Christian Nation (45 page)

I occupied myself the first few days becoming accustomed to the routine: the way in which food and water would be delivered without allowing any light into the room; the way to piss and shit as far as possible from the place where I could lie down; the way to stand and squat given the short chain; how to keep my arms from seizing up and keep the blood flowing; how to scratch using the wall.

Soon, however, everything changed. In a world of darkness and silence, time becomes flat, constrained, like a physical world of two dimensions. The passage of time is not marked by events in the empirical world, for there are none. Instead, the landmarks on the map of time are purely mental. Looking back, distance is impossible to judge, and even sequence is uncertain. I do know I went through a welcome phase of vivid hallucinations. They were terrifying but welcome. When they ended, the real torture began. For during most waking moments I felt nothing other than the cold terror that this could last forever. I slowly became obsessed with the thought that I would be left here for the rest of my natural life, and eventually convinced myself that this was their plan. At some point I came to believe that I had already been in the cell for two years and that, at age forty-two, I could be here for another thirty to forty.

I learned that insanity can be sensed as an event just over the horizon, a feeling not unlike the sense that you are coming down with a cold. We call it a mental breakdown, but those who live out their lives in sanity have no idea how aptly the phrase captures what it purports to describe. The mental processes we take for granted—perception, logic, deduction, short-term memory—all start to falter. Like an ominous rattle in the depths of your car. A momentary shimmy. A shudder. A skip. There’s that moment when an accumulation of ominous symptoms makes you lose confidence in your vehicle. You start to wonder if you’ll make it home.

At first I welcomed this development. After all, it was something. Something happening. A change. A mystery. A destination. What would happen? How would it feel? Finally, like normal people, I would have an answer to the question “What did you do today?” I could answer, “Today I lost my mind.”

I believe I was within moments of surrendering to this temptation. But instead I decided to die. The plan formed itself in an instant, and in an instant I decided. As I rocked slowly back and forth on the floor, the allure of allowing myself to sink into insanity receded, and I decided to stop eating. Like so many prisoners before me, I realized that the only path of resistance, the only path to preservation of autonomy, was to end my own life on my own terms. The only discretionary act left to me was the choice of whether or not to kneel before the plate of food and bowl of water shoved through a hatch at the bottom of the door at irregular intervals. I had other choices: whether to lie on my right side, left side, or back; whether to squat or stand. Where to piss. But these decisions were of no consequence because
they
were indifferent to my choices. But the choice not to eat was a choice that would have consequences. It showed them that I was still ultimately master of my own life. It would frustrate whatever plans they had for me. It was all I had, and it filled me with a sense of purpose and determination.

It may seem strange, but the weeks I spent on my hunger strike were some of the most satisfying of my life. My hellish sentence of decades in the cell had been commuted. I had stepped away from the brink of an irretrievable psychotic breakdown. Every time I woke, there was a purpose to my waking. Something to do. Something to achieve. And best of all, I joyfully imagined the frustration and difficulty I must be causing Super JJ and his gang of thugs. Every physical symptom of starvation was a welcome affirmation of my autonomy. I was fascinated that hunger persisted for what seemed like only a few days. I celebrated the first time I could not rise to a squatting position, triumphant at the strange and unexpected failure of the quadriceps to perform the function they had reliably performed for forty years. My wrapped hands, now completely at home in their position on the sides of the ribs, probed in wonder as my flesh seemly melted and the ribs emerged proudly, shrouded only by the skin’s thin sheath. In contrast, my feet and ankles swelled to a bizarre size. This cornucopia of events filled my days with new things to experience and a happy validation of my plan. When I was a lawyer, I was never happier than when I had a plan.

I don’t remember when they took me from the cell. I remember going to sleep in the cell and then, suddenly, a waking that was not gentle. With a single injection to my intravenous tube, the medically induced coma was ended and I was jolted back to consciousness. I dimly saw a nurse smiling warmly and noticed that she was holding my hand. My hand, strangely, was down next to my knee, and not in its customary position wrapped around the opposite side of my chest. I was wearing dark sunglasses. The bed was soft and clean. My skin was clean. My beard was gone. I bent my knees and elbows, and each extremity moved until it was gently stopped by a canvas loop, luxuriously lined with sheepskin, that attached each limb to rails along the side of the bed. I looked down to see an intravenous drip to my left arm, and I felt the strange sensation of urine being drained through a catheter.

