The
light thundered through everything, beating back drapes and curtains. The
entire house was rattling and trembling, the light swirling and turning. Pedro,
darkness, Pedro, darkness. And then just the darkness. And then just the light.
And Dad’s life hot on my hands and my clothes and my face, and the hard beating
light outside like a summons, celestial and vast, like Jesus or God, Buddha or
Muhammad. Like Dad’s voice. Like Mom’s love. Like light and motion, motion and
light–
“Rodney!”
I cried. “Come back! This is it! It’s over! They’re here!
“
ROGER, TEN-FOUR
” the shortwave outside
blared, its cessation as suddenly loud as the world around it. Massive car
doors opened and slammed, footsteps sounded heavy and fast on the front stairs.
I heard a flowerpot crash into the cold alleyway. “Open up!” they shouted.
“Open up in there!” And then that loud peremptory knock at my front door and,
as I turned, the door exploding open with a crash of dark large-bodied men in
dark blue uniforms. Their badges and flashlights gleamed, their weapons
flashed, but I wasn’t afraid, because I wasn’t going anywhere I didn’t want to
go. They were mine–I wasn’t theirs. My arms were even outstretched to
embrace them, my hands and face stained with the sacred blood.
Totem, totem, totem
…
and the light streaming through me like
the rain and the wind and the sky. We would all taste the Eucharist, we would
all ingest the flesh and suffer strange transubstantiations. We would all find
God, we would all live forever. I knew she would tell them. I knew all along
she’d never leave me or send me away. My mom loved me. They were here. I was
saved. It was the police.
____________
26
WHILE
undergoing three weeks of isolated observation at Valley Youth Correctional
Facilities I was allowed some books, a pen and notepad, and a few choice hours
each afternoon of strictly regulated media privileges. I was also granted,
almost as an official afterthought, what seemed to me at the time like
virtually acres of soft, casual introspection. They tell me I slept nearly two
full days and nights upon my arrival, awaking only to take slow bites at the
facility’s tepid, customized meals. I don’t, however, remember those first two
days at all. I only remember waking one bright spring morning to the harsh sun
flashing outside my window, the glass of which was inlaid with a fine
protective wire mesh. The thin bed and walls of my room seemed drab by
comparison. I heard a few singing birds, eccentric, anxious and shrill. I was
confronted by a long mirror in which I sat on my bed, observing myself with a
sort of cool diffidence, as if I were warden to my own reflection. I assumed
that invisible behind the mirror sat my more official audience. My reflected
face was lined and bruised from excessive sleep, and I poured a glass of water
from the blue plastic pitcher beside me on the weak, clumsy bureau. My room was
like the rooms of the motels in which I had been raised, at once transient and
profane, fleeting and ill-designed. After months of strange vacation I was
finally home again. And no matter how much fun you have on vacation, it’s
always good being home again.
“Do
you know what you did?” Officer Henrietta asked me soon after my arrival.
My afternoon sessions with Officer
Henrietta, a trained and certified psychotherapist, were the only ritual of my
day beyond mere self-maintenance.
Officer Henrietta was a bluff, affable man, but one who wanted it known
he wasn’t about to take any nonsense, especially not from a child.
“I
don’t remember,” I confessed.
“But
I’m sure that, whatever it was, it was wrong.
Or else I wouldn’t be here, would I, Officer Henrietta?”
“What
you did was very, very wrong,” Officer Henrietta said. “What you did endangered
the lives of people you loved. What you did frightened a lot of people. It
frightened you, so you can’t even remember what happened. Do you believe you’re
capable of that? Do you believe you’re capable of doing things so horrible you
can frighten yourself that much?”
The
office in which we met six days each week was cluttered with papers, Styrofoam
coffee cups and crumpled Hershey’s wrappers. I always felt comfortable in that
office, and actually looked forward to the rather easy, meaningless
conversations Officer Henrietta was kind enough to conduct with me. Officer
Henrietta’s distinct, often provocative questions never startled me or made me
feel ill at ease. Instead, they implied what my obvious responses simply had to
be, responses I did not utter so much as activate, like functions in a
computer. Graphs, data, production, profit, loss. Anger, love, resentment,
sadness, pain. The world of the self and the world of machines. During these
days and nights of slow, unhurried reflection, I began to realize that those
were the two worlds I always seemed to be getting confused. The world of the
self and the world of machines.
