence me to death. For that brief while, I felt the faintest glimmer
of hope, that life was still not over, that James Carter would leave me alone,
and that I could restart my life after imprisonment. How wrong could I be? How little did I know the wraith of the mad
father who was willing to, and had the power to, do anything to avenge his son?
James Carter made sure
that I lived as miserably as possible in prison. He, like most of the billionaires out in the
world, knew some people who tread on the dark side of the society. Secretly, as to not ruin his reputation, he paid
these people some hefty sums so that I could suffer in the cells, and I
did. Over the course of twenty years, my
lungs were punctuated by broken ribs four times; all the toes on my left foot
were crushed, and my left eye was penetrated by a plastic spoon. I was beaten, humiliated and tortured beyond
what I thought was possible, and the guards did not even glance in my direction. There were no friends in prison, no ally of
any sort, and I could only wait. In the darkness
of my cell, beside spider webs and rat holes, under the leaky toilets upstairs,
I counted every second that passed, and how much longer I still had to stay in
that horrifying place.
While I was in prison,
Carter also bought various newspapers and TV channels with one purpose – to
tell the world about the man who “murdered” his son. In the publicized story regarding the death
of William Carter, Robert Clemens was cruel alcoholic who, after one night’s
drinking, stumbled over the poor William Carter and killed him in cold blood. You know this story well, Mr. Devans. You must have heard it over and over again in
the last twenty years. I think that most
people who watched the television or paid attention to the news could probably
recite word for word how I impaled William Carter over and over again with
glass shards from the a heavy wine bottle that I was drinking from.
Not only did they
uncover the truth of the homicide, James Carter’s writers were incredibly
clever and astute detectives. They discovered
a side of me that not even I know of. They
were able to contact my elementary teacher, who then swore that I had dark
thoughts at the age of seven and drew pictures after pictures of corpses and
dead people. She even recalled that I
once cruelly impaled a hamster on a tree to observe how it would die. “Drug addicts” from my high school were
invited to news channels and many schools to speak about bullying and the
effect of drugs. They moaned and cried
about peer pressure and how I forced them to take drugs. Later, my university openly declared that I am
not a worthy student of theirs, and decided to revoke my master’s degree in
engineering. A woman that I had never
met cried about how I abused her and caused the death of our unborn child.
Every day in prison was
hell, and I only survived twenty years and finished serving my sentence because
of a tiny hope that there would be an end to this torture. I was far too optimistic. Twenty years is ample time for something to
change, and the public’s opinion is always the easiest and fastest to do
so. Whatever insights and facts the
people had about my killing of William Carter were washed away or altered, like
pebbles at the bottom of a roaring river or leaves in a windy storm. All that people know now is that I am an inhumane
villain, a fact that James Carter spent twenty years engraving into people’s
minds, an identity that I could never shake off again. Anywhere I went, people who recognized me openly
displayed their looks of disgust and stayed as far away as they could. Even my best friends twenty years ago don’t
trust me anymore. One even demanded to
know if I had really tampered with the blueprint of the Nelson Bridge. Was he not there when we worked on the bridge? Did we not all agree on a design before
starting to build the megaproject?
Even my family shunned
me after twenty years of brainwashing. My
parents died years ago, and my sister sent me back to the streets after giving
me what was left of my old clothes, three hundred dollars, and a speech on how
I would be a bad influence on her children.
My girlfriend twenty years ago is married, and hung up the second she
realised whom she was talking to. All my
ties to the world I once thought I knew were cut. Nobody wanted affiliation with a murderer who
deserves to rot in hell.
Clemens withdrew his pen, his eye red and
watery. He bit his lips until he tasted
blood, and he gripped the pen so hard that he would have broken it if his hand
wasn’t so weak from malnutrition. He let
out a laugh, but there was no joy in it. Tears dropped silently onto the paper as he
remembered the way he was treated after he left prison. Clemens choked back a sob, and continued
writing:
Is there still hope, Mr.
Devans, that people may see the truth as it is, undistorted and unbiased? Can people’s eyes be opened again? The world is cruel, but do we have to lose something
as important as the right to truth and the right to decide for ourselves what
is right and what is wrong?
I see no hope, Mr.
Devans, at least, no hope for me.
Perhaps someday the people’s eyes will be reopened, and they will
finally see the real world, not the one the media fashions for the population,
the one that the rich and powerful paints, but that day will never come for me,
and I cannot carry on any longer. Living
itself is a burden, and I see no light on the end of the tunnel. Even if James Carter dies this day, I will
never have my reputation back. I will
never have my life back.
Farewell.
Thank you,
Robert Clemens
Robert Clemens stood up calmly and blew out the
candles. The basement was enveloped in
darkness. In pitch black, he climbed up
the creaking stairs with steady steps. Thud. Thud. Thud. Clemens quietly left the letter on the table closest
to the front door, and exited the house. The door creaked behind him.
Outside, the night sky was dark and grim. The moon was nowhere to be seen, and even the
stars were hidden behind thick layers of clouds. Clemens looked up, smiled bitterly, and continued
walking, his slender figure soon engulfed by the darkness.
