The Four Stages of Cruelty (13 page)

I sat in stunned exhaustion, whatever good luck I had left draining from my limbs. I reached for the phone and listened to the messages. My union rep. My friend Gina. A hang-up. I checked the hang-up against the call record. The number looked familiar, and I remembered the crumpled note from Ruddik. A match.

In the morning at the appointed time Josh arrived at Brother Mike’s office. All his nervousness clung to his skin like static electricity. He sank into the couch and waited for Brother Mike to look up from his desk. It was utterly quiet in the room, just the tick of the clock, and the waxy smudge of morning light leached through a window that overlooked the yard.

It was only their third private meeting, but the first two had touched on nothing in particular except Josh’s art and his family life and the books he liked to read. Brother Mike had promised they’d start digging in soon. That promise or threat revealed itself now in the lack of friendly banter. Brother Mike left his paperwork, sat in the chair before him, and began speaking—the gray grizzled beard, the sparks of eyebrow.

“Do you know what grace means, Joshua?”

The word roused him, made him focus. He sensed the shit storm coming and braced himself.

“I know the bare bones of what you did. I don’t know why yet. Maybe you don’t either. If we’re successful, in time, you might achieve a reconciliation, a personal forgiveness. But it’s easy to see how much pain you’re in, how uncomfortable you are in your own skin. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Josh didn’t bother to nod or shrug. You did not admit guilt or innocence. Your opinion was irrelevant.

“From our earlier talks, and your files, and the time I’ve spent with you in the studio, and yes, the times I’ve talked about you with others, I’ve come to some views about you. Do you want to hear them?”

“Yes,” Josh croaked. As if he had any choice.

“You’re profoundly out of touch with yourself and with God. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in him, whether you pray fervently every night or only when you’re frightened. You’re weak. You’re lazy. You’re devastatingly narcissistic. You tell yourself lies to justify the things you do and the things you don’t do, and you believe in those stories. That doesn’t make you unusual. That’s the human condition.”

No better and no worse than anyone else. It was a conclusion he wanted to argue in both directions at once.

“Now, let me put forward an alternative path,” Brother Mike continued. “It’s through God’s grace that we feel his will and his healing hand. You don’t know what I mean yet. You’re thinking, I need to please this man by agreeing to whatever he says. You’re thinking, what does this have to do with therapy or restorative justice, let alone art? You don’t have any idea what kind of journey you’ll be taking. No matter what I say, you’ll still sign on and tell me what I want to hear. But I’m telling you, your fundamental challenge is that you are disconnected from yourself and from God. What does that matter? Nothing and everything. No one else cares or will ever care. It’s been my frequent experience in this place that the lost lamb is quickly forgotten
by everyone except God. And sometimes I have to remind even him.”

“Are we going to develop a program together?” Josh mumbled. He knew, or had learned like Pavlov’s dog, that psychologists, counselors, and case officers liked structure. They liked to fill up a schedule, monitor progress, and write reports. They wanted you to sit, beg, and bark on cue. He wanted Brother Mike to stop being vague and set up those rules, give him a game to play.

But Brother Mike said, “I’m not interested in your correctional plan. I have no influence on your career as an inmate, unless you ask me to testify at your parole hearing, and I couldn’t guarantee you’d like what I say. I warned a man about that once, but he asked me anyway. And when the parole board requested my opinion of his character for the record, I suggested that he was unrepentant, manipulative, deluded, and unsafe to release, though immensely eager to please.

“Since the early days of this country, there have been men with good intentions who thought the secret to reform was changing a man’s behavior. If you can’t change character, they felt, then why not change how a felon acts in the world? I don’t think that’s the answer. It’s a kind of programming for reducing incidents of violence, with dubious results. The soul needs more attention than that. You might as well wait until a man is old and toothless if you want to solve the problem of violence. Let nature run its course, and a man gets too weary to take such instant and disproportionate offense at all the perceived slights of the world. But that doesn’t mean he’s a better man.”

“But what if he’s a better man before his time is up—isn’t it unjust to forget about him for a couple decades or so?” Josh was roused to his own defense. He knew it was a trick. You weren’t supposed to question the calculus of justice.

