In court, I was the picture of sanity and was declared fit for trial.
I lay on my bunk. It’d taken me two weeks to consider this body to be truly mine, not a mere convenience to make me visible to humans. Now, I knew it. It was my body that lay on the thin mattress. It was me.
A defense. I needed a defense. My mind would not settle on the idea.
Perhaps my situation was temporary. Perhaps my fall from grace was a kind of warning from God. In my line of work, I had orchestrated numerous near-death experiences, in which a living person dies briefly, has a vision of the beyond, and is returned, chastened, to life. Perhaps I was having the opposite, a near-life experience. Now, I waited merely to be returned to heaven, chastened. I would regain my divinity, but would have to vow never again to dabble in human hearts. That would be a very difficult vow. Love cannot be simply shut off. I had used my one phone call to talk to Donna. She said she’d come to see me soon. She said I’d be okay. She said she’d bring a friend to help us sort everything out. I couldn’t wait to see her. I had no idea the boredom and tedium of being trapped in space and time, or the agony of being trapped in love. I told my cell mate about my plight. He was a fiftythree-year-old white businessman whose well-trimmed graying hair and narrow, sensitive eyes made him look distinguished even in a shapeless orange jumpsuit. Derek Billings was his name, an embezzler. (I hadn’t asked his crime. The first time I had asked someone’s crime, I’d gotten a black eye. Billings told me of his own accord.)
I told Billings my crime, too. He looked very alarmed. I kept talking, relating my angelic past. My voice was low and gentle, my manner polite and deferential. Billings slowly calmed. White-collar criminals are that way, comfortable among well-educated, soft-spoken psychotics. The inmates that Billings feared were the uneducated but sane ones.
The only reason an embezzler was put in with alleged murderers and rapists was the scope of his crimes. Billings had embezzled thirty-five million dollars, had stashed it away in coded accounts he still would not divulge, and had already made one attempt to flee the country. The judge at his arraignment had bent quite a few guidelines to establish bail at thirty-five million dollars. Apparently, the judge believed Billings could be trusted not to flee only if he no longer had the money to flee with or to. Billings confessed to me that the judge was right, and so kept his stash a secret. We made a perfect team, the polite white men whose soft-spoken manners belied the enormous crimes we had committed – allegedly. Further, the prosecutors were sure that we both hid the key to our crimes locked away in our brains – Billings with the location and numbers of his accounts, and me with the human name and past that I couldn’t divulge since I didn’t have them.
“Well,” said Billings as he sat beside me on the lower bunk, “they want you to have a name and a past, so why don’t you give them one?”
“None of it would check out. There are no records of me anywhere – no birth certificate, no immunization sheet, no school performance, no family, no friends.”
“The documents, you can forge,” he replied. He made a motion as though he were smoking, one of his few joys in life, though he had been denied any money to buy cigarettes. It didn’t matter. The air was rank with smoke, anyway. “I know a good guy. He’s expensive, but he does good work.”
“It doesn’t matter if I have the documents. One call to the hospitals or schools to verify, and the forgery would be obvious.”
“Not if the hospital was torn down or the school burned,” Billings said easily. “For a little extra, my guy can slip your stats into the archives of existing hospital computers and school archives. Investigators will stop there. They don’t want to look too deep.”
I shook my head. “I can’t pay your guy. Angels don’t have money. Never needed it.”
“I have money,” said Billings, releasing a long draw of imagined smoke from his lungs. “It’d be tough to get to, but we could buy you a past.”
“Well, thank you for the offer, but I don’t see how a name and a past are going to help me out of this.”
“Easy. Right now, you’re just an uncommunicative, uncooperative psycho who’s damn-near certainly responsible for five gruesome slayings-”
“Much more than five,” I said, “though they have evidence only for those.”
“You’re just a monster. That’s all people see. But let the people see your past. If you’ve got to create one, make it a good one – one that explains why you are who you are, what happened to you. Everybody looks at you and sees Darth Vader. Let them look and see Anakin Skywalker. You’re not a monster anymore, John. You’re a tragic hero.”
“A fallen angel.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Well, then, what do you suggest?”
He gathered his legs up before him, scooted back on the bunk, leaned against the cinder block wall, and took a long drag on his invisible cigarette. “It shouldn’t be sexual abuse and incest. Folks are sick and tired of those. The Menendez brothers buried that defense deep. Post-traumatic shock disorder won’t work either. Most folks with that just get silent and sullen and suicidal – though a couple suicide attempts would be helpful – show you were willing to kill yourself as well as others.”
“What about MIA? What about if I had been in Desert Storm and was MIA in some Baghdad rape room for thirteen years?”
“How old are you?”
“I don’t know. How old do I look?”
“Thirty-five. Forty at a stretch. That’s about perfect. Young man signs up to fight in George H.W. Bush’s war for oil, gets shot up pretty bad-”
“I do have an old bullet wound, one that was part of this body when I created it.”
“Good. So, you get shot up, and before the medics can find you, some Republican Guard fighter drags you into a living room and hides you until you can be given over to Saddam and his sadist sons. They interrogate you, torture you, put you up in a rape room for thirteen years, the only permanent resident – keep you just to kick around-”
“I’ve got a surgery scar, here, too-”
“Wow. That’s gold. Nobody gets scars like that now, with arthroscopic surgery. That can’t be from surgery. It’s got to be torture – one long cut from hip to hip – evisceration! Vivisection!”
“Yeah. A disemboweling torture, done with a hook?”
I was beginning to enjoy this game. It was the opposite of what I’d been doing: instead of arranging someone else’s death, I was arranging my own life. “The rape room guy sticks a hook through me, from here to here, and hangs me from the ceiling. I hang that way, upsidedown, for three days until the hook rips through my stomach muscles.”
“Expert testimony,” Billings said with a shake of his head. “What’re you gonna do about that? They’d get a doctor to say that it was cut, not a rip mark. Of course, we could just dig up a doctor who’ll testify it’s definitely a rip mark – but that’ll cost more money.” He shrugged, taking comfort from his pantomime smoke.
“Well, that was just one torture,” I continued. “I was there from 1991 to 2003 – thirteen years. After the first two or three years, they weren’t really trying for secrets. Not anymore. They were just having fun. They would entertain dignitaries by torturing the mad American.”
“But we’re not there yet,” Billings said. “Just because you were a tortured MIA doesn’t give you a license to come back and kill Americans.”
“Well, all right, so I get liberated when we take Baghdad. I think the tortures are over. I’ve been imprisoned in Hell, and now the angels have swept in to lift me away. George W. finds out about me and wants to use my story. I’m his boy – the unfinished business his father left behind, business that the son took care of.”
“Right. Right,” Billings said, rubbing his hands together. “So, why have we never heard of you?”
I stared ahead of us, like I could see it all. “It’s what I saw. I saw a massacre.”
“Oh, this is good.”
“Seventy-five virgins in burkhas, three hundred orphans in their care – all of them rushing out of a mosque that was collapsing because of missile fire and the brigade that saved me firing. Firing. Firing. Fifteen seconds of automatic weapons fire, and four hundred Iraqis dead, and the MIA American who witnessed it all, who is supposed to pose with George W in the Rose Garden but who blows the whistle – he is handcuffed and hooded and carried away to Gitmo. And the angels have turned to demons, and the tortures begin again.”