by James Frey
I walked into the room. Ben Zion was in bed on his back. There were intravenous tubes in his arms and a mask on his face and monitors on his head that had no hair and on his chest covered with scars. There were scars everywhere on his body where he had been cut by the glass. Long terrible jagged scars on his body everywhere. I was scared to go closer to him, scared of my own son asleep in his bed, my beautiful boy who I had loved his whole life, even when he was not with me. My son with all of his scars, with all of his pain.
I walked slowly to him and I started crying again. I cry because of what happened to him, and for all those lost years, and for why he was sent out of my home, and for all the times Isaac and Jacob beat him and are mean to him, and for the times I was with him when he was a boy and a baby and he smiled and laughed and for all the love I had for him. I walk to him and I say his name and I start crying very hard and it hurts my body and hurts me inside like I am destroyed and I kneel by his bed and I can’t touch him or look at him, I just say to him over and over I am sorry, I am sorry. There are no other words, and even those words aren’t enough for my feelings. There are never words for the strongest of our feelings. There is just the pain that we cannot share. Pain we must all feel alone.
I stay at his bed for the whole of the night and when the sun comes up I sit in a chair next to his bed and I hold his hand and I tell him about the years he has been gone and what has happened in our life. I hold his hand and it’s cold and there are scars on his wrist and his hand and he does not move except for breathing which is faint, and sometimes labored, and sometimes he twitches or shakes a little amount. At one point many doctors come in and ask me who I am and I tell them and they say the chart still says John Doe and it makes me cry to think of how long my son has been lying here alone being called John Doe. One of the doctors calls someone on the telephone on the wall and more people come but they are not doctors. Some of them work for the hospital and some of them are police and I tell them his name and where he is from and I tell how long it has been since I have seen him. They ask for my ID and I tell them my son does not let me have ID or driver’s license because he does not believe in any authority other than God. They take me to a room where they say I must stay until they confirm me as who I say I am.
It is a long time, many hours I sit alone. When the door opens, it is Jacob and he says to come with him. I ask him what happened and he say he talked to police and tell them everything and show them the driver’s license he has for himself and they say I can go. We go to Ben Zion’s room and Esther is waiting outside the door for us and we go in together and we kneel and spend the day praying together for the health of Ben Zion. And for many days that is what we do. We kneel by the bed and together we pray for the health of Ben Zion. Jacob and Esther go back to Queens sometimes because they both have many responsibilities at church but I do not ever leave the hospital. I stay with my son. And I wait for him. And I know in my heart, because I have known all my life, and I have known all of his life, what he will become when he returns. I wait for him.
JEREMIAH
Jacob was like a brother to me and a father to me and a spiritual guide to me and a true inspiration to me. He saved me and believed he cured me and I loved him and admired him, and in many ways I wished I was him. When the MSM descended after Ben’s real identity was made public, he asked me to stay in the hospital with his mother and help protect them from the reporters and their tape recorders and their cameras and their lies. He also wanted me to take notes whenever the doctors were there so he could have them for lawsuits he planned to file on Ben’s behalf against the city, the construction company, the real estate developers, and the hospital, which he hoped would provide him with financial security and help to expand the facilities and the teachings of the church. I was truly and greatly honored, and I promised him I would take the job very seriously and lay down my life if necessary. Jacob said he knew, and that was why he chose me. The hospital’s policy was that only family was allowed to stay, so Jacob told them I was his brother, his real brother. And we believed that in the eyes of God, the Holy Spirit, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we were telling the truth, and that because our aims were righteous, the sin of lying was not actually a sin. We did what people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong. We told ourselves God would allow it, but not because of the Laws of God, but because we wanted to do it.
I met Jacob when he was protesting deviant lifestyles outside a club where I went to meet men. I had seen him a few times before standing with three or four other people, all holding signs that said God Hates Fags, or Fags Will Rot in Hell, or AIDS is God’s Cure for Faggots, and he would yell verses from the Bible at people smoking outside the club and hand out pamphlets about his church. My story was the same as a million others in New York. I grew up in a small town, liked boys and dresses, got teased and beaten at home and at school, ran away to New York at seventeen to be a model or a singer or an actor or whatever I could be that was fun and easy and would make me famous. It didn’t work, and I got addicted to drugs and sex and clubs and lived a sad empty life that I pretended was fun and exciting. I always felt I had a hole in my heart, this big black hole that made me feel lonely and empty and worthless. I tried to fill it, everybody tries in some way, and it just got bigger and bigger. The night Jacob approached me I was on a date with a man who gave me certain things and expected certain things in return. He lived in the Midwest and was in town for three or four days a month. It was my second night out with him and I was hurting really bad. The man wanted me to get some meth, and on my way out of the club Jacob said I can cure you as I walked past him. I stopped and asked him what he would cure me of, and he said the vile, soul-damning lifestyle of sodomy and homosexuality. I asked him how, and he said the Bible offers a message of love and hope, and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will save you and show you the way. I started crying. I was surprised. I hated religion because of its treatment of me, and its absoluteness, and I never would have believed I would believe in it, but something opened inside of me, the Holy Spirit opened inside of me, and it was lovely and fantastic and the most powerful thing I’d ever felt, a sense of joy and peace and love, and I believed at that moment that for whatever reason God was calling to me and telling me to follow this man. Two hours later I was baptized and born again. The next day I moved into a basement apartment in Queens in the house of one of the church elders. It felt right and true and good to me, and it was lovely and joyful and secure and strong. To have the Holy Spirit inside of me and to cultivate a personal relationship with the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To have friends who called me brother and wanted to take care of me instead of use me. It was all I ever wanted in my life, all anyone ever wants. To have someone love you. To have someone tell you that they know the way and want to share it with you.
