The Final Testament of the Holy Bible (12 page)

Some people just ain’t made for the world. Can’t fucking take it. Can’t deal with Momma and Dadda and school teaching you nothing and a fucking job with some motherfucking boss going blah blah blah and bills and neighbors and some kind of bullshit church and having a good credit score and a mortgage and getting married with kids and some kind of mysterious motherfucking retirement plan that don’t ever let you do nothing but put more in and get none back. Lotta people ain’t made for it. They the people you see on the streets, in dirty clothes, talking to themselves, screaming on the corner like they demonized, mumbling and crying, they the ones in your family and your town you always scared of and feeling sorry for and making excuses about, the ones you don’t even thinks is fucking human. They is, they just ain’t made like the rest of you and they can’t deal with it so they go to drinking and getting fucking high and being criminal and getting locked-the-fuck-up and just saying who gives a fuck to all of it. People be thinking they’re crazy and be needing some kind of fucking help, but the help ain’t nothing ’cause a motherfucking soup kitchen or some kind of shelter that can’t hold enough or a nuthouse where we get beat or some charity that’s really about motherfuckers’ friends knowing how good they is and how much they care ain’t nothing but bullshit. And don’t
even bring up that made-up motherfucker people be calling God, ’cause that motherfucker don’t even exist, and don’t be bringing up all these so-called houses of God, ’cause they more about killing and hating than they is about helping and loving. Sorry to break the motherfucking news if you ain’t heard it, but that’s it motherfucker, that’s the fucking news.

I been living underground for a long-ass mother-fucking time. Living underneath New York fucking City, where there’s tunnels, and there’s tunnels underneath the tunnels, and there’s some more fucking tunnels under those tunnels. Some of ’em empty, some still got trains rolling through ’em, some of ’em got the subways and some of ’em gots peoples. And then there’s some so dark, so goddamn dark, darker than the darkest night, and blacker than what you see when your eyes closed, that most peoples, even underground peoples, won’t go into ’em. And those are the tunnels where miracles happen, where people like Yahya and Ben go and come back something different, where motherfuckers who got the gift go and in the blackness they see. I know it be sounding crazy, but the ones with gifts got to go into blackness, ’cause that’s where they learn to see.

I was born in New Haven, Connecticut. My daddy was a respectable motherfucker who had him a college degree and worked his ass off as a bank teller. My momma finished high school and spent her life
being his bitch. He wasn’t never around when I was growing up, saying he was always working to get promoted and going out with clients and his boss. When he was around, he was drinking and yelling and ignoring me and my two sisters and telling my momma she wasn’t pretty enough or skinny enough or dressing well enough or getting them invited to the right parties with the right peoples and every now and then if she talked back to him he’d hit her in the fucking face. He didn’t think nothing about me ’cept that I was a piece of shit, which was fine with me ’cause I didn’t think nothing about him ’cept he was a piece of shit too. They sent me to all sorts of different schools, thinking the better name or more of ’em would make a difference, but it didn’t make nothing ’cept them real pissed. When I was seventeen, I left ’em for good. Just walked the fuck away. I was figuring I’d do fine on my own, and even if I didn’t, I’d rather be doing real bad my own way than be an asshole doing what other peoples thought I should be doing. I convinced myself I was breaking out in the name of some kind of fucking freedom. I hadn’t learned yet that everybody’s locked up some way or another. That’s how life is; we’re all imprisoned by something.

