". . . he grabs you by the hair and throws you on the bed. He takes off all your clothes until you're buck naked and he twists your arm so that if you try to squirm it hurts like hell . . ."
"No!"
". . . and then he pulls off his strap with one hand and whips you and whips you until there's welts all up and down your legs and your body . . ."
"No."
". . . and when you say, 'Please stop,' he tells you that he asked you not to make pork chops but did that stop you? And he keeps on beating you until your arm feels like it's breaking and your body feels like it's on fire."
"Please, Ben, stop."
I heard my own plea in her voice. I was my father using my tongue as the strap. The receiver in my hand was her arm all twisted and mangled.
"Would that be okay, Mom? If he did that to you like he did to Briggs and me. Would you have stood quiet and forgiven him?"
I expected her to hang up on me this time. The susurrous sounds made by some soft friction on her end made me think that she was quivering with rage and sorrow. I had said everything I had ever wanted to. I was ready to give up on my mother.
"You never understood your father, Ben. He had a hard life, a scary life. Nobody ever showed him the slightest bit of love after he was seven and his parents and sisters died in the fire. He loved you and Briggs more than anything, and all he ever wanted was to make you boys into men."
What she said was no doubt true. Rage stoked the fires of his love, but it was still love. He worked twelve-hour days and never bowed down under the weight of his responsibilities. He never abandoned his family. The beatings were filled with his passion for us. I could see that.
"I have to go now, Mom," I said.
"You must forgive him, Ben."
"Would you forgive him if he beat you like that?"
"I would have rather he did it to me than you, Ben. I would have taken your punishment if I could, because seeing your pain was the worst thing in my life. I stood by because the only other thing I could have done was to take you away. And if I did that, your father would have died."
It was the truth. I knew it. My father, who loved me as much as nuns love God, had to beat me in order to stave off the demons that bedeviled him. And my mother had to watch or to kill him. The only other answer would be that I was never born, that some other child had taken my place in my father's torture chamber of love.
There on the east side of Midtown I sat with the phone pressed to my ear. Thousands of miles away my mother sat in the same pose. Both of us were silent, both of us grieved for the love we did know.
Time passed effortlessly in the face of that shared, silent misery. I realized that I had no notion of what my mother felt. I understood that I could have gone to my father's funeral. I could have gotten on a plane and said good-bye.
I had never been to his grave site, never sent flowers or even asked what was written on his stone. Maybe my name was there . . .
Derek Dibbuk survived by Briggs and Ben.
I didn't even know if my father had a middle name.
They say we live in the most advanced culture in the history of the world. But there I was, more ignorant than any lump of coal.
"Ben?" my mother said.
"Yeah, Mom?"
"You have to let it go, baby."
"But, Mom," I said. "It's all I have. I've hated Dad every day since I can remember. I never think about it. But all he ever was to me was a beating waiting to happen. He broke Briggs. That's why I used to call you, to try to explain why I drank and ran around so much."
"But you cleaned up," my mother said. "You got a good job and gave us a grandchild. Your father was very happy about that." "I didn't clean up, Mom. I gave up. I stopped feeling. At least when I was drunk I was feeling something."
"I feel sorry for you then, baby," she said.
I hung up.
On Dr. Shriver's couch I continued thinking about my dead father.
". . . he would tell us stories about when he was a tough down in Texas," I was saying, "but when we asked him how life was when he was a child like us, he got all broody and quiet. If we pushed too much, one of us would have ended up getting a whipping."
"Did you love your father?" Adrian Shriver asked.
"Not in the way I wanted to."
"What does that mean?"
"I loved him because I needed him . . . for my survival," I said. "I needed him to save me and at the same time not to beat me. I needed him for food and shelter and protection against the outside world. But I never loved him for who he was. He scared me. He came from a world that I never wanted to see. He was angry and drunk and smelled like cigarettes."
"You smell like tobacco now," Dr. Shriver said.
"These cigarettes are more important than therapy," I said. "If I didn't have them, I'd go mad."
