The first time my mother ran away from home, she was eleven.  At some point early in the morning, while her parents and a few other men from the neighborhood drank in the kitchen, she went through her mother’s purse and then let herself out the front door of the apartment.  She took thirty dollars, a pack of Pall Malls, and a tube of lipstick.  She stuck to the alleys until she got to the Marcy Avenue subway station, and in the stairwell up to the platform she put on the lipstick and smoked a cigarette.  Then she jumped the fence onto the platform and hid under a bench until the train came.



They didn’t know she was gone until they sobered up and couldn’t find the cigarettes.  Her father went door to door in their building, bumming cigarettes and asking about a little girl, and eventually he took a break to drink.  Her mother telephoned her two brothers, hard-working men who had always been good to their niece, and they drove up and down the avenues of Bushwick and Brownsville asking after her on street corners and in subway stations.



 



Later that night one of her uncles found her smoking a cigarette on the platform of the Flushing Avenue station.  She still had all thirty dollars.  He drove her home, and by the time they got up to the apartment, her father was drunk and her mother had long since stopped crying.  The uncle left, reluctantly, and my mother’s father scrubbed the lipstick off her face with a bottle of whisky and the sleeve of his shirt before giving her a few hard slaps across the face.  He broke her nose, and it stayed crooked after that.



 



The second time she ran away from home, she left a kitchen knife stuck between her father’s ribs.  She ended up in Union City, New Jersey; God knows how.  She had a lot more to bargain with that time.  She had the nose, for one thing: men will hedge their bets on something like that.  You know she’s seen worse.  She made it to Union City and no one heard from her for two years.



 



When she finally called her mother, she was pregnant, six months, and broke.  She hadn’t had much bargaining power since she started to show.  Her mother met her at the North Bergen Park and Ride and offered her three hundred dollars to come home.  My mother refused, on the grounds that her father wasn’t dead yet.



They sat on a bench at the Park and Ride for three hours and her mother prepared her as best she could.  Dilation and contractions.  Water breaking.  Cash for a cab.  What prayers to say.  If she doesn’t make it to a hospital, stop the car in a parking lot, or bring the sofa cushions into the bedroom.  Take three or four Demerol if you can find them, but nothing else.  Don’t drink.  Watch the cord around its neck.  Breathe.



 



I was born on a towel in the apartment of a hairdresser.  The hairdresser was named Amara, and she and my mother had met through a pimp and become close over a shared, uncompromising, and often violent hatred of men.  That morning Amara had left for work under the condition that my mother would promise to call her immediately if and when her water broke, and she did promise, although her water had in fact broken and been cleaned up in the bathroom earlier that morning.  My mother went into labor shortly after Amara left, on a towel at the foot of the bed, and when the contractions got bad, she put on a tape of *Diff’rent Strokes* at full volume to hide her screams.



 



When Amara came home that afternoon she found me on the floor, crying.  In hysterics, she called her aunt, who drove in with her husband from Jersey City.  They brought me and my mother, who had died from hemorrhaging shortly after delivery, to Christ Hospital, where I was washed and fed.



 



My grandfather, the one with the scar along his ribs, put his stock in the Bible.  We’d start with Mark, then Matthew, always in one sitting; then John and Luke, in another sitting.  Then, for three days, we’d read Acts through Revelations, in order, but he always saved Galatians for last.  He was interested in the works of the flesh.  After Galatians, we moved into the Old Testament.  We would read Deuteronomy twice.  It took us a month to read the whole thing.  The year I learned to talk we read it eight times.  After my grandmother died we read it through ten times.



 



Every morning before school kids played a game called suicide.  We played with a tennis ball against a brick wall at the back of the parking lot.  The goal was not to fumble the ball.  If it bounced off the wall and you messed up catching it, you had to sprint to the wall.  If someone threw the ball against the wall before you got there, you got a strike.  If you got three strikes before the bell rang, you had to march up to the wall and stand there with your hands against it, while everyone else got a chance to whip the ball at you.  One morning a kid named Sammy got hit so hard in the back of the head that he fell forward and cracked his forehead against the wall.  Another time a kid tripped while he was sprinting to the wall and broke his wrist so bad it looked like a Tetris piece.  If you took your punishment, you were alright.  But if you didn’t, or if you cried, or if you flinched too much, you’d catch a beating.  Probably lose your money or your headphones.



The kids who did the beating and the taking, we called them puffies.  They sat on steps or car bumpers and wore big headphones and big, puffy jackets.  Most of them didn’t go to school anymore.  Some of them had weed in their jackets, or handfuls of money.  One guy, Ray, would wave around a knife.  But they didn’t mess with us too hard before school.  When we were in class, older kids—they would have been in high school—divvied up eighths and dime-bags of weed and sometimes a few Percocets or little crack rocks among the puffies.  When school let out, most of us went straight home, but every once in a while a puffy would get the attention of a kid hanging around the parking lot, or fall into stride with a guy walking out toward the bus stop, and those kids usually only had a week or two of school left in them.



 



By the time I was in middle school my grandfather had started to go.  He was done drinking, but he didn’t breathe so well anymore, and couldn’t stay on his feet for very long.  When I was eleven he got disability and stopped going to work.  He still read the Bible, and he watched a lot of TV, but he couldn’t use the remote very well and he usually forgot to turn it off.  He didn’t go shopping anymore, and he didn’t really make any food, either.  He ate rice and chicken breast and a lot of cereal, and coffee ice cream.  I bought plastic silverware and paper plates and bowls after most of our other stuff broke or got so crusty I couldn’t clean it.  One day the fridge started leaking.  I opened it and everything was warm and rotten.  I took five dollars from his dresser and paid a guy on our floor to help me carry it down to the street.  One afternoon I found a paint can full of piss under his bed.  After that, I took his wallet and went to a bodega where I knew the guy, and started cashing the checks that came in the mail.



 



I was in seventh grade when I finally got hit up.  A tall kid in a white puffy stepped out in front of me as I turned out of the gymnasium door after school.  I walked straight into his jacket.  He pushed me back, hard, and fronted like he was going to hit me.  I squared up and tucked my chin and put my fists up, but he was already smiling at me.



