“Not revelry do I seek, but pure sorrow.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The walls of the Pétrer Police Station were all white with its breaks created by photographs of men and women who had achieved notoriety in the justice sphere. Every one of them had the same expression as if they were manufactured from the same factory. Their stern lips, brows coming together in uncanny ways, eyes drunk in prideful sense of power looked down to Nathaniel. He was sitting in front of the officer whose shirt’s buttons were straining from the pressure of the belly. The officer was flipping through the file slowly, even more at those pages where Nathaniel’s photograph hanged in the upper left, making sure by tearing them if it will come out.

“What do you do, Mr. Ambert?” the officer asked, closing the file in a rapid movement.

“Me… oh, currently nothing in terms of job job,” he replied, scratching the bridge of his nose.

“Then how do you get the food?”

“I do a thing or two, packing stuff, filling gas, stuff like that.”

“That is what I asked you, didn’t I?”

“You asked about job, these are not my job.”

The officer looked at Nathaniel with brooding eyes, seemingly perplexed at the waste the youth was spurning out, and let out a conscious sigh that retained the cigarette smell that he so cherished.

“Why did you steal it?” asked the officer, wiping his balding head with his swollen yellow hand.

“I wouldn’t call it steal.”

“I am not asking you the verb.”

“To write.”

“To write what? Cheap little advertisements for the procurement of Cannabis.”

Nathaniel’s body ached, his head became heavy with the drumming lights hanging overhead, the glaring eyes shooting arrows which agonized the epidermis, of which he had ceased to take care of a long ago.

“Write my novel,” he answered, adjusting himself in the wooden chair.

“Now you are a writer too!”

“I was trying to be.”

“What else you try to be? A mugger?”

“Look officer, they hadn’t had any use for it. It sat like Narcissus staring at the ceiling, eaten by dust and wind. I took it because it needed to be with me. I had written pages over it. I felt good, it had its own soothing sounds.”

The officer didn’t listen to the ‘gibberish’ yelled by Nathaniel, that’s what officer Courant did when the accused went into the landscape of paganism, science or alchemy. Officer Courant didn’t have a self-indulgent persona or a conscience that was at the depth of a forgotten well, but listening to the pity problems of degraded, decomposed individuals had shrink his mind in a proportion that only made room for the wish of crispness of solitude. He opened the yellow stack of papers and went checking through the details as if the ink will be ripped by the paper if he didn’t.

“Where do you live, Mr. Ambert? Or, you are going to tell me you sleep in whosever apartment which got a defective lock?” the officer asked wetting his finger to turn the sheets.

“Grande Complex, Alessandro Arrondissement, Séanche.”

“I have eyes, Mr. Ambert; where do you actually live?”

Nathaniel had his eyes inflamed but the redness deepened at the stream of questions that were falling, he remembered Niagara, only the water falling wasn’t colorless, all grey, a grey thick mud. Nathaniel just threw his hands outward, threading the mouth, so as to save himself of being drowned in the grey mud.

“Why you came here then? I reckon a financial hub must have more opportunities than a city like New Athens.”

“It has. Only not for people like us.”

“More surveillance?”

“More restlessness.”

“Well, be it so then, now you’re here, and I am afraid you have to drown on these stones, at least for some weeks say,” said officer Courant, closing the file, rubbing his hands on his pant to dry the moisture that held the fingers so firmly, “and you won’t get in here Dostoyevsky or a typewriter to pastiche. Jennings!”

A muscular man with a big pockmark on his forehead and his fist closed as if he had just punched somebody signaled with his eyes to Nathaniel. He got up with his stomach feeling cold, his breathing slow and uneven, when the officer asked:

“Where are your possessions, writer?”

“The officer took it. The one who brought me – the stout one.”

“Is your manuscript in those?”

“Yes,” Nathaniel said hesitatingly, “you will return them back, right?”

“Law will do its drills, writer,” the officer replied, jerking his head, indicating Jennings to take him away.

Becoming an artist, creating stuff, conjuring the muse; landing here amid the prideful ghosts, the chilling darkness, the drug users, the drug healers, the shamans, the abusers, the thieves who broke the invisible hand was the symphony of fate that handed down Nathaniel his existence in the burned-up walls. A temporary existence, yet in no way less scaring, for the souls that create are famished for their thoughtful consideration.

“That small triviality,” Nathaniel thought, “that scornful triviality. Hadn’t I written it, hadn’t it been in those morning papers, hadn’t I been here.”

A whirlpool starts with a few words, a short story that the friend thinks highly of, then, comes a piece, maybe an essay in print, and the dreamy one thinks of turning the world upside down, on imaginary toes. Such is the thing that plagued Nathaniel, and the disease had become a thing that won’t die, to an extent where removing it would mean death of a part.

 “What did you do?” darkness asked from Nathaniel. He looked around to spot the interrogator, but nothing could be formed but the legs with the quaver.

“Stole.”

“How much?”

“A typewriter.”

Sound of spitting arose out of the darkness, the grunting and gritting of the teeth. “Abducted a kid.”

Nathaniel did not reply, just in the blindness lamented the steps he hadn’t had the guts to follow, the routes not ventured, and the pulsing anxiety hung over him if he would ever be able to go back to a life that was said to be normal.

“The kid turned out to be a Socrates, ate my hairs out,” the legs continued, “how many times you frequent?”

“First.”

“You have a career ahead of you, typewriter boy… Married?”

“No.”

“For whom did you steal it then?”

“Myself.”

“Insanity,” thundered the legs and trounces the floor.

Then the legs with his various postures went to describe the exploits that it had pleasured to carry out: robbing on a gun point, amputating some hairy hands, running off with an automobile, and the gratification of using the working-day productively that let on the legs rest in the afternoon, when the sun used to blaze out through the windows. Nathaniel also heard snores that slowly enveloped the crowing of the legs, and Hypnos took him to her Universe.

The distant ball did come out the next morning, only wasn’t clever enough to find its way to the attic where Nathaniel sat. He knew it was morning: the birds with their chirping, the insects with their buzzing conveyed what the almighty failed to. The iron gates thudded, a flurry of light blinded Nathaniel, whiteness washed into his eyes; accepting the light after a continuous period of darkness is not easy for evolutionary beings.

“Ambert, Nathaniel,” a heavy voice roared. “Come along!”

The other souls just looked on to Nathaniel, as if he had betrayed them in some way.

Nathaniel arrived in the same white walls that sent him amid the souls of exterminated, the mortals who only visited the residents to scare and disappear again.

“You are free to go, writer,” officer Courant ordered, looking through the files on the back desk to find if someone had escaped his gaze and the duty of justice.

“Were the charges taken away?”

“Do you want to go back out there?”

Nathaniel looked on to the clock which were pointing a quarter past to nine, and Jennings, and officer Courant, as if he had not paid for his sins yet, and longed for nothing but to descend into the circles of hell.

“You can collect your things from Ms. Elova.”

Ms. Elova made Nathaniel give his prints, and the photograph of the eyes, and handed his belongings as if she had never done such monstrosity in her short career.

“You can go now,” she intoned in her peachy voice.

How the day went through Nathaniel had no idea, Carpe Diem, but it had to exist for to be conquered. A new morning hit him – having exhausted the bag of possibilities in New Athens – in Séanche, on the doors of his apartment. He opened the door, breathing deeply to shake off the exhaustion, to return again to ragged existence, to disappointments, to fury, to despondency, to the window which every morning showered him with unbearable distress, looking through it to the ethereal dawn of Séanche, his eyes caught something beneath it, almost swelling itself to make him see, fuming to spur letters on to the pages, fidgeting to spread its music, awaiting its conductor.