28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  THERE’S NOTHING LIKE the image of another person’s body rising out of your own to make you appreciate the transcendental possibilities of yoga. Or make you really appreciate pigeon stretches—the equivalent of twisting your body into a hairpin folded back on itself. Particularly if the image of the body rising out of your own was someone you’d been accused of killing, and who was most definitely dead.

  It was a freezing evening in Toronto, the last week of December 2009. At Moksha Yoga Uptown, I tried the Pranayama for the first time, in a smaller room, which meant holding postures for a long time, breathing a lot (as opposed to?), and barely breaking a sweat. At the time it happened, I almost didn’t think it odd, didn’t reflect on it much. I was in pain, my body folded over in a position hereto-fore unknown to my anatomy. The yoga instructor was saying that the pigeon stretch was excellent at “opening up the hips.” When she first said it, I thought this was an analogous description. But at that moment, with my body twisted into a hairpin folded back on itself, I realized that she meant it literally. This stretch was like placing my hips in a nutcracker and pushing the lever down until there was a loud crunch.

  “This will open up your hips. If you’re struggling, if you feel stuck, it’s often emotional blockage. These stretches will open up your hips and unblock some emotions that are stuck,” she said, with a soothing voice that made it hurt less.

  Oh, this will be good, I thought. I’ve got plenty of blockages. Plenty. A marriage collapsing, a soul searching, a head cracking, a heart breaking, enough repression to hibernate a bear into the next century, and everything that comes with being a former Attorney General who has been charged with two felonies for the death of someone last seen alive by the 43-year-old man in a pigeon stretch.

  Stretch. Creak. Ouch. She came around and gently placed her hand on my lower back. Whereas most in the class were comfortably flat on the floor like a hairpin folded on itself, I looked like a hairpin after a long ride in the garborator. So she carefully extended my stretch with a soft push down on my back.

  A few seconds later, I saw an image of Darcy Sheppard.

  He seemed to be hovering there, floating for a few seconds.

  I can’t remember what happened except that it seemed as if he exited my body; he just rose up and left.

  “So. How was yoga?” Susan asked me, when I got home, about an hour later. I was a novice at yoga; had only been a few times. It was a new hobby in a new life of hobbies du jour. Her question was a major effort to sound civil and friendly. She might have said: “Hope your solitary excursion was all you wanted it to be, because I’m so lonely I could …”

  But she didn’t say that.

  “Well, thanks for asking,” I said quickly. This was something we were learning through various audiobooks on therapy for couples: master couples versus disaster couples. We were the latter, seeking the status of the former. So you needed to show affection and compliment your partner for things you sincerely appreciate. Like asking how yoga went.

  “Good.”

  Pause.

  “I think during … What’s that pose where you—” I started doing it and she helped.

  “Pigeon stretch—”

  “HI DADDY!! I LOVE YOU!!” Louie, age 5, plowed into my hip and stomach, pinning me against the counter, rearing back, and crashing his pillowy fist into my solar plexus. Hugs were exchanged, and we went off to watch him play a video game. An hour later, at dinner, sitting across from Susan, my eyebrows curled upwards.

  “Did I tell you that during my pigeon stretch I think I saw Darcy Sheppard rise out of my body? At yoga. I saw him—”

  “Wow. No, you hadn’t told me. Describe.” This painfully formal extrapolation of Gottman Institute master marital techniques made us both cringe invisibly. I did describe, and then we conversed on anything but that.

  The mistake would be to imagine that Sheppard had somehow exited from my life, that I’d gotten over my grief or fear or shame or pain involving him. The experience of what happened that night welded Sheppard to me forever. It’s always there. He’s always there. This does not mean that I await the day that he’s not somewhere in the constellations of my thoughts. I can pretend he’s not there, or hide from him, or distract myself from him. Or try to do something less fearful.

  “So,” I said to Susan. “I’d say that the dark part of Darcy maybe rose up out of my body. But he’s always there, somewhere.”

