It was dark, too dark, and the laughter and the footfalls were gone. We were here, just the two of us, and I didn't like that one bit. I didn't know what was keeping his backup, and would have been as afraid to ask as the beast probably would have been to answer at that moment. These shadows didn't belong to people like me. They didn't even entirely belong to people like him, and I knew all too well who might come out of them, and how little help I could hope for when they came. To whom did you turn when the good guys were as home in those shadows as the bad guys, finding an unwholesome comfort in the thought of how many secrets they might keep?

Sometimes you learned to forget the things you remembered, knowing that the darkness was never so far off, or the streets as wide as one might wish, or memories as quickly lost as one might hope. Accidents could happen to the curious or outspoken people in those hours, accidents that few would be curious or outspoken enough to question. So one played the fool, and sometimes found that one had been helped in this so well, that one wasn't playing at all.

The beast had been looking at the welt across my forehead, "the mark of Frankenstein" a neighbor had called it. "Admiring a friend's handiwork?", I wondered, losing faith in the thought that I might reach him, but I saw no joy in his eyes. Confusion, worry, sadness ... was that concern? Impossible!

Unless it was true. Everything was impossible until it was true. One it was impossible that a police officer, a member of the noblest profession, could ever be friends with a gang enforcer, the lowest of the low. Could Heaven be in league with Hell? But then, one day ... what was that about? I wasn't entirely sure, but I did remember that nightclub going across the back of my skull, over and over, after I admitted to that good man that I had seen something. I remembered the trip to the hospital, the time I spent in county after having been found guilty of resisting arrest, the love I so did not want to be shown by my fellow man while I was in there, and the relief I felt when the doctor at the clinic told me that I was still healthy when I got out.

How foolish I must have been! Why did I think that love would make me sick? I thought that there had been a reason at the time, something about the way I had been hugged, but it was all foolishness and so I forgot it.

But the impossible had become the possible, the inescapable, the inevitable and that I had to remember. I couldn't forget that club. I remembered it every time that I looked into a mirror. Nor could I forget that our angel in blue had a friend who wore other colors who needed to stay free, and so somebody had to take his place. Somebody suspect. Somebody unrighteous. Somebody who nobody would ask questions about.

Who was that friend? I wasn't sure, any more, but I was fairly sure that being kept from breathing bothered me. This had only lasted for a minute, but the fact that it kept happening over and over - I think that bothered me. The burns on my body? Where had those come from? That nice doctor, the one who nobody could find any more, had said something about electricity, but that was silly. There were no outlets in my cell, and electricity didn't just reach out and grab one, did it?

I just remembered the good man being so disappointed, so angry with me because I couldn't help his friend. It was strange. You would think that I'd have felt bad about the fact that I couldn't help, but all that I could remember feeling really bad about how angry the good man was, so bad that I was screaming.

I don't remember when I stopped. I don't even remember how that all ended, but I do remember being back out on the street. But I still was back out on the street at this very moment, having been not much of anywhere else for ages, one day blurring so much into the others that I couldn't tell which was which, so I guess forgetting the experience of being out here would have been some trick. I remember thinking that good men and bad men weren't so very different, after all, just different actors on the stage, doing what they did.

I also remember thinking that this had to be absurd. What made a place what it was, what gave it its character, other than the character of the people in it? Surely there were good places to be and bad and that one had to learn how to find one's way into the former? If nothing else, surely life would have taught one that much? Indeed, what would be the point of a life that lacked such a lesson? What would become of the very notion of salvation, if good and evil could not be distinguished? What would that tell us of the reward God would give to each for the life that he had lead, of the places to which each of those lives might lead? What were we to learn from that?

