Ubo

10

DANIEL BELIEVED HE woke up several times during the night. It was difficult to tell, half-awake or half-sleep being so close to the mental state experienced while wandering around inside a scenario. He remembered a great deal of buzzing, as if his nerves had short-circuited.

Was this what dying was like? It seemed entirely possible, the noise memories made as they disintegrated.

His time as Stalin still disturbed him. The lack of human caring always loomed, just on the other side of a fragile membrane. And it didn’t require that much effort to cross over—a series of significant losses, disappointments, disillusionment, or maybe just a night of poor, interrupted sleep so that you temporarily forgot how to do the things that good people do.

The werewolf was howling again. It sounded closer, pounding through the floor right under his feet. He wondered if they had moved the werewolf, or if it was some acoustic trick of the architecture.

Again, this howl longer and lower than the rest, as if they were torturing him and he was giving up. But the roaches didn’t torture, did they? A matter of definition. Around him the other residents were stirring, rising, talking to themselves as they often did. He wondered whether the boy from the roof had to hide again this morning.

Daniel was the last one of their group to enter the waiting room. He found them arguing, a common occurrence of late. Before joining them he stopped by the large window, thinking of the coin the boy had found. Examining the crumbling horizon line, he felt a mirroring disintegration within himself. What he saw out there would not have seemed alien to certain residents of Detroit or Kosovo.

“The Catholic Inquisition, the Puritan witch hunts, the Mormon massacre at Mountain Meadows—“ Gandhi ticked them off on his narrow fingers, bending each back as far as possible and wiggling it for good measure. “—Aztec human sacrifice, the Indian thuggee murders, the Crusades, not to mention all the children molested or abused under the cloak of religion. The greatest crimes in history, all committed in the name of religion.”

“Of course, those are terrible, terrible things.” Charles/Lenin looked flustered. “But look at Nazi Germany’s Jewish Holocaust or Stalin’s Great Purge. We all know about those things, right? We’ve played the roles. Those people were atheists. Certainly atheists have committed more than their fair share of atrocities.”

Daniel seldom involved himself in those kinds of discussions. People rarely changed their minds, so what was the point? Especially when there were far more immediate concerns, such as survival, such as the absence from your family.

But if he had said something, he would have told them it was about collective belief. Groups of people believing the same way, in a god, in a cause, in a particular way of life. But perhaps that was too broad—fear made him exaggerate. Belief could be a great thing—people did heroic things because of belief. Belief without generosity, without compassion destroyed people. Daniel didn’t go to church—just stepping inside a church filled him with anxiety. But he felt the same way stepping into a filled meeting hall where people planned their perfect world.

The werewolf howled again, and the others stopped what they were doing. “Can’t somebody do something about that?” Gandhi was angry. “We should do something about that.” No one replied. He scowled, emphasizing the bony, gnome-like quality of his thin face.

“Well, I believe in divine retribution, and punishment for sin,” Lenin said, sitting on his bed now. “I don’t know why else we’d be here, except for punishment. And those roaches, they look like the very Devil, don’t they? And this place, you can’t tell me it isn’t some kind of Hell where we’ve been sent to recreate the wicked lives of the damned.” He waited, perhaps to see if there would be any objections, and hearing none, went on. “I run a Bible study group, or I did, before I was sent here. It was more than Bible study, actually—we talked about all kinds of things. It was extremely important to me. I used to say it saved me.

“I’d been in and out of jail most of my adult life. Petty theft, mostly, some drugs, and a fair amount of misbehavior following the consumption of alcohol. Sometimes I’d take somebody’s car if I needed to go someplace. I don’t mean ‘borrow,’ of course. The way I figured it, you had to survive, and I had this picture of what survival meant—food, clothing, basic supplies and an especially nice meal from time to time as a treat. Treats were important. Treats were a rudimentary human need, I figured, and part of my picture of survival. So I’d get these treats, the meals, some extra nice shoes sometimes, sometimes something electronic. I didn’t feel guilty about it, because I didn’t think I was asking for much. Just survival stuff, according to my definition, and everybody’s entitled to survive, right? Everybody’s entitled to their shot at Heaven, and my Heaven was modest—survival was Heaven, that’s all it was. And no one was going to get in the way of that.”

