The Two of Us on the Battlefield (Memoir)

(this piece was written during my Nonfiction MFA back in 2006–2008)

“Remember, God loves you. He created you in his image. He knew you were coming. He loves you.” I say this to him each time I leave.

“The Truth?” He asks.

“The Truth.” I reply.

He smirks from underneath his bicycle helmet at me. His pudgy cheeks and soft brown eyes fail to conceal every ounce of sadness crushing down upon him. I cannot help but smile when I see him; no offerings needed in this sanctuary. My smile barely obfuscates that I am trying desperately to have something to offer him, like hope, or providence, two things I have long run out of.

I remind myself: “Just because you fall, does not mean you lose your angel status.” He is an angel who has just fallen. I am a member of the fallen who is trying to be an angel. We are both kidding ourselves, but only one of us lying.

From the world of broken promises and broken deeds he has surfaced into my life, a leviathan who only wanted to be something far more graceful.

I am the adult here and I have to show him that you can rise above your origins, you can overcome your trauma, live a good and righteous life. Meanwhile, I do my best to hide my long black wings, my anger at the Creator: who would create a world that could do things like this to a child?

We surface at the farthest extension of the system. I do not fear the flaming sword any longer. He is just getting to know it burns, living proof of the ubiquitous, “the system isn’t perfect.” He is twelve-years-old. He might as well be fifty. He has lived through wars that no young boy should have been conscripted into.

He giggles, nervously, cautious, not a full laugh, testing the waters between us, the desire to feel joy with the moment, never sure what he is expected to do. I fake a laugh in reply. Nothing is funny about this situation. “You laugh funny,” he says, “like a Raven.”

“Probably because I think far too much,” I reply, and then I smile, laugh again, think of a Raven myth, Egyptian, to offer, resist, must stay true to the Gospel. I conceal the black feathers begging to burst forth, but still play the wise blackened bird. I don’t offer him the truth, my own uncertain laugh, the fact that I just don’t laugh at all anymore, I have forgotten how, the misunderstood light-bearer I know myself to have become.

We play basketball with an old blackened-orange Sears basketball and hoop whose graying, plastic weighted frame has split so that you have to let the hose keep running inside of it in order to weigh it down. After fifteen minutes of play there is a small swamp around the base and when the ball lands in it, it thumps and sinks without rebounding. He runs after the ball with his belly wiggling around inside his chocolate stained white T-shirt, his tongue flapping outside of his mouth from his lack of coordination, his log like legs barely propelling him fast enough to catch up to the ball.

Between breaths he asks me questions like, “Were you fat when you were a kid?” or “Did you ever have to live in a home like this?” I wasn’t and I haven’t — they made me stay with my abusers — , but we share so much of a storyline to our lives that I do not offer to him.

I know he lives with his own terror, although the truth of it all, he has not yet fully realized, that will take a lifetime: God throwing another soul, meaningless to Him and His fucking plan. God, who threw His own Son to the block and nails. God, who fathered a child without feeling any of it. God, who created an orphan, Holy, rejected, betrayed, accused, and mutilated, like the boy before me, to the top of the heap of the damned pile.

This is the first time I have returned to the fields of Nephilim since going into Religious Studies. This is my first attempt to help the fallen through the lens of the Church and God. My service is not completely selfless, although the State loves volunteers no matter what: we help to elevate their sins, that, like the Heavenly choirs, they and their bureaucracy are as much of the problem as the problem they think they serve to cure. The cause, causing itself to be and become. I tell them, “You cannot cure the symptoms if the problem is inherent in the design.” They don’t know what I mean.

I’m a reassuringly Gothy, middle-aged man, working on a Divinity degree, volunteering my time to work with abused children, appealing to a sense of Grace that, as a former Catholic, I find to be as short-sighted of a plan as I do their laws (Church and Government) and departments and guidelines. They let me volunteer to work with this boy and that is the important thing. My own plan is to offer guidance, an existential, in the midst of such meaninglessness and despair; to be a good friend, a good listener, and a good example of trauma overcome. He is my first case, my first boy. He has many of my first symptoms: hyper-sexuality, nightmares, a fascination with death, overly sensitive and shy, with an impending sense of doom. He is absolutely terrified and so used to being a whore, and from the start, I am bluffing every line I thought I was so well-prepared for here with him.

Most of all, I am not prepared for this anger. I am angry when he misses the basket, or when he loses his dribble; I want him to succeed at even the insignificant things in life. The bigger things are even harder to take.