“I
believe the human mind is capable of anything,” I told Officer Henrietta. “The
mind is its own place, just like Milton’s heaven. It sounds like something Blake
would have said, doesn’t it? I’m talking William Blake, now. Do you know who William
Blake is, Officer Henrietta?” Officer Henrietta’s black felt pen sat poised at
the edge of the paper, but his unresponsive brown eyes were trained upon me
with a remote, unfocused expression, as if they were staring into something
both vital and abstract, like the weather. “And as for me,” I said, “I believe
I’m capable of anything I’m capable of doing. I can be anybody I want to be,
because only I have the power to decide. Not the world, not this institution,
not you and your framed documents. Only me and my conceptions of me. My mom
taught me that. I can grow up to be a doctor, an astronaut, or even the president
of the United States. I can be a bird, a rock, a cloud. I can be anything I want
to be, Officer Henrietta. And I’m afraid there’s not really anything you can do
to stop me.”
Every
once in a while Officer Henrietta emitted long, mystical sighs, vague
punctuations which indicated vaster and cooler worlds than ours filled with
sunny, padded white clouds and sparkling blue beaches. He leisurely chain-smoked
Marlboros or Winstons and drank vile, bitter coffee dimly discolored by
Cremora. He showed me ink blotches and asked me what they meant (though I suspect
he may have known already). I described for Officer Henrietta bats, abattoirs,
leering faces and dark twisted passages filled with incessant and secret
motion. He asked me abstract questions. If you drew a picture of yourself on a
piece of paper, what color paper would you choose? If a strange man came up to
you on the street and asked you to love him, what would you say? If you were on
a sinking ship, who would you save first–the women or the children? These
were all fine questions, and I answered them the best I could. I told him I
would choose a sheet of beige paper, because that was the color of my mom’s
car. I told him I would tell the strange man to love himself, and let me get on
with my own life. I told him in the event of a shipwreck I wouldn’t try to save
anybody, I would let the whole world drown. We would all return to the deep
earth together, drifting down through the intricate seaweed and glistening blue
water, women and children all together at last, journeying into a safer and
warmer world than the one of broken ships.
One
day Officer Henrietta began showing me photographs of a beautiful woman with
white, smiling teeth. He showed me photographs of a man tied up on a nice sofa
in the living room of a nice house. Strange things had been done to his body,
from which the clothing had been torn in places, like the paper windows in a
Christmas Advent calendar. The pictures seemed slightly familiar to me in a
dozy, unimperative way. I thought vaguely I might like to meet these people. But
then I also thought it wouldn’t matter to me that much if I never met them at
all.
“Is
there anyone you’d like to see?” Officer Henrietta asked, laying the photos
facedown on his desk, shuffling and stacking them meaninglessly like a deck of
cards. “Can you think of anybody offhand? A relative, maybe. Somebody you
especially love.”
I
thought. I thought about silent places where darkness covered everything with
an oily film. These were uninhabited and soundless places, like hidden chambers
of the moon. You could see no faces there, you could hear no names. Like
Officer Henrietta’s photographs, these places didn’t matter to me that much one
way or the other.
Officer
Henrietta was looking at me. I looked at the sheet of unmarked white paper on
the desk before him, at his upraised and ineffective pen, at a photograph of
his beaming family in a cheap plastic frame.
“Is
Rodney around?” I asked after a while. “Is there any possibility I might be
able to see my friend Rodney for a few minutes or so? I’d like to know how he’s
doing, you know. I’d just feel a lot better if I knew my friend Rodney was all
right.”