“No one would deny your right to survive. Many of us have had to struggle with that.” Falstaff spoke slowly, deferentially. “But everyone defines survival differently. Some people define it so broadly it becomes an excuse for doing evil.”

“Evil? Isn’t that a rather extreme term? Who are you to say such a thing?” Gandhi looked unhappy, as did many of the others. “Let him tell his story.” Daniel had noticed lately that attitudes toward Falstaff appeared to be shifting.

“Why are you the disciplinarian here?” Lenin was standing, pointing. He made a slashing motion with his other hand to add emphasis. “Why do you always seem to be the one in charge, the one who knows everything? It would seem that no one here understands the roaches better than you do.”

Falstaff stared at him. “We’re all nervous today. It’s understandable. Try to control yourself. What else am I supposed to do when there are problems?”

“We know nothing about you,” Gandhi said, “but you seem to know a great deal about us. Why is that?”

Falstaff looked at Daniel then, as if expecting him to say something in his support. But Daniel had no intention of speaking. Falstaff sighed and leaned back on his bunk, but Daniel didn’t think he was as relaxed as he seemed. “I listen well, is that a crime? We have to pay attention to the roaches if we’re to survive. I pay attention. I try to do what needs to be done. And, yes, I’ve tried to make myself an expert on the roaches, for the sake of my own survival, and yours. I’d urge you to do the same. But if my telling you more about myself will appease you, then I will oblige.

“I know no more about why I came to be here than the rest of you. The roaches may not be as methodical as we’d like to think. Although I came from a family of financial advantage I took no share in that. It was my grandfather with the money, and we didn’t get along. I went to college in the sciences and although I did well, there were no jobs to be had when I got out. It was, it was during a period of serious… shortages.”

The other residents listened quietly, respectfully, and Daniel wondered if the others were having the same problems with Falstaff’s speech he was. It all seemed so carefully—vague. What science? What shortages? There were never enough details to pin him down. Daniel had always assumed that Falstaff was taken from the same relative time period as the rest of them. But there was something about Falstaff that didn’t quite fit for the times Daniel knew.

“I was drinking a great deal in those days. I had not seen my wife in more than a year. She had left me, or she was dead. It was never a very good marriage—I suppose that was mostly my fault. I was always a man of great faults. It was difficult for me to change. I was stubborn. But you said you were trying to change,” he said to Lenin. “You said you were trying to turn your life around.”

Lenin looked eager, leaning forward. “I was tired of going to jail. Jail wasn’t Heaven, far from it. I was too old for jail, too old to survive it. I had to come up with something to keep me on the straight and narrow. But Heaven had to be part of it, you know? I had to have my perfect Heaven. So why not the old-fashioned way? The Bible, I mean. Christianity, all that? I could see it worked for some, so why couldn’t it work for me?”

“It doesn’t work for a lot ofpeople,” Gandhi interjected.

Lenin rounded on him. “Like everything else, you have to give it a chance. You have to take chances in this life, take a leap of faith, or you never get anywhere. And that’s a fact.” Gandhi looked surprised by Lenin’s vehemence and scooted back from the edge of his bunk, nodding. “So the last time I got out I started going to church. I went to church after church. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but I was pretty sure I’d know it when I saw it. It took me awhile to find the church I felt comfortable in. Most of them, well, they were a little vanilla, a little white bread. I’m not talking race here; I’m talking boring. It was hard to sit through the sermons without falling asleep. Not much variety, not much passion. Not much sense that people actually believed what they said.