“I’m not concerned about whether your punishment is justified. Why should I be? You come from a good family. You were loved, not abused. They made sure you were healthy and educated. You are not noticeably deficient in your mental faculties. You probably went to church. In short, my philosophical friend, you had a lot going for you. More, I would bet, than any other inmate in this institution and many of the staff. If anyone is a poster child for the importance of deterring future wrongdoing through harsh punishment, I’d say you fit the bill. And maybe that’s why they sent you here. Tell me why you did it. I’ll know if you lie.”

“You want to hear what happened?”

Brother Mike nodded.

Josh swallowed. He’d told the story before—done the jig of regret—but not for some time.

“We broke up in the summer before freshman year. I thought it was a mutual decision, but later on I started to wonder if she hadn’t made plans to get me to agree to something I didn’t fully understand.” He stopped and slowed down, told himself to speak carefully. “Looking back, it seemed as though a lot of the reasoning behind the breakup had come from her. I felt duped. I was looking forward to being free. Then I realized I’d made a terrible mistake, and when I tried to correct that, to get back together, she didn’t want to. It was like she’d never loved me. I couldn’t understand how
she could change so quickly in terms of her feelings. And then I found out she was already seeing someone else.”

He’d spent the whole first semester in a daze. He couldn’t concentrate in class. He felt fearful and panicked all the time. “She turned it all off like a switch. Something I couldn’t do.”

“How did you know she was seeing other people? Did you follow her?”

With every waking thought, and most of the sleeping ones. “It was a small world. You just knew what was going on.”

“Did you have any contact with her, intimate contact where you could talk things through?”

“That was all I wanted,” he said, “a chance to talk things through one more time. To understand why.”

“Did she agree to see you?”

“No. So I went to her house when I knew she was alone. Or I thought she was alone. She turned out to be with this guy she was dating.” He found the word boyfriend hard to say.

“Ah, but Joshua. Why did you bring your father’s gun? It was your father’s gun, wasn’t it?”

He let the silence go by for a minute. He looked toward the window. Maybe he would never speak again. Then the words came, almost easily, floating on a strange sense of calm.

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, come on. You don’t answer me like that.”

He was back in the room. He wanted Brother Mike to understand.

“I wanted her to know how bad I felt. The gun was just a message.”

“Communicating what?”

“Talk to me.”

“And if she didn’t talk with you. What were your plans for the gun?”

“I thought about using it on myself.”

His throat was dry. Brother Mike seemed unmoved by the confession.

“You’re saying you would have demonstrated your undying love by shooting yourself in front of her?”

Josh shrugged. “I didn’t have any plans.”

“Why not kill the other man, then? The male in her company. You must have hated him.”

“I didn’t go there to kill anyone.”

One of the fundamental things Josh had no right to anymore was credibility. Why should anyone ever believe his story again? He waited for the exhalation of disappointment, the deep sigh of moral resignation.

But Brother Mike said nothing. The nothing went on until it achieved an uncomfortable tension. Josh moved on the couch to relieve the clench in his belly. There were diplomas on the wall, next to the shelves of pottery. Certificates. He nodded to them and asked Brother Mike what he studied in school. The narrowest line of smile formed on Brother Mike’s lips, almost hidden in the beard.

“You want my story? I did a master’s in social work and a Ph.D. in psychology before going to Vietnam for a year in the medical corps. After my service, I lived in Japan for a time studying pottery; then I returned to the U.S. and did a second Ph.D. at divinity school. I lived in a monastery in upstate New York for about a decade, then worked here for six years, left
for missionary work in Central America and another monastery in California, then came back. My first doctorate was an analysis of cognition levels in criminal offenders. My second was an examination of whether the presence of evil in the world conflicted with the goodness or benevolence of an omnipotent God. And here I am, sitting with you, mixing it all together.”

“Figure anything out yet?” Josh asked.