I am angry when the staff reminds him he needs to take his medicinal cocktail of zombie drugs, drugs which prevent him from being human, from coming into contact with his terror, which prevent him from finding a way to express his outrage at a world not of his choosing, a life not of his choosing, and no one would choose it if they could. Instead, I have to find words for such ineffable existence at an ineffable Creator, who I have more than a few, certainly, “F-able,” words for, in this situation. Where is the fucking Mercy here? Where is the Grace? There is only absence and anger.

I get angry when the boy wants to go to a movie and he isn’t allowed to because the day before, he started madly screaming at the staff workers, “You sluts, you whores!” They see it as incorrect behavior and put him in a hold. I know he is remembering and repeating the script from his life, flashing back to scenes and dialogues he heard and he now uses during times of frustration. I tell them that is what he is doing and they tell me, “it is unacceptable no matter what,” and I reply, “YOU are unacceptable, in this whole situation! His whole fucking life is unacceptable, no matter what!” No Bible prepares you for this shit and anyone who says it does is working on a life of privileged existence, chosen for a better cast in the creative cum dump.

I am frustrated that his caseworker isn’t up late at night trying to get him a home where he feels safer, or why the caseworker isn’t here reading to him and assuring him things will be all right. And I find I am starting to hate the caseworker and the teachers and aids who are supposed to be the guardians of this boy, and I resent my spiritual director who tells me to ‘focus on God’s plan,’ all of whom only offer more self-defeating ideals to misdeal this boy with an utter sense of abandoning, all consuming defeat. They keep telling me, “It’s a job, you just can’t get that close, you can’t take it personally.” How can I not?

“Everything is personal when you have been violated so personally.” I reply. They shake their heads and show me State regulations. I toss the books over my shoulder. They try and tell me about the system or the rules or responsibilities, worse, the laws. I open the Bible, I throw quotes at them, they counter with equally meaningless, misconstrued proof-texting, their greatest proofs provided by the State laws, some PhD who wont ever have to face the people they are actually explaining by explaining away. None of that stuff, Bible nor Governmental, I really care about. My training is failing me. I only care about the boy.

I want him to be able to ride his bike far from the house, to be able to go to the movies, to have dreams that he knows he will be able to see become reality, and I don’t want him to fail, not at basketball, not in his schooling, not in this half-way (to Hell) house he is restricted to, not in his confining life, not in the life he is condemned to beyond.

I am furious to consider that his falling went beyond me. I wasn’t there to save him, to save anyone. I couldn’t even save myself. There is more of my kind in the world, many more, far more then there should be; I am not the last one. We don’t wear our victimhoods and trauma like flags at a pride, we bare these things deep below the skin, no horns, no trumpets, just shame, just perdition. God keeps making us, abused little boys, we keep falling. It’s not our fault, I know that. I tell the boy, “It’s not your fault.” He has heard it a hundred times. It is no answer, we both know it, only the workers and the psychologists and the doctors and the Church hierarchy don’t seem to get it. It is a self-maintaining system of damnation. I wont perpetuate this, unthinking, unthinkable truth anymore.There is no way to complain about the system, all I, we, can do is search, wait, struggle. It all seems so futile at times like this.

The boy fails and I feel like I fail. Everyone fails him, and I fail. God fails him, and He fails me, and thus, I fail him, and Him, as well, and so, we fall, that is all that we are asked to do by God. I pray on the matter more. Same answer everyday, it just gets harder to accept.

I see the sullen little boy all alone in the yard, staring down the street, thousand-yard-stare, on that delicate verge of child and monstrosity, with clenched fists and battle scars so deep that no salvation could restore him to normal. This boy’s life is destroyed. No one can save him, save me. After a month, I can’t tell the difference between us.

I keep asking myself, “Who could have done this to a child, a sweet little boy? A boy who wants to be held and healed and inspired by life, not have it limited or destroyed at such an early age?”

I turn to my Systematic Theology, my Rahner, my Aquinas, I search through my Bible, and I read the writings of the Church Fathers, and I pray and I confess, and I consider the example of Jesus on the Cross. Everything seems like a lame excuse, a half-hearted attempt to come down here and deal with these unwanted children, this creation-in-passing, this creation-without-a-heart, and I am finally beginning to understand the necessity of pride, not before, but in the face of, the Fall.