“Then one day I walked into Reverend Philip’s church. True enough, I almost walked back out again, because of the way he was dressed. Light blue suit and shiny white shoes, pink carnation in his buttonhole. Sandy-colored, slicked-back hair. He looked like a high school kid on the way to his prom. But he caught my eye as I walked in, and he grinned like he knew me, so I sat down near the back and listened. And I have to say that although he still looked like the most ridiculous man to me, he spoke with poetry and passion.

“John 14:23. I still remember the first verse I ever heard him talk about. Jesus says, ‘Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.’ And it looked as if Philips was speaking directly to me. ‘Hebrews 13:2—Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.’ And he stepped out of the pulpit and walked down into the congregation, grasping hands and patting people on the back, and when he came to me he grabbed my hand and pulled me right out of my seat, and he said to me, ‘To be at home with the Lord is to make your home on the heights. There will be no one left to look down upon you because you’re way up there dwelling in paradise. Come, come with me, my son, because we’re on our way home today. We’re on our way to paradise.’”

Lenin was smiling broadly then, remembering. It was the most genuinesmile Daniel had seen since he had arrived. And he envied him. But if a minister had pulled Daniel out of his seat in church like that he would have been beyond uncomfortable.

“Paradise would be nice. Paradise would be great.” Falstaff’s voice boomed. And to Daniel’s surprise the emotion in it sounded genuine. “Have any of you been hungry, I mean more than for a late dinner? Perhaps you haven’t eaten in several days, certainly at least in two days. Nothing but some bad-tasting water that made you sick? My family had money—they could have saved me from that, but they didn’t.” Then he stopped, looked around, and appeared uncharacteristically unsure of himself. “But I’m interrupting. I apologize. Please continue—you were telling us about this church.”

Lenin looked only vaguely annoyed before continuing. “The Reverend made it a point to talk to me after church that day, and every Sunday thereafter, and after Wednesday night services when I started attending those. I told him I had some catching up to do where religion was concerned, but that I was eager to learn. He told me I should start a Bible study group at the church, said the church basement was available to me Monday and Thursday nights.

“With the Bible study happening the day after Sunday and Wednesday services, I began to see those meetings as a kind of debriefing session. We talked about the text covered by the sermons, and any other verses that seemed related—the Reverend would send me notes about those—and we talked about things from our own lives that seemed related. After a few weeks it became clear that the ones in the Bible study—about thirty of us by then—weren’t the typical churchgoers. We were stragglers, mostly, wanderers, outsiders with a history of self-control issues, folks who had been to Hell and back. That was partly the Reverend’s doing—he was always sending new people down to join the group.

“I didn’t ask to be the leader—it just sort of happened that way, like gravity or centrifugal force, something that couldn’t be helped and was just understood. They believed in me, and their belief made me believe. The group became everything to me. When I wasn’t in the group, I was thinking about the group. They weren’t exactly my friends—and one of my regrets in life is that I’ve never had any close friends—but it’s hard to be a leader and a friend. It almost never works. I took the responsibility seriously, and I embraced modesty. I made myself obedient to the Lord. I was only going to follow God’s instructions. Of course, there’ve been killers who have said the same thing—we all know that now. But I trusted myself. I trusted I would hear God accurately. I knew about Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. The dangers of an arrogant leader who believes himself divinely inspired. But I knew I wasn’t going to be any kind of Jim Jones. Not even close. God would guide me.”

“Have any of you done the Jim Jones scenario?” Falstaff was standing again. Several of the men looked annoyed. The conversation must have hit a nerve in Falstaff—Daniel had never seen him look this agitated. No one responded. “Suicide as a social event—it’s almost unheard of. That was the charismatic power he had over these people. He abused them psychologically, blackmailed them, and still they revered him. Sometimes we underestimate how vulnerable people are.”

“But like I said,” Lenin continued, “I was no Jim Jones. There were vulnerable people in that group, troubled people. and every new member seemed to have a different kind of trouble. We had our alcoholics, our addicts, our thieves, wife beaters, gamblers, and adulterers. There were folks into pornography and all manner of sins of the flesh, and we had individuals who were just sad, almost too sad to live.

