The pain Plato carried within him had diminished. The grip of the migraine was easing. Chewing food with the left side of his jaw was a possibility again. His bones were at rest, even the disfigured and fractured ones. Opium was the only cure Plato had found to the pounding pain in his groin. Under its influence, time lost its oppressive quality. The present seemed to glide. Either that or Plato himself grew wings, like the mosquitoes in his cell of solitude. “I can forgive them for everything,” he said, crushing years of silence in a second. “The broken teeth, the dislocated bones, the
...more