“More questions. A few answers. It’s easy, in certain settings, to lose faith in the goodness of God because of all the suffering that occurs in the world. If you believe that every event is part of God’s plan, for example, does that mean God allows evil to happen? Some believe that evil is in direct conflict with God’s goodness, but that doesn’t say much for God’s omnipotence. So the general consensus, among those who care about such matters, is that evil is a consequence of God permitting us to have free will. We choose evil, or follow evil paths, because God allows us to be free. In that sense, returning to God means forgoing evil—in other words, choosing, with your free will, to give yourself to God. A complicated mystery.”

Josh sat with it. “The thing I’ve never understood”—and it was something he’d thought about since coming inside—”is why God lets one person do what he wants even if it means making someone else suffer.”

“Another mystery for you. A very complicated one. In theory, God could permit the evil act, done of free will, but prevent the evil consequence.” He waited until Josh nodded. “But of course the questions come from there. Why then does
he let the rapist brutalize the victim or the child molester destroy the child? The violation of innocence is appalling to contemplate. Why doesn’t he stop the murderer’s bullet?” Brother Mike shrugged. “What can I tell you, Josh? I’m sure you wish the thing could be undone, but if God stopped that bullet from firing or diverted it enough to give you a healthy shock and then sent you on your shaken way, what kind of freedom would he be offering you? Eliminating suffering from the consequences of evil choices would dissolve the meaning of free will. We would all be free to rampage in sin.”

“But what about her?” he asked hoarsely.

“You cannot begin to understand God’s plan. Submit at least to that. Maybe suffering exists to show us the way to forgiveness and atonement. Judas was an agent of Satan, and he caused great suffering for Jesus crucified on the cross, but his evil act, born of free will, revealed God’s love for us and granted us the possibility of salvation. That’s the mystery. And the most beguiling aspect of the plot is that Satan, in thwarting good, remains a servant of God, doing his ultimate bidding. You are the lamb that was lost, Joshua. God loves you even though you stray from his flock. He has plans for you, too.”

“I want to get out of here,” Josh said. I don’t need to be here to learn to be good, he wanted to say. I need to leave, or I will die or do other horrible things. I won’t have a choice. That’s what you don’t understand.

“You can’t get out of here.” A smugness to Brother Mike’s smile. An endless benevolent love.

“Roy,” Josh said, and then he remembered that he was not supposed to mention Roy by name. Fuck it, he thought, irritated
by his own mistake and desperate. “Roy told me, based on what happened and the way my trial went, he thinks they put me in the wrong prison. Roy said he would help me try to get transferred. If you gave him access to my complete files and transcripts, he could look at them and see if there’s some information we can use.”

The request fell like a stone dropped into water. Brother Mike’s smile disappeared. “Roy,” he said with disappointment in the utterance. “Roy used to work in here, did he tell you that? My file clerk. He has an unhealthy curiosity for case histories.” Josh wished he could have pulled the words back, but Brother Mike’s anger continued to grow. “I think you should accept the fact that you’re here. Using an inmate’s legal counsel to get out of prison is pathetic. I’ve seen men waste their entire lives in that fool’s quest. It’s an avoidance of the very thing we’ve been talking about, the moral lessons of consequence.”

“I know,” Josh kept saying. “I know, I’m sorry. It wasn’t my idea.”

“Think of this prison as your own monastery. Free will is a limited and precious resource here. Moral consequence is in abundance. How you barter makes all the difference.”

“You don’t understand,” Josh whispered. “I’ve got twenty-five years to serve. I don’t think I can make it.”

Brother Mike shrugged, his anger and his time depleted. “Take it from an old man, you’ll have years left to live when you get out. Plotinus called time the life of the soul as it passes from one experience to another. Be grateful for those experiences. If you look hard enough, maybe you’ll find something.”

A long silence. Josh wanted to scream with frustration. He wanted to throw the old man down. Instead, he insisted, and didn’t know where the strength came from. “Roy told me you needed to give me a copy of my file if I asked for it. I’m asking for it now.”

Brother Mike stared at him, then rose and walked to one of the file cabinets along the wall. He pulled out a drawer, the long metal drone of a morgue, and fingered through.

“My catalogue of sin. I use a coded system for each file because I know how powerful this information can be.”

He retrieved a thick manilla envelope from a hanging folder and brought it back to the coffee table, laying it before Josh.