“I kept painting them this picture of the Heaven I wanted them to see. I wanted to convince them how wonderful it was going to be. The ultimate location! If they strayed, if they started veering into beliefs and speech that didn’t contribute to my vision of Heaven, then I’d tell them, ‘my Bible doesn’t say that. You must have gotten hold of the wrong Bible.’

“I didn’t try to cover up any of the hard truths. I talked about Noah, and all the people that had to die. I talked about Lot’s wife. They had to know that the stakes were high. Their immortal souls! The stakes don’t get much higher than that! This was serious business, and I had no tolerance when they weren’t serious about it.

“I’d give them verse after verse to say with me. I wanted to get the words embedded so far into their heads they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a Bible verse and their own thoughts. ‘Repeat after me,’ I’d say, again and again, ‘repeat after me.’

“I convinced them all to tithe. Sometimes I shamed them into giving more than they planned to, and doing more. Maybe you don’t approve of that, and maybe you’re right. But I saw it as just winning more souls to Christ. Sometimes the ends do justify the means.”

“But it always comes down to the money, doesn’t it?” Some of the men were trying to get Falstaff to sit down but he appeared oblivious to them. “The church needs it to get their message out, to convert people to their way of thinking. The rich man needs it to shield himself from death, or so he thinks. My grandfather was a rich man; he could have prevented everything that happened to me. I don’t know, maybe he wanted me to learn my lesson. Rich people are all for poor people learning their lessons, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and all that. My grandfather was one of those people who make money even in the hard times. Like they say, ‘the rich get richer while the poor only get poorer,’ something like that. He was always on top. Perhaps he sent people to look for me, perhaps not. I would have been difficult to find.

“But so much could have been prevented if we’d all just agreed to get along with just a little less. If all of us had made that sacrifice—accepted a lower standard of living, fewer things, less expensive foods, a smaller footprint on the planet. Maybe we could have sustained things better. In the part of the city where I lived things had gotten pretty hopeless. There were just too many people and not enough good housing, not enough food. The New England summers had gotten hotter every year. Augusts were unbearable—it drove people crazy.

“The neighborhoods were full of strangers-immigrants from Mexico, South America, and down from New York. Of course they came because they thought they had to. People have to eat somehow. But if you don’t want people to be racists, don’t let them get into situations where they have to compete with people from another culture for food.”

“The money was for good works!” Lenin shouted. “Sometimes you have to feed the spirit while you feed the body, otherwise people forget what life is for. I was going to tell you about Malcolm before you interrupted me. One day the Reverend Philips brought Malcolm down to the basement and introduced me to him. He certainly looked troubled—his eyes buried in his face and never once did that young man look at me directly. The Reverend said, ‘I’m delivering our young Malcolm here into your care and to the ministrations of the group.’ What can I say? I took on Malcolm as part of my holy mission.

“I admit I didn’t like him. Oh, I tried to like him, but you’re never going to like everybody, now are you? Most of the time you don’t need to take care of that—God will take care of them, God will adjudicate, but sometimes it’s God’s will that you take action.”

Even the residents not part of their intimate little group had turned their heads to listen. Some had moved to closer bunks. Only Falstaff appeared nervous and restless. In the windows a red sky had fallen over the crumbling city. The distant shadows appeared smoky, on fire.

“… abandoned by his parents to wander the streets begging, the addiction, the aggressive theft and other crimes. Obviously this young man was in considerable pain. But some of the things he would say about God, Jesus, and religion! I started to think he actually might be some kind of demon sent to test me. So defiant. So unreasonable. Maybe God let him in the door just to test me. God has all kinds of tests—you never know when you’re going to be tested.

