The Final Testament of the Holy Bible Part 1

THE FINAL TESTAMENT OF THE HOLY BIBLE.

JAMES FREY.

He will come again.

-The Apostles' Creed.

This book was written with the cooperation of and after extensive interviews with the family, friends, and followers of Ben Zion Avrohom, also known as Ben Jones, also known as the Prophet, also known as the Son, also known as the Messiah, also known as the Lord G.o.d.

MARIAANGELES.

He wasn't nothing special. Just a white boy. An ordinary white boy. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium height and medium weight. Just like ten or twenty or thirty million other white boys in America. Nothing special at all.

First time I saw him he was coming down the hallway. There was an apartment across the hall from where I lived that'd been empty for a year. Usually apartments in our project go quick. Government supports them so they're cheap, for people who ain't got s.h.i.+t in this world and, even though they always telling us different, know we ain't ever gonna have s.h.i.+t. There's lists for them. Long and getting longer. But n.o.body would live in that one. It had a reputation. The man who lived there before had gone crazy. He'd been normal. Sold souvenirs outside Yankee Stadium and had a wife and two little boys, real cute little boys. Then he started hearing voices and s.h.i.+t, started ranting about devils and demons and how he was the last man standing before us and the end. He lost his job and started wearing all white and trying to touch everybody on their head. He got his a.s.s whooped a few times and his church told him to stop coming. He screamed at his family and played this organ music all night. Cursed the demons and pleaded to the Lord. Howled like some kind of dog. He didn't ever let his family leave. We stopped hearing the music and it started smelling and Momma called the cops and they found him hanging from the shower. Wearing a white robe like a monk. Tied up with an electrical cord. They found his wife and boys with electrical tape around their ankles and wrists and plastic bags over their heads. There was a note that said we have gone to a better place. Maybe the Devil got him or the demons got him or his Lord left him. Or maybe he just got tired. And maybe they did go to a better place. I don't know, and won't probably ever know, not believing what I believe. And it didn't matter anyway. Everybody heard about it and n.o.body would live there. Until Ben. He came down the hall with a backpack and an old suitcase and moved right in. He either didn't know or didn't care about what had happened before. Moved right the f.u.c.k in.

He was the only white boy in the building. Except for the Jews who owned the liquor stores and the clothing shops, he was the only white boy in the neighborhood. Rest of us was all Puerto Rican. A few Dominicans. A few regular old-school black motherf.u.c.kers. All poor. Angry. Wondering how to make it better and knowing there was no answer. It was what it was, is what it is. A f.u.c.ked up ghetto in an American city. They're all the f.u.c.king same. Ben didn't seem to notice. Didn't care he was out of place. He came and went. Didn't talk to n.o.body. Wore some kind of uniform like a pretend cop during the week that made everybody laugh. Stayed in his apartment most of the time on weekends, except when he'd go out drinking. Then we'd see him pa.s.sed out on the benches out front of the buildings, right near the playground. Or in the hallway with vomit on his s.h.i.+rt. One time he came stumbling home on a Sunday morning and his pants were all wet and he was trying to sing some twenty-year-old rap song at the top of his lungs. My brother and his friends started going along with him, making fun of him and s.h.i.+t, and he was too drunk to even know. We started thinking we knew why he was living among us. Why he didn't care he was out of place, didn't belong. We thought he must not be welcome where he came from anymore. They didn't want him around. And we was right, he'd been kicked the f.u.c.k out by his people, we just had the reasons why wrong.

First time I talked to him was in the hallway. It was probably six months after he moved in and me and my daughter came walking out of our apartment on our way to chill in front of the building. He was standing there in his boxer shorts and a t-s.h.i.+rt with his door open, holding his telephone. My daughter was like a year and a half old. Just learning some words. She said hola and he didn't say nothing back. She's like her momma. I say something to someone, I expect they say something back. Everybody wants that. Some basic level of respect. Acknowledgment as a human being. So she said it again and he just stood there. So I said hola motherf.u.c.ker, don't you know how to be a decent motherf.u.c.king neighbor and say something back. And he looked nervous and sort of scared and said sorry. And then my girl said hola again, and he said it back to her and she smiled and hugged his leg and he laughed and I asked him what he was doing just standing there in the hallway with his drawers on and his door open and the phone in his hand. He said he was waiting for a new TV, that he had bought one on sale and it was being delivered. I told him he better have a good G.o.dd.a.m.n lock, that there's motherf.u.c.kers around here that'd kill a motherf.u.c.ker for a good TV, no lie. He just smiled, still seeming all nervous and scared, and said yeah, I think the lock is good, I'll check and make sure. And that was that. We left him standing there. Waiting for a TV.