I lived in a park for a while. Lived in a cardboard box. Lived under a highway. Got my ass beat and got robbed and got addicted and got locked up a few times and got raped more than once or twice. Learned what I already knew, that the world is an ugly motherfucking place where people’ll spit
on you and fuck you up before they’ll be good to you. I found my way into the tunnels just wanting to get the fuck away, lived like a fucking rat, scrounging for food, eating fucking garbage, taking what other people didn’t want and using it to survive. First time down was for three years. Just by myself. Living by the trains that went to Long Island. Had a sleeping bag and flashlight and a baseball bat. Then I got busted for being in a fight with a knife over some pizza in a dumpster and had some crack in my pocket and got sent upstate for three years. Got out and came back to my tunnel and found some other motherfucker in my sleeping bag and wasn’t in no mood for fighting after fighting the whole time in prison and went further down and found me an old electrical closet on an abandoned
IRT
track and stayed there for three years. I got back on the rock and drinking again and spent my days begging and going through dumpsters trying to find some shit to sell. One day I came back from up top and I had me a couple nice rocks and a bottle of wine and I see two motherfuckers sitting on the ground outside my closet. They wasn’t in uniforms and they definitely wasn’t working with the
MTA
or Amtrak, so I figured it was some undercover pig motherfuckers coming to drag me back to prison ’cause I didn’t never go see my parole officer, and I think about running away but figure they’d shoot me or some shit like they always do to poor supposedly crazy homeless motherfuckers. So I just walked over to ’em and asked them what the fuck was up and when I was close I could see for sure they wasn’t no fucking cops ’cause they had these
scars that was identical and looked liked someone had put two long slices on each of their arms and they said some motherfucker named Yahya wanted to see me. I asked them what the fuck Yahya wanted and they said to see me. I asked them who the fuck Yahya was and where Yahya was at and they said they would show me. And that’s what they did. They fucking took me down into the blackness and showed me.

I was there on that first day we saw Ben. We was just sitting having some dinner and most of us was there, sitting at the tables eating some macaroni and motherfucking cheese. At that point I’d been with Yahya for almost ten years, and it had taken a long fucking time, lots of hard-ass work and patience, but we had everything dialed up just fucking right: electricity hijacked from the city power lines, water hijacked from the city water pipes, a tunnel that hadn’t been used since the eighteen fucking hundreds that was blocked at both ends, holes that we could close that was going up to other tunnels in four different places, and one passage that went straight into a alley on the Lower East Side that we could lock the fuck up to keep people out. We had built little shelters for everyone out of scraps of wood and siding that peoples up top threw away. We had pots and pans and sheets and towels and beds and old tape players for music and radios for when the bad news started coming and we had thousands and thousands of batteries. We had enough canned and boxed food to keep us going for a year, and that was if we didn’t start eating any of the rats or the other
fucking animals that was living in the tunnels, which could keep us going for just about forever. And we had us a stockpile of weapons. Everything from old medieval-like shit, fucking swords and spears and shields we made out of scrap metal, to new-school shit like nine millimeters and assault rifles and tasers and mace. There was other tunnels that had peoples living in ’em, and there was other groups that had organized into some kind of community or something, but none like us. We was a movement, a fucking army, with a philosophy and a motherfucking plan. We was ready for what’s coming. For what is going to befall humanity. We was prepared to survive when everybody else is gonna fucking die.

Yahya’d been telling us for a couple weeks he’d been having dreams about someone coming to see us. Yahya was a prophet, an old school holy man, like fucking Moses or Muhammad or some other motherfucker from the old books, so when he was telling us he was having dreams or visions we took that shit seriously. Yahya had been in the tunnels for thirty-three years. Came down when he was fourteen years old, living in some foster care fucking nightmare, getting beat by the other kids and raped by the man who was supposed to be caring for him. He got fed-the-fuck-up one day and lit the house they was living in on fire. The other kids got out but the man burned to a fucking crisp, just like his ass deserved, and as soon as he’d dropped the fucking match, Yahya walked into the nearest subway and hopped the fucking turnstile and walked off the platform and
into the tunnels. He figured out how to live without being above, eating discarded food from the garbage cans of subway stations, finding clothes that people be leaving behind on accident, getting water from bathrooms at the big stations. He kept going down further and further, finding his own motherfucking way, like all the prophets and the great peoples of the world find their own fucking way, and eventually he found our tunnel we living in now, pristine and unopened for almost a hundred fucking years, and he lived in it alone for ten years, till he started building our society. He only been coming out one day a year for the whole time, just the day of the anniversary of the fire. He come out and he read a newspaper and he walk around the city and look at the shit going down, which ain’t never any good, and been getting worse and worse every goddamn year.