  Susan just looked at me. “Okay. I think I understand what you’re saying,” which was her post-counselling way of saying, kindly, that she shared comprehension, if not entirely believing or grasping my feelings. We were extremely post-modern at this point.

  Suddenly, she appeared. Or maybe we just suddenly noticed her standing there. Sadie, the 7-year-old, had been listening to our conversation. She had either hid behind the wall or just stood there in plain view, making herself invisible. This was her latest trick.

  Susan said, softly: “Do you understand that Daddy doesn’t mean that a real, living man came out of his body? You understand that—”

  “No, I understand. He was like a ghost. The man who died in the car accident. The dark ghost left Daddy’s body…. But it could come back, Daddy, so be careful.”

  I nodded my agreement, very slowly.

  “I KNOW THAT EVERYTHING will work out for you.”

  “I am sure things will work out.”

  “I hope that things will work out for you.”

  “Do you think everything will work out?”

  These four comments were said very often to me, and I reacted very differently to each. During the nine months between being arrested and the dropping of the criminal charges, I was rarely angry (albeit mostly dysfunctional, mostly depressed, occasionally happy). With my pride hollowed out by the experience, there wasn’t much to be angry about. But there was ego detritus left behind. I resented greatly those who seemed to question my innocence, just as I welled up when they supported me.

  I privately awarded gold medals to those who said, “I know that everything will work out for you.” It represented a judgment of me as unquestionably good and innocent. Their prognosis was positive, without qualification: they “know” that I will be exonerated by the criminal justice system.

  Silver went to those who expressed confidence in that result of exoneration, but they hedged their bets. Perhaps it’s just Canadian semantics, being not overconfident: “I am sure things will work out.”

  Bronze medals are impressive only if there is high drama involved: an athlete’s mother has just died, or someone has suffered a crippling injury. Or if it’s a miracle they were even able to compete and finish: think rower Silken Laumann’s 1992 Olympic bronze for Canada.

  But for me, for the first six months after Sheppard died, I was not a big fan of the bronze medallists. They were a distant third, from my haughty perspective. “I hope that things will work out for you.” They’d only get a medal because they expressed hope for me. Otherwise, I’d disqualify them altogether.

  What the f*#k do you mean you HOPE I’m innocent! Of course I’m innocent, you *&^%--!

  Now, they were probably talking without any intention of expressing doubt about my innocence. But the fact that they just “hope” it, rather than being “sure” about my innocence, got them only a bronze.

  The Goat award went to those who dared question my innocence. They didn’t hope for it, it seemed to me, nor could they muster up confidence in me. They actually asked me a question about my innocence. Goat: “Do you think everything will work out?”

  Even though these people were trying, in their way, to express solidarity with me, I reacted badly. Ungrateful shit that I can be, I’d always reply the same, with differing emphasis, depending on their medal status.

  “Of course I will be exonerated!” I’d reply to bronze medal winners.

  “Yes, I will be exonerated,” I’d say, nodding, shrugging, stating the obvious to the gold medallist.

  Or “I know there will be exone
ration,” unlike you lazy hopers-not-knowers (silver).

  For the goat, just “of course,” then, with a look of dismay and hurt, I’d make an escape, looking to find someone to commiserate on the goat awardee’s utter lack of judgment.

  Judgment is tricky business. Judge not lest ye be judged is quite right, but it’s not a prohibition on judgment. The tricky part is finding the righteous judgment. Here I was, judging people’s powers of empathy and confidence in me, when all they were doing was trying to make me feel better. Or maybe they were curious and wanted to know my opinion and feelings on my future.

  The truth. Judgment is not truth and it’s not untruth. Judgment is apart from truth, more mechanical than soulful. Every day criminal court judges hand down sentences to people perhaps also judged innocent of heart by that very same judge. Such judges are executing their legal duties, applying the due process of the law. This is the stuff of textbooks and cases and logic. I’m convinced much of this could be done via computer software. X plus Y equals guilty. Not guilty means no X or no Y.