“Welcome, back, Sweetheart,” the nurse said. “How do you feel?”

It took days for me to answer that question. I know that, as I could once again tell day from night. My private room had a high ceiling and six-foot-tall windows overlooking a leafy courtyard. During the day, the shadows of the oaks danced on the wall, a show I found more riveting than any film.

I never spoke to a doctor. My hunger strike was never discussed. I never saw a guard. A cheerful blond physical therapist came twice a day. The restraints were removed from a single limb, and she would skillfully work the limb, stimulating the muscles, stretching the tendons. It was not the same as going for a run, but my muscles started to grow back, and the stiffness in the joints disappeared in a few days.

“How do you feel, Sweetheart?” the nurse asked every morning.

The only question I ever asked her, after about a week, was the date. When she told me, I became angry. “Please, why are you lying?”

She looked genuinely startled. “What? Lying? Why would I lie about the date?”

“It cannot be,” I said. “I was at the castle for over two years.”

She held my hand. “Greg, you were in the castle for five weeks. You didn’t eat for the last two weeks. You’ve been here for ten days.”

When I looked distressed, she went into the hallway and came back with the
New York Times
. “See,” she said, “November 26, 2022.”

Until that moment, I had been floating in a dull stupor, my body enjoying the nutrition and comfort, my mind reveling in the light, company, and stimulation. I had no interest in thinking about anything. How did I feel? Like a dog, content with the gifts dispensed by a benign and responsible owner. There was only a comfortable present. After the chain and straightjacket, the padded restraints were a luxurious caress. Until that moment, I felt gratitude. But now this peaceful interlude was at an end as my mind struggled with the implications of the fact that the period of my dark self-embrace in the cell at Castle Williams had been only five weeks.

What happened next seems sufficiently ordinary as to hardly merit reminiscence. During the entire time at the castle, I had not thought once about Sanjay. Now I dreamed every night about the stoning. In most dreams I managed to hang on and endure the stoning, usually waking at the moment I lost consciousness in the dream. Sometimes I told him jokes. Sometimes he comforted me. Sometimes I swore vengeance. Sometimes I lost my grip and was dragged away by the guards. In my waking hours, I thought obsessively about the hunger strike, ridiculing my plan and chiding myself for the childish illusion that I was engaged in something meaningful.

Within a few days I had sunk into the most conventional of depressions. The pretty nurse and therapist, the animated oak shadows on the wall—all the ornaments of my little world lost their appeal. I was unable to make the simplest decision, and not, strangely, merely from lack of caring (although it is true that I didn’t care) but from some distinct mental disability.

“Orange juice this morning, Sugar? Or grapefruit?”

I actually struggled with the decision, straining to figure out the answer. When I gave up, it became another failure with which to torment myself. Despite Adam’s urgings, I don’t think I have anything to add to the rich literature of clinical depression. My fatigue was continuous. I was consumed by feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing. More than anything else, I believed with utter conviction that the days and nights of lurching from hurt to hurt was my new and permanent normal. Even suicide, the last refuge of the depressed, was cruelly denied to me. I could stop eating, but they would feed me intravenously. Yes, it was a lighted room with a soft bed, but it was much worse than being strapped and chained in the darkness. Finally, I knew the true meaning of despair. My condition must have been obvious to the nurses and whoever monitored the video feed from my room. But I was left, strapped to the bed, to sink deeper and deeper into despondency.

One morning in April, with no apparent precipitating factor, I had an idea that quickly became an idée fixe: hell. My God, I thought, they were right. There is a hell. I know because I am in it. And it is something completely supernatural, something surely not of this world. My lawyer’s mind ran with the idea. Never-ending torment, my new reality, was something impossible for any man to cause. I didn’t choose it or make it, nor did they. It was, simply, something outside nature and outside human nature. Therefore, there must be a God or at least something like a God. If there was, and if this God had created this hell for me, then this God could end it. End it. The seemingly impossible notion that there could be an end to my suffering floated there miraculously. The impossible suddenly seemed possible.

