Part 1 (1/2)
THE FINAL TESTAMENT OF THE HOLY BIBLE.
JAMES FREY.
He will come again.
-The Apostles' Creed.
This book was written with the cooperation of and after extensive interviews with the family, friends, and followers of Ben Zion Avrohom, also known as Ben Jones, also known as the Prophet, also known as the Son, also known as the Messiah, also known as the Lord G.o.d.
MARIAANGELES.
He wasn't nothing special. Just a white boy. An ordinary white boy. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium height and medium weight. Just like ten or twenty or thirty million other white boys in America. Nothing special at all.
First time I saw him he was coming down the hallway. There was an apartment across the hall from where I lived that'd been empty for a year. Usually apartments in our project go quick. Government supports them so they're cheap, for people who ain't got s.h.i.+t in this world and, even though they always telling us different, know we ain't ever gonna have s.h.i.+t. There's lists for them. Long and getting longer. But n.o.body would live in that one. It had a reputation. The man who lived there before had gone crazy. He'd been normal. Sold souvenirs outside Yankee Stadium and had a wife and two little boys, real cute little boys. Then he started hearing voices and s.h.i.+t, started ranting about devils and demons and how he was the last man standing before us and the end. He lost his job and started wearing all white and trying to touch everybody on their head. He got his a.s.s whooped a few times and his church told him to stop coming. He screamed at his family and played this organ music all night. Cursed the demons and pleaded to the Lord. Howled like some kind of dog. He didn't ever let his family leave. We stopped hearing the music and it started smelling and Momma called the cops and they found him hanging from the shower. Wearing a white robe like a monk. Tied up with an electrical cord. They found his wife and boys with electrical tape around their ankles and wrists and plastic bags over their heads. There was a note that said we have gone to a better place. Maybe the Devil got him or the demons got him or his Lord left him. Or maybe he just got tired. And maybe they did go to a better place. I don't know, and won't probably ever know, not believing what I believe. And it didn't matter anyway. Everybody heard about it and n.o.body would live there. Until Ben. He came down the hall with a backpack and an old suitcase and moved right in. He either didn't know or didn't care about what had happened before. Moved right the f.u.c.k in.
He was the only white boy in the building. Except for the Jews who owned the liquor stores and the clothing shops, he was the only white boy in the neighborhood. Rest of us was all Puerto Rican. A few Dominicans. A few regular old-school black motherf.u.c.kers. All poor. Angry. Wondering how to make it better and knowing there was no answer. It was what it was, is what it is. A f.u.c.ked up ghetto in an American city. They're all the f.u.c.king same. Ben didn't seem to notice. Didn't care he was out of place. He came and went. Didn't talk to n.o.body. Wore some kind of uniform like a pretend cop during the week that made everybody laugh. Stayed in his apartment most of the time on weekends, except when he'd go out drinking. Then we'd see him pa.s.sed out on the benches out front of the buildings, right near the playground. Or in the hallway with vomit on his s.h.i.+rt. One time he came stumbling home on a Sunday morning and his pants were all wet and he was trying to sing some twenty-year-old rap song at the top of his lungs. My brother and his friends started going along with him, making fun of him and s.h.i.+t, and he was too drunk to even know. We started thinking we knew why he was living among us. Why he didn't care he was out of place, didn't belong. We thought he must not be welcome where he came from anymore. They didn't want him around. And we was right, he'd been kicked the f.u.c.k out by his people, we just had the reasons why wrong.