All I have left, besides my Fall, is my pride, not one that preceeds a Fall, but one that survives it, this sense of nobility, sense of moral transcendent fortherightness, diabolical indignation, call it what you may, that you can be dark and still be good, the terms are not mutually exclusive. I have begun to regard pride as my best weapon in the fight for atonement, to be at one with myself, my condition, my creation. My pride makes me defend the boy ferociously. I have my own scars and my own wounds and my thirst for fire, and I am not afraid to take it from the mountains into the valleys, nor deep into the underworld nor to the throne itself: I do not fear carrying this war up to God, not for this boy.

He calls me “Uncle,” and asks me, when I will be coming back, as soon as I get there. He says, “You are the closest thing to family I know anymore,” and his eyes well up with tears. I know he thinks of his parents, those pieces of shit, his mother and father who initiated him into this abandonment, who prostituted him for the safety and normalcy of a life, and then he asks me, “If I take my meds, and I am a good boy, do you think I can see my mommy again? Can you take me to see her tomorrow?” I change the subject, I focus on exercise and dialogue and Bible stories, and I repress the urge to go to his parent’s trailer out in the woods and shoot them in the face while they sleep in their methadone stupor. “Can you Uncle, Can you?” he asks, his voice softening. Roman’s 12:12, all I can give:

Be joyful in Hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.

I make a note to myself, a gentle reminder, “Listen to your own advice.”

Alone in my room, on my knees before the cross, I try and take stock of my situation. I served my time as well as I could back when I was the boy’s age. I was silent. I loved my mother. I loved my step-monsters. I loved my God. The reality, I was of use to them, that was all. To love without love in return, this too is essential to the Divine Plan. I remain hopeful for atonement, that I will find a state of “at-one-ment, ”patient that I am in a position where I can serve people as best as I can, and I have been faithful in my prayers for clarity in my vocation, it will all come together, instead, it all breaks down, brick by brick, prayer by prayer, hope by hope.

A week later I arrive at the house and he is on a bed in the quiet room, in a four-point-restraint. He shakes and snaps his body as much as he can, given that his body is restricted at every segment. The convulsions are so violent that the table jumps a little at the legs. A staffer, a harmless and helpless country mom, with long greasy brown hair and a thick Franco-American accent says to me, “He looks like a crazy person, like something out of the Exorcist.” His gaze at me is both “save me” while also being “save yourself.” At least this is a place we have both been now.

I run over to him and wipe his sweaty brow with my long black sleeves, see the desperate look in his eyes for movement, for understanding, and I begin to unfasten the towel secured with medical tape around his head, the head restraint. He says to me, “Help Me! Help Me Uncle!” and I untie him with great desperation, as if he is slipping through my fingers, like wine inside of a broken vessel.

The staffer grabs my right arm, and automatically, the victim in me kicks in. I shove her backwards and through the door, onto her back. She screams, “You got the devil in you as well!” I stare at her with as much hate for her as for the whole system she is a part of. While she calls for assistance, I begin to free the boy from his restraints, fully knowing that my actions will only further constrain him in the end. All suffering feels immediate though, and all the waiting in the world begs for cessation; people have waited for Jesus for two-thousand years to come and rescue them. At least, I am here, by his side, now.

The director’s office is entombed with dark brown paneling, shelves of useless medical and psychological jargon surround us like Canopic jars. The director sits behind the immense altar of a desk in his high Pharonic seat. He explains to me, that the boy was caught exposing his genitals to another boy, attempting to convince the other boy to allow him to service him, and when caught, he resisted, he bit an intake worker, he kicked over a table, he would not go into time out, nor did he respond well to being put in a hold, and so, restraining him became the only option. I ask if anyone asked him why he was doing what he did, or if anyone explained to him how acting out his abuse could be worked on. I know they don’t care why he does what he does, only that he does what he does, as if the former were not the path of light and not the latter. This is what makes me a heretic in their system and God’s.

I am informed of rules and policies and inappropriate behaviors, and then the director says to me, “I thought you people understood right and wrong?”

“What people do you mean?” I reply.

“Priests,” he says, with a raised eyebrow, trying to look authoritative while his sarcasm sneaks out.

“I’m only in Divinity School now,” I start, “but I know the difference between right and wrong.”

“Good then…” he starts.