“Ey, cuz,” he said.



I knew this kid, Yujhan, in elementary school.  He used to sit in front of me and mess around, draw on his desk and things like that, pass notes to girls as they walked past.  One time, I remember, he turned around and winked at me, before raising his hand.  Our teacher called on him, and when he stood up, he had one hand down his pants, and his little finger sticking out of his fly.  I remember, he says, “Miss James, can you turn up the heat?  I’m freezing.”  After that he got sent to the office and a couple of weeks later he stopped coming to class.



He was a tall kid now, a puffy.  He put his arm around my shoulders when he introduced me to some older kids, and I remember the sound of air squeezing out of the sleeve of his jacket.



 



They paid me five dollars a day to shake down my classroom.



 “You ever smokin weed?”



“You ever smokin crack?”



“You ever skip school?”



“You got a brother, huh?  What he do?”



“Your parents be fightin?”



“Your daddy fuck with you?”



“You got a daddy?”



“You got some money?”



“You wanna make some money?”







Most of us that were still in school didn’t do that stuff, but we had family problems.  The only thing worse than being at school was being at home.  Outside of either of those, you needed protection, respect.  Sometimes I gave a kid a dollar just to show I had my shit right.  I made a profit.  I still sat in class, but now I passed girls notes with fifty-cent chocolates in them.  I drew on my desk.  Kids knew my name.



 



Kids still played suicide, too.  We gave them the tennis balls.  We paid attention.  If he was tough, if he took his punishment, if he had good hands, if he was big, we’d stop him after school.  Shake him down, feel him out.  Smoke with him.  Get him a girl.  That was the game: comb through the parking lot, through the classroom, for ambition, unrest, anger, and when you find it, add fuel.



 



You can buy an ounce of Marcy project weed for $180.  A quarter pound runs $600.  It breaks down into $35 eighths.  To buy an eighth, you just have to know where to stand.  To buy an ounce, though, you have to know people.  If you know people, in an eight-hour school day, you can make $150 selling eighths and dime-bags.  On a Friday night you can tack on another $100 hanging outside the community center, and if you have pills or E or crack you can make another $50.  Do that for a month, skipping a day or two of school a week, and you can buy in quarter pounds.  Start lifting weights, get a puffy, a nice walkman, a fitted hat, don’t talk much.  Get high.  Buy a chain.  Learn the rules: names, numbers, prices.  Where to stand.  What to wear.  Who to listen to: Nas, Big, Jay, Mobb, Pun, Meth.  Get out of your apartment, leave the screaming and the drinking and the beating, the babies, the poverty.  Earn something.



 



They got me when I was sixteen.  Behind the school with half an ounce bagged up and a wad of cash.  They charged me with possession with intent to distribute.



The guy in the holding cell across from me had a fat bandage down the side of his face.  Every few minutes, he would stand up against the bars, and yell down the hall at his girl, who was in another cell.  She didn’t stop screaming at him the whole time, and it was easy to put together.  He beat her up pretty bad, and they both just came from the hospital.  After he hit her around, she’d called up her cousin, and he and some guys stomped the boyfriend out.  At some point, she took a car key to his face—that’s what the bandage was from.  I couldn’t see her.  No one tried to shut them up, but a few other guys in holding cells started cracking jokes.  How he can’t run his bitch, how he got keyed up, how he got a little bitch voice.  After an hour or so, he started apologizing—he didn’t mean to fuck up her face, she’s his girl, she’s his baby, she’s the mother of his son.



They brought us juice and sandwiches in wax paper.  The guy with the bandage got up against the bars and told me to give him my sandwich.  I didn’t look at him, just stared at the wall.  He tried spitting blood into my cell.  They came down and yelled at him for that.  Someone told me to come to the bars so they could see me.  Another guy told me not to give him the sandwich.



They took the girl out around midnight.  Her stitches had come loose.  The guy with the bandage started crying, and someone called him a faggot.  I got arraigned in the morning and sentenced to six months at juvey and a year of probation.



 



When I got out things looked different.  I didn’t enroll in high school.  The only kids I knew were drug dealers, puffies.  A couple of them were in juvey.  Yujhan was in jail.  They told me he stabbed a kid in a fight.  I went back to my spot in the parking lot.



Drugs had changed, too.  Weed was more expensive.  The kids I used to sell to, older kids, wanted crack and meth.  And the cops were out.  Dealers had beepers and safes.  You sold alone and didn’t trust anyone.  I bought my first bag of junk from a skeleton of a white boy at a playground in Bushwick.



Squid—that’s the skeleton—he fixed me up the first time.  It happened quick.  He cooked it with a Bic, it in a spoon with a band-aid around the handle, and soaked it up with a piece of cotton ball.  I closed my eyes while he tied my arm.  When I looked again, he had the spike in me, and I could see my blood mushrooming up into the brown.  A second later, he gave me half, and then finished me off.



At first I thought I pissed myself, from the warmth.  Like my blood just came out of the dryer.  Everything went purple.  Hot gold flooded through me.  I was beautiful and separate and numb with pleasure.  I listened to the bottom of the ocean and smelled flowers, I sank through clouds, I touched my face and laughed.  My skin felt like soft glass.  My hands were as heavy as dumbbells, but they floated like they were tied to balloons.  Behind my eyes I watched a black canvas swirl and splotch and melt.  And inch by inch, heartbeat by heartbeat, everything disappeared, until there was nothing left, sweet nothing, and the warmth.  Nothing, that’s a junk lullaby.



 



A couple years down the road my luck ran out.  I was riding on a six bag a day habit when I got jumped in Prospect Park on my way back from Squid’s.  Two old white guys fucked me up good, broke my nose and took everything, my junk, my jacket, my shoes, even my fucking cotton ball.  After they left I puked all over the sidewalk.



I got the sickness bad.  For two days I stayed well on shots I begged off the skeletons I was living with.  Then they cut me off.  I couldn’t sleep.  My bones scraped and my skin itched like wool.  I made it two days.  Then I attacked them.  They were high, on the couch, and I beat them for as long as I could stand it, dry-heaving and crying, with a golf club we kept around for protection.  I shot up their last two bags in the bathroom before I left.



