Free The Cause by Roderick Vincent

the punishment a light in the darkness, a torch to help erase the stupidity I felt for stepping out of line. My burning muscles and strained tendons stretched like rubber bands bending away from my own self-loathing.
    After some time, Seee visited me down in the dungeon. I heard a voice while doing pushups far off in the darkness. Perhaps he stood there silent for hours before he said anything, submerged like a periscope, peering above the surface, letting his gravity weigh down on me, attracting me to what later he would offer for those strong enough to survive. I hadn’t yet understood how to see, so therefore he had to speak before I really knew he was there. The first words I heard in days were a kindness. “How do you feel?” he asked.
    I paused with my nose touching the dust in the middle of pushup seventy-six. “Like a million bucks,” I said, continuing my set. I asked him how long I’d been down here.
    “Three days.”
    “Should I believe that?”
    “I don’t care what you believe.”
    “Is it night or day?”
    “You’ve already lost track?” He seemed disappointed.
    I finished my set and then sat in a lotus position. “Breakfast is bread and water so it’s throwing me off.”
    He laughed from somewhere out in the darkness. “Lunch and dinner are the same then?”
    “There’s varying degrees of staleness.”
    “I’m not sure Kumo likes you.”
    “It’s hurting my feelings.”
    He sighed. “You’re disappointed you lost.”
    “You don’t fight honorably.”
    The reverberating walls echoed his voice. “The Red Coats fought with honor. Then they were shot apart like pheasants by a bunch of inexperienced farmers with inferior arms. In a fight you should never expect the honorable, and you of all people should know it.”
    “So that was the lesson?”
    “As I’ve already said, there is no word
fair
in a fight. Lesson one in Primitive Law. Nature knows no losers. Losers are extinct, overrun by evolution. Losers are fools who fail to adapt.”
    I said nothing. I wanted to hear his movements in the thick of the darkness—if he’d scrape a foot on the ground, touch his face, that sort of thing. He didn’t. In darkness, there is a thirst for sound. Silence for me rang in a monotone chime, a flat-lined EKG buzzing sound without curve or wave or spastic discord. Too many shotgun rounds without the use of ear protection. In The Hole, you quench this thirst by creating your own noise—rubbing your scalp, hearing the flick of your middle fingernail between your thumbnail, cracking knuckles, the bristle of growing whiskers, the gulp of water swallowed down your throat, the tranquility of breath. In the dark, the body becomes more self-aware, and in this I was listening for a tell, but he sat there quietly, and I did not so much as hear him breathe. He could have been a phantom whom I was in dialogue with, another voice like my mother and father. Finally I said, “You’re a voice from afar, strong and reverberating, as if you are in a cathedral.”
    “True,” Seee said. “And I can tell you that down here it’s moreheaven than the hell of what you’ll find above.”
    “God doesn’t exist.”
    “Perhaps,” he said. “But while you’re alive you’ll still hear my voice, and I will always speak the truth to you.”
    Somehow the conversation turned into a direction I wanted to veer away from, so I said, “Tell me about this name—Seee. It is a strange name.” Conroy’s question of the letters
A-B-C
in the hangar flashed back in my mind. The few days were a lifetime ago, and I had trouble remembering if it actually happened. “Is it a letter? As in the letter
A
or
B?
Is it the third letter in the alphabet? Perhaps it is an abbreviation, like ‘C’ for ‘cat’ or ‘C’ for cruel, or ‘C’ for cunt.”
    He answered without malice. It was apparent that plebeian methods of arousing an emotion from him were ill-suited strategies. Instead, he asked, “Why would I disguise the