we think giving something to eat or drink will motivate them, we are allowed to do it. This, though, wasn’t anything like that. This was entirely personal. And it involved physical contact, which was expressly forbidden. It was against regulations. But I had been in so much pain for so long. I had been haunted and terrorized and destroyed by images of my dying child, of the pain he felt as he went, of the fear he must have experienced as his body failed, of the horror of the moment when he stopped breathing, with my wife and me holding his hands. I knew I would never recover from my boy’s death, and I doubted the pain would ever subside, but I decided that if Ben could relieve me of it for a minute or an hour or a day, it would be worth whatever penalty I would have to pay.
I reached into my pocket and took out a key. I leaned across the table and unlocked the shackle that kept his right arm bound to the table. He did not move as I did it, but once his arm was free, and I was still leaning over the table, his arm shot up and he grabbed me and pulled me towards him with a strength that no one who looked like him should have possessed. I felt my feet leave the ground. He held me with my head on his shoulder, and he started whispering in my ear. I don’t know what language it was, though I believe it was either ancient Hebrew or Aramaic. I was terrified, and I didn’t know if he had tricked me and was going to hurt me, or if he was actually doing what he said he could do. And in a way it didn’t matter, because he was so strong that I couldn’t have gotten away if I had wanted to.
He kept whispering, and my body went limp. It felt like someone had just emptied it of everything, like what I imagine people who die and come back say they feel while they’re dead and drifting towards the light. My emotions, my soul, and my physical strength, my pain and sorrow and struggle, it was all gone. I felt completely empty. I felt like I had always wished I could feel: peaceful, and simple, and uncomplicated. I wanted to be that way forever, to stay with him forever, my head on his shoulder, his voice in my ear. I heard the door open behind me and I heard people come rushing into the room. Someone had been watching us and assumed he was hurting me and I knew it was going to end. Ben stopped speaking whatever language he had been using and just before I was pulled away he said
I was carried out of the room. The last image I have of him before the door slammed shut is of one of my colleagues spraying mace into his face. I was later told he was also shot with tasers and beaten with billy clubs, and when the beating was over, he was carried out of the room, bleeding and unconscious. I was taken to a hospital, where I checked out normal and went home a few hours later and slept easily for the first time since the day my son went into the hospital. I was transferred off the case and Ben was bailed out two days later. I never saw him again, though I did try to find him. I wanted to thank him for doing whatever he had done, and for giving me a new chance at life, for teaching me to love as he had loved me. I wasn’t surprised when I heard what happened to him. We live in a cruel and unfortunate world. The longer I am in it, the more I believe he was right. Hope is an illusion, a dangling carrot, something to keep us going, but going towards what? It all is ending. His end, cruel, unnecessary, and cloaked in a veil of religion and righteousness, like so much of what’s wrong with what we’ve built, will be but the beginning.
LUKE
I’m a white man, brothers and sisters. From the great state of Mississippi. Born a Christian white man and raised with a strong sense of my Southern heritage and the belief that I was part of a God-given few: the few who founded this country, who built this country, and who run this country, even when it appears someone else might be doing it. I was raised in Jackson, Mississippi. A beautiful town, brothers and sisters, a beautiful town. My family had been in the state for two hundred years, and most of us had never seen a reason to go anywhere else. We’d been settlers, soldiers, plantation owners, slave traders, slave owners. We’d fought for the South in the Civil War, and a good many of us had died for her. We’d been gamblers, farmers, Indian hunters, sheriffs, thieves, lawyers, bootleggers, congressmen, and senators. My daddy was an oilman. Spent his life searching for the black gold, that thick, dark, elusive money juice. He bought and drilled some land in Laurel, Mississippi, and he struck it, brothers and sisters, struck it deep and made himself a bundle. When I was a youngster, he lived in Laurel during the week, working and spending his nights sleeping with his black mistress. My momma and I lived in Jackson, and my momma spent her nights sleeping with the golf pro, the tennis pro, the local police, and just about anyone else who wanted to sleep with her. On weekends my momma and daddy got drunk and pretended they loved each other. They went to cocktail parties and horse races. They played golf and went to events at the club. Occasionally they threw things at each other, and occasionally my daddy hit her. I didn’t think it was anything but normal. Even after my momma killed herself, my brothers and sisters, I didn’t think it was anything but normal. I just thought maybe my momma had got got by the Devil, or that she had had a bout with some kind of female insanity. Lord knows how many believe those kinds of things happen. Lord knows.