So he’d been telling us ’bout his dream, that some motherfucker was going to find us, a man who’d wandered the world, suffered shit none of us could ever imagine, knew shit that none of us could ever imagine, that his arriving was a sign that the end was coming, the final motherfucking sign. And there we were, eating our macaroni and listening to Yahya preach, and this motherfucker comes walking out the darkness, skinny as fuck, white as paper, scars all over the fucking place, scars that made the scars we had, the scars Yahya cut into our arms as a sign that our life above was dead and we was in the tunnels for life, this motherfucker had scars made those scars look like little bandaid booboos I used to get when
I was a four-year-old shithead. Yahya, who preached every night at dinner, just stopped, stared. If he hadn’t been having his dreams he’d a pro’ly killed the motherfucker. But he knew, knew he was coming, and knew who he was, knew why he was walking the face of the fucking earth, and Ben just came strolling up, not saying a word, just looking unhuman, but not scary like a monster or shit, but unhuman ’cause it looked like he was glowing, like there was some kinda light coming out of him or something. He came to the table, asked if he could sit down, and Yahya nodded. We was all shocked and I personally was scared, scared of the motherfucker who could silence Yahya. So he sat down at the end of the table, looked at Yahya, and asked him, real polite and shit, if he would continue preaching. Yahya smiled, and he was not the kind of motherfucker who smiled very often, and said yes. And then he continued fucking preaching. And I remember that sermon ’cause of Ben joining us. Was about how the governments of the world leading everyone towards death, disaster, ruin, and apocalypse. And how God and Jesus and the rest of the motherfuckers and the dumbass prophecies in the Bible had nothing to do with it. It was the greed and folly of the men who running the world. Their belief in silly religions that preach murder and hate and division. Their need to control other peoples who’s different from them and kill them if they don’t bend to some motherfucker’s will. That’s what’s gonna end it all, some dumbass war over religion and money, and that’s who’s gonna end it all, the motherfuckers who believe and hold the purse strings.

Ben settled right the fuck in. He took a job like everyone had a fucking job. Most of us went up top to either beg for money that we used for buying weapons and long-term supplies or look through the garbage for food and building materials and shit we could use down below. Some of us took care of our business in the tunnel, working on the electric or the water, managing supplies, doing maintenance, cleaning the place the fuck up. The worst job was cleaning the area around the toilets, two deep holes that went into a tunnel down below us. We had built little outhouses ’round the holes, and peoples tried being hygienic and shit, but it was still nasty, still a place where peoples pissed and took shits and smelled fucking bad. Ben became the toilet man, cleaning and stocking the paper and dumping a bucketful of water down the hole to make some of that foul shit go away. When he wasn’t working there, he’d help whoever else was needing help, doing whatever they was needing doing. When we was eating, he’d always sit at the end of the table, and he didn’t hardly eat nothing. Maybe two, three bites of rice or pasta, maybe an apple or an orange or half a banana, one glass of water, and that’d be it for the whole fucking day. And when we was sleeping, we all went into our shelters, some of ’em being pretty fucking nice, with mattresses and
TVs
and more than one room, and some of ’em being more the simple way, with maybe a sleeping bag or some blankets. Ben would sleep on the ground at one of the dark ends of the tunnel, all by hisself, nothing but his clothes, ’cept when it got real fucking cold, then he used this
thin-ass blanket that wouldn’t keep a fucking cockroach warm. And he didn’t hardly ever talk. If you asked him a question, he’d either nod or shake his head or smile. If it was needing more words, or was a more complicated kinda thing, he would always say just what he needed as quick as possible and then shut up. And with the way he looked, he was making all of us think he wasn’t a person, not a real person at least, he was something fucking else beyond, something that wasn’t like the rest of us, not even like Yahya.

About a week after he was being with us, his seizures started happening. One lunchtime he just fell backwards from the table and his body went fucking haywire. He was shaking and rolling ’round and had shit coming out his mouth and was grunting like a goddamn dog. People got up to help him but Yahya said leave him be, the man is doing what the man needs to do. So peoples left his ass alone. And the first time it lasted something like two minutes. When it was over we just left him alone, and at a certain point he came back awake and sat back down at the table like nothing fucking happened. Twenty minutes later it happened again. He just fell back and freaked-the-fuck-out. One of us was a doctor before he became a crackhead and ended up in the tunnels, where Yahya found him and saved him, and he was saying we couldn’t just leave Ben alone, but Yahya kept saying this is what the man needs to do. And it was one of Yahya’s beliefs, one of the tenets of our fucking society: a man does what he needs to do, he lives his
life how he wants to live it, other people ain’t got no fucking right to impose. So even though we was all scared, and we be seeing that the seizures were fucking his ass up, we left him alone. He was doing what he needed to do.