An exiled mind is free to produce whatever wonders it is capable of imagining, but an exiled body is hemmed in by the suffocating limits of time and space. After enough time in a small enough space, the mind will acquiesce to the body and revert to the most essential level of human thought.
It was in such a small space that the author sat, left only with enough food to sustain him for a dwindling period of days. The hours as they passed grew longer, and the nights in their ever widening depth grew darker than the shadows of the trees. He could no longer remember the reason for his exile, but he knew the words he had written had threatened those in power, and they had removed the threat. A small cabin, no larger than a row of coffins stacked on top of each other and tucked away between rock and branch, was his only shelter from the deep night. His time was beginning to wane. Knowing full well the limits of his potential (the exiled man soon to become the hunted man) he set upon creating a plan. It was this that he recorded in a small blue notebook, which lay always where he could reach it. On it, he had written:
Plan for Escape and Eventual Freedom
The title held the essence of the work in its words; it was refreshingly, deceptively simple. He spoke it aloud to himself as a mantra, or a reminder of what he was trying to achieve. It was transparent, as if anyone was going to read it and someday congratulate him on his brilliance and outstanding mental clarity that allowed him to create a plan under such pressure, maybe, after he escaped. He hoped this would happen. He hoped to be revered. But he knew they were coming soon, and his time was slowly fading. Among all else, this was all he knew for sure.
So the first night he heard muffled crackling, as if of footsteps treading quietly outside the thin walls of his cabin, he lay awake with an axe in his hands, rotating it between his palms and feeling its heft brush against his skin. He was terrified and yet he hoped they would come for him, bursting through the doors, streaming through the open window, noise and explosions and gunshots, screaming for his blood. He envisioned hundreds of them, though he knew he would be powerless against a group of even two or three.
When the noises persisted for a period of days, he grew warier and created an elaborate series of traps in the forest immediately surrounding his house. Tripwires, nets, holes covered by tree branches, all the things he thought people in his situation did to protect themselves. He labored during the day and at night, resisted sleep sitting by the fire to await their arrival.
When, after more days and sleepless nights, nothing happened, a change occurred. He knew suddenly they would not come in droves as he had imagined, and it would not be a magnificent spectacle of power when they took him. He felt stupid for ever having imagined it that way. He slowly, unconsciously adjusted his expectations to accommodate the possibility that his eventual capture, for he felt it was imminent, would arrive in secret and without the glory he had wished. It was at this moment of realization that his fear ceased being masked by the hope of a falsified redemption sometime in the future and became a tangible object that haunted his steps.
He slept in terror, when he slept at all, of the noise he had imagined at his capture, but instead of hundreds of screaming men there was only one. It was the noise he feared most, for each crackle of a branch, each rustle of a leaf against a rock, set him alight in a frenzied storm of anxiety. He knew nothing, and from this his despair flowed; a trickle at first that turned into a raging torrent. He knew nothing: who was coming for him, why they pursued him, when they would arrive. He did not know the reason for his exile, for he had forgotten it to a place that cannot be recalled. He sought his reflection in a pool of water after a storm and he saw nothing. He had become nothing. He did not signify anything any longer; he was devoid of meaning, even to himself.
The author despaired, and in his desolation he turned to the only outlet that presented a diversion to his mind. He sat hour after hour, filling hundreds of pages in the blue notebook with words, all that he could remember from the moment he first learned to speak. He catalogued them, listed them one upon another upon another, screaming them aloud as he thought of them until he had exhausted his supply, and then he slept and dreamt of more. Scribbling words became his obsession, for they alone were possessed with form. He knew, or thought he knew, what they meant, and though he had forgotten himself among the dark and distant objects of his past, he remembered the words and placed himself among them. Bringing language out of the air and placing it on the page let him breathe, for he had found something in which to hide.
One night, the same in which he used the last piece of blank paper in his notebook, filling it to the very top with the last of the words he could conjure from the air, he knew they had arrived. He heard them sneaking around the back of the cabin, listened as they whispered together in a strange language he did not understand. It was not the language of the words in his notebook. They rounded the back of the cabin, and he heard them outside his door. As he rose from his chair slowly, his fear left him. He had lost his name, and he knew they could not take him. A solitary figure walking out into a nameless night.
He passed through the small doorway of the cabin and stopped, looking straight ahead without wavering. He neither saw nor heard anything. Silent terror tore across his body as he took two steps ahead, waiting for them to attack, but still nothing. His senses reeled in fits of apprehension. He took one more step and then they were upon him. Two men, he sensed them both, ripping at his shirt as they dragged him to the ground, clutching him by the arms and legs. Their faces were blurred as they clawed and punched his immobilized body, but in a fleeting moment of recognition, he saw one clearly. The face was his own. He felt a flash of pain arc down his spine as his head hit the ground. The forest was still as he lay, quiet and alone.
