I don’t remember when they took me from the cell. I remember going to sleep in the cell and then, suddenly, a waking that was not gentle. With a single injection to my intravenous tube, the medically induced coma was ended and I was jolted back to consciousness. I dimly saw a nurse smiling warmly and noticed that she was holding my hand. My hand, strangely, was down next to my knee, and not in its customary position wrapped around the opposite side of my chest. I was wearing dark sunglasses. The bed was soft and clean. My skin was clean. My beard was gone. I bent my knees and elbows, and each extremity moved until it was gently stopped by a canvas loop, luxuriously lined with sheepskin, that attached each limb to rails along the side of the bed. I looked down to see an intravenous drip to my left arm, and I felt the strange sensation of urine being drained through a catheter.
“Welcome, back, Sweetheart,” the nurse said. “How do you feel?”
It took days for me to answer that question. I know that, as I could once again tell day from night. My private room had a high ceiling and six-foot-tall windows overlooking a leafy courtyard. During the day, the shadows of the oaks danced on the wall, a show I found more riveting than any film.
I never spoke to a doctor. My hunger strike was never discussed. I never saw a guard. A cheerful blond physical therapist came twice a day. The restraints were removed from a single limb, and she would skillfully work the limb, stimulating the muscles, stretching the tendons. It was not the same as going for a run, but my muscles started to grow back, and the stiffness in the joints disappeared in a few days.
“How do you feel, Sweetheart?” the nurse asked every morning.
The only question I ever asked her, after about a week, was the date. When she told me, I became angry. “Please, why are you lying?”
She looked genuinely startled. “What? Lying? Why would I lie about the date?”
“It cannot be,” I said. “I was at the castle for over two years.”
She held my hand. “Greg, you were in the castle for five weeks. You didn’t eat for the last two weeks. You’ve been here for ten days.”
When I looked distressed, she went into the hallway and came back with the New York Times. “See,” she said, “November 26, 2022.”
Until that moment, I had been floating in a dull stupor, my body enjoying the nutrition and comfort, my mind reveling in the light, company, and stimulation. I had no interest in thinking about anything. How did I feel? Like a dog, content with the gifts dispensed by a benign and responsible owner. There was only a comfortable present. After the chain and straightjacket, the padded restraints were a luxurious caress. Until that moment, I felt gratitude. But now this peaceful interlude was at an end as my mind struggled with the implications of the fact that the period of my dark self-embrace in the cell at Castle Williams had been only five weeks.
What happened next seems sufficiently ordinary as to hardly merit reminiscence. During the entire time at the castle, I had not thought once about Sanjay. Now I dreamed every night about the stoning. In most dreams I managed to hang on and endure the stoning, usually waking at the moment I lost consciousness in the dream. Sometimes I told him jokes. Sometimes he comforted me. Sometimes I swore vengeance. Sometimes I lost my grip and was dragged away by the guards. In my waking hours, I thought obsessively about the hunger strike, ridiculing my plan and chiding myself for the childish illusion that I was engaged in something meaningful.
Within a few days I had sunk into the most conventional of depressions. The pretty nurse and therapist, the animated oak shadows on the wall—all the ornaments of my little world lost their appeal. I was unable to make the simplest decision, and not, strangely, merely from lack of caring (although it is true that I didn’t care) but from some distinct mental disability.
“Orange juice this morning, Sugar? Or grapefruit?”
I actually struggled with the decision, straining to figure out the answer. When I gave up, it became another failure with which to torment myself. Despite Adam’s urgings, I don’t think I have anything to add to the rich literature of clinical depression. My fatigue was continuous. I was consumed by feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing. More than anything else, I believed with utter conviction that the days and nights of lurching from hurt to hurt was my new and permanent normal. Even suicide, the last refuge of the depressed, was cruelly denied to me. I could stop eating, but they would feed me intravenously. Yes, it was a lighted room with a soft bed, but it was much worse than being strapped and chained in the darkness. Finally, I knew the true meaning of despair. My condition must have been obvious to the nurses and whoever monitored the video feed from my room. But I was left, strapped to the bed, to sink deeper and deeper into despondency.
One morning in April, with no apparent precipitating factor, I had an idea that quickly became an idée fixe: hell. My God, I thought, they were right. There is a hell. I know because I am in it. And it is something completely supernatural, something surely not of this world. My lawyer’s mind ran with the idea. Never-ending torment, my new reality, was something impossible for any man to cause. I didn’t choose it or make it, nor did they. It was, simply, something outside nature and outside human nature. Therefore, there must be a God or at least something like a God. If there was, and if this God had created this hell for me, then this God could end it. End it. The seemingly impossible notion that there could be an end to my suffering floated there miraculously. The impossible suddenly seemed possible.
I asked the nurse to send a chaplain. Fifteen minutes later, one of the camp clergy, whom I knew from daily prayers and Bible study, entered my room and sat by the side of the bed. He was the first person, other than the nurse and physical therapist, I had seen or spoken to since leaving the castle. He waited for me to speak.