First time I talked to him was in the hallway. It was probably six months after he moved in and me and my daughter came walking out of our apartment on our way to chill in front of the building. He was standing there in his boxer shorts and a t-s.h.i.+rt with his door open, holding his telephone. My daughter was like a year and a half old. Just learning some words. She said hola and he didn't say nothing back. She's like her momma. I say something to someone, I expect they say something back. Everybody wants that. Some basic level of respect. Acknowledgment as a human being. So she said it again and he just stood there. So I said hola motherf.u.c.ker, don't you know how to be a decent motherf.u.c.king neighbor and say something back. And he looked nervous and sort of scared and said sorry. And then my girl said hola again, and he said it back to her and she smiled and hugged his leg and he laughed and I asked him what he was doing just standing there in the hallway with his drawers on and his door open and the phone in his hand. He said he was waiting for a new TV, that he had bought one on sale and it was being delivered. I told him he better have a good G.o.dd.a.m.n lock, that there's motherf.u.c.kers around here that'd kill a motherf.u.c.ker for a good TV, no lie. He just smiled, still seeming all nervous and scared, and said yeah, I think the lock is good, I'll check and make sure. And that was that. We left him standing there. Waiting for a TV.
I know that d.a.m.n TV came too, 'cause we started hearing it. Bang bang bang. Some explosions. Helicopters and airplanes flying around. Heard him whooping and hollering, saying yeah yeah yeah, gotcha you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, how you like me now, motherf.u.c.ker, how you like me now. Could hear him pacing, walking around. Got a little scared 'cause he was sounding like the crazy man who killed his family and I started wondering if that place really was cursed. Made my brother, who dropped out of school the year before me and was still around then, go listen at the door. My brother got all serious and listened real close and turned to me and said this is bad, Mariaangeles, real bad, we got a honkey playing video games across the hall from us, I better round up some of my boys and take care of this s.h.i.+t. I laughed, and knew I shoulda knowed better. But that's the way it is in this life, you love your own, and you don't trust people who ain't like you. If I'd a moved into a white neighborhood and one of my neighbors'd started hearing gunshots and hollering, there'd a been a f.u.c.king battalion of cops kicking my d.a.m.n door in. That's just the way it is.
My brother liked video games. He started spending all his time in that apartment with Ben. They got a basketball game and a driving game where the more people they ran over with their car the more points they got. They started watching Knicks games and drinking beer together and sometimes smoking weed. I told my brother to be careful 'cause white people could be tricky, and you could never know what they might want. I thought everything in my life that had gone wrong had been because of white people, and most of 'em looked Jewish. My daddy got sent to prison by some when I was little. My momma had to work cleaning their houses most her life. My teachers, who all pretended to care so much but was really just scared of us and treated us like animals, was white people. They're the cops, the judges, the landlords, the mayors, the people who run everything and own everything. And they aren't letting go of any of it or sharing any of it. The rich take care of the rich and make sure they stay rich, and they talking about helping the poor, but if they really did, there wouldn't be so many of us. And it was one thing having a white boy live across the hall and saying hi to him now and then or watching him get drunk or wear some silly uniform, but it's another having my brother spending all his time with him. I didn't think nothing good would come of it.
My brother didn't ever listen to me. Never did. Wish he had, he might still be with us. This time, though, he was right and I was wrong. Even before he knew, before he became what he became, before it was revealed, Ben was okay. Nothing more, nothing less, just okay. I first found out when my brother took me over there. He had got tired of me telling him all the time that the white boy was no good, so one day he says you either come with me and see he's cool or you shut the f.u.c.k up about me spending time over there. I ain't one to shut the f.u.c.k up, only a few times in my whole life, so I went with him. We made sure Momma was okay and we went across the hall and we knocked on the door and he answered in his boxer shorts and t-s.h.i.+rt with tomato sauce all over it and my brother started talking.
What's up, Ben.
Ben wiped some grease off his face and talked back at him.
What's up, Alberto.
This is my sister Mariaangeles and her daughter Mercedes.
Yeah, I met them once.
Ben looked at me.
How you doing?
I gave him a dirty look.
You gonna invite us in?
I guess.
He opened the door. Stepped aside. And we went in and I started looking around. Big TV in the living room. A grubby old couch with cigarette burns that looked like it was made out of old carpet.