“‘A belief in God’s worse than heroin!’ He’d blurt out something like that right in the middle of a serious discussion. ‘More people have prostituted themselves in the name of Christianity than have ever whored for drugs!’ That kind of thing. It made some of the group furious. A couple even jumped out of their chairs and went after him. I had to break up more than a few fights, something I never expected to do in Bible study. Still, I kept telling the rest of them to have patience with ‘Brother Malcom,’ that his soul was wounded, but eventually we would win that soul for Christ and wouldn’t that be a triumph!”

“People would riot over the smallest thing.” Daniel turned his head. The voice—he recognized Falstaff’s voice—had come from the corner. He could see Bogart and a few others sitting there, listening. Perhaps they’d been turned off by Lenin’s religious rhetoric. Or perhaps they simply found Falstaff’s pre- or post- apocalyptic narrative more intriguing, or in fact, more relevant. Daniel moved closer so that he was between the two groups.

“The police rarely interfered. They generally stayed away from our part of the city—I suppose they found it too dangerous, and the local residents had too little power to influence them. The fire fighters still came—there were a large number of fires in those days, but I guess there are always fires—it’s one of the ways people vent their anger while still remaining largely anonymous. But in our neighborhood people didn’t shoot at the firefighters. It was a point of pride, I think.

“But buildings still burned, and they were torn down, and everybody looted, sometimes in the middle of a fire. When you think you’re starving, and your family is starving, you’ll risk pretty much anything.”

“So why did this Malcolm come?” Gandhi was asking Lenin. “How did you hold him there?”

“We didn’t. And that’s why I didn’t kick him out when, to be honest, I used to kick people out for less—showing up intoxicated, for example, or when, say, one man’s wife divorced him for having an affair. I couldn’t abide that kind of hidden sin, that kind of hypocrisy. But Malcolm, even with all the trouble he gave us, the blasphemous interruptions of our discussions, he still came there voluntarily. No one was forcing him to come, so obviously he was desperately reaching out for our help. I just couldn’t turn my back on that. The Lord was testing me, and I wasn’t about to fail him. So I let that boy have it. Every meeting I gave him a double shotgun blast of the Lord! Winning souls to Christ, that’s what I was all about. I was even keeping a notebook listing all the souls I’d won, and I was determined to add Brother Malcolm’s name to my list.

“I’d get right up in his face. ‘God told me to tell you,’ I’d say, ‘that he wants you to be one of his soldiers! God wanted me to tell you that you’re alone no longer!’

“I’d talk to the others, and once a week I’d arrange for the group to plant a ‘lovebomb’ on him. Even the ones who hated the fellow did that for me! We’d surround him and we’d hug him, we’d pat him on the back and tell him we loved him, God loved him, everybody loved him. We were all on his side so he had nothing else to fear.

“And I tell you he began to come around, even to participate a little. He still didn’t say much in the meetings, but those blasphemous declarations pretty much stopped. I gave him little chores, little assignments, and he did them well. He proved to have some real skills with words, so when the Reverend would give me some text to go over for him, some plea for money to keep the church’s message on the radio or on TV, I’d pass it to Malcolm, and he’d almost always improve it. Of course I gave him credit for it, and the Reverend Philips was so pleased with the both of us—I won some important points for the way I handled that, I gotta tell you.

“And when we were looking for support for the new building program or the missions in Africa, he found some great pictures on the internet for us. That black child with the flies on his face? A huge increase in donations after we put that one up on the website!”

“I hadn’t had much to eat that week,” Falstaff continued. “I could say that’s why I did what I did, but I’m not going to use that as an excuse. That night I didn’t think I was risking much. It was some rich man’s food storage. The fire had been put out, the firefighters were gone, the looters were gone, I was tired and on my way to this little room I shared with eight other people. I was thinking I’d just check it out, see if they’d missed some little thing I could eat.”