“Reverend,” I said, weeping, “it happened. This morning. I finally understood. My God, it’s true. There is a God. There is a heaven and a hell. I can see it now. So clearly. Why? Why couldn’t I see it before?”
“What do you mean, son? What do you see?”
“I see that I am, am … nothing. I am worthless. A speck of dust. I mean nothing apart from Him—apart from creation, apart from the creator, apart from God. And I don’t know what, what I have done or been or said, but He has punished me. And I am in hell. A hell only He could conjure. A hell so terrible, so hopeless that I cannot bear it. And there, right in front of me—right inside me, was my redemption. He sent me this hell. He can take it away. That’s what I have figured out. That’s what I now know. I pray to God with all my heart to take away my suffering.”
“Are you a sinner?” he asked.
“Yes, yes, a sinner,” I said. “How else, why else would I be in this hell? I must be a sinner. I am a sinner.”
“And do you repent your sins?”
“Repent? My God, if that’s what brought me to this place, then I regret them more than anything. Would that I could undo whatever I did to offend God and never have experienced this pain. I would give anything, everything.” My sobs flowed from the gut, nearly choking me. I had never wept like this in my life. I was practically hysterical.
“Is your heart open to God and His son, Jesus? Do you want the redemption of Jesus Christ?”
“Yes, yes,” I cried, “I want it more than anything else I have ever wanted.” And I had never spoke a truer word. My whole being was an open wound. My soul was empty and crying out to be taken and filled.
“Pray with me, son. ‘I believe in you, Jesus. I accept you. Please come into my life. I commit it to you.’ ”
“Lord Jesus, I believe in you. I accept you. Please come into my life. I commit it to you,” I stammered.
“Son, you repeat that prayer. You keep that feeling. You open your heart to Jesus and, if you truly repent your sins, and if your heart is truly open to the Lord, he will come in and you will experience the most wonderful thing a man can experience, the taking of your life by Jesus, the certainty of eternal salvation, and your rebirth in Christ. Keep praying, son.
I will come see you tomorrow.”
For three days I lived as an open wound. Inside out. My whole being nothing more than a desperate hollowness longing to be filled. I begged and begged, and cried and cajoled for Jesus to enter my heart. I begged the Lord to end my pain. I promised I would do, say, believe, and be anything if he would lift the hell.
The pastor sat by my bed each day and did his best to give me strength.
“If Jesus has not entered your heart,” he said, “it is because some corner, some part of your being remains closed to his love. Some part of your repentance is imperfect. Some pride remains.”
Sometime on the third sleepless night, a startling calm took hold of my troubled mind. For the first time since the stoning, my conscious self felt familiar. And then I seemed to float to the ceiling, look down at my pale body strapped to the hospital bed, and see everything clearly. In a single insightful flash, I understood it all: In the depths of depression and despair, I had opened my heart. I was as ready for redemption as any man could be. I had never wanted anything more completely or more genuinely. But no one was home. No redemption came because there was no redeemer. I had, like a child, longed for a miracle to put an end to my troubles, but the miracle hadn’t come, and I was, again, on my own. And that was fine. It was how I was born and how I would die. It was the human condition and it was OK.
I was stunned but alert. I felt that peculiar ease of thinking that follows restorative oblivion. By morning I had a plan. During the hour before the nurse arrived to take my blood pressure, I did ujjayi breathing exercises—long, slow, slightly constrained inhales and exhales taught to me by Sanjay to lower my blood pressure and lock in the calmness in my mind. I carefully remembered and organized everything I knew about the born-again experience, developed my script, and rehearsed it over and over in my head. When the pastor arrived, I was both the physical and mental picture of equanimity.
“My son, what’s happened?”
“Just as you said, Reverend. Last night, just when I thought I could go no lower, I was filled with a strange peace. I felt—well, free—for the first time in my life. Where only a moment before there was a most terrible emptiness, there was a fullness, a …”
At this point I teared up and choked, and for the first time I smiled faintly.
“… a joy. And he was here. Just as surely as you are there. Jesus was in my heart. I didn’t have to ask or beg or grasp or try. The moment I was fully open, there he was. And he was pure light, and perfection, and love and grace and … I just cannot describe …”
“Thanks be to God.”
During the next two weeks, a series of camp chaplains and doctors came to interview me. My appetite returned, and I had no physical symptoms. When the room was empty and my only audience was the video camera that I knew must be somewhere, I moved my mouth in silent, and sometimes whispered, prayer. I did not complain, and when the restraints were removed I asked for nothing other than a Bible.
During the balance of my time at GI, I never indicated to a single one of my fellow prisoners, by so much as a wink or grin or raised eyebrow, that I harbored the least bit of skepticism or discontent with the Christian Nation program. I led Bible study and was a model prisoner. I was released two months before the three-year deadline, my death sentence commuted.
