He signed the paper and the man who had sent four hundred tons of pure poison into the blood stream of America walked free.

Then he gave the order to sink more boats.

Twelve men and kilos burned on Caribbean waters that night. The President watched the footage and nodded.

Someone in the room understood. You could see it in his face. The mathematics of it. The insanity. But he had learned as they all had learned that understanding was no longer required. That words like contradiction had been emptied out and now just rattled in the skull like seeds in a dry gourd.

The President turned to them. Grinning.

You see it dont you, he said. You see what I can do.

They saw.

He could grant clemency in one hand and dispense death in the other and feel nothing where they met. He could pardon the sea and punish the drops. He could say the words and unsay them and the ground would not open and the sky would not fall and tomorrow would come just the same.

That was the power. Not the doing. The nothing that came after.

He looked at his small hands.

Get me another name, he said.

Sir.

Someone else to free. Unforgivably guilty.

The aide wrote that down.

Outside the waves kept coming and the poison kept coming and the names of the dead kept accumulating in a ledger nobody read and the President slept well because he had learned what all such men eventually learn.

That the soul is never taken.

It is set down somewhere and forgotten.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​