I have run out of room on the wall to continue marking the days that pass as I dwell in this room. I don’t know how long it has been since I last held pen and paper, but I do know that my beard has grown by the length of my hand since then. I am grateful to the guard who slipped this in to me, although I am not sure that he knows who I am or why I am here.
If you are reading this, know that I am in all likelihood still here. Before the scratches on the wall had decayed to a circular mess of crossed marks, I had counted over 20,000 days. I am not sure that the new jailers know why I am here, only that I was condemned to die before the government, so I am told, proclaimed a permanent moratorium on executions. And so I have dwelt here, condemned to die but not yet put to death, for at least 60 years.
The guards who pass by today seem young. They laugh, they speak nervously. They seem quieter lately than they were years ago, and I must admit that I’ve wondered, sometimes, whether there are others remaining. I do know that the sounds from the cells to my left and right went silent long ago, before the wall behind me lost the definition to show one year from the next. But the meals still come and water still flows in this plumbing they’d given me. There were once books in here with me before they turned to dust. Everything has turned to dust, and when last I tried to ask for more the guards had just maintained their silence. That was many years ago.
I am not sure that any of them remember my crime. I am not sure, anymore, that I fully understand it. I could never quite understand this system of laws that I one day found myself bound to. As a child, life was simple. We hunted with bows and spears and we consumed the whole animal. We roamed across plains and stayed on the sunrise side of the mountains, for reasons that I never thought to ask. When the white men came from the east, things changed, and those of my people who were not scattered to the winds were herded into camps, reservations. I was among those scattered to the winds, and I wandered for a century before there was no longer a place left on earth where I could avoid the rule of other men. When they found me, I was told that the place was called Saskatchewan, and I believe it may well have been the last remnant of my homeland, what they call America, to have escaped from the “civilizing” influence of man.
I remember that I was asked for my name. I remember that they had guns. And I remember the sounds that they made when they entered my home, that little cabin that I’d hastily built over only a decade as I settled down into the tundra in my last attempt to find some solitude. I remember the disbelief, the anger, when I told them my name and where I was from. That I could predate their civilization was, apparently, too strange a thought, and I was branded a liar. Again and again they asked for some proof. I am certain that they thought I was someone else, but upon reflection now, I wonder if they simply didn’t know.
As I begin to grow old, alone with my thoughts for all these years, I can’t help but think of all that I miss. I am too old to remember my family. I suppose I can never know with certainty whether there are others like me, but I am certain that I have never encountered another who spoke of memories of the time before cities. But I do know that as the years wore on, the men that I saw seemed ever more urban, ever more refined, ever more manufactured. I believe that when they caught me they had never seen someone so old – so far beyond the cutoff.
I see that they guards are new again today.
If you are reading this, then perhaps you are among them. Let me tell you briefly about the time before you were born. Before the cities rose to engulf the full surface of this continent, there was endless forest. For a thousand years I wandered this land, from the desert that they later called Mexico to the tundra, here in Canada, and between the seas on the three sides that I could trace. It was all forest before they began to build. And of course I had tried their ways, briefly. It never quite fit. The clothing, the confinement, the monotony. If I could have only grasped the irony of that! For ultimately my punishment for avoiding that life was simply more of that life.
When they finally left me here, they told me that it was for the failure to rehabilitate. They came to my home and built a city around me, they captured me and demanded that I conform to their ways, and for twenty years they locked me in a room far brighter and softer than this one. They paraded before me a series of so-called doctors, learned scholars who’d studied for mere decades, until finally the last of them declared that there was nothing to do for me – that, as I could never be “civilized” that I must die.
That was so very long ago.