It stirred up more memories than I ever would have believed. Writing about yourself seems to be a lot like sticking a branch into clear river-water and roiling up the muddy bottom.
Well, you weren't writing about yourself, I hear someone in the peanut-gallery saying. You were writing about Andy Dufresne. You're nothing but a minor character in your own story. But you know, that's just not so. It's all about me, every damned word of it. Andy was the part of me they could never lock up, the part of me that will rejoice when the gates finally open for me and I walk out in my cheap suit with my twenty dollars of mad-money in my pocket. That part of me will rejoice no matter how old and broken and scared the rest of me is. I guess it's just that Andy had more of that part than me, and used it better.
There are others here like me, others who remember Andy. We're glad he's gone, but a little sad, too. Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.
That's the story and I'm glad I told it, even if it is a bit inconclusive and even though some of the memories the pencil prodded up (like that branch poking up the river-mud) made me feel a little sad and even older than I am. Thank you for listening. And Andy: If you're really down there, as I believe you are, look at the stars for me just after sunset, and touch the sand, and wade in the water, and feel free.
I never expected to take up this narrative again, but here I am with the dog -eared, folded pages open on the desk in front of me. Here I am adding another three or four pages, writing in a brand-new tablet. A tablet I bought in a store - I just walked into a store on Portland's Congress Street and bought it.
I thought I had put finish to my story in a Shawshank prison cell on a bleak January day in 1976. Now it's late June of 1977 and I am sitting in a small, cheap room of the Brewster Hotel in Portland, adding to it.
The window is open, and the sound of the traffic floating in seems huge, exciting, and intimidating. I have to look constantly over at the window and reassure myself that there are no bars on it. I sleep poorly at night because the bed in this room, as cheap as the room is, seems much too big and luxurious. I snap awake every morning promptly at six-thirty, feeling disorientated and frightened. My dreams are bad. I have a crazy feeling of free fall. The sensation is as terrifying as it is exhilarating.
What has happened in my life? Can't you guess? I was paroled. After thirty-eight years of routine hearings and routine details (in the course of those thirty-eight years, three lawyers died on me), my parole was granted. I suppose they decided that, at the age of fifty-eight, I was finally used up enough to be deemed safe.
I came very close to burning the document you have just read. They search outgoing parolees just as carefully as they search incoming 'new fish'. And beyond containing enough dynamite to assure me of a quick turnaround and another six or eight years inside, my 'memoirs' contained something else: the name of the town where I believe Andy Dufresne to be. Mexican police gladly cooperate with the American police, and I didn't want my freedom - or my unwillingness to give up the story I'd worked so long and hard to write - to cost Andy his.
Then I remembered how Andy had brought in his five hundred dollars back in 1948, and I took out my story of him the same way. Just to be on the safe side, I carefully rewrote each page which mentioned Zihuatanejo. If the papers had been found during my 'outside search', as they call it at the Shank, I would have gone back in on turnaround ... but the cops would have been looking for Andy in a Peruvian seacoast town named Las Intrudres.
The Parole Committee got me a job as a 'stock-room assistant' at the big FoodWay Market at the Spruce Mall in South Portland - which means I became just one more ageing bag-boy. There's only two kinds of bag-boys, you know; the old ones and the young ones. No one ever looks at either kind. If you shop at the Spruce Mall FoodWay, I may have even taken your groceries out to your car ... but you'd have had to have shopped there between March and April of 1977, because that's as long as I worked there.
At first I didn't think I was going to be able to make it on the outside at all. I've described prison society as a scaled-down model of your outside world, but I had no idea of how fast things moved on the outside; the raw speed people move at. They even talk faster. And louder.
It was the toughest adjustment I've ever had to make, and I haven't finished making it yet ... not by a long way. Women, for instance. After hardly knowing that they were half of the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working in a store filled with them. Old women, pregnant women wearing T-shirts with arrows pointing downward and the printed motto reading BABY HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out of their shirts - a woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten arrested and then had a sanity hearing - women of every shape and size. I found myself going around with a semi-hard almost all the time and cursing myself for being a dirty old man.
Going to the bathroom, that was another thing. When I had to go (and the urge always came on me at twenty-five past the hour), I had to fight the almost overwhelming need to check it with my boss. Knowing that was something I could just go and do in this too-bright outside world was one thing; adjusting my inner self to that knowledge after all those years of checking it with the nearest screwhead or facing two days in solitary for the oversight... that was something else.