I came down that night outside a Duane Reade.  I had nothing, no junk, no money, no jacket, and I was getting sick.  My shirt was soaked with freezing sweat. My bones were bruised.  My stomach was tied up with twine.  My legs and feet were crawling with ants.  I puked on the sidewalk and a cashier came outside and told me to leave or she’d call the cops.



 



I had nowhere to sleep.  My grandfather was two years dead.  I’d been living on the couches and floors of other junkies since he died and selling weed and pawning furniture to cover the junk.  I didn’t have a phone or a driver’s license.  I left Duane Reade and walked to Prospect Park.



It was dark and Squid wasn’t at his bench.  He’d probably been back on his couch for hours, dead to the world.  Instead there were gangbangers standing in groups and smoking cigarettes.  I stayed out of the light.



I got sick again in a trash can at the west end of the park.  I walked down Prospect Park West looking for an alley, or a dumpster, or an open cardboard box; anything to sleep in.  I saw an old Chinese guy rifling through a dumpster off 16th, and I started to walk toward him, but he shuffled away, dragging something.  I climbed on top of the dumpster and pulled myself onto the roof of a building, some kind of restaurant.  The roof was gravel.  I was still sweating, and shivering, and when I tried to stand my legs cramped up.  I crawled from vent to vent until I found one with hot air.  On that bed of nails I curled up against the pain.



 



I was getting a fix about three times a week.  It wasn’t enough to get high, but it was enough to stay well.  The rest of the week, I’d drink enough to sleep, and recycle bottles.  If the opportunity arose, I’d rob a sleeping drunk or an unlocked car.



 



The new kids will break your heart.  They come from drunk dads or bus stations with backpacks and sleeping bags.  They get soaked by sprinklers in the park.  They stay up late, trying to beat the night, drinking and bumming cigarettes, and get their backpacks taken in the morning when the rest of us are up.  The girls get used up for crack and meth.



One night a new kid, fresh out of a project hallway, took another guy’s doorway.  Didn’t know any better, but the guy whose doorway he took was a junky, a sicko, a Vietnam vet who used to turn tricks with fake papers for the fags on Bergen Street.  He found the kid sleeping on his cardboard.  Started kicking him, spitting on him, screaming like an animal, talking about stabbing him, killing him.  I was still awake at the time, looking for a spot.  The kid couldn’t get up, just kept getting kicked.



I took two beer bottles from my recycling bag.  I got up behind the guy and smashed the first bottle against the back of his head.  He crumpled into the doorway, on top of the kid.  I dragged him off and broke the second bottle over the side of his face.  There was blood all over the cardboard and I told the kid to leave it unless he wanted to get sick.  I got my stuff and we left the neighborhood.



There’s things you learn out here.  Where to sleep, how to eat, where to shit, where to wash up, how to stay out of trouble.  If you’re lucky, someone will teach you.  Two layers of cardboard over cement can keep you warm enough to sleep.  Parks have sprinklers.  Brush your teeth.  Avoid drainage pipes, sewers, park benches, and alleys.  Don’t take someone else’s spot.  Leave a few hours before nightfall to scout one out for yourself.  Get to bed early.  The kid’s name was Rene.



 



I don’t know what you’d call it, but me and the kid stuck together.  And sometimes, every once in a while, as the sun came up, early in the morning, on Linden Boulevard or at the edge of Prospect Park; after I took my shot and eased the sickness, and looked around at the black bodies and the sun-burnt faces, drinking from water bottles and taking cover from the heat; as we shuffled, dirty armies in loose formation, looking for that stretch of sidewalk or patch of grass, a little space on earth, one found pockets of comfort; in the slow heat, there passed moments of calm.



 



Rene didn’t have junk before he came to the streets, but it didn’t take him long to find it.  He and I stuck together, but I didn’t start him on it—I barely had enough to stay well myself.  He was a skinny little kid, Haitian I think, but he was tough, and smart.  Sometimes we scouted together at night; with two of us, we were safer, and it opened up a lot more places to sleep.  He’d be gone when I woke up.  He turned tricks, I think.  He’d get beat up sometimes, but he made enough to pick up a daily junk habit.  I don’t know where he got his shots, but he never brought it back to me.  Bless his heart for that.



One night, though, he got it bad.  He’d turned down a guy who came around a lot, a big biker, a fag, who was positive.  The kid told him he only did clean.  That got him in trouble.  Don’t know who got involved, but they worked him over pretty good.  When they were done, they’d broken his arm, broken a few ribs, messed up his face.  I found him up on the roof of a bakery where we sometimes slept.  I don’t know how he got up there, with his arm.  It hung loose at his side, with the elbow propped lamely against his ribs.  He had his kit laid out in the gravel, and a ball of tar about the size of a marble on his spoon.  Must have been more than a gram.  More than he could handle.  He didn’t say anything to me; I think his jaw was broken, but he looked down at his kit, and then his arm, and then back at me.  He wanted me to prep him.



I got out my knife to cut off a piece of the tar, but Rene shook his head, so I cooked him up the whole ball.  He had a clean spike, a big 1cc allergy needle.  There hadn’t been a needle exchange that night, so he must have bought it from a drug store.  That stuck with me.  I found a vein in his good arm.  He closed his eyes while I gave him the shot; first half, then the whole thing.



 



After that, it got dark again.  We all took it pretty bad.  This life has its share of indignities, and they pile up on a body over the years.  But there’s things that people can’t accept.  I knew a guy who slept under an overpass who still paid for a proper haircut every month.  There’s a family I squatted with that would set a picnic table, week in and week out, with the fork on the left and the knife on the right, and say grace before eating, even though they got most of their food from a Key Food dumpster.  There’s respect for that kind of thing out here, decency, consistency.  Sometimes all it takes to stay sane is a toothbrush or a pair of sunglasses.  The kid was no better than the rest of us, but he kept himself clean.  He had papers.  That made him something.  He still would have gotten by, with a few more tricks a day, but it’s the deals we cut with ourselves that matter in the end.  By the grace of a clean needle, he had his lullaby.