  But I would learn to judge not, lest I be judged. Most people that I came into contact with did not judge me as anything but Michael. They’d say I was a “good person” or “one of the good guys,” and I’d be flattered and sometimes astounded: how would you know?

  The first step in learning the lesson of judgment is found within, I learned from others. This sounds like words from a fortune cookie but it would be a good one if you got it. Judge yourself as you would be judged righteously, the little Cookie Torah reads. Without that, I would keep judging myself wrongly and others unfairly.

  Harry taught me that. An elderly Dutch fellow with a medium thin moustache and heavy accent—let’s call him Harry—whom I knew from my fellowship of recovery shared with me that he had been jailed years before, and that he resented his prosecutors and judges for years, to no avail. Before I could leap to a defensive posture, he poked his finger in my chest.

  “The law is not yer true judge, Mister,” and he poked my sternum, softly, three times, then left it there. “You are yer own judge and love is yer judge and God is yer judge.”

  The skin on my forehead drew lines horizontal but more accurately curling like question marks. I was straining to open my mind, my forehead pulling open its doors with all its weight.

  Eyes widened and eyebrows raised, Harry threw his hands back: “How do you judge me, young man?”

  “I judge you to be a good soul, probably a great father and grandfather and husband. But goodness. You’re good, Harry.”

  “But I was found guilty by de court. I was guilty under de law—”

  My forehead relaxed as I closed my eyes and shook my head with a paternalistic affection.

  “No, Harry. I don’t judge you harshly at all for that. You got drunk and hurt someone in a fight, you said. It was a mistake. There was lots of fault to go around, under the law. But it doesn’t rob you of your goodness.”

  Harry’s chest started heaving and his lower lip curled up, touching his moustache. Out came the poking finger. He roared:

  “What do you mean!? I was guill-tey! Guil-ty!!”

  “No, Harry. You are innocent. You’re one of the good ones, Harry. Whatever you did. The law’s judgment is different. The law is there for a decent purpose, but it can’t take everything away from you.”

  Harry pulled back his shoulder to really get behind this last poke: “So who can take every-ting away from me, if not dat judge sitting on dat bench, if not dese people looking up or down at me? Who?”

  And I felt a poke in my sternum that seemed to crack me in two. His hands were thrown back now, eyes wide again, asking that question.

  After that conversation, from then on, I got it. I didn’t always remember to get it, but when I remembered Harry, I was fine. The law would do what it would do. The prosecutor would do what he would do. If it came to trial, the judge would judge me under the law, but probably like me just fine, regardless.

  After that day, I tried to stop persecuting myself. I tried to. Being rigorously honest with oneself doesn’t mean defaulting to self-pity, martyrdom, hand-wringing, shame. And I stopped judging others. Or I tried to. Only I could take everything away from me, and I wasn’t going to do that to myself.

  ROOT VEGETABLES are grown in hot climates, mild climates, and cold climates. If you’ve only had carrots grown in California or Texas, you don’t know the sweetness of a carrot. Carrots grown in comfortable climates don’t convert starch to sugar, or at least not to the degree that root vegetables grown in cold climates do. A plant physiologist would explain that the hard frosts, the bitter freezing, over and over, demands the conversion of starches to sugars to survive. The sweet carrot—and it can be so incredibly sweet, 13 percent of that carrot can be pure sugar—is telling us that it wants to live. For if ice crystallizes in that carrot, it dies. That harsh freezing, maybe several, pushes that carrot towards death. But if it doesn’t crystallize and die, if it can fight that near-death experience and survive, the carrot is left immeasurably sweeter than its carrot cousin sunning in Florida.*

  Some people confront that frost in life, and they fight, or they give up, and if they let the darkness crystallize, they die inside. Or at least they’re cold, perma-frozen. We all know someone like that. Their souls are frozen. And of course there are many people who opt for moderate climates, warmth, even heat, over near-death frostbites. Perhaps they faced a coming cold front, and they headed for the hills, or sand-dunes, or suburbs.