That Heaven was Hell? That each had been remade in the uniform image of the faceless mass that occupied both? How could that be? Even as I forgot precisely why I had that thought, in a vaguely distant past that didn't want to be remembered, I remembered that it had been there, leaving me with questions that I didn't know how to answer, as it was doing again. What was to be said of the kindness of a God who would subject us to such a world, and leave us with nothing to look forward to after such an ordeal as we had experienced, but the sick joke of offering us the same hellish experience, branded under two different labels, while pretending that the choice we made mattered? A choice of experience to be trapped in, knowing always that there could be no hope of escape, ever, that was really no choice at all? How cruel did God have to be, to leave us with nothing but that?





But God was cruel, wasn't He? Some would seek to excuse Him, by saying that He had rendered Himself blameless by giving each of us free will, but how was one to judge an artist but by looking on His creation, His hideous creation? Where was the freedom for the weak, when the strong were so absolutely free to do as they wished? Especially when some of the strong weren't flesh and blood at all, but spirits whose stated intentions seemed to be anything but pure?

Think, in our supposedly holy scriptures, of the betrayal of poor Judas, I told myself. Were we not told that for the world to be saved, that the Son of Man had to be betrayed and, in suffering death as he took all of the sins of the world upon Himself, pay that world's karmic debt? So Judas, in his actions, however motivated, had saved all of creation, unlocking the gates of Heaven for all. All but one.

How was he rewarded, I asked myself? By being sent below, to linger in anguish without hope for eternity, anguish before which the fleeting suffering of his lord and master would pale by comparison, even though his supposed crime had been the idea of He who had condemned him, part of His plan for His own creation. "Relatively speaking", I thought, "what could be my protest, what could be anybody's protest at how one had been treated, once one accepted that? What bitter surprise could seem anything but anticlimatic by comparison? What right had we to be astonished at all?"

An irreligious man might have laughed at my despair, thinking that I had dwelled too deeply on the quirks of fictional characters. "Just find a few people worth caring about and don't spend so much time worrying about the ones who aren't", they'd say. "They'll turn on each other in the end, because that's what sociopaths do, and the righteous, as you call them, shall inherit the earth, as they have before and shall again. Have a little faith. Isn't that what you're always saying? So take your own advice, and stop bothering me with this nonsense."

So easy such an answer must have seemed to one who would, having offered it, walk off laughing and shaking his head, but it did nothing for me. Or it hadn't done anything for me? Was that hypothetical skeptic a real person that I was remembering, however imperfectly? Sketchily? I could not, at this point, say exactly why this was, but those stories had meant a great deal to me in those days. Yes, that sounds like the beginning of a cynicism of my own, but it was not. My memories of those times, of all times if truth be told, were blurry, but passion of any kind is not so easily forgotten as are such cold and mechanical things as facts. I could accept the reality of my despair. I could not accept its reasonability. There had to be something that I was missing.

If I seemed stubborn in my faith as I recalled that moment, I wasn't - at least not at that time. Even a determined faithlessness calls for confidence, a faith in one's lack of faith, as it were. I couldn't have that. If the faith that I now doubted were true, then I was surely in the wrong. If I insisted that I was not presently in the wrong, however, what did that say about me? That I had devoted so much of my life to a mistake?

Had I done that? Somehow, I felt sure that I had, so what would such a conclusion say about my own judgement? Paradoxically, the only humble thing for me to do was to proceed aggressively on the assumption that I had not been in error - before - and find some justification for my aggression, and for my faith, in the process. This was not easy, but out on the street, one has nothing but time, and my box was well insulated, as I had these strange thoughts.





My box? A cryptic reference at first, I'm sure. Among the many things that I couldn't clearly remember was my profession. I couldn't remember exactly what I had done for a living before my present circumstances arose, or how I had done it. This proved a matter of great, if passing inconvenience, because landlords do insist that one pay for one's place of residence, and deep thoughts are not accepted in lieu of cash. Not that I imagined or imagine that I was having any of those, at the moment. Or now.

Conveniently, I found that I couldn't remember where I lived, either, saving me from what would have been a most unpleasant meeting, the decent man from whom I'd no doubt have been renting struggling to find the words needed to explain to me, his unfortunate and half addled tenant, why he needed to put me out on the street. I was glad that he, whoever he had been, was spared that. However selfishly, I was also glad that I had been spared having to be present for such a moment.

