Outer Banks

by Russell Banks

  It thus happened that one particularly sour and chilled December noontime, when my wife came unto me and entered my cell, and when the jailor had left us alone and had returned to his post below, the close heat of my cell swiftly brought a blush to her face and encouraged her to unwrap her scarf and shawl, which revealed in the glow of the brazier and my reading candle an illusory fullness through her hips and breasts, an illusory healthy roundness to her arms, and great warmth of illusory color in her throat. I declare it illusory simply because I well knew that the woman had long been ill and pinched by pain and that in my absence she had been forced frequently to deprive herself so that the plates of my children, her step-children, could be filled. Further, I declare it illusory so that it may be known abroad that she did in no way provoke me or otherwise draw from me lustful ambitions. They existed prior to her arrival that noontime and they merely used her presence as an occasion to arise and make themselves known to us. The woman lived purely. She wished no more than to let me beget a new child upon her, a child of her own who would be able someday to tender proper mercy to her when she herself had joined the blessed dead. I, I was the one who had no pure thoughts that day, no thoughts of an unborn child coming to life so as to bless me in death, I was the one whose lust had no ambition other than its own satisfaction, a means with no end, a cause with no effect.

  Therefore did I reach out and paw her soft body and draw her to me, and then did I wrench her dress from her body and expose her creamy surface to the flick of candle light and the steady glow of the reddened coals in the brazier, and then did I strip my trousers off, and pulling my wife down, did I cover her with my body and swarm over her for a great long time, until at last did I fall away and, exhausted, uncouple from her.

  At first, my response to this act was, of all the possible responses then available to me, the weakest one. I strode down the path of least resistance, as it were, by simply refusing to acknowledge this lustful seizure and the seizures that regularly every afternoon followed it, like links in a binding chain, as being anything more than some natural expression of my body, no less natural than the continued growth of the hair of my head or the hair of my beard or the nails of my fingers and toes. This insistance upon the naturalness of my act was, of course, as the reader must know all too well, nothing but a means of construing the situation so as to be better able to repeat the act, over and over, day after day, until it had become a hideous habit and there seemed to be no way of separating the head of it from the tail. Each time after my wife had wrapped herself once again modestly in her scarf and shawl and had left my presence, I would groan aloud and beat my breast with shame, and each time, before long, I would start up with assurances that what I was doing was no more than any man’s body, so deprived by imprisonment, would wish him to do. I even contrived a clever guard against shame by wheedling out of my intelligence this argument: that to berate myself for having fallen into lustful copulation was to give an unnatural attention to things and events of this life, which was unnecessarily and sinfully to pull my proper attention away from contemplation of the dead. And like a true sophist, I even used scripture to woo me from self-disgust. Leave off undue fascination with and morbid examination of things of the body, I told myself, quoting the sacred book of Walter (x, 42). Thus did I not only debase myself, but I debased the words of the sainted dead as well. And all this in but the very beginnings of my period of transgression! I elaborate on and attend to it here solely that the reader will know that I too have been confronted by the forces of life that would demean and destroy our faith, and I too have walked across the barren desert of my own weakness and have come to the mountains beyond, and I have at last ascended those mountains. I have endured as all men may endure, if they will but will it.

  From here my debauch, like a tropical river, broadened and deepened, until it seemed to flow irresistably into a sea of life, a tepid expanse where nothing but teeming forgetfulness and transience may exist, where the permanence of remembered death is denied a place and the singleness of mortal existence, our movement from life to death, has no meaning. For not only did I begin to curtail by an increasing amount of time the period of instruction and prayer each afternoon with my wife, so that I could squirm and roll with her on the mat in the darkened corner of my cell, but I began to vary from one day to the next the modes and positions of our interpenetration. This was, to be sure, a consequence of the regularity of our unbridled comings together, a way of avoiding contact with and recognition of our essential boredom with the act and our deep knowledge of its superfluity and utter gratuitousness, for we had long since removed ourselves from any possible rationalizations such as the begetting of new children. It may also have been the consequence of a newly released idle curiosity. (I credit this motive only to myself; I know that my wife never experienced such a loathsome provocation.) But whatever the cause, before long we were engaged in acts that could only be named beastly, in positions that could only be described as perverse or, if one were inclined toward compassion, as pathetic or, if one were maliciously detached, as comic. And we worked heatedly and furiously, as if we were about to be interrupted and publicly exposed while in the midst of our abominations.