　　一边写着，一边勾起我更多的回忆。撰写自己的故事，就好像把树枝插进清澈的河水中，翻搅起河底的泥泞。
　　我听到有人说，你写的又不是自己的故事，你写的是安迪的故事，你在自己的故事中，只是个小角色。但是你知道，其实并非如此，里面的字字句句，其实都是我自己的写照。安迪代表了在我内心深处、他们永远也封锁不住的那个部分，当监狱铁门最后终于为我开启，我穿着廉价西装、带着二十块钱走出监狱大门时，会感到欢欣鼓舞的那个部分。不管其他部分的我当时是多么老态龙钟、狼狈、害怕，那部分的我仍然会欢欣雀跃。但是我想，就那个部分而言，安迪所拥有的比我多很多，而且也比我懂得利用它。
　　这儿也有不少人像我一样，他们都记得安迪。我们都高兴他走了，但也有点难过。有些鸟儿天生就是关不住的，它们的羽毛太鲜明，歌声太甜美、也太狂野了，所以你只能放它们走，否则哪天你打开笼子喂它们时，它们也会想办法扬长而去。你知道把它们关住是不对的，所以你会为它们感到高兴，但如此一来，你住的地方仍然会因为它们离去而显得更加黯淡和空虚。
　　我很高兴把这个故事写下来，尽管故事似乎没有结尾，然而故事勾起了往事（就好像树枝翻搅了河中的泥泞一样），不禁令我感到有点悲伤和垂垂老矣。多谢你肯耐心聆听这个故事。还有，安迪，如果你真的到了南方，请在太阳下山以后，替我看看星星、摸摸沙子、在水中嬉戏，感受完全自由的感觉。
　　我从来没有想过这个故事还能继续写下去，但我现在坐在桌前再补充个三四页，这次是用新本子写的。这本子是我从店里买来的，是我走进波特兰国会街的一家店里买来的。
　　原本以为我在一九七六年一个阴沉的一月天，已经把这个故事写完了，但现在是一九七七年五月，我正坐在波特兰一家廉价旅馆的房间里，为这个故事添增新页。
　　窗子是敞开的，不时传来外面车子的喧嚣声，震耳欲聋，也挺吓人的。我不断看着窗子，确定上面没有装铁栅栏。我晚上常常睡不好，因为尽管房租很便宜，这个床对我来说仍然太大，也太豪华了。我每天早上六点半便惊醒了，感到茫然和害怕。我常做噩梦，重获自由的感觉就好像自由落体骤然下降一样，让人既害怕又兴奋。
　　我是怎么了？你还猜不到吗？他们批准我假释了。经过三十八年一次次的听证会和一次次驳回，我的假释申请终于获准了。我猜他们放我出来的主要原因是我已经五十八岁了，如此高龄，不太可能再为非作歹了。
　　我差一点就把你们刚刚读到的故事烧掉。他们会详细搜查即将假释的囚犯，就好像搜查新进犯人一样仔细。我的“回忆录”中所包含的爆炸性资料足以让我再坐六到八年的牢，除此之外，里面还记载了我猜测的安迪的去处。墨西哥警察将会很乐意和美国警方合作，而我不希望到头来得牺牲安迪来换取自己的自由——另一方面，我也不想放弃这么辛苦写好的故事。
　　这时候，我记起安迪当初是怎么把五百美金偷渡进监狱的，于是我把这几页故事以同样方法偷渡出去。为了保险起见，我很小心地重写了提到齐华坦尼荷的那几页。因此即使这篇故事被搜出来，我得回去坐牢，警察也会到秘鲁海边一个叫拉思因楚德的小镇去搜寻安迪。
　　假释委员替我在南波特兰一家超级市场找了个“仓库助理”的差事——也就是说，我成为年纪很大的跑腿伙计。你知道，会跑腿打杂的人基本上只有两种，要不就是年纪很轻，要不就是年纪很大。但不管你属于哪一种，从来没有客人会正眼瞧你。如果你曾经在史布鲁斯超市买过东西，我说不定还曾经帮你把买好的东西从手推车中拿出来，放到车上……但是，你得在一九七七年三、四月间到那里买东西才碰得到我，因为我只在那里工作了一个多月。
　　起初，我根本不认为自己能适应外面的世界。我把监狱描绘成外面社会的缩影，但完全没料到外面的世界变化竟然如此之大，人们走路和讲话的速度都变快了，连说话都更大声。
　　我一时之间很难适应这一切，到现在还没有完全适应，就拿女人来说吧。近四十年的牢狱生涯，我几乎已经忘记女人占了世界人口的一半。突然之间，我工作的地方充满了女人——老女人、怀孕的女人（T恤上有个箭头往下指着肚子，一行大字写着：“小宝宝在这儿”），以及骨瘦如柴、不穿胸罩、乳头隐隐凸出的女人（在我入狱服刑之前，女人如果像这样穿着打扮，会被当街逮捕，以为她是神经病）等形形色色的女人，我发现自己走在街上常常忍不住起生理反应，只有在心里暗暗诅咒自己是脏老头。
　　上厕所是另一件我不能适应的事。当我想上厕所的时候（而且我每次都是在整点过后二十五分想上厕所），我老是有一股强烈的冲动，想去请求上司准我上厕所，我每次都忍得很辛苦才没有这么做，心里晓得在这个光明的外面世界里，想上厕所的话，随时都可以去。关在牢中多年后，每次上厕所都要先向离得最近的警卫报告，一旦疏忽就要关两天禁闭，因此出狱后，尽管知道不必再事事报告，但心里知道是一回事，要完全适应又是另外一回事了。