Chapter Text
As he sat in the old-fashioned wooden chair, staring blankly through the glass pane and into the room with an empty bed, Simon Blackquill thought of how, a few months ago, that bed would have been his to die on. In prison he used to envision himself being led by kind-hearted nurses, smiling despite the circumstances, into the very room that he was currently fixated at, and then he would be reassured that everything would be alright, that the only pain he would feel would be the pain of the needle and nothing more. And then they would ask him if he had any last words, and he would shake his head—he spent a considerable amount of time thinking about this, and finally he decided not to have any last words at all. It would be easier that way. For some reason, in his imagination, there would only be Fool Bright sitting there in the viewing room. Sometimes, even now as a free man, that very scenario would return as a dream, and in the end Fool Bright was always smiling.
And then Simon thought of the man who was going to be in that bed.
Whenever he was given the opportunity, Simon would launch into a story about his inmates. This inmate was a surgeon. That inmate was a ninja. This inmate said this, another inmate said that. But despite his seemingly endless amount of prison accounts, most of which were about the antics of his inmates, he had never told anyone about Pascal Maitland. There was never an opportunity to talk about Pascal Maitland. There was never an opening in a conversation that was odd or disturbing enough to slip in a story about Pascal Maitland. If one were to be given a brief glance at Pascal Maitland, it was more likely to deduce how odd he was, rather than his apparent criminality. He was an outcast among outcasts; other inmates avoided him, either out of fear or disgust or both. He was the only inmate who had the privilege of always having less than five people sitting on the same table with him at the cafeteria if he had been the first one to arrive, and among those five people, only Simon who would always be there by his own accord. Pascal Maitland occupied the cell in front of him, and for a very long time, he was the only person Simon could consider a friend—or at least something close to it.
Pascal must have felt the same way.
A bailiff knocked on Simon’s office one afternoon stating that he had a request from an inmate. In the bailiff’s hand was a letter, enclosed in a white envelope, and written on the envelope was ‘Simon Blackquill’ in thin, messy letters.
“An inmate has requested that we give this to you as one of his last requests,” said the bailiff. “He also requested your presence at his execution. It’s next week on Friday.”
It’s next week on Friday. The bailiff said it like he was talking about a school talent show.
“Thank you. You may leave.” said Simon. This wasn’t a letter he wanted to read under the supervision a stranger, knowing full well who had sent it, and the bailiff nodded before closing the door again. Simon grabbed a nearby letter opener, seamlessly cut the envelope open—he had been practicing this since he was a boy—and its contents fell onto his desk and floor, the yellowed but neatly folded journal pages looking out of place amongst his white, fresh-from-the-print papers. But there was one sheet of paper from the envelope that wasn’t a journal page nor yellowed, and that was the first sheet of paper from the envelope that Simon read. The thin, messy letters returned again, and a familiar voice returned to his head, a voice that recited the letter with a morbid quality Simon had grown accustomed to back in the clink.
Dear Simon,
Hello. It’s me, Pascal. Pascal Maitland.
I’m going to be executed next week. They’re going to let me eat anything I want for my last supper, and I think I’m going to try that noodle joint you like. I’ll order two bowls of soba and leave the other one for Melchisedec in case my cell doesn’t get occupied for a while. I read somewhere that rats can only last 14 days without food. He squeaks more often now; I think he knows I’m leaving him. I’ve been leaving more bread crumbs for him so he would start thinking more about food and not me.
By the way, I’ve torn out some pages out of my journal for you. I used to write every day, but I only sent you some of the pages from after you came. I already burnt the ones before that since I have no one to give them to, and I’ve already requested that I be buried with some of the pages with you in them—the ones I didn’t send you. If you don’t want to read the ones I sent you, then I completely understand. I don’t even want to read them, and I wrote them, so why should you? But just in case you wanted to read them, I already sent them to you.
Please come to my execution. I don’t have any family left and it wouldn’t look good if no one came. I know the press would be there and if no one were there it would be like Lee Harvey Oswald’s funeral where the reporters on scene end up being the pallbearer because no one showed up to carry his casket and I don’t want that. Anyway, how are you, Simon? I hope you’re doing well. I’ll see you next Friday. We can see each other then.
Pascal Maitland
For some reason, the light-hearted and yet bindingly compulsory nature of the letter did not strike Simon as odd, not even slightly. That was just how Pascal was. The word ‘contradictory’ hung over his head like his very own Sword of Damocles, except it wasn’t a ticking time bomb of peril. The timer had long gone off.
And so, Simon sat there in the viewing room, where he would soon witness the slow, peaceful death of Pascal Maitland. Pascal was right—there were indeed reporters, and they filled in the room all at once as if they were waiting for each other to come, and once they were all there they pointed fingers to decide who would enter the room first. Of course, none of that happened. That was just what Pascal would imagine happening. When the flock of cameramen and reporters flooded the room, they immediately took pictures of Simon Blackquill, the infamous Twisted Samurai, who was apparently the to-be executed’s only friend in prison and vice versa. They asked him questions, and he either ignored them or answered with one or two words. It was easy enough to guess how the press would portray them, if the pictures made it on print—‘Known goon pays hellish imp one last visit’.
Pascal had yet to arrive. Simon was no longer the center of attention, as the vultures were busy with themselves, making phone calls about other affairs or fixing their double-breasted suits or re-applying their lipstick—the last two, Simon didn't understand why, since none of them were going to be on camera unless they wanted to take Pascal’s place. He took this opportunity to fish out the crumpled envelope he had deposited in his pocket, where he began to re-read Pascal’s entries, from the day they met to the day Simon left prison.
