James Frey - The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

It is finished .

Ben used to talk about our souls. Said the idea that we had souls was something silly. Ridiculous. Like something a child would think up. Said people who believed we had these spirits inside of us that would survive after we died was fools. That people was living their lives for something we didn’t even have. Something that wasn’t even possible. He used to say we had brains. It was all in our brains. And more and more and more, doctors and scientists and people who be living in the real world were coming to understand that everything we is, everything we feel, everything we know and experience, every emotion we got and every thought we got and all the pain we got and all the love we got, it all comes from our brains. There ain’t such a thing as a soul. You believe in that shit, you just stupid.

I don’t know exactly what happened. Doctors tried to explain it to me but nobody could ever get their story straight. They was all worried, nobody wanting to take the blame, nobody wanting to just admit that what happened is what happened. That’s how it is in America today. Everybody blaming everybody else. Even the fucking president do it. Used to be the buck stop here. Now it’s always somebody else fault, don’t blame me, I’ll take your money and fuck you but it ain’t ’cause of me. All I know is the end result. One of them killed Ben. They cut his brain and they couldn’t stop it bleeding and when they did it was already fucked. It was fucked beyond fixing. It was fucked beyond anything. Like he said, we ain’t alive ’cause we got souls, we alive ’cause we got brains.

When they finished with that surgery, he was gone, but there was enough of his brain left that he kept breathing. It was the most fucked thing I ever saw. This beautiful man, this man who knew shit nobody for thousands of years had known, this man who could change your life and change the fucking world, he was gone, but his body was still working. They laid him down in a bed and he stared at the ceiling. You sat him in a chair and he’d stare straight ahead. You’d turn him on his side and he’d stare at the fucking wall. He didn’t move. He couldn’t move. He’d blink but nothing else. They gave him all these tests. Testing his reflexes and whether he felt pain or whether he could hear somebody or know what they was saying. All negative. He was a shell. A body that could breathe and be alive but nothing else.

They moved him out of Bellevue. Said they needed more room for more of the crazy motherfuckers that was crazy for real. Sent him to some home in Brooklyn where he could be cared for. Cared for meant making sure his feeding tube was hooked up and his diapers was changed. It wasn’t hardly more than that. Sometimes they’d turn the channel on the TV they kept in the room. Sometimes they’d move him a little bit so his bedsores wouldn’t get infected. It was him and two other men in that room. One of them was a vegetable like Ben. Had been in a car wreck. Some drunkass had hit him. His wife would come every day and hold his hand and talk to him. She’d read him the Bible like she thought it was gonna do some fucking good. She’d get down on her knees and pray for him. The other man might as well have been a vegetable. He was a gay man who’d got beat for being gay. Nobody ever came to see him. Most of the time he was staring too, but every now and then he’d start groaning, trying to move. It was almost more sad ’cause he had some inkling he was fucked. Some inkling of what he used to be. Some inkling that he was alone and he was gonna be alone for the rest of his fucked-up miserable life. Most days the orderlies would just line the three of them up in front of the TV. They’d shit their pants and piss on themselves. If they was lucky, somebody would turn the channel. In some ways it wasn’t much different than how half the people in the fucking world lived. And whether they believed it or not, none of them, not Ben or the other two, or all the rest of the motherfuckers in the world, had a choice.

I came twice a week. I’d moved back to the Bronx. Back to the same apartment. After everybody heard what had happened, we left the farm. Maybe a few people stayed, but most of us went back to whatever we had been doing before we went there. We didn’t stop believing in what Ben taught us, or how we lived with him, we just spread back out. Decided to take it back to the real world. That’s how it always started. There was one person. One person who understood. Who could see. Who knew. And that person would share what they had, and it’d just spread ’cause everybody touched by that person would be sharing it. In Ben’s case there were enough of us. Enough to help each other and maybe some others. Enough to know what it felt like to feel real love. To see real love. To live with real love. To share real love. Love that wasn’t about hating or judging or where you was from or what color you was or where you grew up or who you loved. There was enough of us that had been changed that we could change some others. Change them over before all this shit goes fucking boom and explodes.

Mercedes had plenty of people helping out with her. She was growing up real sweet. She’d always ask if she could come see Ben ’cause she missed him so much. I’d kiss her goodbye and tell her some other time and ride the subway over and come and sit with him and hold his hand. I knew he couldn’t feel it, but I did it anyway. And I’d talk to him. Nothing like all that God bullshit the other man’s wife would talk about. Just tell him what was going on in my life. I was working at a clothing store. I was doing school at night to get my GED. I was starting Mercedes on letters and numbers so I could get her into a better school. And I was pregnant. I was pregnant with Ben’s baby. I knew he wouldn’t know, but I’d tell him anyway. I was gonna have his little baby.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been pregnant with him. First time was when we was at the farm. I’d known right after we got there and Ben and I talked about what to do and he said it was my choice. I asked about what God would say to him about that and he laughed and said God didn’t make choices about what women did with their bodies. Women got that right. Only women got that right. No man, no God, nobody else did. And he said if I didn’t want the baby, he would go with me, and hold my hand, and love me, and make sure I was okay when it was over. And we went, and he did what he said he would do, and it was the hardest moment of my life, but sometimes you got to make hard choices. And at that point, being on the road and not having no money and not having no idea about what the future would be doing, I couldn’t have that baby. I remember when we was walking in. All these people had signs about God and us being killers and was yelling at us. They had verses from the Bible on their t-shirts. Ben just smiled at them. And that got them real mad, even madder, and he just kept smiling. One of them got real close and called him a murderer and said he was going to burn in Hell. Ben took the man’s hand and kissed it, kissed it real soft and long, and it looked like that man was going to die, and his friends was all shocked. Ben let go of his hand and whispered something in his ear and the man smiled and hugged Ben and walked away. I ain’t got no idea what he said, just what I saw. Ben loving another man. There ain’t nothing wrong with a man loving another man. It’s all the same. It’s love.

I was keeping this baby, though. I wasn’t expecting it to be no Messiah or nothing like that. All I wanted was a healthy little baby. A healthy little child that was part me and part Ben, this man I loved with my whole heart, and this man that loved me, loved everyone he knew. I would tell Ben about how I was feeling, what I was feeling, what I was eating, the names I was thinking about, had some for if it were a boy, and some for if it were a girl. I’d tell him about my dreams, about how maybe we was gonna go back to the farm after I got my GED, about how maybe I hoped I’d fall in love again sometime. I’d tell him about how people was still showing up at the apartment sometimes looking for him and people was still talking about him in the ghetto and the jail. When I got sad, and I always did get sad, looking at that shell where there was once a beautiful man, looking at the vegetable where there was once the man I loved, I’d tell him how much I missed him and loved him and wished he’d come back to me. I’d ask him to perform one of his miracles on himself, to make himself better, to heal himself so he could get up and walk again, and talk again, and smile again, and hold my hand again, and kiss me again, and say my name again, just one more time I wanted to hear him say my name, and I wanted him to love me again, and make me feel perfect and beautiful and peaceful and safe again. I’d ask him, and say do it Ben, please do it for me, but he wouldn’t do nothing. And even if he could, I knew he wouldn’t. Thing about him that made him what he was and who he was, if he had one more miracle, one more hiding in his back pocket, one more hidden in his cheek, he’d use it on someone else. If he had two, he’d use both on other peoples. If he had three, there’d be three lucky motherfuckers out there. He wouldn’t ever do nothing for himself. He’d always give before he take. He was giving until it all got took.