It's a strange sensation indeed to know that you're in pain and yet not feel anything of it. Once again I found myself ten-thousand leagues under the sea, my limbs as dead heavy as sandbags. Nostrils clogged by swelling blood, I could barely breathe, and what little mental capacity remained was given solely to reviewing my hellish predicament. Those sadistic guards had beaten me within an inch of my life, and as I continued to lay incapacitated, thoughts spiralling ever darker, I wondered why they couldn't have finished the job.
Days and nights meshed into unmeaning, consciousness and void intertwined. I heard inmates chanting my name and watched—from various angles—my stepmother kissing Doctor Wheeler as the guards bludgeoned me on the floor. They split my head open and from that wound trooped an army of ants, each of them wearing a tiny a red trench coat. I called out for Desiree, for Klokov, but nobody came. Had it all been delirium? The spider in my cell descended on a web and told me to hang in there.
Eventually I was visited by Winston Lane, the lawyer. He told me I was to appear in court, just as soon as the judge presiding signed off on my physical and mental readiness. "You'll be arraigned at the Crown," he said. "It's a formality at this point but procedure must be followed."
I blinked at the harsh light spilling down from the ceiling but could not block the rays with my hands for the handcuffs affixing me to the table. "And what, pray tell, would that she-devil enjoy accusing me now?" I asked. "Did I steal her knickers again? Or perhaps she takes issue with my peeping on her and Doctor Wheeler?"
"Don't be assured." Winston Lane was not amused. From his briefcase he extracted a document from which he read the following out loud: "I, Isaac Blaze, in full cognisance, do hereby declare and confess to the crime for which I have been duly accused. I am given to remorse for my heinous actions and seek not clemency but understanding and consideration of my personal medical conditions by the court of appeals. I am deeply disturbed and regret fully this most egregious and sinister act of violence which has tragically resulted in the death of Doctor Lawrence Wheeler. I beseech his family—"
"You think I killed Wheeler?!" I exclaimed.
"I beseech his family," Winston Lane pressed on, casting a disgusted eye upon me, "for the terrible suffering and lifelong misery that I have caused them. Sincerely…" He pulled a pen from his jacket and tapped on the dotted line.
"You're insane," I said.
"For god's sake just sign it, Isaac."
I swore at him and immediately two prison guards encroached upon our table. Lane turned to stave them off but left me precious little time to make heads-or-tails of what the hell was going on.
"Look, I don't have time for this," said Lane. "If it were up to me, you'd rot away in this place or worse—as much I've said to your stepmother. But for some unknown reason she continues to have pity on you. I suggest you take advantage of it." He extended the pen again. "Now will you please accede to reason or do these gentlemen need to treat you as hostile?"
"You bet your powdered arse, I'm hostile," I said. "You're accusing me of a crime I didn't commit."
"Good grief. Are you so far fallen from your father's tree that you lack even the spine to admit your sins?"
I didn't fall for that goad, replying simply that there was no blood on my hands. But Lane jumped down my throat and decried the exact contrary. He informed me, in no uncertain tones, that the blackjack guards had given sworn statements of the scene: they'd found me kneeling over the doctor's corpse, my red-soiled hands—and mouth—presenting almost vampiric predilection, thus warranting the extreme force with which they had subdued me. Footage from the office security camera would back this up.
"That's ridiculous!" I said, but my aghast seemed to quiver in the face of Lane's conviction. If any blood had stained my hands, I could only assume that it had transferred from the closet door handle or perhaps the corpse itself when I'd collapsed to the floor. But Winston Lane wasn't interested in my theories. "Do you always fall mouth first?" he snarked.
"That was lipstick!" I cried to which he gave me a look that quite frankly I couldn't chip him for. "No, listen, you idiot. I got that from the other doctor when she kissed me." I put the whole thing across in as lucid a way as my confounded disposition would allow but the more I spoke the more ridiculous it sounded. My audience summarily lost, I pounded the table with my fists, drilling home the salient point: "It was the other doctor. Desiree. She's the culprit."
"Stop wasting my time," said Lane. He bade me to sign the confession or else face further jail time.
"I'm telling you I didn't do it. It was her. It had to be."
"Enough!" said Lane. He was shouting now, his tiny collar button threatening to burst as his throat toaded with bile. "Desiree du Coeur hasn't been out of her cell in over ten years. I don't even know how you've heard of her."
He went on to berate me something wicked, each hateful word like a chisel hammered upon my skin until soon enough my entire being had cracked like his croc-skin briefcase. Desiree du Coeur? An inmate? My head swam in confusion. I asked if she was the person in cell three but Lane had reached the end of his tether. Slamming his pen onto the typed confession, he demanded I sign it right then.
"Never," I told him. "And you can't make me."
"Oh yes I can," he said. "I'm your lawyer."
"Over my dead body. I don't want you anywhere near me."
Again he swore at me, intimating how little I understood, how lucky I was not to have a court appointed representative who'd likely have already signed a plea bargain—sans consent. I didn't disagree but given the choice between them I'd take option three. "I'll represent myself," I told him.
"You can't represent yourself. The court won't accept the competency of a lunatic."
"Please," I said, holding up an automatic hand. "We don't use that term."
That did it. Lane rose to his feet, swelling upwards like some angry phantasm. Snatching the papers from the table, he stuffed them into his briefcase, and, venom spewing, he daggered the pen nib towards me and told me to go to hell. I bid him an equally destitute departure and that his services would never again required. "I'll be just fine without you."