Every morning in prison he wished everyone he saw a good day and said not one other thing.
“I had to be strategic. I had to bar myself from the bad guys, the real scary guys. That’s what you call it. They respect that you want to bar yourself from white supremacists and black supremacists and the real nutters, like rapists.”
He made sure to be the last one leaving the block or leaving any room so that no one was behind him. He made sure to stand at the end of the shower and complete his ablutions in two minutes.
“I have to tell you the worst thing I ever did.”
“No,” Jep said, crossing the room in two steps. “You don’t have to tell us that.”
“I do so I can get clean of it,” Stefan told him.
There was this kid not much older than he who was a child molester. The little boy this prisoner raped was six or seven; for his sin, the molester was labeled a “chomo.”
There was the word that went around that this was the day they would beat the chomo down. “And the deal was, for me, I was fresh fish, and you beat him or you join him.” Stefan could still make himself throw up he said by thinking of what happened that day, behind one of the metal shelves in the library, that young man’s empurpled eye and ripped lip, the pallor of his cheeks and the back of his neck as he cowered in submission. “But it was worth it. It was worth it for me because then I could say my own terms, I mean, without ever really saying anything. I could be an indy. There were a few dozen. Not part of anybody’s gang. Just yourself.”
He lived all his prison days in either boredom or fear or both, unable to even conceive of how it must have felt for those who faced twice, three times, four times as long a sentence. The aggregate of all of that extreme emotion would be that, sometimes for hours at a time, he would feel sorry for himself. And feeling sorry for himself was how he knew, he told us, that something was changing in him for the worse, and that he would need to change it back to become whole again.
Hence, the plan my son had conceived and was ready to embark on now.
Back at the flip chart, Stefan said, “I owe something to the world. I’m also scared to death of the world. I’m more scared of ordinary people these days than I was of scary people in prison. I’m always afraid they’re going to see right through me. But I’m fighting it. So I am hoping that through this path and through my everyday work and just living right, plus my friends, plus you both, I’m hoping it will all be enough…enough to redeem myself.”
He went on, “I think of it as a kind of renewal, for myself, and for other people. And just maybe, it will work on my head. And I’ll really believe that I deserve to live.”
Right then, I wished my son were in a locked ward at our local hospital, stripped of belts and shoelaces and sheets, and I was sitting there with him, saying, please no, please don’t leave. Death is not a fanfare or a tunnel terminating in beautiful light, death is the balm of hypotensive shock. That’s why people who survive near-death experiences say nothing hurts, not because there is really a life hereafter, it’s just a few seconds of biology, a little parting gift from your good brain. It’s hearing maybe one trill from a bird, remembering how good it was on a summer night, through an open window, to hear music from the radio in somebody’s car going past, but by then it’s too late, sound is all there is, a last rasp of fluid settling in your ears, and then nothing at all.
I was reminded of riding up in the hospital elevator to the locked ward that fateful night, how that elevator was fitted with an odd series of outside-looking windows, like an amusement park ride, so that inside I could watch the parking lot drop away and glimpse the distant hills with their muddle of red clouds forecasting dawn. Then, and now, the image reminded me of being at Disney World with Jep and Stefan; how, at eleven, Stefan was still unselfconscious enough that he gladly held both our hands. Ten years ago. Only ten years ago. How could I fit that boy into the boy in the locked ward, and both of them into the man he was now?
There is in every incident a lesson, said Father Kanelos, even if the lesson is not immediately apparent; this is true even if it is never apparent.
The lesson in my experience seemed to be that, in whatever present circumstance you happened to find yourself, there was not necessarily a seed of the inevitable.
How would Stefan ever get past the place he had arrived at where taking his own life was always the default? Shit, it was probably possible to commit suicide even at Disney World, if you wanted to badly enough.