DAY 481
It’s been fifteen days. Fifteen days since they got Mac out of the cell only to lock him up in another room so they could give him the one, only and last injection in Mac’s miserable life that he didn’t inject himself. (He didn’t look like someone who was ever vaccinated.) And apparently, fifteen days was all Los Angeles needed for another criminal to turn up, get caught, and take Mac’s place, which is the cell right in front of mine, the furthest cell from the left—my left. Fifteen days. Two weeks and one day. Sometimes you just wonder if being incarcerated is as scandalous as people make it out to be, seeing how increasingly common it’s getting.
This time, the guy’s name is Simon. When he came into the block, some of the others hooted and cheered and laughed in their cells, pointing their huge, ugly-nailed fingers in the guy’s face, like a bunch of high school jocks making fun of some nerd who just got thrown into the dumpster. “I knew you were nasty!” screamed Raymond Glover. I never liked Raymond Glover. I never heard Raymond Glover—I always hear what he has to say, even if I don’t want to, because of his booming voice—refer to anyone as ‘nasty’. So, I thought, whoever Raymond Glover thought was ‘nasty’ was someone I would like to befriend. And it wasn’t just Raymond Glover. Every inmate seemed to have a personal vendetta against this guy, even though, when he entered Mac’s old cell, despite having shackled wrists and a cocky smirk on his face, I could tell right away he wasn’t a criminal, and I know people like Raymond Glover knew that too.
They laughed at him and acted like they knew all along, for some reason, but I know they were surprised. I thought, this guy must’ve been some kind of snitch or something, if he looked like an honour student but had an entire cell block of criminals against him.
“Hello,” I greeted Simon.
He turned around.
“Hello.” He said with a strange snort. “How nice it is to see there’s someone with courtesy here.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just nodded. Then I remembered what other inmates asked me when I first got here. It seemed like the right thing to ask.
“What are you in for?”
Fresh meats like Simon, who don’t look like criminals but are in fact criminals, always take a while to answer that question. I’ve talked to enough new cellmates, enough new inmates sitting alone in the cafeteria to know that. Most new Simon-type inmates can’t wrap their heads around the fact that they were now the lowest of all lows, below the Sudra, equal only to the rat that I sometimes see hanging around, and even it runs away when I try to touch it. But Simon wasn’t like that.
Edogawa Ranpo, a Japanese mystery writer whose pseudonym is a play on the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he cites as his greatest inspiration, once wrote a story about a guy who got caught lying about murdering someone precisely because he was too good at lying. The story is called The Psychological Test. The part of the story that reminded me of Simon is when the detective in charge of the case finally decided that he would hold some sort of psychological test to determine the true culprit—the criminal was a cunning one, and he almost got away with the entire ordeal if it weren’t for this little test. The test was a word association test. The test goes like this; the subject is given a list of words and they are told to say the first thing that comes to mind. A large portion of the words are unrelated to the crime, but sometimes words that do have a connection to the crime are slipped in to throw the subject off guard. The longer it takes for the subject to respond, the more likely it is that they were lying. Hearing of this, the criminal did his homework and practiced with a stopwatch, and ingenious as he was, he managed to ‘get used to’ the test. When the day of the test came, his results were bright, too bright, as he was too quick to answer the words, particularly the words that are related to the crime. And then the detective and the psychologist who administered the test cornered him. And then he confessed everything. What a dumbass.
Everything about Simon was wrong. His smirk was wrong. It was too cocky and too confident and too arrogant. His answer was too quick and too rehearsed. I wanted to tell him that, I wanted to tell him about the story of the criminal who was too good at lying, when he said “Murder” like he was playing the lightning round in a late night quiz show, but I was too confused to say anything other than “Oh, me too”. When he didn’t say anything, I thought I should keep up the conversation. “Lots of people here are murderers too.”
Then he snorted, and that was wrong too, and then I knew why it sounded strange the first time I heard it—it wasn’t real.
“I should know. I prosecuted them.”
“You’re a prosecutor?”
“Well, I was.” Then he laughed like he had a rat living inside his mouth and it had made him choke.
“You laugh a lot,” I said.
“I find it hard not to nowadays, ever since my mentor died.”
“Did you do that?” I asked.
He looked at me and smiled.
“Yes.”
I didn’t like his smile. It was the biggest lie of all. I pretended that I didn’t hear him and played with my fingers.
I must have bored him, because he turned his back against me and laid down on the bed. And then I heard the rat; except it didn’t sound as squeaky as it usually does. Instead it sounded like someone was using a sponge to clean the floor; only the sponge had a strange, deep squeak that turned into sucking noises once in a while, like it's vacuuming all the dirt away and getting itself clogged in the process. I closed my ears with my hands, but the noise didn’t go away. If anything, it got louder. My skin felt itchy and my eyes started to hurt the harder I tried to clench them shut.
“Shut up, Melchisedec!” I yelled. And it stopped squeaking.
I only found out that Simon's name was Simon a while after that little talk, when the guards called out his name in the middle of the night—Simon Blackquill. Now every time I see him, I can only see a spectacled chipmunk.
By the time he had finished reading the first entry Pascal had sent him, the other side of the room remained deserted, while Simon’s side of the room only continued to swell with reporters and police officials and more reporters. Pascal would have hated to see them.
With that thought in mind, Simon began to read the next page.