I gave him five hundred pounds for his work and he handed the bundle through the bars. Thirty-five photocopied articles by you. He went off happy, but what about me? I had no idea then what kind of night lay ahead. Perhaps they were the worst few hours of my life. It was torture, Joe, coming face to face with your sad dry thoughts. To think of the fools who paid you good money for them, and the innocent readers who had their day polluted by them! I sat in the room my mother used to call the library, though the shelves were always pretty bare, and I read every last word, and actually heard them, in my head, spoken by you straight to me. I read each article as a letter sent by you into the future that was going to contain us both. What were you trying to do to me, I kept thinking. Hurt me? Insult me? Test me? I hated you for it, but I never forgot that I loved you too, and that was why I kept going. He needs my help, I told myself whenever I came close to giving up, he needs me to set him free from his little cage of reason.