Video game disks and controllers. Kitchen was nasty. Pizza boxes. Empty cans of soup and pasta with spoons and forks still in 'em. Garbage bags filled on the floor. I opened the fridge 'cause I was thinking of having a soda or something and all it had in it was some ketchup and that was it. Whole place smelled like old food and stale beer. Went to the bedroom and there was a mattress and a pillow. Some clothes on the floor. Closet had his uniform hanging up in it, and it was the only thing that looked cared for. Bathroom, the bathroom where that man was hanging, was worse than the kitchen. Stains in the toilet and sink. Tissues overflowing out of a little garbage can. No toilet paper to be seen and I doubt he had ever cleaned it once. Even by the standards we was used to seeing, his place was bad. And more than bad, or nasty, or disgusting, it was just sad. Real sad. Like he didn't know any better. Like he thought it was normal for a grown man to be living like that. Made me think he didn't have n.o.body in his life that cared about him. Like he was all alone. Alone in a place where he didn't belong because he didn't have nowhere else to go, and no one else to go to. They'd have done something if they was around. But they weren't. He was all alone. I went back into the living room. Bang bang bang. Him and Alberto shooting n.a.z.is, throwing grenades at 'em. Mercedes sitting on the floor chewing her blankie, watching people explode on the TV. Too much. There's enough ugliness in the world already without pretending to do more. Too much I said, and I smacked Alberto on the back of the head. He got all mad, said you knew what we was doing here, you didn't have to come. I said play another game, play some game where you don't gotta see blood squirting everywhere, and Ben said we'll play the NBA game and changed the disk. While he doing it I ask him where he from, and he says Brooklyn, and I ask if he got family there, and he says yes. I ask him do he see them, he says no. I ask him why and he says I just don't. I ask for how long and he says a long time. I ask him how old he is and he says thirty, I ask where he been living before this and he says he don't want to talk about it. Answers made me sad. I always thought white people had good lives. Even the worst of 'em had it better off than me and everybody I knew. Just what I believed. But this boy didn't have it better. Worse. Just him and his video games and his s.h.i.+tty apartment that no one else would live in. I had my girl and my family at least. He had it way worse.
Their game started back up and I didn't like being there 'cause it was sad and depressing so I got Mercedes and we left and went back to our place. And that was it. For a long time. Six or nine months or something. Alberto played video games with Ben. I'd see him around. In his uniform if it was day, drunk if it was night, sometimes in the hall in his underwear while he was waiting for a pizza. I turned eighteen. Went out with some of my girlfriends from around the project and some girlfriends from when I was in school. They was all around my age, almost all of 'em in a situation similar to mine: no diploma, a kid or two and a couple had three, boyfriend still around but not really there, no way to get out or move up. Just ways to make it through the day or the week or the month. One of the girls was wearing nice clothes and a nice watch and smelled good like expensive perfume and she started saying she was working as a dancer and making plenty of money. Said you had to be eighteen, but could make three, four hundred, maybe five hundred bucks a night dancing in clubs. We started saying she was hooking but she said no, she danced naked on a stage and gave men lap dances in a private room and they gave her cash. That it was easy. Men from Manhattan would come up, tell their wives they had meetings or was working late, or they'd come over after baseball games at Yankee Stadium. They was stupid and it was easy to make 'em think they was getting some a.s.s and the more you could make 'em think it the more they would pay you. She said it wasn't a churchgoing job, rubbing her a.s.s and t.i.ts all over white men, but none of us was churchgoing girls, and a good shower at the end of the night and she was fine with it, especially 'cause she was making so much money. She said maybe she was gonna leave the neighborhood. Find her a place where her kids would be able to go to a good school. Because even though almost all of us was dropouts, we knew the only way out for real was an education. Just none of us could do it.
Next day I called the girl. She took me to the club. I met the manager. Fat white man from Westchester. He made me strip down to my panties and bra and show him how I danced. Made me rub my a.s.s on his crotch and rub my t.i.tties down his chest and whisper s.h.i.+t his wife wouldn't say to him in his ear. His hands started wandering and I asked him what he was doing and he said he test drove all the girls before he let 'em out on the track. Made me sick. But we needed the money. Momma wasn't working and who the f.u.c.k knew what Alberto did. Made me sick. But I let him. I let him do anything and everything. Took me for a test drive. Made me f.u.c.king sick.