“Wrong,” I cut him off, “is grabbing a child and scolding him when he is acting out his patterned, response-learned, abuse. Wrong, is fighting with a child who is more confused about who he is, about what is healthy touch and not healthy touch, than he is about your rules, your staff’s lack of understanding, and your book-learning. Wrong, is putting a child in a four-point restraint for two hours, when he has been restrained, in so many ways, his entire life. Wrong, is that people without any firsthand knowledge of what long term physical, emotional, and sexual abuse looks like, feels like, and manifests like, rule over it like some kind of God-damned self-serving Messiah. This whole fucking situation is wrong!”

“Sounds like you speak from first hand experience. A little too much.” He says smugly.

“You make fun of child abuse again, anyone’s abuse, and I will give you a taste of what it feels like…first hand.”

My prayers for vocation clarity have been answered. They contact my advisor and set an ending date for my volunteer work. I spend the next week thinking to myself how that whole discourse had been directed at God, the suit behind the desk was just the name that fit Himbest at the moment. I am becoming Milton’s sympathetic Lucifer. My advisor says I shouldn’t go into pastoral care, maybe not the Ministry even, “Perhaps Theology would be a better choice.”

“I am living my Theology. I don’t know how much deeper I can go.” I reply.

“Sounds like your Theology is caught up in a lot of darkness these days.” He offers, sincerely, caringly.

“Or freed by it.”

On my last day, I arrive dressed in a jacket, a tie, a pressed dress shirt and pants. The boy jokes, “You look all serious.” I explain to him that what I did was wrong, that I had to listen to the staff workers, and so does he, and that I transgressed the rules when I shoved the worker and freed him, and that I need to learn to not let my mouth get ahead of me so that I can come back and help him in the future, life is about learning from your mistakes and doing better the next day. He has heard enough excuses and false promises in his life, to know I am both full of shit and, cowardly, saying goodbye. “So, you are giving up on me too, because I did a bad thing?”

I sigh. I look down. I look at him, so tired of pretending. “You may have done something you don’t understand, but that doesn’t mean you are a bad person, that you should be abandoned. People do things all the time without knowing why…only God knows why, His plan, things are the way they are.” I hate myself.

He fidgets his hands in front of his belly to keep from hurting himself, rolling his fat little digits in circles as his eyes space in and out.

“Is that the truth?” he asks, seriously.

“Yes.” I look at him and I fucking lie to him. I am another liar in his life. I might as well of just betrayed him, the way Jesus betrayed Judas by setting him up with a job nobody would ever want.

The boy begins to cry. He tells me that he has nothing to live for, and I tell him that he has plenty to look forward to, just like I do, and asks me what I have that keeps me going, that keeps me from wanting to end my life. I bullshit him another answer like poetry, or my studies, or Italian food, worse still, God. “The Truth?” He asks again.

“The Truth.” I lie again.

I pat his head, mess his hair, hug him, draw my lips to his ear and say, “Someday, this will all make sense, you will understand everything I told you, and you will do good work too.”

“But…” he begins to say and I interject, sternly:

“You cannot hurt a good person.” I smile, and laugh, deeply.

“It says that in the Bible?”

“It should.” I say and turn to leave once again. I feel my black wings begin to rupture through the thick cloth of my jacket, redeemed. “It’s Socrates, a deeper truth.”

He is crying when I leave this last time. The staff, watching us, are glad to see me finally go. They can now get back to their real work. As I get to the front door, he is still following me and by the time I am at the pavement he yells, “You forgot to say, ‘Remember, God loves you…’”

Looking back at him, smiling, I say nothing. I wont lie to him anymore.

I cannot tell him the real truth, not because it is forbidden of me, but because, “The Truth,” he will have to learn on his own, the most terrible of all truths that so many of us, in perdition, have to figure out. There is only one Truth why I live, one reason to not check out: I live to come back for the survivors, I live for boys like him. I carry a spear and a shield and wait at the frontlines, proudly. I stand with those that would join this war, who are outraged at a God (or a man or a woman or an industry) that could do these sorts of things to a child, the things done to him, done to me, done to so many others.

In the end, this is our only choice, only, I do not tell this to the boy. I still have hope for him, hope for myself as well. Theology groans a darkening radiance within me. This whole Divinity gig is so much false hope. I am starting to realize that, loss of Hope is damnation, but that damnation is liberation. We are those damned to lose heart, and lose hope, and proceed on the flames of pride, a pride fueled by the loss of hope, propelled by the steaming anger of indignation, and this makes us free, our rebellion will not go unnoticed. I will continue to search for survivors and wait.