"How would that look?"
"I'd get violent. I'd, I'd holler and shout. I'd go out and kill Harvard Rollins for sleeping with my wife. I'd kill her too . . .just for good measure."
"Would you really?" he asked.
I sat up on the sob, clasping my hands tightly. I looked at the gentle doctor. My reflection in the lenses of his glasses hid his eyes from me. I stared at myself, my hands grasping at each other.
"That is the central question of my entire life, Adrian," I said, his first name unfamiliar on my tongue. "Would I actually lose control? Could I? Have I?"
The therapist shifted his head and his eyes came into view. There was sympathy in that gaze, real concern.
"And the answer is," I said in my imitation of a game show host, "I don't have the slightest idea."
"And so when Barbara Knowland suggested that you committed some heinous crime, you believed that it might be true."
"It echoed with something deep inside of me," I said. "My mother said to me just today that my father beat me because he loved me. What kind of lesson is that?"
"Your mother is still alive?"
"Yeah. Didn't I ever tell you that?"
"No."
"Did I tell you that my father died seven years ago and that I didn't go to his funeral because I had too much work?"
* * *
"Mr. Dibbuk," a serious and masculine voice announced.
"Yes?"
I was coming out the front door of the therapy office. This door was a few feet below the sidewalk. The men were waiting for me at the top of the stairs.
"Officer Bandell," the white man who called to me said, identifying himself. He was showing me a badge and an ID card in an open wallet. "I'm sorry but you'll have to come with us."
Mona had heard me on the phone. That was the only way they could have known I'd be there that afternoon.
There were two cops with Bandell: one black, the other Asian. The Asian man put handcuffs on me. The black officer took me by the arm. I was in the custody of the military arm of the Rainbow Coalition. Soon I'd be thrown at the feet of Jesse Jackson and asked to repent my antisocial ways.
They locked me in a cell with a middle-aged man like myself, only he was white and short, silent as a stump, and almost without affect. He sat on the corner of his cot, across from me, staring off into space—less like a thinker and more like a coma victim or maybe even an open-eyed corpse.
The officers said very little to me on the way to the precinct. They told me before taking my belongings that I was being held for up to seventy-two hours while someone higher up was considering my case.
"What case?" I asked them.
"I have no idea," Officer Bandell replied.
They took my fingerprints and my shoelaces. They itemized the contents of my pockets and took down my name, social security number, date of birth, and home address.
There were no bars on our cell. The door was metal, painted green, and solid. There was only a slit that I could look out through. If my roommate wanted to kill me or I wanted him dead, there was no one to stop us.
I didn't find out the squat white man's name. He never even spoke a proper sentence to me.
"How you doin'?" I said to him upon entering the cell.
"Huh," he replied with a nod.
"Dibbuk?" a man said.
I woke up out of a completely dreamless sleep. My summoner wore a gray uniform with a hat that you'd expect to see on someone who worked for the railroad.
"That's me,'' I said, trying to get my head straight.
"Come on."
He turned and left the cell. I followed. Three other men were waiting for me outside. One wore a blue uniform; the other three were clad in gray. They surrounded me in diamond formation, their protection unbreakable. They didn't even bind my hands.
We went down an extraordinarily long hall of green cell doors and lighter green walls, turned a corner, and walked down a hall the same length again. Then we came to a huge elevator. The man who retrieved me from the cell pressed one of the middle buttons. The elevator moved so slowly I didn't know if we were going up or down.
We came out into a large square room that was lined by doors on all sides. They brought me to an office in the far-right corner. One of my guards opened the door and I entered, wondering if1 could have subdued those men and made my escape if1 were some great martial arts master.
Sitting behind a very messy desk was a huge-faced white man with a pink wart on his nose. His nameplate said
BILL TORNAY.
Tornay was reading a file, maybe mine, and scowling hideously.
"Sit," he said without looking at me.
There was one chair but it had a few dozen manila folders on it. I wondered if I should remove the folders or just sit on them.