Started working a few days later. It wasn't hard but I had to close up part of my heart, part of my soul. I had been with three men before. One when I was twelve. Mercedes' father, who I was with from when I was fourteen until he left when I was seventeen. The manager. Except for that manager, I'd waited. Tried to make sure they loved me. I know I loved them. Would have done anything for them. Killed for them or died for them. Hit the cross for them. I thought they felt the same, loved the same. But love is different for every person. For some it's hate, for some it's joy, for some it's fear, for some it's jealousy, for some it's torture, for some it's peace. For some it's everything. For me. Everything. And to let a man touch me like that, or to touch a man like that, I had always had to love. So I shut it down. Closed it. Buried it somewhere. And I danced and touched and whispered and got them hard and took them as far as I could and took them for as much as I could. They didn't know but they took more from me. A shower at the end of the night wasn't enough. Not even close. Didn't clean nothing.
Three nights a week I worked, sometimes four. Started saving up. Got Mercedes some clothes that hadn't been worn before, some of her own shoes, brand new. Got my momma a sweater, and new magazines every week. Didn't put none of the money in a bank 'cause I know what happens with white people and their banks. I put it away. Where Alberto wouldn't never look. Where n.o.body would look. A couple months, a couple more. Making money but hurting. And changing. Keeping myself closed and hard all the time started taking it out of me. One of the girls gave me some s.h.i.+t to smoke and it helped. So I did more of it. And it helped. More than a shower or anything else. But when it wore away it started hurting more so I was taking more. Sleeping and working and getting high. Starting to do things I would have never done before because I didn't care, because I was hurting so much that more of the hurt wasn't nothing. And it brought more money. One night I was working and Ben came in and one of the girls smiled and said look who's here. And I asked her what about him and she said he was an easy mark. Would come in with his paycheck and get drunk and give the whole d.a.m.n thing away. I told her he was living in my building and that he was mine. She got in my face about it for a minute till I told her how far I'd go. I was dipping into my money too much and I needed more. Momma was getting sick and Mercedes was getting sick and I needed them to get to a doctor and I didn't have no insurance. And I needed more.
I went over to him. He was already drunk. He smiled and said hi and I said hey baby, nice seeing you here. And I didn't even ask him. Took his hand. Led him to the room where we did the dances. And I went at him, giving him what all them men wanted and whispering in his ear about what we could do back at home now that I knew what kind of boy he was. I told him I wanted to suck his c.o.c.k and I wanted him to f.u.c.k me, that I would ride his a.s.s all day and all night, that I was getting all wet thinking about it. And I kept ordering drinks and feeding him. Just kept it going. And he took it. And was wanting more. And after an hour he was gone. His mind was gone and his money was gone. And I felt bad 'cause I knew what he was and I knew he wasn't bad. Just sad. And alone. Man without anything or anyone, alone in that apartment where no one else would live, with his TV and his games and his pizza boxes and soup cans and his garbage and his sad mattress and his dirty bathroom. That's all he was. He pa.s.sed out. Right in the chair with my a.s.s between his legs. The bouncers came and took him out. He didn't have no ID or driver's license or credit card. Nothing with his name or address or nothing. I told them he was my neighbor and I knew where he was living. They was gonna throw him on the street, in the gutter. Leave him there. Let whatever was gonna happen, happen. He'd been there before, I know. And s.h.i.+t had happened to him, I know that for sure. I told them I could at least get him back to the building. I had just taken everything he had and I was figuring I could do that much. We got a cab and put him sleeping in the backseat. I sat next to him. He was snoring like a baby. And when we got to the projects the driver helped me get him out of the cab. And I got him into the building and into the elevator. Got him into the hallway front of his door. And I left him there. And I went back out and got high. Spent some of his money on what I needed. And when I came home later he was still there.
Next time I saw him was like two days later. He was coming home in his uniform and I was going to work. We didn't say nothing to each other. I don't even know if he remembered. Just looked sad and nervous like he always did. And the next time I saw him after that was a long time. And he wasn't the same no more. He had changed. Changed and become someone else. He had become something I couldn't even believe. And then I did. I believed. I believed.