  Which, unhappily, is what happened. One afternoon in late December, when my wife and I were feverishly engaged in copulation, from a position that in retrospect now appears grotesque but which at the time functioned on my visual sense so as to draw forward from me a great long surge of erotic attention, my new jailor, a man named Jacob Moon, suddenly appeared at my cell door, which, as was the practice with political and religious prisoners, perpetrators of what were then called crimes of conscience, lay open and unlocked. It was only at night or during a rare emergency or during the visit of some legal dignitary that the cell doors in my section of the prison were closed and locked. This relative freedom of movement was considered a privilege and, more importantly, a tacit acknowledgement of the vague and ambiguous terms of our crimes and the punishments attached thereto, for during those years both the prisoners and the authorities felt that it was to their respective group’s advantage to perpetuate for as long as possible the vagueness and ambiguity of the terms of the crimes and punishments. Now, of course, both parties have taken the opposite position, which accounts for all the recent bouts of litigation, the continuous appeals to higher courts, the rising income of attorneys, and the facts that the cell doors are locked at all times and that many other amenities, such as my coal brazier, have been eliminated. For nowadays the prisoners have come to feel that they must be either wholly free or wholly imprisoned. In previous years, however, since they had feared that the only alternative available to them was total imprisonment and that total freedom was out of the question, and since the authorities feared that total freedom was the option and that total imprisonment was out of the question, both groups had struggled to achieve the mid-point between, a compromise that, because it denied both parties’ worst fears, satisfied everyone. At present neither party is satisfied. And therefore, one of my several tasks here, as I see it, is to try to show both parties the wisdom of the old way.

  Jacob Moon was John Bethel’s replacement as chief jailor, but in no other way was he that man’s replacement. He was not unfriendly, and he was not unkind to the prisoners, neither was he especially efficient nor especially inefficient as manager of our confinement. He had been, up to this moment of his discovery of my wife and myself in a particularly humiliating circumstance, a man who had struck me by his strikingly ordinary manner of doing his job and by a singular lack of curiosity or interest in the lives and minds of the often quite interesting and enriching individuals under his care. He did seem, however, to come to life that afternoon, and with a forthrightness that surprised me, he asked if he could join me and my wife. His request was tenderly put, and because it came at precisely the moment of my and my wife’s greatest sensual arousal, I signalled him impatiently to enter the cell and to join us, which he proceeded to do in quite a matter of fact ma
nner, as if it were his habit or custom so to find himself on an otherwise uneventful mid-winter afternoon.

  Naturally, I was afterwards filled with great remorse and shame. Not only had I debauched myself and transgressed the teachings of my faith, but I had also led my wife, my poor trusting wife, into debauchery and transgression likewise, and here I was now, leading yet a third person into debauchery and transgression. The fact that Jacob Moon, or Jake, as we came to call him, was not of our faith in no way lessened his transgression or my responsibility for it. The scriptures say, If you would transport yourself unto the dead, you must also transport others, and if you refuse to transport others thither, the gate shall be closed to you also. (II Craig., xxii, 43.)

  My wife and Jake attempted to calm me and tried valiantly to purge me of guilt by asserting that I was not responsible for their participation, and for a brief period I was sufficiently weak and spiritless (in will, for my appetites were extremely strong) to believe them, so that I was then of a mind that the only weakness I was contending with, the only one I had to feel guilty for, was my own, a vain fantasy, I now realize, but one that I clung to during those horrible months with the desperation of a man drowning in a sea of overpowering desire. During this period I turned with embarrassment away from prayer and scripture, and also I gradually gave up attempting to explain the ethics and metaphysics of my faith, upon which I heretofore had expended great energy, time and ingenuity in conversation with my wife and, now and again when she accompanied my wife, her cousin Gina.

