TODAY, on the morning of my death, just after sunrise, and before my spirit departs, I will think of him for the very last time. While recalling our first meeting now, I would even ascribe it to some sort of presentiment. It was fate. One does not fix appointments with fate. If over the years, and passing through the realities of life, the memory of him dies, It shall stay intact on the pages of this memoir, the salt of remembrance. One can always count on a convicted murderer for a fancy prose style.

I've been ill for quite some time now. I'm starting to forget things, which is why I decided to write everything down, three hundred and sixty four days ago, in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion. But I am too various to be trusted anyway. If this were not so I would not be alone in this cell tonight. I would not be about to perish, sometime between this morning and this afternoon, on the gallows. And still, just so long as the blood throbs through my writing hand, I will continue recalling my lover's face, old and sick and repulsive. It's the only image of him I like. My lighthearted dream of controlling him through his passion for me was all wrong; I had toadied to him when he was my darling, my awesome patron, and a groveling something still persisted in my attitude toward him even when he revealed himself as beast. The only ace I held was his ignorance of my monstrous love for him. Did he have a precursor? He did, of course he did. In point of fact, there might have been no man at all that I had not loved, in the summer, or in the fall, a myriad of initial, old, cruel men of principle.

Oh, you cannot imagine what these men of principle are! He never noticed the falsity of all his everyday conventions and rules of behavior, and drugs, and books, and his love for a person he fancied (not me), but would distinguish at once a false intonation in anything I might say with a view to change him. He always pointed it out with a diabolical accuracy of judgment, and, turning as pale as a shirt, slowly replied: "But I do love you, Steven."

This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of cloth sticking to it, and blood, and locks of frizzy hair. The following decision I make with all the legal impact, if there is to be one: I wish this memoir to be published only when I am no longer alive.

Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book.

***

I was arrested on the 5th of July, 1920. There had been little difficulty in my trial. I adhered exactly, clearly to my statement, and did not confuse nor misrepresent the facts, nor soften them in my own interest. This fell in with the most recent fashionable 'Slave theory' (which I shall describe in its proper place), so often applied in our days in criminal cases. Finally the court admitted that I belonged in a loony bin, and that the crime could only have been committed by a slavish instinct.

On September 1st of that same year I was sentenced to death, on condition of the fact that the penalty would be carried out only after a year; the mentally disturbed get an extra year to be sold before they can be executed.

Now it was August 31st, 1921.

My heart was beating violently, and my brain was in a turmoil. The monthly auction took place on the main square of Charleston. The heat that day was stifling, and there was a sickening smell of fresh paint and stale oil from the newly painted planks. I stood on the edge of the wooden podium, next to a crowd of ill-smelling consumptive women. One of them—a tall dark girl of about my age–was evidently in the very last stage of syphilis. Through the yellow coloring of her thin neck showed a white speckled rash, like stars in the sky. She was in fact a mere skeleton, and still—had it not been for the mask of chalk and red with which her face was covered—traces of a former beauty might still have been discerned in her. To my great amazement, I saw in her lashless eyes a look of dignity and a sense of her own importance. Bored and indifferent, she blinked occasionally as she watched a group of men below.

My crime, to use an American term, in which justice, retribution, torture, death, and freedom of speech appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was treason. Prison put me through hell: the terrible impossible gulf laid between me and all the rest of the prisoners. It seemed to me that they loved and valued life more in prison than in freedom. Not only did they not share my way of looking at things, but also thought of me as a madman. Every time after going through another painful, humiliating battery, I would entertain a hope of being beaten to death.

I stood still, barefoot, half-naked, sickly and anxious. I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of the day, my underwear kept climbing like a damp salamander around my legs and hot beads of sweat kept racing across my back. An abominable wave of heat attacked the Carolinas a few days prior; the air was broiling, the last— certainly the warmest— day of the season. And in this hot air, in the stench of filth, and sweat, and rotting women, was some secret, sweet, conscious mournfulness, which usually is so gentle on the days between summer and fall. The indistinct noise of the city floated in, the dolorous, snuffling air of a church chorus could be heard from across the road; the warden's soles were scraping dryly; lazily and irregularly automobile wheels would rumble by, and all these sounds mingled with ugliness and harshness in my sunburnt ears.

Everyone from my gang had been sold last month, and I remained all by myself, thank god. Objectless life, and in the future a continual suffering—that was all that lay before me. And what comfort was it to know that in a month I would only be twenty-one? What had I to live for? To live in order to exist? Why, I had been ready a thousand times before to give up existence for the sake of an idea. Perhaps it was just because of the strength of my convictions that I had thought myself a man to whom it was more permissible to commit a crime than to others. I was comforted by the thought that everything was going to be over by the end of the auction. Oh, how the heart beats with the thought that freedom was really, at last, at last, close at hand.