CHARLES.
I felt sorry for him when I met him. He had come in to apply for a security position at my job site. We ran two guys at a time, on twelve-hour s.h.i.+fts. There were weekday guys and weekend guys. Pay was minimum wage. No benefits. It was a s.h.i.+tty job. You walked the perimeter of the site, stood around for hours at a time. We didn't have a security shack. You bring one in and the guards end up never leaving. They buy little TVS and drink coffee all day. Take naps. This was a sensitive site. We were putting up forty stories in a neighborhood where the tallest building was twelve. There had been community opposition. A couple protests, and a big pet.i.tion. I needed guys who were willing to work. To make sure that the site was secure. It's harder than you think finding them. Most people want something for nothing. They want everything to be easy. When a job is hard, they demand more money, more time off, they complain to their union reps and try to renegotiate terms. That's not the way it works. Life is hard, deal with it. Working sucks, deal with it. I'd love to sit home and collect a check every two weeks for watching baseball games and spending time with my kids. Doesn't happen that way. You gotta work for everything in this world. Scratch and claw and fight for every little thing. And it never gets easier. Never. And it doesn't end until you die. And then it doesn't matter. Learn to deal with that. It's the way of the world. You fight and struggle and work your a.s.s off and then you die. Deal with that.
He came in with a resume. It said his name was Ben Jones, that he was thirty years old. He was wearing a b.u.t.ton-down with the logo of a security guard school on it. My first impression of him was that he was very eager, very excited, and very nervous. His hand was shaking when I shook it. His lips were quivering. Aside from his basic biographical information, and an eight-week course at the security school which made him officially qualified for the job, the resume was empty. I asked him where he was from and he said Brooklyn. I asked him if he went to college, he said no. I asked him when he left home and he said at fourteen. I told him that seemed young and he shrugged and I asked what he'd been doing for the past sixteen years and he changed, just a little, but he changed, and something in his eyes came out that was really sad and really lonely and extremely painful. It was only there for a second, and normally I wouldn't notice anything like that, or pay attention to it, or give a s.h.i.+t, but it was very striking, and he looked down at his feet for a moment and then looked up and said I've had hard times and I'm ready to work and I promise I'll be the best worker you have, I promise. And that was it. He didn't offer anything else and I didn't push it. I just thought to myself sixteen f.u.c.king years, what the f.u.c.k has this guy been doing. And I still think about it, all the time, what the f.u.c.k was he doing. And I imagined, and still do, because of the flash of deep sadness and loneliness and pain that I saw, that whatever it was, and wherever it was, it had been truly truly awful.
So I gave him the job. He was very excited. Like a little kid at Christmas. A big smile, a huge smile. He said thank you about fifty times. And he kept shaking my hand. It was funny, and very endearing. It wasn't like he'd won the f.u.c.king lotto. He got a minimum wage job walking around a construction site for twelve f.u.c.king hours a day.
I put him on the five-days-a-week day s.h.i.+ft. Thought that would be best. That he'd be proud to have that position. And he was. It showed in how he did the job. He was always on time. His uniform was always clean. He never tried to extend his breaks or his lunch. He never complained. He seemed fascinated by the process of putting a building up: knocking in the pilings, setting the foundation, the construction of the skeleton frame. He'd ask different people questions about what they did, or why they did things a certain way. He'd listen very intently to their answers, like he was gonna be tested on it or something. He was generally the happiest guard I'd ever seen or had on a job, and he became sort of the site mascot. Everybody liked him and enjoyed having him around. He knew everyone's name and would greet everyone in the morning and say goodbye at the end of the day. There were only two things that ever seemed off, and I dismissed them both because he did such a good job and seemed so happy. First was right after he got his first paycheck. He came and switched the address in our files to an address in the Bronx. The previous one had been in Queens. I don't know why but I was curious, so I looked up the address in Queens. It was a state-run transitional home, a place where they send men coming out of either prison, rehab, a homeless shelter, or a mental inst.i.tution. I thought about looking into it more, but I had other things to worry about and Ben seemed fine. Second thing happened one day during lunch. I had a doctor's appointment and had to leave the site. On my way to the subway, I saw Ben sitting on a bench a few blocks away. He was crying. It was the middle of the day, and he had seemed like his normal self when I had seen him earlier. I did a double take because I couldn't believe it was him. But it was. He was sitting on a bench with his face in his hands and he was sobbing.
