The first thing we need to understand, Jake, is that this won’t do any good. A lot of things happened to me and I happened to a lot of people. Everyone’s been carried down the river and scattered to the seven seas and their separate fates. What’s the use of talking about it?

– Try.

Piling up one word after another won’t take any effort at all. I could do it in my sleep. You’d take that down, too, I suppose. But what will you do if I start screeching like a prophet, because the light blinds so and the word is so terrible sharp? Just keep filling up the pages?

– Yes.

Fine. Agreed. I can even take a kind of comfort in that, cold-blooded as it is. As long as you’ve pencils enough for a tale and strength of wrist enough to scratch a line across a few miles of white laid desert, eight inches at a time, I’m ready to deliver it to your dispassionate ear. Prepare yourself for a journey, then, mute brother, my silent passenger. We’re in this together. Once I get started there’s no telling how long it will take this caravan to travel from the beginning all the way around my history and right back to this room. If the crack of doom doesn’t sound first, we’ll reach the end when I’m here once again, walking through that door a few minutes ago. Maybe not even then. Who knows what else will have happened in the course of the telling? Mustn’t that be told?

– Of course.

Well, then, I’ll tell you how it was and is, and if memory fails, and vision grows dim, I’ll spin the tale out of whatever materials come to hand. I am not upon oath while seated in this chair of yours. Except to keep talking.