I know that d.a.m.n TV came too, 'cause we started hearing it. Bang bang bang. Some explosions. Helicopters and airplanes flying around. Heard him whooping and hollering, saying yeah yeah yeah, gotcha you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, how you like me now, motherf.u.c.ker, how you like me now. Could hear him pacing, walking around. Got a little scared 'cause he was sounding like the crazy man who killed his family and I started wondering if that place really was cursed. Made my brother, who dropped out of school the year before me and was still around then, go listen at the door. My brother got all serious and listened real close and turned to me and said this is bad, Mariaangeles, real bad, we got a honkey playing video games across the hall from us, I better round up some of my boys and take care of this s.h.i.+t. I laughed, and knew I shoulda knowed better. But that's the way it is in this life, you love your own, and you don't trust people who ain't like you. If I'd a moved into a white neighborhood and one of my neighbors'd started hearing gunshots and hollering, there'd a been a f.u.c.king battalion of cops kicking my d.a.m.n door in. That's just the way it is.

My brother liked video games. He started spending all his time in that apartment with Ben. They got a basketball game and a driving game where the more people they ran over with their car the more points they got. They started watching Knicks games and drinking beer together and sometimes smoking weed. I told my brother to be careful 'cause white people could be tricky, and you could never know what they might want. I thought everything in my life that had gone wrong had been because of white people, and most of 'em looked Jewish. My daddy got sent to prison by some when I was little. My momma had to work cleaning their houses most her life. My teachers, who all pretended to care so much but was really just scared of us and treated us like animals, was white people. They're the cops, the judges, the landlords, the mayors, the people who run everything and own everything. And they aren't letting go of any of it or sharing any of it. The rich take care of the rich and make sure they stay rich, and they talking about helping the poor, but if they really did, there wouldn't be so many of us. And it was one thing having a white boy live across the hall and saying hi to him now and then or watching him get drunk or wear some silly uniform, but it's another having my brother spending all his time with him. I didn't think nothing good would come of it.

My brother didn't ever listen to me. Never did. Wish he had, he might still be with us. This time, though, he was right and I was wrong. Even before he knew, before he became what he became, before it was revealed, Ben was okay. Nothing more, nothing less, just okay. I first found out when my brother took me over there. He had got tired of me telling him all the time that the white boy was no good, so one day he says you either come with me and see he's cool or you shut the f.u.c.k up about me spending time over there. I ain't one to shut the f.u.c.k up, only a few times in my whole life, so I went with him. We made sure Momma was okay and we went across the hall and we knocked on the door and he answered in his boxer shorts and t-s.h.i.+rt with tomato sauce all over it and my brother started talking.

What's up, Ben.

Ben wiped some grease off his face and talked back at him.

What's up, Alberto.

This is my sister Mariaangeles and her daughter Mercedes.

Yeah, I met them once.

Ben looked at me.

How you doing?

I gave him a dirty look.

You gonna invite us in?

I guess.

He opened the door. Stepped aside. And we went in and I started looking around. Big TV in the living room. A grubby old couch with cigarette burns that looked like it was made out of old carpet.

Video game disks and controllers. Kitchen was nasty. Pizza boxes. Empty cans of soup and pasta with spoons and forks still in 'em. Garbage bags filled on the floor. I opened the fridge 'cause I was thinking of having a soda or something and all it had in it was some ketchup and that was it. Whole place smelled like old food and stale beer. Went to the bedroom and there was a mattress and a pillow. Some clothes on the floor. Closet had his uniform hanging up in it, and it was the only thing that looked cared for. Bathroom, the bathroom where that man was hanging, was worse than the kitchen. Stains in the toilet and sink. Tissues overflowing out of a little garbage can. No toilet paper to be seen and I doubt he had ever cleaned it once. Even by the standards we was used to seeing, his place was bad. And more than bad, or nasty, or disgusting, it was just sad. Real sad. Like he didn't know any better. Like he thought it was normal for a grown man to be living like that. Made me think he didn't have n.o.body in his life that cared about him. Like he was all alone. Alone in a place where he didn't belong because he didn't have nowhere else to go, and no one else to go to. They'd have done something if they was around. But they weren't. He was all alone. I went back into the living room. Bang bang bang. Him and Alberto shooting n.a.z.is, throwing grenades at 'em. Mercedes sitting on the floor chewing her blankie, watching people explode on the TV. Too much. There's enough ugliness in the world already without pretending to do more. Too much I said, and I smacked Alberto on the back of the head. He got all mad, said you knew what we was doing here, you didn't have to come. I said play another game, play some game where you don't gotta see blood squirting everywhere, and Ben said we'll play the NBA game and changed the disk. While he doing it I ask him where he from, and he says Brooklyn, and I ask if he got family there, and he says yes. I ask him do he see them, he says no. I ask him why and he says I just don't. I ask for how long and he says a long time. I ask him how old he is and he says thirty, I ask where he been living before this and he says he don't want to talk about it. Answers made me sad. I always thought white people had good lives. Even the worst of 'em had it better off than me and everybody I knew. Just what I believed. But this boy didn't have it better. Worse. Just him and his video games and his s.h.i.+tty apartment that no one else would live in. I had my girl and my family at least. He had it way worse.

