Eyes, and Those Who See

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.