ALONE
IN MY discrete room I would lie on the bed for hours gazing at the stale
ceiling and talking to the figures who sat observing me behind the mirror. I
could hear efficient machines whirring back there, official documents being
filed into sliding cabinet drawers, the occasional hum of a word processor, the
brief interjections of a clattering typewriter. “I think I’m learning to take
things a lot easier than I used to,” I told these invisible people. “In the
past, I may have been too quick to make judgments. I couldn’t seem to accept
the way things were. I think I’ve learned a lot about myself in the past few
days or so, and I may be on the verge of some real sustained growth–both
intellectually and emotionally. I’m growing more and more interested in eastern
religions, for example. Yoga, Brāhmanism, Buddhism, Tantrism, Oriental
alchemy, mystical erotism. We’re very much a thing-oriented culture–the
West in general, I mean. We’re into making things, changing things, moving things
from one place to another. Sometimes I think it’s best just to let everything
lie. To not keep banging and bumping away at the world, to accept things for
what they are. I guess in a way that might sound escapist to you. I’m sure my
friend Beatrice would probably be quick to agree. To imagine the world and all
its suffering as a sort of necessary trial, one which presumably conditions us
to understand our true
being
, is to
imagine that the world itself doesn’t matter, nor the conditions in it. That
means, in a way, accepting the world’s cruelty and its pain. That means just
leaving it alone to get on with its own alien and material processes, however
wrong and unjust they may be. I’m sure that could sound rather self-centered, even
pretty ambivalent or smug. But there often comes a time in your life when you
stop worrying about whether the way you think is right or proper or not. You
just get tired, and start accepting the way of thinking that’s easiest and
least worrisome. Maya, the world as illusion. Karma, that duplicity and
evanescence of mere physical life, the incessant beat and blur of material
repetition. Then nirvana, the self’s final liberation, a dream of nonbeing as
pure being. We find our way out of this world within this world, I guess that’s
what it all boils down to. Now that I’ve got your attention, maybe I can ask
you to send me a few books. I could use one or two books on Vedantic
philosophy. Then, of course,
The
Upanishads
, and the
Bhagavad Gita
.
I could use a general edition of
Patañjali’s
Yoga-sūtras
, while
we’re at it. I don’t mean to hurry you, but whenever you have time. I was
thinking they might even make a good permanent addition to the library here. When
kids get screwed up like I do, they need some traditional wisdom in order to
work through their confusion. Kids who try to break the rules are only trying
to find better rules they can live by, and the best rules are always the ones
you carry within yourself. Kids need to learn they can’t expect anything from
anybody. They need to learn that everything they’ll ever have is already inside
them, simply waiting to be recognized.”
As
I lay in my bed talking, I heard doors opening up and down the hallway outside.
I heard toilets being flushed, and gurneys squeaking and clattering along the polished
tile floors. The halls were filled with the bright, audible noise of
institutional fluorescents, that hypnotic artificial light you might discover
like atmosphere inhabiting some alien space station.
“Of
course, you know what Beatrice would say about all this, don’t you?” I shrugged,
affecting a smug disconcern. I couldn’t remember if I’d told these invisible
beings about my friend Beatrice or not. “She’d say all my talk about spiritual
liberation’s just a big con, that I’m trying to disavow ontology. You can’t
disavow ontology–that’s what Beatrice would say. Ontology’s what happens
when you’re hit by a bus. It’s not something you can just disavow.”
I
WANTED REDEMPTION in these days of my slow recuperation, the warm equatorial
haze of samadhi, the total cessation of all transformations. They never brought
me the books I requested, however. Whenever I reminded him, Officer Henrietta
avoided the issue. Instead I received a few “world classics.”
Les Misérables
,
David Copperfield
,
War and
Peace
, all of them abridged and illustrated for some theoretical “young
adult” reader. These books lay casually disregarded on my bureau while I lay in
my bed thinking. If I could not learn redemption, I could at least imagine or
even reinvent it. I gathered what fragments of Oriental wisdom I could recall
and tried to generate larger worlds around them, vaster pictures into which
these fragments might tidily fit, like pieces in a philosophical jigsaw puzzle.
The mind was just a reaction of pure spiritual being to the world’s material
force. The mind was a whirlpool, constant and uncontainable, which spun off
into the world knocking into other things, inciting other spirits to move. This
was karma then, I decided: the constant push of objects which tried to make of
spirit and object too–a sort of cosmic bullying, a rushing and herding of
things into other things. These forces made life, death, people, pain,
suffering, cities and, worst of all, human emotions. They made anger. They made
hate. For years now I had been filled with this hot and irreproachable anger
that burned and flared in me without warning–this anger I could not
contain, which had caused me to do something, or perhaps even a series of
things, for which I had been legally incarcerated. I had been incarcerated in
order to protect the people I loved, and as a result of this real burning drive
in me, this raging drive to hurt, to conquer, to create a more material and
corrupted world, I had harmed people–people I loved, Officer Henrietta
liked to remind me–and I had consequently harmed myself as well. You
can’t direct your hate at other people; hate is a force that burns him who uses
it too. Hate never does anyone any good, I thought. This was the lesson I had
been brought here to learn, and I was amazed at the effortless and benign
nature of its composition. It had simply grown in me, blossomed like flowers. It
took root and grew from the very rage and anger it was intent on eliminating. Everything
carries within it the fuel of its own driving antithesis, I thought. Anger is
the stuff from which real love and knowledge grow. In order to grow and learn,
we must permit the world to betray itself.