The monster looked up at me after a few beats of indecision. "I said, sit down."
I sat on the folders.
"Ben Arna Dibbuk," he said. "Is 'Ben' short for 'Benjamin'?"
"No, it's not."
"What are you in here for, Dibbuk?"
There was an odd scent in the air. I didn't know if it was the man or just his environment, but it was a sour odor that had a ripe edge to it. I felt my butt slipping on the slick folders.
"I have no idea," I said, scooting backward in the chair. "Officer Bandell just picked me up and said that they were going to hold me."
"Did he allow you a phone call?"
"No."
"Did he read you your rights?"
"He never asked me anything and he said almost as little."
My turn of phrase caught the ugly man's attention.
"It says here that you're a computer programmer," he said. "Where do you work?"
"Our Bank."
"Are you in trouble there?"
"Not that I know of."
He studied my face, looking for signs of criminality or depravity. He leaned back and the office chair cried out as if in pain.
"Do you want to make a call?" he asked.
"Do you know what time it is?" I had lost track of the hour.
"Eleven fifteen."
"Tuesday morning?"
That got the man to smile. He was even uglier when showing good humor.
He called to the men in the hall and they took me to a corridor of pay phones. One of them handed me a quarter and they let me loose among the dozen or more little cubbies that contained the phones. The corridor was actually a cul-de-sac, so they didn't have to worry about me running away.
"Hello?"
"Hey, brother man," I said.
"Ben," Cassius Copeland said with real happiness in his tone. "Where are you?"
I told him about my arrest. He took down all the information I could give him and said that he'd look for a lawyer. After he hung up, I sat there for a while longer, pretending to speak to someone in low tones. I didn't want to go back to that cell. As long as I was in there, it was okay, but now that I was out, I wanted to stay out.
Finally I knew I had to get OK I hung up and went back to the jail guards.
In my cell again I wondered about Mona. She was definitely with Harvard again. Sex with him would always be better. She was even fucking him while using me for the cock. But maybe she hadn't actually betrayed me. Maybe she had mentioned about the therapist and he passed the information on without her knowledge.
I didn't hate her for loving someone else; I was just lonely. My daughter most likely didn't even know that I was missing. I felt completely alone in that cell. I think I would have cried if my silent cellmate weren't there.
I wondered if this was how it would be in Colorado once I was convicted for the murder I may or may not have committed. Would I just be sitting on a cot staring into space, counting the days, looking forward to rice pudding on Friday nights and letters from my daughter?
She would get married, have kids, and send me photographs. I would look at those pictures, feeling distant, disconnected. But I'd write letters telling her how beautiful the children were and I'd send them little gifts that I'd make in the wood shop or metal shop that the prison afforded.
I spent the rest of my jail time having fantasies like that. I thought about my mother coming and apologizing for her negligence. I thought about my brother getting out of prison and him coming to visit me so that he could gloat over how far I'd fallen.
"You were always the one they liked more," he'd tell me.
"They never liked either one of us," I'd say to Briggs. "We were both failed experiments—like Frankenstein's monster or American democracy."
A few hours after I'd been to see him, the green metal door opened and Bill Tornay entered. The cell stank from my roommate's use of the commode. I was embarrassed that the warden coming in would think I had made that smell.
I had closed my eyes while my cellmate took his grunting shit. We'd had two meals; powdered eggs for breakfast and bologna sandwiches on white bread for lunch.
"Mr. Dibbuk," the hippopotamus-faced ugly man said, "come with me."
He was alone. Standing up he was more of an oddity than he was behind the scrim of refuse piled on his desk. He had small, slender shoulders while his legs were huge, shapeless pillars of flesh. He walked as an elephant might if an elephant stood upright on two legs. It was a shambling, side-to-side motion that had very little to do with everyday humanity.
The sour-ripe smell did come from Tornay. It wafted behind him, making me want to take the lead. But I couldn't do that. I was a prisoner; I would be for the rest of my life.