Chapter 12

12

Grace means that all of your mistakes now serve a purpose instead of serving shame.

—Brené Brown

Lower East Side

One Year Ago

“I’m glad to see you again,” Kenji says.

He’s standing with his hands tucked inside his long black jacket, and he offers me a little bow. I offer one in return. He’s a bit older now, his hair a little more gray, but he looks different than that last time I saw him, on that snowy rooftop.

He doesn’t seem as burdened.

He also snuck up on me, which is a hard thing to do. I guess some skills never go away.

“Long way from Prague,” I tell him.

“Would you walk with me, Mark?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, sensing I will. We weave though the dense crowd on Delancey Street. It’s a Tuesday. Three whole days since I tried to end my own life and then found P. Kitty, and I’m taking that as a win. The thought of finishing the job snuck up a few times since then and lucky for me the cat would always do something dumb—go in the bathroom and cry at the tub or fall off the bookcase.

It was just enough to get me to open the paper crane, inside of which was the password for the forum on the Via Maris: anxious phoenix.

We walk for a bit until Kenji stops in front of a dilapidated church. The doors are painted red, worn and beaten by age. The stone fa?ade is crumbling. Had we not stopped here, I might have walked past and not even registered it.

“Do you know the story of St. Dymphna?” Kenji asks.

“I know there’s a bar in Alphabet City named after him. That’s the best I got.”

Kenji nods. “ Her. St. Dymphna was a princess, born in Ireland in the seventh century. When she was fourteen she swore a vow to Christ. Shortly after, her mother died. Her father was a petty king. He took the death very hard and searched far and wide, looking for a woman to marry who matched his wife’s beauty. He eventually settled on his own daughter.”

“Gross,” I tell him.

He doesn’t laugh. “She fled to Belgium, where she opened a hospital for the poor and sick. A year later her father found her, and when she rejected his advances, he cut off her head.”

“That’s some real family dysfunction there.”

Kenji turns and gives me a hard little stare.

“Sorry,” I tell him. “Please.”

“A church was built in her honor in Geel, the town in Belgium where she died,” he says. “People came from all over Europe, seeking help for psychiatric conditions. Thus began a tradition that still persists today, where the people of Geel take in those who are sick and suffering. They call them boarders, not patients. They are welcomed as part of people’s families. It is not meant to be treatment or therapy. It is purely a thread of kindness that has stretched for hundreds of years.

“This church is named after her. This is where we meet. Every Tuesday night. We picked this location because the pastor is a friend, and I knew we could be safe here. I do not believe in coincidence, but the name of it felt a bit like providence.”

We stand there in the silence, surveying the building.

“There are rules,” Kenji says without looking at me. “We are modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous, but the meetings are small, so they can be less structured. We do not reveal the names we worked under, and we do the best we can to obscure our political affiliations. That is for everyone’s safety. No one must know you are the Pale Horse but me.”

“Thank you.”

“Normally there is a vetting process,” Kenji says. “And that takes time. But from what I see, I believe you are ready to join us tonight.”

“And what do you see?”

He turns to me, looking me up and down, and zeroes in on my eyes. His gaze is so searching I feel compelled to hide from it, but I know that’s not the thing to do. The thing to do is stand here and let him see me.

“Sadness, that you carry like an anchor,” he says. “But more than that, a desire to put the anchor down rather than follow it into the deep.”

“Sounds about right.”

He leads me to the side of the church, down a short flight of stone stairs, and through a door, then a darkened hallway, and around a corner. The church basement is sparse, but large enough to fit a few dozen people for a mixer or a fund-raiser. There’s a folding table holding a coffeepot and an open box of donuts. The walls are robin’s-egg blue and the floor is a black-and-white-checkered pattern.

In the center of the room are four chairs facing each other, just close enough that the people sitting in them could lean forward and stretch and hold hands. Two of those seats are occupied: a Hispanic woman and a Black man, both of them immediately recognizable by the smell of gunpowder in their blood.

“This the guy?” the Black man asks. “Doesn’t look very tough. You sure he’s one of us?”

I get a little closer, let his eyes meet mine, and he nods.

“Yeah, guess he is.” He offers me his hand and we shake. “Booker.”

The Hispanic woman offers me her hand. “Valencia.”

I return the shake. “Like the orange.”

“No,” she says, pulling her hand away, her face going dark. “Never like the orange.”

Booker puts his hands up. “This is a safe space for everything but that.”

I put my hands up in mock surrender and look around. Kenji gestures to the folding table. I pour myself a cup of coffee, just to have something to do with my hands.

“Now,” Kenji says as I sit, placing down a small silver lipstick-sized device. “This will disable any listening or recording devices and obscure our voices. A measure of security, given the things we discuss. And at the start of every meeting, we review the steps:

“One, we admit we are powerless—that our lives have become unmanageable.

“Two, we come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

“Three, we make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a higher power, as we understand it.

“Four, we make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

“Five, we admit to our higher power, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

“Six, we are ready to have our higher power remove all these defects of character.

“Seven, we humbly ask it to remove those shortcomings.

“Eight, we make a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.

“Nine, we make direct amends to such people, wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

“Ten, we continue to take a personal inventory, and when we are wrong, promptly admit it.

“Eleven, we seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with our higher power, as we understand it, praying only for knowledge of its will for us and the power to carry that out.

“Twelve, having had a spiritual awakening as the result of the steps, we try to carry this message to others like us, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

Kenji pauses, giving the words a moment to sink in. Then he says, “No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints…”

“Damn straight,” Booker mutters.

“The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines,” Kenji says. “Now, Mark, as this is your first meeting, you’re welcome to share. Would you like to tell us what brought you here?”