Lenin, apparently aware of the distraction in the corner, raised his voice. “In no time at all Malcolm was handling some of our key initiatives—the prayer requests, the brochure for our Spring tour of the Holy Land, the special pleas for unexpected expenses, the lists recognizing the members who had contributed the most to the cause. He could have had quite a career in advertising if he only applied himself.

“But it became clear after a while, I’m afraid, that our young friend Malcolm still clung to another life, a life outside the church. I gotta admit it was the other members of the group who saw it before I did—of course, they’d always been pretty suspicious of him. I suppose I just didn’t want to lose a soul. I’d been adding up all the souls I’d saved, and I was feeling pretty good about the number.

“He started missing the Thursday night meetings. Now, they didn’t have to go to all the meetings, but it was pretty much expected. I just wanted them to attend voluntarily. So I asked Malcolm about it, and Malcolm, he said ‘I’ve been going to therapy,’ he said. ‘I still have problems, all kinds of problems. I still need help,’ he said.

“I was a little shocked. ‘You don’t need that,’ I told him. ‘Jesus will provide forall your needs.’

“‘It’s not enough,’ he said. ‘I still hear this little voice inside, telling me that things are wrong.’

“‘That’s the Devil’s voice,’ I told him. ‘The Devil’s just trying to steal you away from us, your family. We’re your family now, Malcolm. You have to trust in Jesus—he’ll take care of you. You mustn’t listen to the devils and demons trying to keep you away from faith.’

“He looked like he might hit me! ‘Don’t be angry, Malcolm,’ I said. ‘Anger is a sin. You don’t want to end up in Hell, do you, Malcolm? The angry people—they’ll all end up in Hell, burning for all of eternity.’”

In the corner, Falstaff was increasingly emotional. “But I wasn’t alone, as it turns out. I was going in just as another fellow was leaving. He had a loaf of bread and a couple of cans of tuna in his arms. I figured that must be the last of it, otherwise he’d be carrying more.

“He was a young guy, but a big guy. But he looked scared. A big muscular fellow like that, and he looked frightened. I suppose it was the stakes. He needed that food.”

Lenin, too, appeared increasingly upset. “I told Malcolm, ‘at least now you’re a part of something. But you have to do the right things if you’re going to stay part of this group. You can’t be selfish—you have to give of yourself, you have to help us meet our goals. You have to be a good example to the others. We all do. If you fail, then you leave. God sets a certain standard you have to strive to meet. It’s a job, just like any other job, and when you disappoint your boss he makes you leave, right?’

“I could tell he wanted to confess, but I’m not a priest, and besides that isn’t part of my beliefs. He didn’t say anything. I guess he thought that was the end of the conversation. Later on I heard that he was seeing other people, that there were people waiting for him a couple of blocks away, and he’d go there after the Bible meetings. So one night I followed him. A couple of blocks, then three. And I saw something that greatly disturbed me.

“In the distance there were these men, at least I thought they were men, their shapes distorted, blocky bodies and oh-so-skinny legs, and heads like what you get if you twisted up one corner of a handkerchief. He went right up to them, and then they all turned and walked away. I have to say I had no idea what to make of that.”

Falstaff had lowered his voice. Daniel had to lean in more closely in order to hear. “‘Just let me pass, okay?’ this big fellow said to me. ‘I have a wife and three small kids at home. I need this food. No trouble, just let me pass.’ He was desperate.”

“We all had relationships outside the group. Well, I didn’t, but most of them did. But I encouraged them not to let their kids play with the children of nonmembers. And I always asked in detail about the acquaintances of those attending the Bible study. We had to make sure those relationships didn’t disrupt the group, otherwise we’d have to say goodbye to those relationships, however painful it might be. Oh, God understands pain. Pain is God’s currency.

“Sometimes to get right with God you just have to hide yourself away from the world. Sometimes there’s no other way.

“But I was thinking that what Malcolm was doing outside the church was more than just having other relationships. Those people he met up with, those distorted shapes, well, they had a sinister aspect to them. After thinking on it I became pretty frightened. I came to the conclusion that Malcolm was also part of some other church, some church that had nothing to do with God. Maybe that sounds far-fetched, but I could come to no other conclusion based on the evidence.”