One might ask if this good luck was really so very good. What of those who would be looking for me? What, indeed, of them? Which, I know, sounds cold and selfish, but even if they found me, would they really have found me? They, if there was a they, remembered somebody with memories I didn't even quite completely remember losing. They were looking for somebody who didn't exist, any more.

I was nothing more than a shadow of somebody who no longer was, a ghost of sorts, and there is nothing healthy about an attempt to find one of those. So I did as I felt that a ghost ought to do, and faded away. Having rather more of my own biology left to me than the average shade, I soon found that hunger and thirst were undermining my well made plans, shelters not being as common or well stocked as I had hoped, but people willing to pick the trash off of the subway tracks for minimum wage were even scarcer, so that problem was easily solved, at least at first. I had rather wished that the trains would have slowed down while I was working, or that my employers would have stopped high fiving each other every time that I had just barely managed to roll out of the way of an oncoming car, but five hours and ten dollars later, I had enough money for an all that you can eat Indian buffet, with a little money left on the side. Nothing to complain about in that, though I was a little unsure of why it was that my boss had been dragged off the platform by his ear, at the end of my working day, or what his father coming home had to do with anything. This just didn't seem very professional at all, but as long as I was getting paid, that wasn't my concern.

The world did provide me with what I needed, if not always what I wanted, and seemed to do so on a tight enough schedule to keep me alive. The cold night air had worried me, until I found a refrigerator carton left on a loading dock, and a king's ransom's worth of bubble wrap inside. With a few of my precious dollars, I was able to buy some garbage bags, a kindly store owner throwing in some glue in exchange for my promise to not take up residence on his loading dock, which he said could be very dangerous at night, and even more so when the trucks came through in the morning. I was no longer homeless, and I had a friend. A man could ask for no more.

Wraoping the box in plastic, so that the water dripping into the viaduct in which I was sleeping wouldn't weaken the cardboard, I packed newspaper on the bottom, a few discarded blankets atop it, and bubble wrap over the blankets for added insulation. It wasn't a palace, it wasn't even very warm, but a man could live in it. Not bad for what I was guessing was my first day of genteel poverty, based on the fine tailoring of the clothes on my back, at the time. I had food in my stomach, protection from the snow that had been blowing past, and time to think about my day. Time, leisure and a chance to do what I knew I needed to do - calm down, as I tried to remember who I was, or at least a few answers that I had once found to questions that I must surely have asked, even when the world was not so unknown to me as it had become.

Faded memories, snatches of voices ... not much, but all I needed to find a little peace. I began to remember that there were more than four gospels, and that they didn't all agree. In one of them, Judas was praised, not condemned for his seeming act of betrayal, for it was this act that allowed Jesus to escape the prison that was his earthly body. Rather than being seen as the most vile, he was seen as being the most wise of men and the greatest of the apostles. I didn't know whether or not to agree with such an idea, but just by being there, the idea reminded me that this is all that scripture was - a collection of Man's ideas about He who we could not hope to comprehend. If the ideas weren't always inspiring, that was only because Man was seldom inspiring - a reflection of our failings, not of His, I thought.

Then I remembered something that - was that my father - had said to me when I was little, or at least a lot shorter than I was now, and asked why God would let evil into the world. "Would you have Him keep good out of the world?", he asked with a smile - I think that it was a kind of smile. "No", I said, "of course not", adding that I did not understand. Given that I was viewing the edge of the kitchen counter from below at the time, I guess that I had a recognized license to be clueless; yes, definitely that was a kindly smile. "Have you ever seen a thing without its opposite? If there was no light, would there ever be shadow? If there was no cold, would warmth ever bring us any comfort?" I looked at him with such bewilderment as only a child can know.

"We experience goodness and grow in doing so only by resisting evil. If there was no hardship, no sorrow, then there would be nothing for us to do to be men of good character, and so our good character would be nothing more than an affectation, posturing without conviction, without heart. A world in which the words 'I love you' would be without meaning - wouldn't that be worse than any other evil that you could ever imagine?"