  I cannot blame any of these three good people for having joined me in my debauch. I blame only myself, for clearly, if I had not permitted it, if I had not given myself over with such foolish abandon to the physical pleasures offered by my wife’s body, if I had not permitted Jake that afternoon to enter my cell but had instead reacted with proper horror and self-loathing at his proposal, and if the following week I had not permitted Gina to give herself over to Jake’s demands, and then later had not allowed myself to answer her wild cries for satisfaction or my wife’s child-like demands for equal attention from Jake, if at the beginning or at any point along this long, satiny, declining path I had stood up and had said, No! and in that humble way had begun again to turn my attention back to the dead, then none of it would have occurred. I here publicly admit my failure and in this way offer to the dead what meager mercy and remembrance I am capable, in such a fallen state, of offering.

  My strength did eventually, though only partially, come back to me, yet it came suddenly, like a room filling with darkness when a candle is extinguished. It came back to me in full force much later, however, and only on the day when I finally obtained my coffin again, an event of great magnitude, coming as it did after such sustained desolation. And then once again would it be proved to me that solely by the careful and proper observation of rite and ceremony and the methodical, informed use of artifact may the mind of the living be permitted the transcendent experience of contemplation of the dead, which in turn is the only way to obtain a proper understanding of the meaning of life. All other means, despite the best of intentions, are but approximate and ultimately misleading. And innocence leads nowhere at all. (The Book of Discipline, viii, 23-25.)

  How it came to pass that I obtained a new coffin will be described near the end of this testament. In the meantime, let the reader imagine me, in the descriptions to follow immediately, as daily, usually in the afternoons, engaging in the awful practices and depravities I have described above, while during the mornings and evenings I passed my time in peaceful argument with my jailor (for we had become brothers of a sort and an exchange of views between us was a natural extension of our new affiliation) and also with diverse other prisoners who were of a religious turn of mind but who were not of my faith. For my purpose now is to reveal how the mind of the fallen man, the man who has allowed his attention to wander off the dead and fix itself onto the living only, swiftly divides itself into segments, boxes of thought, attitude and activity with no necessary or discernible link, consistency or communication between them, resulting inevitably in that pathetic and sorrowful figure, the man of time.

  THE MAN OF time is without self-unity. I was now such a man. Every day early in the day, I hailed my jailor Jacob Moon in his office at the bottom of the stone staircase that spined the prison, and upon first catching sight of his grim and wholly pragmatic face, the face of a man who had long ago made of himself a tool to fit what he regarded as the job of life, I instantly arranged my own face into a matching mask, and because he never signalled with a wave or other such greeting gesture, neither would I make any gesture. After I had initially hailed him with the sober utterance of his name, Jacob, I merely entered his office and leaned against the jambs, like a wrench or sledge hammer laid there by a workman, and we commenced to speak, drily and without feeling, of economic and political affairs in foreign lands or the difficulties encountered by certain civil engineering projects or the desirability of a central heating system for the prison.

  Gone from me now the glorious, unifying vision that had come to me with my faith when I was but a boy. Gone from me now the work of my calling, which was to make coffins. Gone from me the ways of being used in a process larger than that of my own decaying body’s, gone from me the affectionate need of the community. Gone from me now even the need of my brethren in the faith, for not enough of them had followed to where I had been led, and then only a few had known, until this account, my reasons for having forsaken death and clung to imprisonment. And gone from me the urgent presence of my five children, their wonderings, their desires and needs that the incomprehensible be made comprehensible. And now, now, gone the cleaving presence and trust of my wife, for she more than any other person, except for me myself, knew now of my weakness and the state to which I had fallen. And finally, of greatest significance, gone from me the dead, gone timelessness, gone its continuous flow of wisdom, gone its absolute clarity. Gone from me now was I myself, and all that remained were the hard bright surfaces of a self that generated no light but merely reflected back whatever surfaces it met. For once a man loses his connection with whatever looms forever larger than himself, he has lost himself as well. He exists solely as a nexus after that, a mere contingency, a crossroads without a place name.