I asked the nurse to send a chaplain. Fifteen minutes later, one of the camp clergy, whom I knew from daily prayers and Bible study, entered my room and sat by the side of the bed. He was the first person, other than the nurse and physical therapist, I had seen or spoken to since leaving the castle. He waited for me to speak.

“Reverend,” I said, weeping, “it happened. This morning. I finally understood. My God, it’s true. There is a God. There is a heaven and a hell. I can see it now. So clearly. Why? Why couldn’t I see it before?”

“What do you mean, son? What do you see?”

“I see that I am, am … nothing. I am worthless. A speck of dust. I mean nothing apart from Him—apart from creation, apart from the creator, apart from God. And I don’t know what, what I have done or been or said, but He has punished me. And I
am
in hell. A hell only He could conjure. A hell so terrible, so hopeless that I cannot bear it. And there, right in front of me—right inside me, was my redemption. He sent me this hell. He can take it away. That’s what I have figured out. That’s what I now know. I pray to God with all my heart to take away my suffering.”

“Are you a sinner?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, a sinner,” I said. “How else, why else would I be in this hell? I must be a sinner. I
am
a sinner.”

“And do you repent your sins?”

“Repent? My God, if that’s what brought me to this place, then I regret them more than anything. Would that I could undo whatever I did to offend God and never have experienced this pain. I would give anything, everything.” My sobs flowed from the gut, nearly choking me. I had never wept like this in my life. I was practically hysterical.

“Is your heart open to God and His son, Jesus? Do you want the redemption of Jesus Christ?”

“Yes, yes,” I cried, “I want it more than anything else I have ever wanted.” And I had never spoke a truer word. My whole being was an open wound. My soul was empty and crying out to be taken and filled.

“Pray with me, son. ‘I believe in you, Jesus. I accept you. Please come into my life. I commit it to you.’ ”

“Lord Jesus, I believe in you. I accept you. Please come into my life. I commit it to you,” I stammered.

“Son, you repeat that prayer. You keep that feeling. You open your heart to Jesus and, if you truly repent your sins, and if your heart is truly open to the Lord, he will come in and you will experience the most wonderful thing a man can experience, the taking of your life by Jesus, the certainty of eternal salvation, and your rebirth in Christ. Keep praying, son. I will come see you tomorrow.”

For three days I lived as an open wound. Inside out. My whole being nothing more than a desperate hollowness longing to be filled. I begged and begged, and cried and cajoled for Jesus to enter my heart. I begged the Lord to end my pain. I promised I would do, say, believe, and be anything if he would lift the hell.

The pastor sat by my bed each day and did his best to give me strength.

“If Jesus has not entered your heart,” he said, “it is because some corner, some part of your being remains closed to his love. Some part of your repentance is imperfect. Some pride remains.”

Sometime on the third sleepless night, a startling calm took hold of my troubled mind. For the first time since the stoning, my conscious self felt familiar. And then I seemed to float to the ceiling, look down at my pale body strapped to the hospital bed, and see everything clearly. In a single insightful flash, I understood it all: In the depths of depression and despair, I had opened my heart. I was as ready for redemption as any man could be. I had never wanted anything more completely or more genuinely. But no one was home. No redemption came because there was no redeemer. I had, like a child, longed for a miracle to put an end to my troubles, but the miracle hadn’t come, and I was, again, on my own. And that was fine. It was how I was born and how I would die. It was the human condition and it was OK.

I was stunned but alert. I felt that peculiar ease of thinking that follows restorative oblivion. By morning I had a plan. During the hour before the nurse arrived to take my blood pressure, I did
ujjayi
breathing exercises—long, slow, slightly constrained inhales and exhales taught to me by Sanjay to lower my blood pressure and lock in the calmness in my mind. I carefully remembered and organized everything I knew about the born-again experience, developed my script, and rehearsed it over and over in my head. When the pastor arrived, I was both the physical and mental picture of equanimity.