Their game started back up and I didn't like being there 'cause it was sad and depressing so I got Mercedes and we left and went back to our place. And that was it. For a long time. Six or nine months or something. Alberto played video games with Ben. I'd see him around. In his uniform if it was day, drunk if it was night, sometimes in the hall in his underwear while he was waiting for a pizza. I turned eighteen. Went out with some of my girlfriends from around the project and some girlfriends from when I was in school. They was all around my age, almost all of 'em in a situation similar to mine: no diploma, a kid or two and a couple had three, boyfriend still around but not really there, no way to get out or move up. Just ways to make it through the day or the week or the month. One of the girls was wearing nice clothes and a nice watch and smelled good like expensive perfume and she started saying she was working as a dancer and making plenty of money. Said you had to be eighteen, but could make three, four hundred, maybe five hundred bucks a night dancing in clubs. We started saying she was hooking but she said no, she danced naked on a stage and gave men lap dances in a private room and they gave her cash. That it was easy. Men from Manhattan would come up, tell their wives they had meetings or was working late, or they'd come over after baseball games at Yankee Stadium. They was stupid and it was easy to make 'em think they was getting some a.s.s and the more you could make 'em think it the more they would pay you. She said it wasn't a churchgoing job, rubbing her a.s.s and t.i.ts all over white men, but none of us was churchgoing girls, and a good shower at the end of the night and she was fine with it, especially 'cause she was making so much money. She said maybe she was gonna leave the neighborhood. Find her a place where her kids would be able to go to a good school. Because even though almost all of us was dropouts, we knew the only way out for real was an education. Just none of us could do it.

Next day I called the girl. She took me to the club. I met the manager. Fat white man from Westchester. He made me strip down to my panties and bra and show him how I danced. Made me rub my a.s.s on his crotch and rub my t.i.tties down his chest and whisper s.h.i.+t his wife wouldn't say to him in his ear. His hands started wandering and I asked him what he was doing and he said he test drove all the girls before he let 'em out on the track. Made me sick. But we needed the money. Momma wasn't working and who the f.u.c.k knew what Alberto did. Made me sick. But I let him. I let him do anything and everything. Took me for a test drive. Made me f.u.c.king sick.

Started working a few days later. It wasn't hard but I had to close up part of my heart, part of my soul. I had been with three men before. One when I was twelve. Mercedes' father, who I was with from when I was fourteen until he left when I was seventeen. The manager. Except for that manager, I'd waited. Tried to make sure they loved me. I know I loved them. Would have done anything for them. Killed for them or died for them. Hit the cross for them. I thought they felt the same, loved the same. But love is different for every person. For some it's hate, for some it's joy, for some it's fear, for some it's jealousy, for some it's torture, for some it's peace. For some it's everything. For me. Everything. And to let a man touch me like that, or to touch a man like that, I had always had to love. So I shut it down. Closed it. Buried it somewhere. And I danced and touched and whispered and got them hard and took them as far as I could and took them for as much as I could. They didn't know but they took more from me. A shower at the end of the night wasn't enough. Not even close. Didn't clean nothing.

Three nights a week I worked, sometimes four. Started saving up. Got Mercedes some clothes that hadn't been worn before, some of her own shoes, brand new. Got my momma a sweater, and new magazines every week. Didn't put none of the money in a bank 'cause I know what happens with white people and their banks. I put it away. Where Alberto wouldn't never look. Where n.o.body would look. A couple months, a couple more. Making money but hurting. And changing. Keeping myself closed and hard all the time started taking it out of me. One of the girls gave me some s.h.i.+t to smoke and it helped. So I did more of it. And it helped. More than a shower or anything else. But when it wore away it started hurting more so I was taking more. Sleeping and working and getting high. Starting to do things I would have never done before because I didn't care, because I was hurting so much that more of the hurt wasn't nothing. And it brought more money. One night I was working and Ben came in and one of the girls smiled and said look who's here. And I asked her what about him and she said he was an easy mark. Would come in with his paycheck and get drunk and give the whole d.a.m.n thing away. I told her he was living in my building and that he was mine. She got in my face about it for a minute till I told her how far I'd go. I was dipping into my money too much and I needed more. Momma was getting sick and Mercedes was getting sick and I needed them to get to a doctor and I didn't have no insurance. And I needed more.

