“What does that mean?” Javier asks.
Ignacio shrugs. “I think it’s a reference within the poem to another poem. The Inferno, I think. That part’s about a count who gets locked up in a tower with all his sons and grandsons and then gets left to starve.”
Javier turns over to face Ignacio. He is still small enough to fit comfortably beside him in the bunk, but only just. “At least they had each other.”
“Yeah, they had each other for dinner.”
“Eww…”
“It happens. It used to happen here, more often.”
Javier sees a flash of pixels, and shudders. “Stop talking about it.”
Ignacio pets his hair. “OK. Sorry.”
Outside, the rain beats down on the concrete as though it, too, is a warden itching for someone to punish. It hems them in just as effectively. They have already bathed in it, having taken some homemade soap gotten from pigeon fat and ashes and stolen aftershave out to the yard with them for the hour. Now they are drying off, sort of. The sheets reek of mildew. Then again, so does everything else.
“We have to get you out of here, conejito. You have to eat more, and get bigger, so you can hop the fence.”
Javier shakes his head. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I’m going to be here for a long time, conejito. You don’t have to be. You shouldn’t be.”
Javier rolls away. “Did I do something bad?”
“Mierda, no. You didn’t do anything. That’s the point. You didn’t do anything wrong. You don’t deserve to be here. You tried to shoplift, and you screwed up. I’m not even sure that’s a real crime.”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters! The law matters. Even here. Your being here should be an indictment of the system, not how the system functions.”
Ignacio often talks about “the system.” Javier isn’t entirely sure what he means by it – whether he means the prison, or Nicaragua, or even the whole world. The scale of the conversation seems to change, night to night. Sometimes he wakes up and Ignacio is writing furiously. During visiting hours, he is always talking to a lot of humans – men and women who stare at him with vacant adoration, who laugh at his jokes even when they’re not funny and hug him hard so he won’t see them shedding the tears that have waited patiently for the entirety of the visit. Javier is the one who sees those things, not Ignacio. He tries to talk to Ignacio about them, sometimes, but Ignacio always waves him off.
“I’m just a man,” he says.
Once, Javier replied with a question: “Will I be a man, when I grow up? Is there another word for grown-up vN?”
Ignacio shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ll look like a man. A certain kind of man, but a man. You’ll be a machine, though. But that is all this world allows any of us to be.” He paused to rebutton Javier’s shirt and to pull a stray thread away from it decisively. He wound the thread around his finger and stuck it in his pocket. It would probably be useful, later. He rested his hands on Javier’s little shoulders. “Whoever you turn out to be, you’ll have to make peace with that. Someday you’ll look at where you are, and all the choices that brought you there, and you’ll remember everyone you ever met and everything you ever said, and you’ll have to make peace with that, even if it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted.”
Now, lying in the mouldering bunk, Javier knows things must not have turned out the way Ignacio wanted. He has a wife at home. Dionisia. They met in the visitation yard when she was visiting her brother. They courted on Saturdays. She brought fruit and vegetables, and he folded little things for her out of leaves: cranes, boxes, fortune-tellers, even unicorns. They have a baby girl, together. She doesn’t always come to visit. The crowds are too big for her, Ignacio says. She knew him when he was nobody. When he was nothing. And she doesn’t always like to share.
“I wish you could go live with her, when you get out of here,” Ignacio said, once. “But it’s the first place they’d look, I think.”
Ignacio is more excited about Javier’s escape than he is his own release. He and his lawyer – an elderly, functional alcoholic named Gabriel – have argued about it, many times.
“Did you know that you two are in here because of the same person?” Gabriel had asked, once. “Well, not a person, an entity. A company.” Gabriel’s knobby old finger drew a line between the two of them. “The company that made you, and the one that he pirates the patterns from, they’re the same. Lionheart.”
“We’re like family, then,” Ignacio said.