 



For some of us it’s junk.  More and more, it’s crack, or meth.  We all need coffee and cigarettes.  Some need a fifth a day to kill the shakes.  And we’re sick.  HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis, Tuberculosis.  Lice.  Then there’s the crazies: the schizos, the scribblers, the screamers, the moaners.  We’ve got scars, burns, track marks, and rat bites.  We carry knives, cigarette butts, napkins, needles, and, if we’re lucky, HIV-negative papers.  If not, you can buy them for forty dollars in Crown Heights.  We have no burials for the dead.



 



So many have fallen here.  We stumble all night over the bones of the dead, feeling nothing, tending fires.  We lead one another, blind before blind.



 



This is what I have seen.  It peers out of stairwells, with dirty hair and dead eyes, and clings to blankets; it is cruelty with a human heart, and jealousy with a human face.  I am not a wise man but I understand that ours is the God of the flood and the famine, of secrecy and terror, of eyes and teeth.  His city is a forge, sealed with wool and cardboard, and from it we rise, and march, and fall, singing of weakness and of woe, and we return to the gorge no less hungry than when we emerged.  On playgrounds and in project hallways, under street lamps and between holding cells, in footsteps and heartbeats and the chattering of teeth, throughout these streets, echo our songs.

 We go clockwise around the circle of folding chairs. Most of us are shy. We say our names and, per our leader’s prompt, something we like about Quakers. A shiny-headed man with a gold-tipped cane is one of the last to speak.** **



He sits close to me in the circle, wearing a dark blue suit and loafers and clutching two books to his lap. One is a Bible. He does not wear a wedding ring. He shifts positions constantly, putting varied amounts of weight on the cane as he tries to sit up straighter. He struggles to get his sentences out, lips moving frantically around sounds he cannot make. His dark eyes bug with the strain. When the words emerge they are painstakingly placed, each one a piece of fragile glassware set on a high shelf.  



“I….am….in love….with….God.” 



The sentence takes a good fifteen seconds to emerge. By the time it does, the Quakers and I are transfixed; we’re staring at him, and everyone is smiling. Mehmet Rona’s face splits into a grin. Exhausted and pleased, he snuggles back into his chair. Silence. 



I think: My God, this man is a prophet. 



Mehmet Rona has presence. In another life he might have been a politician or a door-to-door salesman; people are drawn to him like moths to light. At our break for tea, he moves around the circle to take hands, kissing fingers. He offers a ride to a woman when he learns she doesn’t have one. I tell the group I’m interested in conducting interviews with Cambridge Quakers, and am met with suspicious looks. Mehmet speaks up. “I’m…..in,” he proclaims, shakily raising a fist to the air. Everyone laughs. I flush to my scalp and beam at my bald knight in shining armor. 



Mehmet the prophet speaks boldly. This particular session of New Lights (an evening teaching group affiliated with the local Friends Meeting) is predominated by ‘non-deists.’ Mehmet, quite obviously, finds their opinions blasphemous. He squints his licorice eyes in frustration when someone conflates God with natural beauty, or identifies Him as the creative impulse they feel before penning poetry. Mehmet adores the Friends Meeting. He exalts its prison fellowship and commitment to the poor. As a vegetarian pacifist, he’s at home here. Nevertheless, his God is bigger than a landscape or a good idea. I know he wishes he could speak more. When he does, everybody listens.  



“The Quakers are hungry for Christ,” Mehmet tells me later, in private. “And they deny it.”



 



***



 



The Society of Friends first coalesced in 17th-century England around a group of Puritan dissenters: the most famous of these, George Fox. Shepherd and shoemaker turned theologian and preacher, drawings of Fox portray a hook-nosed gentleman dressed like the beloved oatmeal mascot. (Contrary to popular belief, Quaker Oats claims their beaming front man is neither Fox nor his contemporary, William Penn; he’s a fictional Friend named Larry.)  



Depressed and dissatisfied by clerical advice and the political pandering of the English Civil War, Fox eventually accessed what he identified as true authority. In solitary prayer, he heard a voice: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” No bishop’s robe or hefty tithe could improve or subsume Fox’s own intimate access to God. There was undiluted wisdom straight from the fount, and it was there for everyone. Fox and his followers envisioned their sect as “primitive Christianity revived.”  



But at the Cambridge Meeting, most of the Quakers are not Christians. 



Quaker worship means sitting in silence for exactly one hour. In Cambridge, that entails filling a bare, tallow-colored room with a predominantly white congregation, shoed in Birkenstocks and draped in scarves, mostly elderly. Some gaze at trees out the window. Some stare at their hands. All mediate, or talk to a higher power(s). Many are Buddhists. Some are atheists. Some are Jewish, some are lapsed Catholics. No text is read. No songs are sung. “Quaker” in Cambridge is a far cry from Fox’s unfettered but rigorous Protestantism.  



The hour of worship isn’t always *entirely* silent. An individual can speak if he or she is ‘quaking’—overcome with the impulse to ‘give a message’ to the Meeting. Anyone can do this. As one member tells me, the Quakers are not so much a society of laypeople as they are a society of clergymen—each ministering to their own conception of God. 



At the close of the hour, before homemade breads and tea, there are announcements: for climate change walks and camp-outs at nuclear power plants, for Israel-Palestine video screenings and singing in the streets. At Meeting, earthly actions collapse into religious worth. They are the sum of faith. The Quakers do good, even though at times they feel more like a left-wing service club than a unified religious community. 



In the midst of it all, there is Mehmet, a bald sore thumb, proclaiming the Gospel whenever he can get words out. Why does he stay—why doesn’t he find a Baptist congregation to join, or a Catholic priest to hear his sins? It’s because in theory, what the Quakers have going on appeals to him—this unmediated means of communing with God. 



 



***



 



Talking is hard labor for Mehmet. I watch flashes of delayed electricity working in the muscles of his forehead, popping his veins in frustrated embarrassment. Tongue, teeth, and lips collide and tangle. I silently cheer when they manage to cooperate, spitting out a word or fragment. Mehmet has primary progressive apraxia of speech. Often, the condition is caused by a left-hemisphere stroke—I’m not sure if this is what happened to him. 



