They disinfected his cell once a week. He returned from the yard to find every crevice blasted clean, the floor puddled with bleach. The cleaning left a residue on the walls, so he took to writing in that alkaline dust, tracing letters with a burning fingertip, knowing his work would be scoured away at the end of the week. Still, it was work. Erasure was the fate of all written words. Books eventually moldered and disintegrated. Even the ancient shards he used to collect on hunting trips in the marshes eventually succumbed to sun and sand, the maker’s marks becoming fainter and fainter until they vanished. Nevertheless, he observed; he wrote. The point was to get it down. His writing was a source of amusement to the guards, who called it “finger painting.” They came in and altered words as he was writing them, changing “hunt” to “cunt,” or “cape gun” to “rape gun,” adding cartoons, sometimes even caricatures of him. There was one guard whose caricatures were uncanny.