The day of the accident was a beautiful spring day. It was sunny, no clouds, slight breeze, in the mid-70s. A perfect New York day, not one I thought would f.u.c.king blow up. I had never had a major accident on one of my sites before, and it was a point of great pride for me. I believed there wasn't a building on earth that was worth sacrificing a life for, and I still believe it. Safety matters more than speed. Safety matters more than anything. It was one of the reasons I had been hired. Because the job was a sensitive issue in the community, and so many people were against it, the developer couldn't afford to have anything go wrong. Accidents are the best weapon community activists have against developers. While it would be nice to think developers care about safety, they don't. Like almost everyone else in America, developers are f.u.c.king greedy. They care about money, and activists with weapons cost them money. My job was to stay on budget, stay on schedule, and keep that site safe.
The skeleton was done. Forty stories of steel frame rising. We were putting in the windows, which were ten foot by ten foot mirrored panels. We had finished the first thirty-three stories without any problems, and we were installing on thirty-four. We'd lift seven panels at a time. Bundle them, secure them, rig them to a wire, bring them up with a crane. I'd done it literally thousands of times at job sites, and I had never had any problems.
I don't know what the f.u.c.k went wrong. Still don't. We had investigators from the city, the state, and the insurance company all look at the rig, and n.o.body could figure it out. To this day, the cause in all of the paperwork is listed as unknown. I could call them and tell them that it didn't matter what we did that day, that no rig would have held that gla.s.s, that there were other forces at work far beyond any that the city, state, or insurance company could muster, but they'd think I was crazy. And sometimes I'm not sure that I'm not. But that's part of faith. Believing and knowing despite what other people say, and despite what the world might think of your beliefs.
I was on the ground. Standing near our trailer, which was on the edge of the sidewalk. I was holding a clipboard, going over some budget numbers with one of our construction accountants. They blow an air horn right before any large load goes up, and the air horn went off. I looked up and the panels were slowly rising. We stop traffic when we lift panels, and there were no cars coming down the street. Most of the workers were standing around talking, which is what they did when work was halted. Ben was standing at the edge of the site, looking towards the stopped traffic, ready to stop anyone who might try to get around our traffic controller. Normally I would have gone back to the clipboard. But I felt something, something inevitable. If you can somehow feel fate, or destiny, or the power of the future, I felt it, very literally. And it made me watch. It forced me to do something that I normally wouldn't do. I couldn't turn away. I couldn't not watch those panels.
The panels continued to go up, and they drifted a few feet, just like they always did, like anything that heavy being lifted that high would drift. The crane was working perfectly. The rig was set perfectly. The panels were in wooden crates sealed with iron nails. At that point we'd lifted and installed hundreds of them. It was no big deal. Just part of our routine. n.o.body was watching, and I'm the only one who saw. I saw the nails slip out of the crate. I saw the back of the crate fall. I saw the angle of the crates change. I saw them drift. I saw the panel fall out. A ten foot by ten foot gla.s.s panel. Probably weighed a thousand pounds. I saw it fall.
It hit him on the back of the head and shattered. There was a huge noise, an explosion of gla.s.s. He got flattened. A total collapse. Everything stopped, everybody turned. There was a moment, a long hideous moment of silence, of never-ending f.u.c.king silence. Then the screaming started. I dropped the clipboard and started running towards him. Pulled my phone out of my pocket and called 911. There was no way he was alive. I told the operator a man had just died on my construction site and gave her the address. I could see the blood before I got there. It was everywhere. And there was gla.s.s everywhere. All I could hear was screaming. People were getting out of their cars, running, calling 911. And above me, for a brief instant, I saw the rest of the panels being pulled onto the thirty-fourth floor. There was no way that one should have fallen.