Then I looked at him, blinking a lot and not doing much else, because children have been known to do that. I didn't remember what came right after that. I did remember, in snatches, moments of hardship in the years that followed that weren't much fun, moments that I made even less pleasurable through the choices I made, choices that I knew that I had felt obligated to make, even if I didn't completely remember why at the moment. I also remembered that my memory of the hardship far outlived my resentment of it, a different sort of comfort following, a feeling of being healthier in spirit. Much as the feeling of being healthier in body had far outlasted the muscle aches and shortness of breath that followed my morning calisthenics. What my father had said made more sense as time passed. Resenting God for those hardships would have been like resenting the gymnasium for putting real weights out, and letting them be so heavy. To be given all of the simple comfort that self-indulgence would have lead me to crave would have left me a wreck in mind, body and soul in the end, my connection to all of them so weak that the least bit of strain could snap it. That stronger connection - that's what wellness was, wasn't it? That real feeling of ease as opposed to the dangerously tempting illusion, that was one's confidence that one's connection to life, in every sense, wasn't about to be broken, because one could meet the reasonable challenges of the day and be ready for them.

"And how ready are you for them now?", I could almost hear a voice asking. "You speak of wellness, but life would seem to have left you the worse for wear." I imagined that it had, though not so much the worse that I imagined that "voice" to be anything more than a well fleshed out daydream, a projection of my own reasonable doubts. No, I was a rattling bag of bones, ready to fall apart, whose senses had been so dulled that he'd only notice his own most recent collapse until after it had happened. I could not see the higher purpose in this latest test. Did one build oneself up by trying to pick up the 500 pound mass left for the visiting olympian?





Visiting olympian? When would an olympian have visited my neighborhood? Such vanity was making itself visible in these thoughts, such an exaggerated sense of self. Maybe this was the point of the test? Maybe I had grown too proud and needed to be brought low? If so, the beast was doing an excellent job of that. Perhaps I ought to commend him for that, and mean it this time, I thought with a bitterness that I hoped wasn't showing, under the circumstances.

"Perhaps you ought", responded that inner voice that seemed a little more real this time, more a memory than a daydream. "Maybe he's doing God's work, just as you say Judas did. Would you claim that you have suffered more than Christ did, or that you were a more righteous victim than He? That He was more in need of correction than you, who react more slowly to it? Such pride you put on display, such an image of yourself. Such hubris. Reminding yourself of anybody at this moment? It's a wonder that you can make the sign of the cross without bursting into flame." A memory - a blurry memory, but it must surely have been a memory, for this imagined voice spoke with a greater wisdom than mine, and it shamed me.

"Doesn't this seem a little too tidy?", came a second inner voice, my own self-doubt doubting even itself. "All of these wicked men, who just happen to be at the right place at the right time to unknowingly do God's work, as if they had no will of their own?"

"What makes you so sure that their truest will isn't with God", I then asked myself, "if what we think of as being ourselves, our consciousness, is nothing more than the thinnest upper layer of our minds, no more able to understand the depths beneath it, from whence dreams come, than a ripple on the ocean's surface is able to plumb the abyss beneath it? Didn't Jung have God hiding down there?

"Now who's being hubristic?", my conscience asked of me, as if there could only be one of me in here, in my thoughts. Could one have more than one inner voice, and if so, would it be proper to give them names, just to avoid confusing oneself as much as I was confusing myself at this moment? "Why wouldn't God hide down there, if he wished to guide us without eliminating the need for faith?", shot back the most recently held doubt, that of an inner voice that I decided that I'd call "Ralph", until I decided that this was too stupid for words, even unspoken ones. "Who are you calling stupid?", asked Ralph.

