Russell Banks - Outer Banks

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 manner, 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.)