But the triumph soon ended when a man approached me. It was a gentleman of about forty, with a black goatee and dark little eyes under gray lids. As I watched the glossy whiteness of his face so little tanned despite the Carolina sun, and his dried lips, and his fashionable black hat, I knew for a fact that he was not from around here. The warden approached him shortly after, glistening, his stiff straw hat in his hands.

"No bets, you say?" inquired the gentleman.

How matter-of-fact, how square his voice sounded in the void of the sunny day! It vibrated through my whole system.

"No, Mr. Hamilton. He's sick."

The name was vaguely familiar.

"What's he sick with? Consumption?"

The warden shook his head.

"He's clinically insane. A paranoid schizophrenic. You can't change that."

"Pity. Well, I do not share that attitude. I am a lawyer, you see, I'm in constant contact with mental disorder."

"I should think that'd be enough mental disorder for one man."

"It's nice of you to want to warn me, but my decision doesn't concern you. Write my name down."

I was startled, naturally, but the really surprising thing was that he had not said that before. Something in Hamilton's leisurely movements and the confidence in his voice suggested that he already made a decision.

"You must think it over carefully, sir."

"Write it down."

I was aghast and terror-stricken; the warden was simply annoyed. I was sure my father's enemies were stuffing his pockets with dirty money, to keep me from being sold. Possibly on purpose, indeed, the wardens used to beat me hard enough to leave bruises. I did not mind.

"Alright. What's your bid?"

"A thousand dollars. I've got a check."

"Excuse me, but a single bid can't exceed five hundred dollars."

"Let it be four hundred and ninety nine, then," said Hamilton in the cheekiest voice. "Cash."

He thrust a ten-dollar banknote into the warden's indifferent hand.

"And have him ready by three, will you?"

He smiled and turned to go away. I stood there unmoved until the end of the auction — with a load on my heart and a blank, immovable despair in my soul.

How I was taken from the square I can't remember. It was as though a fog had fallen upon me, and my mind had been clouded at times. I can only remember that we were herded into a wooden shed, undressed, and then sprayed with rusty water. I remember opening my mouth wide and drinking it as avidly as if it could give me magic wisdom, freedom, or death. Then, for a while, naked, I sat on the edge of a rude bench, watching as in the middle distance, two children in shorts and halters came out of a sun-dappled shed marked "Girls." Shaking their hair because of the flies, they settled into the back of a waiting truck, legs wide apart. And, wobbling, they slowly, absently, merged with the light and shade.

Then someone dressed me, tied my hands and led me outside, where a silver automobile with a chauffeur in the front was already waiting for me. Hamilton stood in front of it, his elbows on the hood and his hat in his hands. He was in a good humor, at least he was smiling very gaily and good-humoredly. I tried to believe that the power he had over me meant nothing. To make assurance doubly sure, I resolved to behave as if he didn't exist.

Most of the ride to the train station was spent in a constrained silence. The new-found owner kept slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his seaweed-colored trousers.

"Are you actually a schizophrenic?"

I shook my head.

"So I thought—just an eccentric. I'm Eugene Hamilton," he said. "I believe I have reason to hope that my name is not wholly unknown to you?"

I sighed heavily. Hamilton started tapping his foot.

"It's not my car. I'm a New-Yorker. Is there anybody who would ship a car from state to state? I wouldn't. But I do own a Ford, just so you know..."

The tonality of his voice was admirably unpleasant, and as he spoke, his rapidly moving tongue would, in true New-York fashion, from time to time skip the "r"s. Having no knowledge about automobiles, I was more annoyed than interested. At last we got to the train station, where the trains cried with ominous plangency in the monstrously hot and humid air. Hamilton's commutation ticket came back to him with a dark stain from the conductor's fingers.

"You don't talk a lot, do you?" he asked as we got into the coupe.

"I don't."

I can't say he behaved insolently or anything like that; on the contrary, he displayed a discreet political civility. He was quietly agreeing his frame with the anatomy of the coupe – putting his luggage on the top-shelf, wiping his seat with the latest issue of New York Times, rolling a cigar, plugging and unplugging the broken electric fan. I sat with my arms folded, opposite from him, dying of heat and boredom. The leather seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion; Hamilton opened the windows, but it admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from outside.

We set off. Several times Hamilton raised his head and looked at me warily. Perhaps he was afraid I would go out the open window and out of his life forever. He offered me a cigar, and when the offer was silently rejected, started smoking himself. As the train made its first stop, only the hot whistles of the engine broke the simmering hush at noon. Hamilton perspired delicately for a while into his shirtwaist, and then, as his cigar dampened under his fingers, finally spoke:

"So that's how it is," he mumbled thoughtfully. "But seriously, it's very impolite..."

"Leave me be."

"I saved you from death. It's a bona-fide deal."

"Then I sure hope you kill me as soon as we get to New York. But do free me first."

Hamilton responded with a long, inquiring, but not greatly astonished look.

"I can hardly believe it. It's impossible to make you speak, but when you do—"

"Pardonnez, mister, I shall stay quiet."

Hamilton opened his New York Times.