The eating itself is calming to Mehmet; the waitress knows him by name and meatless order. Mehmet comes to the Plough and Stars almost every day for lunch. It’s close to his apartment, accessible even with heavy dependence on a cane. We’ve got our hats and coats in a bundle together on the chair, and Mehmet is leaning forward to speak. Without his disease, he would be a lecturing professor, holding all the cards of wisdom and prestige. He dresses like an academic, clad in a dark suit jacket and sweater. But the power dynamics are wonky. I am the one that can articulate quickly, pulling words from recesses with ease. 



It is poignant that the man who for decades practiced silence as spiritual discipline is now confined to it. He takes it lightly—“God wants me to shut up,” he chuckles—but still, it’s sad. Mehmet made his living as a renowned physicist; now, equations and proofs pool in the contours of his brain. Mehmet is funny; when he makes me laugh, his face goes radiant. 



Mehmet loves words, and actively seeks God in collections of them. “The…Bible is prose….written…in poetry,” he opines. In 1989, hospitalized after a motorcycle accident, he read both Homeric epics, plowed through the King James Bible in its entirety, and taught himself Ancient Greek.  



 



***



 



I’ve been attending Quaker Meetings for months. They aren’t easy. The noisiness of my own body is an impediment—the grumbles and pops of a stomach, the creaks of a tense jaw, the scratch of denim as I cross and re-cross my legs. I am so noisy. 



In Morning Meeting, attendance 150 on average, ‘settling’ takes about fifteen minutes. That’s how long children are required to stew before being released to Day School. Tiny cries produce parental shushes. Little boots bump the benches. I like having the kids around. They give me cover to get comfortable.  



It’s 10:35, and the room has filled. Nestled in my pew, I dispose of the ideas that come to mind most readily. Those ones are never about God. I fret over academic assignments I need to complete, wishing I had a pen and pad to make lists. God keeps the lilies and the sparrows, but what about me, bearing the petty burdens of grocery bills and cover letters and homesickness? I don’t know what it will be like to not have a bedroom at home next year. I don’t know how I will get up in the morning without hearing my roommates bustling around, turning on the shower water. But these worries lack gravitas; they aren’t noble. Can You speak to my condition, Lord? Even if You could, why would you want to?



This isn’t what I went to spend my hour on. 



 I picture a broom, knocking down cobwebs from the eaves of my brain—a pair of hands taking out the trash. I know the dust will be stirred up when the Meeting is over. For now, I move it into the corners. 



Next, I must try not to fall asleep. Once, in Morning Meeting, I gave up. I slumped against the tallow-colored wall, closed my eyes, and shamelessly dozed. Every morning is a battle with leaden eyelids. I worry a little about how my mouth might hang open, how my breathing might grow labored. Perhaps I even snore a little. 



I hear the spoken messages: a confession, a snippet of policy talk. I join the singing when it arrives (the same guy sings “Give Peace a Chance” almost every week.)



Finally, I approach something like prayer. It is shocking how tiresome conversation with God is these days. I must knead myself into it. 



The Quaker meetings put the impetus on me. If I want to have an experience of worship, I must focus. There is no guidance from a speaker, no set of songs or parcel of text, just the cloudy space of my own thoughts. For some, like Mehmet, this is where the God of Israel lives—speaking into grey slimy tissues, washing them clean.  



 



***



 



Turkey, the 1950s.Six-year-old Mehmet lived with his parents (culturally Muslim atheists) and his older, adopted brother (Armenian by birth, converted to Islam while living in Turkey).  



The Armenian brother, disgusted with his father’s cankerous doubt, demanded that a lamb be sacrificed. His sin brought shame on the household; atonement was necessary. A lamb was ordered. 



“I….played…with…the…lamb,” muses Mehmet. The sentence comes out surprisingly fluid, not much space between the words. I envision small, brown Mehmet in dust or grass, running wool through his fingers and kissing a pink nose. They’re running together, two young created things. I can see this in Mehmet’s eyes: unadulterated joy, decades old, all the fresher for being stored so long. 



The next day, a man with a mustache arrived at the house and took the lamb from Mehmet. I imagine it came away from his scrawny arms with a bleat, a panicked scuffle of hooves that struck his collarbone.



“I…made…eye…contact….with…the lamb…at the moment…of slaughter,” stutters Mehmet. By this point I’m glued to him, elbows forward on the table, water glass and pen alike forgotten. Recollected blood runs in Mehmet’s irises: life leaking crimson for the sake of his father, whom he loved. But was it really necessary to kill the innocent? 



“It…was…that…moment…I…found…my…religion,” whispers Mehmet. The blood in his eyes turns to tears. I flush. Mehmet pauses. He rasps a little around his breath. His tears collect, almost to the point of spill. 



“You…write…” says the old man, “…I…collect…myself.”  



Mehmet has lived a life of visions. In 1973, he was living in Ankara with his wife Josephine, teaching physics at a university. One night, he sat straight up in bed, waking his bride. She noticed fuzzy light, a halo maybe, tangled in his hair. 



Mehmet dreamt he was strolling into his living room. In the dream, he peered at a print of *Mona Lisa* hanging on the wall. *La Joconde*, Mehmet insists, became the Virgin Mary. Hand outstretched, she tugged Mehmet into the canvas. Suddenly, he was in Biblical times, the illustrations in my purple book blown to size. Mehmet doesn’t provide details of what he saw after that. It’s enough to know that he saw something. 



Mehmet’s official conversion was anticlimactic. In 1981, during the baptism of his godson, a priest asked the Turkish professor if he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Mehmet, of course, said yes—he had for decades, even if this ceremony was his first time articulating the choice. “That’s so beautiful, so subtle,” I murmur. “After all that time.” Mehmet approves: “I’m…glad…you…see…the…beauty…in it.” 



And how did Mehmet become a Quaker? The whole thing is a big joke. He made friends with a man named Michael Shannahan, an Irish guy with seven children. After a few months of shared meals, Mehmet asked Michael to introduce him to his parish priest. Stereotypes were foiled; Michael was a Quaker. From then on, Mehmet was a Meeting-goer. 