My head spins a little. I’m not used to talking about my job. Or my feelings. Or anything at all, really. And here are three people waiting for me to open my wrist and spill blood all over the floor. I press my hands together, crack my knuckles, hoping words manage to spring forth, but not really knowing what to say.

Booker raises his hand, a pair of wooden rosary beads wrapped around his palm and dangling down his wrist. “I can share. To get us started.”

His voice sounds different. Softer now, and warmer. I nod at him.

“My name is Booker and I haven’t killed anyone in two years,” he says. “So for the past week I’ve been doing this guided meditation to get to sleep at night. I thought it was working pretty good. And then last night I woke up in the middle of the night, and he was back, like he never left. The boy…”

His voice drifts and his eyes grow dark, then sad.

“It was a night mission, and we had bad intel. Everyone in the house was supposed to be fighters on the other side. When the bullets stopped flying and we tried to clear the place, I found him. He had gotten out of bed, made it halfway across his bedroom. I don’t know if it was my shots that cut him down. Probably not; this was on the second floor and I was on the first. But I was there, you know? I was part of it. And so last night, I woke up in the middle of the night, which happens, you know, going in and out of sleep.”

He drops his eyes to his hands, which he folds in his lap.

“The boy was standing at the foot of my bed. He’s a regular, so I see him pretty often. But I guess, four nights is the longest I’ve gone without seeing one, you know? And so I thought maybe I’m out of this. Maybe this meditation thing is working. I got so mad. Like, man, I thought this worked. It made me mad at the world. At the people I used to work for.” He regards the rosary wrapped around his hand. “You spend your whole life learning ‘thou shalt not kill,’ and then you get in the service and it’s ‘thou shalt not kill, unless we tell you, then it’s fine.’ How doesn’t that mess you up?

“Anyway. I wanted to say I was sorry. But it’s always the same. When I see them, something happens. I can’t speak. One of the PTSD docs told me it was a night terror. That it was a dream and I just believe it’s real. I think he’s full of shit. Things are always weird in dreams, right? Nothing ever looks right. But every detail, from the color of my sheets to the curtain over the window to the two bullet holes in the kid’s chest—spot on. And then how do you account for the ones I see during the day? I feel silly even saying any of this…”

He pauses. I speak before I even realize I’m going to do it. “Have you tried melatonin?”

He frowns. “Gave me nightmares. Vivid ones.”

“Crosstalk,” Valencia says.

“Crosstalk?” I ask.

Kenji nods. “In meetings we’re supposed to let people complete their shares without offering advice or judgment.”

“Except we end up doing that anyway,” Booker says with a smirk.

“We never said we were perfect,” Kenji says.

Everyone looks at me again.

“It’s the god stuff that’s throwing me,” I say, a little spark of anger flaring in my chest. “That higher-power thing. I’m supposed to believe in god after the things I’ve done?”

Kenji shakes his head. “It doesn’t have to be god. It just has to be something greater than you. It can be god, or the Buddha. Nature, or consciousness. This is especially important for people like us. We acted like gods. Sometimes we need to be reminded that there are powers beyond us, because one of our greatest weaknesses was the way we were seduced by our own power. There’s a saying in AA: Let go and let god. I believe it to be a good motto. It reminds us to recognize that decisions over life and death are not for us to make.”

It’s not the answer I came in here looking for, but it feels like it’s approaching one.

“If you’d prefer not to share…” Kenji says.

“A few nights ago…” I say, then I stop. “Actually, I’m sorry. Hi, my name is Mark and it’s been, uh, three days since I killed someone. So, I met this woman. And I fell for her, hard. I never told her what I did for a living. I did what I’m used to, you know? Made up a lie. We dated for nearly a year, and man, every time I looked at her, it was like seeing a sunrise for the first time. She gave me this feeling of peace, I guess, that I never really had. I was ready to hang it all up for her. But then, Christmas Eve. Her brother came into the house in the middle of the night. He was there to surprise her, to drop off presents. But I was awake. And of course, I figure this is someone here for me…”

I rub the cuts on my knuckles hard enough to bring the pain back.

“I was angry, that someone wanted to take that peace from me, so I killed him. Didn’t even think. Just did it. Killed her brother. Turns out, she was pregnant, too. And I never wanted to be a dad. It’s not something I ever really thought about. But when I found out, I realized I had this chance to create a better version of myself, and I ruined it. Then I went home and thought about eating my SIG. Then I met a cat. Then I got in touch with Kenji. Now I’m here.”

Everyone nods slowly, creating a space for these feelings to reverberate through the room.

“I just keep thinking about that first night I met her. It was February, and there were these trees around Bryant Park, and they looked like hands. Like skeletal hands reaching up to the moon, which was glowing in the sky. And removed from the context I guess it seems like a bit of a spooky image. But I keep thinking about how those limbs were reaching for something beyond their grasp. And that’s what being with her felt like. Like there was something greater I could be reaching for. Something beyond myself, but I guess, also within myself? I don’t know. Like, the more you reach the more you realize there’s something worth reaching for…”

The words I’ve been struggling to find finally come to me.

“Before I met her, my life felt very small. And afterward, it felt a lot bigger. I know that I’ve made mistakes, and I don’t want to be those mistakes. I want to be something else. I don’t know what that something else is. I just know that I want it.”

Valencia leans forward and squeezes my hand.

“You don’t need to know why you’re here,” she says. “You just need to be here.”

“I just…”

There’s more I want to say, but the sob that’s been building in my chest explodes outward, and then I’m hunched over, crying like a baby, and these three people, they put their hands on me. Hands they’ve used to kill, but tonight, just feeling the weight and the warmth of them, they knit together the things inside me that are broken.