  I’ve had a few hard freezings. Certainly, I’ve had one serious deep freeze. And I didn’t head for the hills because I couldn’t. No hills were within sight. So I had to devise some survival techniques.

  When in a foxhole, under fire, be a fox.

  When something terrible happens, there is an aftermath. Even death surely has an aftermath, but I’m just guessing. I don’t have to guess about what happens after you’ve allegedly killed somebody, and the cuffs get burned into your wrists, taken off only once you’re ensconced in a jail cell. That aftermath of the truly terrible—in my case, 28 seconds that ended with the death of Darcy Sheppard—affords the opportunity for reflection and conscious action.

  Yes, you’re in shock. But still, it’s nothing like the terrible event itself: a moment of tunnel vision that is driven not by one’s consciousness, but by something deeply primal and perhaps metaphysical. The whole fight-or-flight phenomenon, which I suppose is what happened to me during my deadly 28 seconds, seemed, in retrospect, driven by another spirit. I have never felt more or less in control of my actions.

  Foxholes were military constructions, places where people fought during wars, particularly in World War I. In the foxhole, people would shout sayings that persist to this day. “Incoming!” “Fire in the hole!”

  Sometimes you’re in a foxhole alone. A battle rages above and you know that survival is the best you might do. You can panic and jump out of the hole and start shooting crazily at the enemy until you’re shot down. You can freeze and do nothing at all until you’re bombed, burned, or rooted out. Or you can behave like a fox, using all of your wits, cunning, and fortitude.

  Sometimes the aftermath of a tragedy can seem what it is not. Upon learning of the death of my grandfather, my 11-year-old self immediately seized upon the idea that it was my fault. The night before, my tired parents had told me, after another evening at his deathbed, to pray that “Papa will go to a better place where he won’t suffer anymore.” So as an 11-year-old who basically did what he was told when out of his depth, I just went ahead and prayed that my grandfather would die that night.

  And he did.

  I’d killed my grandfather, I thought to myself.

  When I was told by my mom that, indeed, my grandfather had died, she did so while putting down a laundry basket in the hallway outside our kitchen at the house in Gordon Head. A red plastic oval laundry basket. My father closed the door behind him as he walked slowly up the stairs to tell his mother that her husband of 50-p
lus years had died.

  I ran to the bathroom and locked the door, weeping wildly. We had those 1970s mirrors in that bathroom—half a hexagon of mirrors: one faced you directly, the two adjacent mirrors were angled out at 45 degrees. If you pulled the two together, you had a triangle of mirrors. As anyone knows who has tried this, if you put your head at the apex of the triangle, pulling those two mirrors tight against your cheeks, the reflection is dramatic. There are countless reflections of your face in that triangle, stretching to infinity, it seems.

  It seemed an excellent means by which I could communicate with God, to advise him of the terrible mistake that had been made, and to demand a retraction, by way of a miraculous recovery. I’d killed my grandfather, it seemed to me, so now it was time to unkill him. God, help! I didn’t mean it!! You are way too literal, God! I meant give him a bit of Demerol, not cyanide!!

  Blubbering into a million mirrored reflections of myself, I sought a long-distance connection to God that went unanswered. I was panicked and responded in a very panicky way to what I perceived as a tragedy.

  I embraced the reality of his death like someone chugs a pitcher of beer. Not surprisingly, I became overwhelmed. I did not behave like a fox.

  But the tragedy may not be as it seems. Eventually I began to realize that maybe I hadn’t killed my grandfather. Indeed I had not. Maybe it wasn’t a tragedy but just the circle of life. That man had to die at some point. Time would eventually allow me to begin soaking up the wisdom and love to be found from his death. But I suffocated that process by trying to gang up on God. All those reflections of me in a full-on God-ambush that went nowhere.

  Perhaps it’s too much to ask of someone that he or she take time to patiently reflect in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy. Some people freak out, as I did when Papa Bryant died. Some just go into shocked immobility and delay the aftermath. Some instead find themselves able to be cunning when meeting a cunning unreality. I’d not killed my grandfather, after all. That was not reality. It was unreality.