Mehmet has lived a life of tragedies. Michael Shannahan went through a horrible divorce with a wife “addicted to being pregnant,” and drank a lot. For months, Mehmet spent all his free time sitting with his friend. Mehmet’s motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the waist down for a year and a half. His own marriage with Josephine crumbled. This mysterious illness rendered him mute in all settings except the most controlled and intentional. And yet he is all praise, all love. 



Mehmet has arrested me. He grasps my hand when proving a point. He makes me order dessert, and won’t let me pay for my meal. Eying my notebook, he tells me he has a “similar fetish” for luscious journals and smooth pens. He praises my home city. He tells his waitress friend what to do with his untouched half of pizza. “Oh, Gary?” she says. “Of course.” It’s Mehmet’s ritual to apportion his meals to the needy. For all his etherealness, Mehmet is a man of the people, offering rides and food and compliments with abandon. “My…whole…life,” he tells me, “people…have said…I have a…transparency…for God. I…leak…my faith.” 



It’s true: Mehmet has a rare life of allegories, a symbolic pattern you can’t ignore. The Lamb of God, the faith of a small boy. The silver tip of a knife pulverizing innocence, all the sadness of the world spilled from sheep veins.  



Mehmet himself is a symbol for holy silence. In the still of Meeting, he comes to know a Lord he has always encountered through noticing and listening and the love of others—not through traditional avenues. “My…relationship…with Christ…is very intense,” he says. Natural. Felt. “Meetings…help me…to organize that.” His relationship with people is intense too. “You…have to love…other…human beings,” he insists—a simple sentence made overwhelming by palsied hands and desperate eyes. He wants me to understand—there are so many ways to know this God. One’s own mind can be a cathedral; one’s own life can be the liturgy. 



 



***



 



When I was a child, God and I met in silence. Like many American families, mine didn’t attend church. Yet even without a pastor’s spoken word for it, I always knew God existed. I liked Him. Whenever our cat got lost in the fields behind our house, I wrote God suppliant letters in fat felt marker. I plunked His spirituals in my piano lessons, singing along as I practiced. 



I never learned about God. I had no sermons to listen to, no Sunday school lessons to complete, no verses to memorize for candies. I hadn’t heard any of the gossip: that some people didn’t believe in Him, or denounced His definition of justice, or found his Son’s claims—the one Way, Truth, Life, etc.—restrictive. My relationship with the Creator was all intuition and innocence. After bedtime, door closed, I thought over spelling tests and worried about friends at school. I felt listened to. God was my friend. 



When my father sang to me in the bathtub, or directed magic shows with me, or helped me with math homework, God was there. When my mother gave up her teaching job to raise me, shuttling me to the library and the zoo and the dentist, God was there. My parents indefatigably modeled sacrifice and adoration, and we never stepped foot in a sanctuary. 



As a little girl, I remember feeling guilty about not going to church. I wanted my family of four busy on Sunday mornings. I wanted us to acquire teachings and talk about them together, or pray before dinner like my friends’ families. I wanted us to follow the rules. Now as an adult, I choose a church with a sermon and songs and communion and structure—because there’s something good about that too: having spoken norms and covenant community and a pastor I trust to keep me on my toes. Church matters.  



But “the church” is fluid, and Mehmet understands this, the Quakers understand this: how God can operate covertly, in an unstructured Sunday service where there is nothing but calm, in the six other days of a week. And while I’m personally convicted that God must be at the center of the Meeting in order for it to operate as a religious community—a God that looks like Christ—I find the fluidity somewhat refreshing, indicative of how invasive He can be. 



God is vast. This has always been an idea that both terrifies me—how can I believe in something I can never see the boundaries of?—and comforts me—that’s what faith is all about. And don’t you want faith in something your limited mind can’t fully comprehend, can never completely espouse in a sermon or hymnal? 



When I rise to leave the table, Mehmet embraces me. He kisses me on the cheek twice, warm and soft, loneliness incarnate in the way he holds me close. He tells me he’d like to keep getting lunch, please. I feel unconditionally loved in the grit of the city. I feel touched by God. 

*Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks.* –Friedrich Holderlin



 



 



I



In the early morning hours of January 12, 1963, a coup took place on the island of Zanzibar. It was a small, relatively silent uprising; those over whom the hand of government had switched in the middle of the night awoke none the wiser. As day broke, insubstantial rumors began to trickle in. The sun climbed in the sky like a fiery balloon, and with it rose the tide of hearsay.



A name began to circulate. It hummed in the narrow, shaded streets, along the brilliant beaches and quays where bobbed the boats of ragged fishermen. It ran through the fields of corn and cassava, beneath the coconut palms and clove trees. Soon a message, freshly composed by the revolutionaries, quaked over the radio.



John Okello, a warrior, had apparently given Zanzibar, until so recently ruled by a minority population of Arabs, back to the Afri- cans. He cut a magnificent figure, the listeners were led to believe and until quite recently had been a high-ranking officer in Kenya. He could construct, with his own two hands, 500 guns in a single day, 100 grenades in an hour, and a bomb with a blast radius of three miles—and he had been planning the liberation of Zanzibar for months.



But very little of this, as it would later emerge, was true. Seizing the opportunity to reinvent himself, Okello had disseminated a stream of fictions so rich and vermiculate that it would be months in the disentangling. The madness, turmoil, and attendant void of information associated with the revolt provided an exceptionally fertile launch pad for this reformation.



The man who post-revolution would pompously deem himself “Field Marshal” of the military was, in reality, a semi-literate laborer—variously a bricklayer, a housepainter, a stonecutter—who had raised himself after being orphaned at ten. Furthermore, he was a spiritual man, in his own mind a prophet. God spoke to him of the righteousness of the revolution, whispered at his ear in the dark night hours. Sometimes he was so bowled over by these inspirations that he retreated to the forest to contemplate his dreams in silence.



He had had no hand in planning the revolution but had merely been the firebrand, the instigator. At first a rank-and-file rebel, it was during the actual fighting that he had distinguished himself, his singular confidence and viciousness exalting him to the position of military hero and, eventually, to figurehead of the revolution.