I spent most of my time in a chair near the door of Ben’s room. We kept the door closed, and if it started to open I would stand and ask whoever it was what business they had in the room. It annoyed the doctors and nurses because I made all of them show me their credentials, even if I had met them before or had seen their credentials before. Twice MSM reporters tried to sneak in as doctors. One of them even tried to show me bogus credentials. Everyone wanted to see the Miracle Man who had disappeared into thin air for sixteen years and survived what he never should have survived. Aside from the reporters, there were lawyers, photographers, psychics, healers, and women. I took the lawyers’ business cards, but had everyone else removed as quickly as possible. And I couldn’t believe how many women wanted to see him or touch him or marry him. He wasn’t even awake and they didn’t know what he would be like if he did wake up, if he’d even be able to speak or move or walk. I handed each of those women a pamphlet and said maybe the void they were feeling in their heart could be filled with the love of God and the love of his Son, the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
For the first ten days I w
as there, nothing happened. Mrs. Avrohom prayed by Ben’s bed and I read the Bible. I went to the gift shop or cafeteria for food. We both slept in fold-down chairs, hers next to the bed, mine near the door. Jacob and Esther came by after breakfast and usually stayed until just before dinner. They spent most of their time kneeling by the side of the bed, praying, though Jacob often stepped into the hall to speak with the doctors, and on a couple of occasions with attorneys. Nobody seemed to know what kind of condition Ben was in. The machines they hooked up to his brain would give them all sorts of different results, and sometimes they were happy and said he seemed normal and sometimes they said he was going to be a vegetable and sometimes they said they were seeing things they had never seen before, extraordinary activity as one doctor called it, and most of the time they had no idea what was happening. When they took the breathing tube out of his throat, it was a big deal. They made everyone leave except for Jacob, who refused to leave, and they were really worried he wouldn’t be able to breathe on his own. I waited outside the room with Mrs. Avrohom and Esther, and we were all praying to Jesus to give Ben the strength to live. We were praying really hard, and when we heard the doctors and nurses clap and Jacob yell Hallelujah, Lord, we knew our prayers had been answered.
For the next five or six days, nothing good happened. Ben was able to breathe, but he didn’t move, and all the brain monitors indicated that there was absolutely no activity, and the doctors were saying that he was going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life. The timing was terrible because Jacob was finishing the church fundraising drive and was going to announce plans for the expansion of the church’s facilities. He asked me to take notes on everything the doctors and nurses said and he’d come by at the end of the day and review them. He also asked me to pray extra hard, and I told him I’d pray my hardest, but I knew my connection to God wasn’t nearly as strong as his was, and I was worried that I didn’t have enough strength, and wasn’t holy enough, to make a difference.
The doctors came and went. I heard terms like severe brain damage, without detectable awareness, Apallic syndrome, post-coma unresponsiveness, continuing vegetative state, permanent vegetative state. They tested his response to stimuli and there was no reaction. They tried to get him to track things with his eyes but he just stared at the ceiling, though I don’t think he could really see anything at all. One of the doctors suggested something called bifocal extradural cortical stimulation, which sounded scary and evil, and I told Jacob that I believed that particular doctor, who looked like a Jew and had a hooked nose, might be in legion with the Devil.