  So it began to appear to me that I was utterly dependent upon the nature and character of whomever I met, before I could reveal any particular nature or character of my own. Unless I could locate clues and hints as to the forms a person used to present himself and deal with other people, which clues and hints would lead me to design appropriate forms for me to present myself back to him, then I trembled all over my body, I whimpered and spoke with an uncontrollable stammer, I fairly well wept with terror. For I had become the man of time. I had lost myself, and lost, I moved in a found world, a very real place that was stuffed to brimming with very real and threatening human beings, animals, plants, powerful objects of all possible descriptions. Nothing there was then that did not fill me with terror and confusion. Though you are seen, you cannot see, and though you are heard, you cannot hear, and though others will walk along with you, you may not walk along with them. For such is the punishment made for the man who has exchanged what is absent for what he cannot avoid. (The Book of Discipline, iii, 30-31.)

  Every day I left my cell at dawn, and affecting gaiety, strolled to the dining hall, there to sit among my fellow prisoners and exchange views and idle thoughts while eating our usual breakfast of bread and porridge. To be sure, my stance and affect were those of a game man, a courageous fellow full of wit and intelligence, yet all the while I trembled inside, all the while I guessed and hoped and tried on faces and phrases rapidly, one after the other, eagerly awaiting the click of recognition in the eyes of the man sitting at table across from me or the sleepy eyes of the bland steward handing me my meager meal across the counter or the eyes of the guard at the door as I passed out of the dining hall to the corridor and, desperate for confirmation, found myself rushi
ng down the stairs to the office of the man I tried to think of as my brother, for he was a man I had come to know solely by means of and in the terms of my fall from faith, and it had come to me in my moral confusion of that period that if I could love my jailor, I could perhaps learn to love myself, or what at that time claimed to be myself.

  Fortunately, however, this feat was not to be accomplished. Jacob Moon was a grim man and also, as I have said, most characteristically a pragmatic man. He did not smile so much as, at moments of gaiety or high mirth, he grimaced. As, for instance, when once a donkey wandered into the prison from the street and soon had lost itself in the maze of corridors and common rooms and stairways, and as it was encountered suddenly and all out of any familiar context by one prisoner after another and one guard after another, discoveries that brought one prisoner and guard after another to the chief jailor’s office to report its, the donkey’s, presence, soon there had gathered at the office nearly all the prisoners and all the guards and assistant jailors and staff and even a few visitors, and still one or two more prisoners trickling in to file the identical report, that there was a donkey in the prison. The atmosphere of the gathering was jovial and easy, almost that of a holiday (for it was a particularly wintry day and the event was doubtless more diverting than if the prisoners had not felt quite so confined by the snow and cold), when at once the door to the street swung open and the chief of administration for all prisons entered, and he naturally demanded to know why the entire population of the prison had gathered here before him, to which Jacob Moon in all sincerity answered that it was because an ass had come in off the street, which statement caused a long, hearty chorus of laughter from all, even from the chief of administration himself, once it had been given him to trust that no one had intended any slight to his dignity or reputation for excellence, not to say brilliance. I myself, as the wave of laughter commenced to wash over the group, had quickly looked over the sea of faces to that of my jailor, so as to determine how he would express himself, so that I could know how I wished to express myself, and I saw his somber face spread tightly into the grimace of a man who hears laughter but no joke, and immediately I formed my face similarly. Not, I hasten to add, before I had first studied the face of the chief of administration, to be positive that he had heard and accepted the joke good naturedly.