Immediately following the revolution, Okello held great sway in Zanzibar. What followed was a confusing period of about two months. Though he had no formal position in the new government, Okello was essentially running the country, while more legitimate leaders—those who had actually planned the revolution Okello had usurped—tried to mitigate his power.



Okello made daily radio broadcasts during this period, claiming, outrageously, that 11,995 people had died during the revolt. He made strange threats, such as:



“We, the army, have the strength of 99 million, 99 thousand...Should anyone be stubborn and disobey orders, then I will take very strong measures, 88 times stronger than at present.”



He would cut, drown, burn, and shoot dissidents. The foreign press was banned, and he began to make insane demands. Off the radio, he strutted about, gussied up and armed to the teeth with pistols, knives, and a Sten gun. He burst in on private meetings and proceeded to act the buffo. He posed for an endless number of photographs.



In short, he was an embarrassment. Fortunately for his opponents, Okello’s violent Christian rhetoric, combined with the ravenous looting his armada of ruffians undertook in regular waves, was beginning to alienate his less zealous supporters. On March 8, on returning from a trip to Uganda, Okello was met at the airport by a host of guards. Unfortunately, they explained, he would not be allowed back into Zanzibar.



He was set to wandering. He still felt the desire to liberate; he still retained his taste for grandeur. With only a handful of loyal men, he halfheartedly stomped around East Africa, dreamily plotting uprisings in Rhodesia, Mozambique, even South Africa.



In 1971, he dropped off the map entirely. Speculation has it he was assassinated by a president or warlord who felt vaguely threatened by his high volatility. Regardless, his misbegotten plans, his synthetic past, the tentative grandeur of his future all disappeared, swept briskly under the rug of history. The magnificence of his illusions dissipated, their energy spreading ineffectually across the whole geography of his wanderings. He burst forth like a flame and petered out, underfed



 



II



It was during his exile of the late 1960s—before his disappearance—that Okello began a correspondence with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, then a relatively unknown director. Okello wanted Herzog to translate a book he’d written on the Zanzibar Revolution into German, while Herzog simply wanted a chance to film Okello, whose grandiose antics he’d followed closely as they’d trickled into the western media. The two never managed to meet, however; Okello, having learned little from his ostracization and still inclined to boil over with vitriolic language, had landed himself in jail.



Even a cursory understanding of Herzog’s filmog- raphy would seem to justify his interest in Okello. As Dana Benelli notes in his essay “The Cosmos and its Discontents,” Herzog’s films, particularly the early efforts, tend to focus on “central characters out of synch with, if not in open rebellion against, the societies within which they live” (89). The “re- bellious response” subsumes the individual, and the revolt escalates, self-augmenting, until the characters are revolting against the universe itself: Stroszek in Signs of Life (1968) demands that the sun cease its constant rising; The President in Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) runs into the desert and orders a branch to quit pointing at him.



These Herzogian protagonists tend to be characterized by their mythopoeic strivings, by the attempt at self-reinvention through a reckless and mad grab for power—elements found abundantly in Okello that no doubt attracted the director. Okello’s absurd and unsustainable demagoguery, marked by a penchant for flagrantly impossible threats, was in itself a bid for transcendence. As Herzog recalled in a 1971 interview:



Okello delivered these incredible speeches from an airplane. He circled around Zanzibar...and before he landed, he had the aircraft’s radio switched to the local radio station and delivered a short speech: “I, your Field Marshall, am about to land. Anyone who steals so much as a bar of soap will be thrown in prison for two hundred and sixteen years!”



The figure of John Okello—mad revolutionary, boastful weaver of absurd fictions—would come to influence not only Herzog’s style of filmmaking, but also the themes he undertook to excavate, most prominently in his 1972 feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a film which includes a character named after Okello and which marked Herzog’s first collaboration with another mad, transcendent person- ality: Klaus Kinski.



The wonderfully strange, frequently violent, and wildly germinative relationship between Herzog and Kinski has become a bit of a commonplace in cinema history. Herzog himself has emerged as a weird wizard of cinema, with various anecdotes attesting to his eccentricity; Kinski, the blonde powder keg, has always remained a larger than life figure, renowned for the shortness of his temper, the force of his outbursts.



At the time of filming, Kinski, in his mid-forties, had a respectful though stunted career. He could act, all agreed, but his frequent and vociferous tantrums—which often bled into the physical realm— had garnered him a foreboding reputation. Many directors were afraid to touch him, but it was precisely this volatility that attracted Herzog. He was intent on making a film about revolt—who better than a revolting actor to play the lead?



The film, which follows a doomed expedition down a mid-16th century Amazon River to find the mythic golden city of El Dorado, was filmed in Peru. The jungle was hot, unbearably hot, and Herzog, hoping to draw real performances out of his actors, allegedly kept them hungry and thirsty for most of the shoot. It was nearly impossible to drag the large crew and cast through the often perilously thin mountain paths, through the webs of viridescent foliage that sprung from the soupy ground. Sickness and fever were a perennial threat; the nearest large city was often dangerously distant and only sometimes in communication.



Early in the filming, Kinski, per his wont, began to act up. “His behavior was impossible, and he raved like a lunatic at least once a day,” Herzog later recalled in an interview. “He also wanted to leave the set—he wanted to go home.” Accounts differ as to how Herzog confronted this last issue; the most frequently circulated rumor is that he forced Kinski to act at gunpoint. Herzog denies this, however. He claims, rather, to have simply threatened to kill Kinski, and then himself: “From then on, every- thing went very smoothly.”



As filming progressed, so, too, did Kinski’s antics. At one point, an extra, waiting off-screen in a hut constructed for the filming, spoke while Kinski was filming a scene. Kinski, who carried a functional Winchester rifle with him at all times, “got so worked up that he took his Winchester and shot a hole through the roof.” (Some accounts have Kinski taking off three of the extra’s fingers with his shot.) Herzog—operating on a hunch, a nugget of inspira- tion—encouraged these tantrums; he egged Kinski on, working him into a lather and watching as Kinski’s rage bled into his acting. All of which, it goes without saying, he captured on film. The environ- ment that Herzog fostered was essentially hostile: the actors should feel uncomfortable and Kinski himself should feel transgressed upon, singled out. This displacement—the alienation engendered by being treated cruelly in a foreign land—would ideally result in a purer, distilled form of acting.