On the seventh night, I sat reading my Bible. This particular evening I was reading Revelations 12. It is a powerful chapter, one of the most powerful in the New Testament, and one with a great amount of truth. It’s about the woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and the crown of twelve stars on her head, and the great red dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns who draws the third part of the stars of Heaven with his tail, and how as the dragon prepares to devour the child of the woman, the child who is to rule all nations with a rod of iron, the woman is drawn into the wilderness of God for 1,260 days while the archangel Michael and his army of angels make war on the dragon. I had read the chapter many times, and I believed that the events of it were going to happen soon, as they had been foretold to occur in the End Times, and I knew the End Times were coming, and that I would bear witness to them, and that I would be one of the 144,000 of the Lord’s anointed who would be saved and raised up into Heaven. Mrs. Avrohom was kneeling next to Ben, same as she did every night. This night, though, this seventh night, she started praying in Hebrew. Jacob told me she might do it, and he wanted to know if she did because he had forbidden Jewish teachings, law, words, and language in his home, and he would punish her accordingly for violating his rules. I didn’t know what she was saying, but I thought I should put down my Bible and try to write down anything I heard. As she was praying, Ben’s mouth started moving. She didn’t see it, but I did. There wasn’t any noise coming out, but he was mouthing the words, the exact same words she was saying in her prayers. And then his eyes opened, and not like when the doctors opened them for their tests, this time they opened and they were clear and focused and alive, and there was something about them, something pure and heavenly, as if they were the eyes of the Savior himself, and I was entranced by them. Mrs. Avrohom was still praying, and didn’t know Ben was with her, and she was quietly saying the Hebrew verses, and Ben started saying them with her, softly, in a voice that sounded very old and strong, and he matched her word for word, like he knew what she was going to say before she said it, and it sent chills down my spine. I tried to write what I was seeing, and feeling, and what Mrs. Avrohom was saying, and what Ben was saying, but I was paralyzed, paralyzed with joy and freedom and a lightness of spirit that felt like the moment I was saved, when the Holy Ghost was so powerfully alive inside of me.
Mrs. Avrohom became aware of Ben when he reached out and put his hand on her forehead. I watched it happen like it was in slow motion. His fingers started moving slowly, slightly, each of them on its own, like they were dancing. And then his hand and arm lifted off the white sheet and his fingers stopped moving and looked like they were stretching, like the fingers of Adam reaching towards God. Mrs. Avrohom was still praying, and Ben with her, and the sound of their words in synchronization was simple and ancient and had a beautiful rhythm to it and as his arm moved towards her forehead he turned and looked at her and it seemed like it took a million years for him to reach her and it seemed like there was nothing else happening anywhere else in the world, there was just this one thing, this one moment, this lost, damaged son reaching for his mother as they prayed to the Lord Almighty.
When he did finally touch her, she gasped audibly. I don’t know if it was because she was surprised or because of something she felt, but she looked like she had had a huge bolt of electricity pass through her. His hand was firmly on her forehead, and she looked up, her jaw dropped, her body went limp, her eyes were full of joy and peace and contentment. And they both continued praying, there was no lapse, no stopping, the words just kept coming. Ben smiled, turned and started to sit up, and as he did, the various monitors and IVs that were attached to his body started coming off, and those that didn’t he pulled off with his free arm. The alarms started dinging, shrieking, but he and his mother didn’t seem to notice. He sat all the way up and smiled, and it was a beautiful peaceful smile, similar to so many of the smiling images I’ve seen of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and his mother was staring up at him, and he moved his legs off the bed, and they were both still praying, almost singing, and his hand was still on her forehead, and he stood up. He was wearing a white robe. His body was hideously and terribly scarred, you could see the scars running along his arms and legs and on his face. His skin was so white, and so pale. And there were alarms screaming. And it was beautiful. He was so beautiful. If only I could somehow communicate the feelings it inspired in me. But that is the way it is with all of the important feelings and emotions and moments we have in our lives, words fail and don’t express even a fraction of what we actually feel. All I can say is it truly did feel like I was in the presence of divinity, in the presence of God himself. And I couldn’t move or speak or write or do anything but stare at him and feel love, and awe, and humility. He was just so beautiful.
The door flew open and a team of nurses and doctors rushed into the room, though they stopped as soon as they saw what was happening. Ben didn’t turn towards them or acknowledge them in any way. He stared down at his mother, who was staring up at him, and then he closed his eyes and lifted his hand away from her forehead and raised it to the level of his chest and held it there and stopped saying the Hebrew prayers and took a deep breath and smiled to himself as he exhaled. And as soon as he was finished with the exhale, he collapsed onto the floor and had a seizure.
I got pulled from the room, but what I saw of the seizure was hideo
us. Ben shook, his whole body violently shook, and fluids immediately started coming out of his mouth and nose, and he made these awful guttural noises. His mother stood up and started screaming. The doctors and nurses immediately tried to hold him down and grab his tongue, but he was strong, shockingly and unbelievably strong, especially given that he had been in a coma for the last several weeks, and it took two of them on each of his arms and legs to hold him down. As I stood in the hall, I could hear him struggling, he sounded like an animal, like he was possessed by Satan himself, and I could hear the nurses and orderlies yelling for more help, and I could hear Mrs. Avrohom, who was backed into a corner of the room when I left it, screaming at the top of her lungs.