OK, no more cheap wine for me, I thought. Whichever inner voice had just been rebutted ... I was having trouble keeping track of myself at this point ... had no response to that, so "Ralph" continued in there, as I made a point of remembering that this was just a metaphor that described the dialectic process in my thoughts, and that switching to the long island iced teas that some of the nicer frat boys in the neighborhood kept trying to get me to try really wouldn't have been a change for the better.

"isn't this karma that all of you" ... all of the imagined voices in my head, who were not going to be promoted to being imaginary voices ..."have been speaking about something that is shed over many lifetimes, not one? Much as the rain, drop by drop, will wear away the mountains, but only over the aeons? What one would expect were the karma something that could only be eroded away on that shallow surface, the same way that a mountain would worn away, in time. Maybe those deeper, truer selves, seeing the mammoth task ahead of them, to be achieved through such limited means, would work together. Each, I imagined, would take turns adopting the role that the other needed to make progress, with those limited shadows of themselves that we imagine to be their minds barely aware of the truth of what was really happening.





Good and evil, then, weren't enemies any more than were ying and yang. That was the illusion. That was the illusion. They were as dancers on a stage, each, through its own movements, giving meaning to the movements of the other. They were abstractions that the human mind had created so that it might come closer to understanding that otherwise incomprehensible dance out of which it arose, itself. If this were so, then wasn't the dance the greatest illusion of all, inviting us to see two dancers where there was but one that hid behind two different masks, evil just being a different kind of good? But if all goodness and nothing but good came from God, and all evil and nothing but evil came from Satan, then God and Satan must be one, for the actions of one were the actions of another, and was it not so that to be was to do?

God tempting us to not follow Him? We would seem to have found our way back to the cruelty done to Judas through the scenic route, me and my retinue of imagined critics. No progress at all, yet ... to be was to do? Because to be at all was to take up space in some sense, literal or figurative? It was to define that space by one's presence and, in impacting on the world, act on it, whether one chose to or not? But if this were so, then how did God do good, do at all in the world, save through the actions He inspired in each of us? God did indeed live in each of us, literally. Why shouldn't He be contradictory, kind and cruel, fair and arbitrary all at once, when we were all of these things at once? To blame Him was to blame ourselves.

"Feel much like a god, lately", came a voice that Ralph insisted wasn't his. At least, my concept of Ralph so insisted. No, I didn't feel like a god, and why would I? I didn't say that God lived in me, alone, I said that He lived in all of us, and Humanity, in its entirety, was certainly a thing far greater than I. As great as creation, one might ask. Greater than anything that I could imagine, greater than anything that anybody could imagine, so who had the standing to ask such a question? As the very language in which the question was asked was, itself, the creation of a species that couldn't properly ask it, in what sense was it a question at all?

And if any true God greater than we could say that he was had wished to give us that greater wisdom that we would have needed to say more of Him, couldn't He have done so with a wish? If God had signaled His satisfaction with our thoughts about Him through His actions or lack of action, then who was I or any other mere human being to question His pleasure in this? This, then was the God we knew: the collective personification of reason, itself - not mine or yours, but everybody's, all of wisdom in its incomprehensible totality.





In this was to be found the answer to the question of whether I loved or hated men such as the beast. Both! I did both, for each was nothing more than an aspect of the other, two different ways of looking at the process of transformation that was the essence of what it was to be alive. How could one be said to have thoughts if those thoughts didn't change one? How could one change, become one's new self, without destroying one's old self? Was that destruction not the work of hatred of a kind, and the creation of that new, better self, the work of love?

That was the answer! In hatred, there was love. In his bludgeoning of me, the good man had shown his affection, and reason had lead me to this, this conclusion that became so obviously ridiculous when I remembered the glow in his eyes. Logic was itself absurd, but what else was there to give sense to life? Nothing, nothing at all. In that moment, I saw the truth - that there was only absurdity, only an excellent joke that we could or could not appreciate, as we found our roles in it. All else was an illusion, a dream out which we did not wish to awaken. The world was itself as unreal as any of the many stories that we had told about it. All that truly mattered was the spirit in which we approached that illusion.

In that moment, I found enlightenment.