I went over to him. He was already drunk. He smiled and said hi and I said hey baby, nice seeing you here. And I didn't even ask him. Took his hand. Led him to the room where we did the dances. And I went at him, giving him what all them men wanted and whispering in his ear about what we could do back at home now that I knew what kind of boy he was. I told him I wanted to suck his c.o.c.k and I wanted him to f.u.c.k me, that I would ride his a.s.s all day and all night, that I was getting all wet thinking about it. And I kept ordering drinks and feeding him. Just kept it going. And he took it. And was wanting more. And after an hour he was gone. His mind was gone and his money was gone. And I felt bad 'cause I knew what he was and I knew he wasn't bad. Just sad. And alone. Man without anything or anyone, alone in that apartment where no one else would live, with his TV and his games and his pizza boxes and soup cans and his garbage and his sad mattress and his dirty bathroom. That's all he was. He pa.s.sed out. Right in the chair with my a.s.s between his legs. The bouncers came and took him out. He didn't have no ID or driver's license or credit card. Nothing with his name or address or nothing. I told them he was my neighbor and I knew where he was living. They was gonna throw him on the street, in the gutter. Leave him there. Let whatever was gonna happen, happen. He'd been there before, I know. And s.h.i.+t had happened to him, I know that for sure. I told them I could at least get him back to the building. I had just taken everything he had and I was figuring I could do that much. We got a cab and put him sleeping in the backseat. I sat next to him. He was snoring like a baby. And when we got to the projects the driver helped me get him out of the cab. And I got him into the building and into the elevator. Got him into the hallway front of his door. And I left him there. And I went back out and got high. Spent some of his money on what I needed. And when I came home later he was still there.

Next time I saw him was like two days later. He was coming home in his uniform and I was going to work. We didn't say nothing to each other. I don't even know if he remembered. Just looked sad and nervous like he always did. And the next time I saw him after that was a long time. And he wasn't the same no more. He had changed. Changed and become someone else. He had become something I couldn't even believe. And then I did. I believed. I believed.

CHARLES.

I felt sorry for him when I met him. He had come in to apply for a security position at my job site. We ran two guys at a time, on twelve-hour s.h.i.+fts. There were weekday guys and weekend guys. Pay was minimum wage. No benefits. It was a s.h.i.+tty job. You walked the perimeter of the site, stood around for hours at a time. We didn't have a security shack. You bring one in and the guards end up never leaving. They buy little TVS and drink coffee all day. Take naps. This was a sensitive site. We were putting up forty stories in a neighborhood where the tallest building was twelve. There had been community opposition. A couple protests, and a big pet.i.tion. I needed guys who were willing to work. To make sure that the site was secure. It's harder than you think finding them. Most people want something for nothing. They want everything to be easy. When a job is hard, they demand more money, more time off, they complain to their union reps and try to renegotiate terms. That's not the way it works. Life is hard, deal with it. Working sucks, deal with it. I'd love to sit home and collect a check every two weeks for watching baseball games and spending time with my kids. Doesn't happen that way. You gotta work for everything in this world. Scratch and claw and fight for every little thing. And it never gets easier. Never. And it doesn't end until you die. And then it doesn't matter. Learn to deal with that. It's the way of the world. You fight and struggle and work your a.s.s off and then you die. Deal with that.

He came in with a resume. It said his name was Ben Jones, that he was thirty years old. He was wearing a b.u.t.ton-down with the logo of a security guard school on it. My first impression of him was that he was very eager, very excited, and very nervous. His hand was shaking when I shook it. His lips were quivering. Aside from his basic biographical information, and an eight-week course at the security school which made him officially qualified for the job, the resume was empty. I asked him where he was from and he said Brooklyn. I asked him if he went to college, he said no. I asked him when he left home and he said at fourteen. I told him that seemed young and he shrugged and I asked what he'd been doing for the past sixteen years and he changed, just a little, but he changed, and something in his eyes came out that was really sad and really lonely and extremely painful. It was only there for a second, and normally I wouldn't notice anything like that, or pay attention to it, or give a s.h.i.+t, but it was very striking, and he looked down at his feet for a moment and then looked up and said I've had hard times and I'm ready to work and I promise I'll be the best worker you have, I promise. And that was it. He didn't offer anything else and I didn't push it. I just thought to myself sixteen f.u.c.king years, what the f.u.c.k has this guy been doing. And I still think about it, all the time, what the f.u.c.k was he doing. And I imagined, and still do, because of the flash of deep sadness and loneliness and pain that I saw, that whatever it was, and wherever it was, it had been truly truly awful.