Until the last hour, when my fingers tapped out the truth for any reader of these words to discover, I have lived this lie to perfection. My actions and words became automatic. I taught myself to believe that I was saved, to ease the burden of dissembling. For five years I have lived the lie, not half-heartedly, not incompletely, but so thoroughly as to call into question what really happened that night. All the evidence in the world points to the fact that I was born again that Easter Sunday 2023, six months to the day after Sanjay Sharma’s death. Only I, and now you, know it to be untrue.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Christian Nation
2024–2029
“Ordinary,” said Aunt Lydia, “is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”
—Margaret Atwood,
The Handmaid’s Tale
Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
—Doremus Jessup,
in It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis
AT THE END OF MY OUTPLACEMENT appointment in a small office next to the ferry waiting room, my counselor opened the familiar white box with the embossed Apple logo. “This is an i20 Device. Only the best for our graduates,” he said, attempting a joke.
The top of the thing looked a bit like the iPhone that had been taken from me three years previously, upon arriving at GI. But it was thin and much smaller, like an overscaled wristwatch. And I was surprised to see when he took it out of the box that it was somewhat flexible.
“Is it a phone or a little iPad or what?” I asked.
“I still find it funny that you guys don’t know. Everyone in the country has one now. And I mean everyone. It’s a Device; it does everything. All you need.”
The wafer-like Device had a wrist strap that was dark gray, extremely thin, and made from some kind of woven metal. A golden cross was embossed on the outside of the band.
He saw me looking at the cross. “For born agains. So you know. You know who you can … count on,” he said somewhat cryptically. “You a righty?” I nodded. “Put out your left hand, then.” He continued, “You can take it off, but you need to keep it with you at all times. Do you understand? It’s important. Serious stuff if they find you without it.”
I waited patiently over an hour for the clean white ferryboat, bearing the familiar Faith & Freedom Rehabilitation Facility logo on its superstructure, to return to the dock. The ferry ride covering the half mile from Governors Island to the tip of Manhattan took no more than ten minutes, but I was transported by that short trip from one world to another. As I set foot on the ferry, I thought of all the millions of prisoners in human history who stood before the prison gate, watched it open, and then—with the hesitation and reluctance with which we receive all things devoutly sought—stepped through into a place where all their suffering meant nothing.
The Governors Island ferry terminal in Manhattan is directly across the street from my old office building. Walking down the terminal steps, I looked up at the corner windows behind which my former partners still sat, and the middle windows behind which a new generation of associates, who most likely had never heard of me, strived to become the lawyers that the firm wanted them to be. I sat on the step, gazing up, wondering. I saw a few fleeting silhouettes against the glass and remembered a favorite scene from the opera version of Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway sits and watches from outside a party under a tent, seeing on the white sides of the tent the shadows of partygoers dancing. I briefly wondered if I always had been an outsider, like Nick, and then realized that it no longer mattered. I had made my decision and had never once regretted it.
I crossed the plaza in front of South Ferry. The taxis were still yellow. The Staten Island ferry was still orange. New Yorkers still wore black. I saw the Nike swoosh. A breeze brought the sweet, salty odor of the nut cart. I sat on a bench. Things seemed completely normal. Secretaries wore sneakers and carried their good shoes in a fashionable bag. Junior bankers and lawyers, looking impossibly young and glowing with confidence and ambition, wore well-shined shoes and new suits and walked with long and purposeful strides. Normal. Tourists poured from the subway, confused about how to get to the Statue of Liberty. All normal. What was I expecting? Women in burkas? Zealots with machine guns? The call to prayer echoing through the canyons of Wall Street? That was what a theocracy was supposed to look like. This looked like the Financial District at the tail end of morning rush hour.
The siege and Battle of the Battery, how
ever, had happened. I looked closely at the plaza in front of the ferry terminal, remembering how it looked the morning we were marched across the same plaza and taken to Governors Island. There had been concrete barricades and rolls of barbed wire, three crashed helicopters, and long black scars on the sides of the office buildings along Battery Place. And every square foot of the plaza was covered with vegetable beds and hoop houses. Lush ripe tomatoes tumbled from a scaffolding made of wire hangers. Spinach grew at the base of the trees. Zucchini squash climbed the columns of the covered walkway where people now waited for uptown buses. All that was gone. I did not see a forgotten bamboo stake, a piece of twine, or a single vegetable seedling forcing its way up through a crack in the concrete. The Manhattan of the siege was eradicated. It might never have happened.
I wandered into Battery Park looking for any sign of the battle fought there just over three years before. I walked over to the East Coast World War II memorial. Surely, no matter how hard they had scrubbed, there would be a faint shadow of the pool of blood in which my friend Matthew had died. I stood below the tall granite slab engraved with the names of the World War II dead, below the same wall of names that had protected me from the first wave of their assault, at the exact place where Matthew lost half his face, and I found no trace of what had happened at that spot. I turned to the wall of names, looking for the pockmarks that would have to remain to tell the story of the bullets that flew that day in August. Again, nothing. The monument appeared pristine. I closed my eyes and touched the wall. And then I felt it. The slight indentations where the bullet holes had been filled. One after another, creating a rippled cratered surface revealing itself to my touch. I stood with my hand on the cool stone caressing the granite surface until I sensed someone nearby and opened my eyes. A well-dressed man, about my age, was standing close by.
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