Back to me. I must declare that I grew up like a little prince. I had fancy clothes and fancy food and went to the fanciest schools in Jackson. I did whatever I wanted and acted however I wanted and I got whatever I wanted. I had black women who cooked and cleaned and cared for me, and though my momma claimed to be raising me, it was really them. And that was the way it was with all the white kids I knew, and we just thought it was the way of the world. When I finished high school, I went to Oxford to attend the University of Mississippi, where I lived like a gentleman prince. I didn’t hardly ever go to class, because I knew I had a job waiting for me. I was the president of my fraternity, where we drank beer and played cards every night and flew the Confederate flag right outside our front door. And when I wasn’t drinking and gambling, me and all my friends did whatever we could to get coeds to sleep with us, including forcing them to do it. It was four years of what I thought was bliss, brothers and sisters, before I knew what bliss was. There was no responsibility to myself, my family, or any sort of higher authority. My loyalty and faith resided within my own ego, and within the bonds established at the fraternity house, where, by the way, we had black women working for us cleaning our clothes and cooking our meals. And yes, brothers and sisters, occasionally we’d try to sleep with them, and if by God they said no, we’d force them to do it.
At the end of college, I went to work for my daddy, supervising his wells. I married myself a nice young blonde girl, whose daddy was in the oil business in Louisiana and had known my daddy for twenty years. We had ourselves a big wedding at her parents’ plantation house, where everyone got drunk and ate too much and generally acted like we were Southerners before we lost the war. We settled in Gulfport, ’cause it was closer to her family, and in six months’ time she was pregnant. We had ourselves a little girl, and then another. They were cute little things, brothers and sisters, believe me, they were pretty as buttons the both of them. I settled into a pattern like my daddy’s. I was working in Laurel and coming home on weekends. Though I said I wasn’t going to do some of the things my daddy did, I did them anyway. I found myself a black ladyfriend and spent my evenings in bars with her and in bed with her. I played some cards and lost some money. I drove a big fast car and yelled at the people who worked for me, even if they didn’t deserve it, and I fired ’em when I felt like it, even if there wasn’t a good reason. I was living a bad, bad life, and I didn’t know any better. Some would say, and I have said at times myself, that I was singing with Satan, running with the Devil, walking down the dark dirty path of the demon Beelzebub. But I thought that was the way life was supposed to be led by a man of my type, brothers and sisters, a rich white man from the South.
As it is in life, what rises must fall. The mighty become the meek. Giants are stricken and empires razed. And even though nobody ever thinks it’s ever gonna happen to them, it sure as shit does, brothers and sisters, and I can attest to that. My fall was swift and pitiless, like a box of rocks falling off the back of a wagon. I started smoking crack, which was a newfangled thing, with one of my ladyfriends. I could not for the life of me stop smoking it. Simultaneous to that little bit of nastiness, my daddy’s wells ran dry and he had a falling-out with my father-in-law. Simultaneous to that, my daddy’s stockbroker disappeared to Brazil with a mistress and all of our money. I stayed in Mississippi under the auspices of helping my family navigate the turbulent and troubled waters of financial Armageddon, while actually spending all my time in a cheap motel with a pipe and a torch and a stream of hookers. Upon returning home, I was greeted by my father-in-law, who had hired himself a private investigator, with a shotgun and some divorce papers. He told me my wife and beautiful daughters were in Louisiana, and if I tried seeing them or contacting them again I’d be strung up and castrated. Brothers and sisters, if you had seen the look in his eyes, you’d have known that was no joke.
So I went back to Laurel and smoked away everything I had left. And then I smoked away a whole bunch of what I didn’t have. And then I started stealing things that weren’t mine and smoking those. Brothers and sisters, I descended into the depths of Hell, where I laughed with Lucifer and made love to his dastardly disciples. I stayed
