The familiar white walls glared at me from the opposite side of the room as they had been doing every single day for the last four years. I always thought the white was a strategy, a sort of torture. White ceiling to look up to at night, giving you no hope of ever seeing the sun or the stars again; white walls to give you no distraction from the guilt and remorse that threatened to eat you up; white floor to make every drop of blood that happened to fall on it stand out like a reminder. I didn’t need reminding; the memory of what I had done filled my thoughts every day, the guilt pulling at my heart. Or the memory of what I had supposedly done, anyway.
You see, unlike most of them, I had hope. I couldn’t actually remember doing it, which made me believe perhaps I hadn’t done it at all. I liked to hold on to the thought that maybe I’d been framed, that it hadn’t been me who had plunged that knife into Mrs. Elmer’s chest that chilly October night. Of course, there had been enough evidence at the trial to prove I was the murderer-but what sort of killer forgets his crime?
“Our brains like to lock away the bad memories-the ones we don’t want to remember-to protect ourselves,” the prison psychiatrist had told me over and over again. “Deep down, in some remote corner of your mind, the scene of the murder is hiding away, like an old book forgotten in a top shelf, waiting to be rediscovered. And one day, when you accept what you’ve done, you’ll remember.” I’d heard those words often enough, repeated to me dozens of times throughout the years I spent at Ironwood State Prison. But for some reason, I refused to accept them. I refused to believe I had committed a crime of such magnitude that I couldn’t even remember. Therefore, I clung on to the belief that I was innocent.
There was only one thing that made me have the smallest doubt about my theory. No, it wasn’t the taunts from my inmates, constantly accusing me of insanity. It wasn’t my psychiatrist’s stupid speech either. It was the guilt. The intense, boundless culpability that ran in my blood and infiltrated my dreams like poison. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night, feeling like there was something crushing my lungs, emptying them of all oxygen and making them unable to refill again. And I knew it was the guilt-that abstract yet intensely real thing that invaded my every living cell, that made it hard to get out of bed in the mornings and even harder to fall asleep at night.
Why should an innocent man feel guilty? I wondered. Why should he worry about someone else’s faults and mistakes? I wished the remorse would leave me; that I could shake it off somehow, much like one shakes off snow after a walk outside in winter. If that were possible-if I could give my restless mind that much-needed rest-I would have the final proof of my innocence. But I couldn’t erase the guilt until I knew I was innocent, and I wouldn’t know if I truly was innocent until the guilt left me. It was the perfect paradox-and a very cruel one at that.
Everyone else kept telling me to accept it: I was a murderer. A ruthless, cold-blooded assassin who’d lost his mind somewhere along the way and slaughtered a complete stranger for no reason. But every fiber in my body told me to fight it and to stay true to my far-fetched idea that I had been framed. I felt it in my marrow, like a silent scream of rebellion that warned me against allowing myself to give up all hope. I was innocent. I was innocent and I would carry that thought to the grave. But the guilt. Oh, the guilt.
There was only one other person in the world who supported my conflicted thoughts of innocence. That person was my beautiful sister Sam. Sam, who’d come to prison once a year, always after Christmas, to whisper words of encouragement to her desperate brother.
“We’re working on it,” she’d say. “We’ll prove you didn’t do it, just hold on.” And with that she’d be gone until the next year, no other visits or phone calls for twelve long months. But still, her brief visits became like small rays of sunshine for me; that one time a year in which I’d look up to meet her gorgeous blue eyes and listen to her as she promised they were trying. I looked forward to those days, wishfully hoping that this year it would be more of a concrete statement and less of a faraway dream that might or might not be accomplished.
The other three-hundred and sixty-four days of the year were spent thinking. Thinking, waiting and hoping. There was nothing else for me to do. I wasn’t like the other prisoners, who knew what they had done and just avoided thinking about it, trying to fill up their time and stay busy to keep their minds on something else. I wanted to think about my supposed crime. It was the most complex mystery in my life that I was simply unable to solve. So I kept trying.
And then one day something changed, and my monotonous routine was altered. It was April, I think, or maybe May. It was hard to know-or particularly care. I heard the loud buzzing that indicated my cell door was being opened, and I looked up from my nest of white-torturous, painful white- bed sheets to see a bald, middle-aged guard standing by the entrance. He told me to get up and I did so. I followed him down the dull and long stone corridors to the visitor’s room, where I usually met Sam every December. And indeed my sister was there, but not alone. A tall young man sat next to her on the gray table, smelling strongly of after-shave and cigarettes. He was smiling, and I couldn’t help wondering what there was to smile about in a place like this.
“It’s not December,” I said as a way of greeting as I took a seat opposite them on the table.
“I know,” Sam replied, the corners of her mouth curving upwards to turn into a smile that matched the young man’s. “But there’s no need to wait until December anymore.”
At first I didn’t understand. My tired brain simply couldn’t process this information in any rational way. But then the young man, who introduced himself as Kevin Martin-my lawyer-, dove into a long explanation that made my heart race and my spirits soar. He had enough evidence, he confirmed, to take my case back to court and prove my innocence.
After they left I went back to my regular routine. I waited. I thought. I pondered about this almost surreal conversation I’d had with Sam and Kevin. I often wondered if I’d imagined it, dreamt it perhaps. But no, it was real, as I soon discovered when I found myself being taken to a trial a few short weeks later.
Sitting in court, my mind kept wandering to its usual whereabouts. I found it hard to concentrate on the action taking place in front of my very eyes as my young lawyer fought for my freedom like a gladiator in a battle. Even the evidence shown to prove my innocence was only mildly interesting for me: the identity of the man accused of being the real killer, the drugs used to erase my memory, the detail of the murderer using his right hand to stab while I was left-handed. There was more, much more but I was busy wondering about the guilt I still felt.
After long hours at court, the jury had their verdict. I honestly didn’t know what to expect: the evidence presented seemed to prove my innocence, but the evidence given at my last trial four years ago said the contrary. My heart wanted to believe I wasn’t guilty-that I hadn’t taken the life away from Mrs. Elmers-like it had always yearned to. But the guilt. Oh, the guilt.
As the judge proclaimed my innocence, I knew I should feel happy. I was finally being released from jail; free at last from the prison that had selfishly kept me to itself for four long years. But I didn’t. I didn’t feel happy. And then I realized it didn’t matter anymore; it didn’t matter because I knew the truth. I didn’t remember it- no, that memory was still missing, and I suspected it always would be. But I just knew.
As I walked out of the building with my sister after the trial was over, the air seemed fresher than I remembered it, freedom taunting me with its malicious games. “You know what,” I said, turning to face Sam. “I think I’m guilty.”