Somewhere beneath their feet the werewolf howled again, desperate to get out of his incarceration, forever trapped in his own head. The residents shifted uneasily on their feet, on their bunks. Both men paused in telling their stories. Falstaff was the first to resume his tale, and in that way some of the men became aware that he’d been speaking, telling his own story off to the side. Some grumbled over his rudeness. But others wandered over to see what he had to say.

“He could have pulverized me if he’d wanted to, a big young guy like that. He could have killed me. But that little bit of food might have been scattered and lost in the process.He couldn’t take the chance.

“I kept thinking about all those little, petty battles you get into in your life, you know? Obsessive, nasty little conflicts when the stakes are nothing, just nothing at all. A better position at work, school competitions, winning some random argument with friends. I used to act quite badly in those situations. The smaller the issue the worse I behaved.

“But here the stakes were important. It was one of the few times in my life the stakes were vital.”

“The argument broke out before the next Bible study meeting. I don’t know how it started—I hadn’t yet arrived. Some of the regulars, the ones who always got there early, they said that Malcolm had gone back to his old habits. Blaspheming. ‘Backsliding’ is the word one of them kept using. I’d taught them that word. All I’d ever wanted was to encourage them along their path toward Heaven, whatever Heaven might be for them.”

“Here the stakes were absolute, probably more important for this man, because he had kids. But I’m embarrassed to say that his plea for his family didn’t sway me in the least. I told the man sure, go ahead, take the food. ‘Go feed your children,’ I said. And when he turned his back I hit him over the head with a board, shattered it over his skull. I picked the food off the floor and ran away with it.”

“Malcolm was on the floor writhing. I don’t know which one of them hit him, if more than one hit him, or what they hit him with. But he was delirious. He was spitting. He was cursing us all and he was cursing the Lord. I honestly thought he was possessed. I honestly did. I made them all back away from him. I made them create a circle of safety around his struggling, distorted body.”

Falstaff was actually crying. “I didn’t even bother to see if the man was okay. I was hungry. If he hadn’t looked scared, and especially if he hadn’t mentioned his family I would have let it go, I would have walked away. He was just too damn big, you know? But he showed me his weakness. He made me take the risk.”

“I thumbed through my Bible. Proverbs 20:30,” Lenin proclaimed. “‘The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of the belly,’ I read to them aloud.

“‘And it shall be, if the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten.’

“‘Judgments are prepared for scorners, and stripes for the back of fools.’ Again from Proverbs. I didn’t see the stick until too late. I think it might have been a broken-off broom handle. Or a mop handle, not that there’s any difference. But I didn’t see it. I was too busy thumbing through my Bible, and finding the verses I’d found before, the ones about punishment.”

Some of the men surrounding Falstaff commiserated, some of them said they might have done the same thing. The others kept quiet, maybe because they didn’t approve or maybe because now they were frightened of him, of what he could do, or perhaps, as with Daniel, they were wondering which world and which time he was actually talking about.

“‘He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.’ Proverbs is just full of punishment. And advice for those who feel they need to dish it out.

“‘Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.’ And Malcolm was crying then, although weakly.

“I just stared at the one holding the stick. He was one of the newer members of the group. To tell the truth I couldn’t even remember his name. The stick had all these red stains on it. And there was red stain on the man’s hand gripping the stick. I was telling myself he’d gotten into some paint, that he’d made a mess.

“‘If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee,’ he said. ‘That’s from Matthew, ain’t it?’

“But I was thinking that was a poor choice of verse. It wasn’t apropos. They hadn’t cut Malcolm—they’d only beaten him.” Lenin looked around at the residents still listening. “And then the roaches brought me here. Tell me now this isn’t my punishment. Tell me this isn’t Hell.”