Miraculously, the shoot wrapped up, and the film proved a massive success, catapulting Herzog into the spotlight of European art cinema while simultaneously reinvigorating Kinski’s career. Herzog and Kinski, battered by the process though pleased with its results, would go on to collaborate on several more critically acclaimed films, entangling themselves in a relationship that produced marvelous fictions while at the same time being, in a sense, another fiction.



In his 1988 autobiography, Kinski, who had most recently worked with Herzog in 1987’s Cobra Verde, viciously derided his partner, claiming that Herzog was an execrable, self-obsessed filmmaker—a dabbler, a dilettante. Herzog, for his part, later claimed that much of Kinski’s autobiography was pure fiction, crafted retroactively, and that he had even assisted Kinski in penning some of the more acerbic insults on his own person.



It seems fitting that Kinski’s last say on his relationship with Herzog should be undecipherable, an unresolvable entangling of the virile threads of rage and fiction.



III



Aguirre, the Wrath of God plays fast and loose with historical figures. It follows an expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro in late 1560 and early 1561, despite the fact that the historical Pizarro died in 1548. Herzog places the historical figures on expeditions they never attended, displacing them temporally. They are pawns in an aesthetic game, their very shifts and anachronistic arrangements contributing to the film’s sense of compositeness, of incompleteness.



Early in the film, the official expedition is stalled. A small party, led by Don Pedro Ursua with Don Lope de Aguirre (our hero, so to speak) as second-in-command, is sent down the river on a fleet of rickety skiffs to scout for food or help.



Throughout this developing drama, Kinski, who has donned the armor of his character, a shabby suit of leather with oversized pauldrons, is preoccupied with delivering the most menacing performance he can manage. He fully utilizes his diseased-looking habitus and the thick, Cro-Magnon ossature of his skull; Aguirre struts about vampirically, brooding and scowling and blaring with his wild, sunken eyes. Before long, his treachery is out in the open. Ursua is deposed, and Aguirre establishes the overweight and simpleminded Don Fernando de Guz- man as the expedition’s new leader—while he, of course, retains his position as second-in-command.



From then on, the film charts a general decline in sanity. The doomed party drifts down the river on a large raft that begins to resemble, with its various small additions and substructures, the barest bones of a theatrical stage. No minor significance to this, in fact. In a 1973 interview, Herzog discussed his understanding of the relation between history and theater:



[A]s a theme, this horde of imperialistic ad- venturers performing a great historical failure, this failure of imperialism, of the conquerors, the theme is really quite modern. The meth- od by which history was then made is actually one that can still be found today in many Latin American countries. History there is staged as theater, with theatrical coups.



To echo this sentiment, Aguirre claims in the film’s final moments that he “will stage history, like others stage plays.” And, of course, the platform on which he crafts his fictions is fundamentally destabilized, a portable stage that bucks and trips and in its disturbance agitates its occupants’ minds, their thoughts, and the fictions that trend from those thoughts.



Herzog indeed is interested in the essence of revolt, of rebellion, but he is even more interested in the relationship between revolution and the crafting of fictions. In his early work, he has limned a triumvirate of madness, associating these two propensities with his “out of synch” characters, snipped cleanly from their contexts, historical or other. As John Okello emerged from a dim personal past and found himself suddenly at the head of a revolution, Aguirre was transported into the tropical wilds of South America, torn from his comfortable lands in Spain—and it is no minor joke that Herzog like- wise tore Kinski, a stunningly German actor, out of Germany and thrust him into the unlikely role of a Spanish conquistador. While the other actors display the fine Spanish features so often associated with the conquistadors, Kinski stands out, his lanky blond hair and brutal features purposely inhibiting the authenticity of his role.



For Herzog, the displaced man’s propensity for revolt is irrevocably connected to his greater-than-av- erage ability (or opportunity) to remake himself— that is, his ability to craft fictions. Without a proper social context, the displaced man will expand indefinitely, revolting and creating fictions of grandeur, of power. The revolt begins to feed the fiction, while the fiction in turn feeds the revolt. It this recursive loop that becomes the madness that leads the displaced Herzog protagonist to “rebel against the universe.”



The last 15 minutes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God constitute a subtle phantasmagoria. The crew of the raft, merely a handful of tatterdemalion survivors struck with hunger, thirst, and fever, begin to hallucinate freely. They spot a complete boat—its sails billowing fluidly, dreamily—suspended in the uppermost branches of a tree and declare that it is merely an illusion. The line between fiction and reality, enervated by the crew’s physical weakness, begins to blur. Aguirre, for his part, claims the boat is real; he makes plans to retrieve the boat and use it to reach the Atlantic.



The slave Okello—so named because Herzog owed the revolutionary’s “craze, hysteria, [and] atrocious fantasies quite a bit for [the] film”—lies crumpled on the raft’s floor. With a skyward glance, he whispers, “That is no ship. That is no forest.” In a stunning moment, an arrow sinks quickly and forcefully into his thigh. He reacts calmly, continuing his delirious ruminations: “That is no arrow. We just imagine the arrows, because we fear them.” Meanwhile, Aguirre hurries about the raft as arrows and spears bombard the remnants of his crew; he fires off rifles and makes noise, insisting with supreme confidence that the arrows are real, that the danger exists.



It is then that Flores, Aguirre’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who has been carried preposterously in a sedan-chair through all these rough environs, is killed by an arrow. Aguirre cradles her, staring menacingly off into the jungle whence the missile came. We might expect reality to rush in now like a torrent, to bring Aguirre to his knees and cleanse his mind of any illusions. But, as it happens, Aguirre sets the corpse of his daughter down. He proclaims that he will marry her and in so doing found “the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen.” A procre- ative loop is established; the father will feed off the daughter, just as the fictions will feed off the revolt, the revolt the fictions.



The raft twirls and yaws down the river. It might be going to the sea.