He has paid it, without missing, for four years and eleven months. He works in the prison laundry. The Bureau of Prisons takes a percentage of inmate earnings under a financial responsibility program, and forty-one dollars is what that percentage comes to, and it arrives on or about the fourteenth.

At forty-one dollars a month, four point three million dollars takes approximately eight thousand nine hundred years.

Nobody explains this at sentencing. I want that written down, because I have now met eleven other people in my professional life who found it out the same way I did, which is from an envelope.

The envelope is the thing.

It comes from the clerk of the court and it has a check in it and a remittance slip, and on the slip, in a field labeled OBLIGOR, is his name, and beside it, his eight-digit federal register number.

I put the first one in a drawer.