Page 37 of Chains and Vows

The past is solid. Cold and fixed like rebar in concrete. You can run your fingers along the edge of it and find the seams, find the places where it cracked and where it held, and you can know it. Every inch.

But the future isn't that at all. The future is just a shape. Amorphous and malleable, shiftin' every time you breathe on it.

And when you look ahead at the future in front of you, ya first gotta stand in place. You gotta be completely, absolutely still. Not just your body—your whole fuckin' machinery. The part of you that's always calculatin' angles and exits, always takin' inventory of what's around you and who's behind you and how far the nearest door is, that part's gotta go quiet too.

Stillness ain't a natural state. It's a discipline. It's somethin' you have to force on yourself like you're holdin' a wild thing down in the dirt and keepin' it there by pure will.

But only once you're still can you turn and look out at all the ways you might step forward. One fraction of an inch in this direction and you end up somewhere. Ninety degrees to the right and you end up somewhere else entirely.

Some other life. Some other version of Legion Kane who made a different call at a different crossroads on a different cold Montana mornin'.

Unlimited possible outcomes.

Infinity itself.

That's what it feels like to stand at the edge of the future and stare into it. Not like starin' out a window. More like starin' down into somethin' without a bottom, somethin' that swallows light, and you're just standin' there at the rim of it with the wind at your back and the whole damn weight of your past pushin' you forward.

This ethereal nature of 'the future' has always been somethin' I've felt deep in the marrow, and it's why I've never been much of a plannin' man. You can't map what you can't see the bottom of. You can't chart a course into infinity. So I never tried. Not really.

Did I sit in my Whitefall cell and imagine myself with Savannah Ashby?

Obviously. Her face is the only one that's ever visited my dreams. The only one that's ever haunted my nightmares. Three years of concrete walls, and fluorescent light, and the kind of silence that isn't at all quiet.

She was there every single time I closed my eyes.

Every time I opened 'em too, if I'm bein' honest.

Burned into the backs of my eyelids like a brand.

So yeah, of course I pictured myself with her when I got out. I pictured the silo. Creepin' out there in the dark like we used to, sixteen, and stupid, and electric with it. Stealin' midnight moments that belonged to some other, simpler version of us.

I let myself have that much. Just that. Just the silo and the dark and her voice bouncin' off those old curved walls, the way sound moves different in there, the way it carries and holds and don't let go.

But never much more than that. Because this, what I'm doin' with her right now, this wasn't ever even a spark of possibility in my mind. Not a flicker. Not a coal. Nothin'.

I don't blame myself for that. I don't think I'm an unimaginative man. Nothin' about my life has ever been colorless. Thinkin' hard on it right now, lyin' here in the dark with her breathin' slow beside me—my life is quite special, actually.

I mean, think about it. Think about it for real. How many people on this earth get to say a famous photographer was so goddamn enchanted with their corporeal presence that she was compelled to capture 'em?

On film. In pixels. On paper. Printed and pressed and locked away in a vault underground like somethin' worth preservin'. Like somethin' sacred.

Two people. That I know of, anyway.

Savannah was her life's work in public. The brand. The inheritance. The whole fuckin' mythology she built and posted and sold to eight million strangers who thought they knew what they were seein'. That was Eleanor's daylight self.

But I was her private collection.

And I don't know what that means. I've turned it over enough times it's worn smooth as river rock and still I don't know. What I do know is that Eleanor Ashby looked at me—at me, Legion Kane, trailer trash, devil's son, future convict—and she thought: worth keepin'. Worth five-hundred-and-twelve pages of heavyweight matte paper, and linen notes, and a hand-bound leather cover locked in bedrock.

That alone is enough to make a life special. Even if all the remarkable moments ended with Eleanor's death, even if the Book of Legion never gets opened again, even if Savannah buries it back in that safe room and never speaks a word of it—it's enough.

A record of my existence.

An account of my bein'.

Proof I was here.

It's enough.