So I gave him the job. He was very excited. Like a little kid at Christmas. A big smile, a huge smile. He said thank you about fifty times. And he kept shaking my hand. It was funny, and very endearing. It wasn't like he'd won the f.u.c.king lotto. He got a minimum wage job walking around a construction site for twelve f.u.c.king hours a day.

I put him on the five-days-a-week day s.h.i.+ft. Thought that would be best. That he'd be proud to have that position. And he was. It showed in how he did the job. He was always on time. His uniform was always clean. He never tried to extend his breaks or his lunch. He never complained. He seemed fascinated by the process of putting a building up: knocking in the pilings, setting the foundation, the construction of the skeleton frame. He'd ask different people questions about what they did, or why they did things a certain way. He'd listen very intently to their answers, like he was gonna be tested on it or something. He was generally the happiest guard I'd ever seen or had on a job, and he became sort of the site mascot. Everybody liked him and enjoyed having him around. He knew everyone's name and would greet everyone in the morning and say goodbye at the end of the day. There were only two things that ever seemed off, and I dismissed them both because he did such a good job and seemed so happy. First was right after he got his first paycheck. He came and switched the address in our files to an address in the Bronx. The previous one had been in Queens. I don't know why but I was curious, so I looked up the address in Queens. It was a state-run transitional home, a place where they send men coming out of either prison, rehab, a homeless shelter, or a mental inst.i.tution. I thought about looking into it more, but I had other things to worry about and Ben seemed fine. Second thing happened one day during lunch. I had a doctor's appointment and had to leave the site. On my way to the subway, I saw Ben sitting on a bench a few blocks away. He was crying. It was the middle of the day, and he had seemed like his normal self when I had seen him earlier. I did a double take because I couldn't believe it was him. But it was. He was sitting on a bench with his face in his hands and he was sobbing.

The day of the accident was a beautiful spring day. It was sunny, no clouds, slight breeze, in the mid-70s. A perfect New York day, not one I thought would f.u.c.king blow up. I had never had a major accident on one of my sites before, and it was a point of great pride for me. I believed there wasn't a building on earth that was worth sacrificing a life for, and I still believe it. Safety matters more than speed. Safety matters more than anything. It was one of the reasons I had been hired. Because the job was a sensitive issue in the community, and so many people were against it, the developer couldn't afford to have anything go wrong. Accidents are the best weapon community activists have against developers. While it would be nice to think developers care about safety, they don't. Like almost everyone else in America, developers are f.u.c.king greedy. They care about money, and activists with weapons cost them money. My job was to stay on budget, stay on schedule, and keep that site safe.

The skeleton was done. Forty stories of steel frame rising. We were putting in the windows, which were ten foot by ten foot mirrored panels. We had finished the first thirty-three stories without any problems, and we were installing on thirty-four. We'd lift seven panels at a time. Bundle them, secure them, rig them to a wire, bring them up with a crane. I'd done it literally thousands of times at job sites, and I had never had any problems.

I don't know what the f.u.c.k went wrong. Still don't. We had investigators from the city, the state, and the insurance company all look at the rig, and n.o.body could figure it out. To this day, the cause in all of the paperwork is listed as unknown. I could call them and tell them that it didn't matter what we did that day, that no rig would have held that gla.s.s, that there were other forces at work far beyond any that the city, state, or insurance company could muster, but they'd think I was crazy. And sometimes I'm not sure that I'm not. But that's part of faith. Believing and knowing despite what other people say, and despite what the world might think of your beliefs.

I was on the ground. Standing near our trailer, which was on the edge of the sidewalk. I was holding a clipboard, going over some budget numbers with one of our construction accountants. They blow an air horn right before any large load goes up, and the air horn went off. I looked up and the panels were slowly rising. We stop traffic when we lift panels, and there were no cars coming down the street. Most of the workers were standing around talking, which is what they did when work was halted. Ben was standing at the edge of the site, looking towards the stopped traffic, ready to stop anyone who might try to get around our traffic controller. Normally I would have gone back to the clipboard. But I felt something, something inevitable. If you can somehow feel fate, or destiny, or the power of the future, I felt it, very literally. And it made me watch. It forced me to do something that I normally wouldn't do. I couldn't turn away. I couldn't not watch those panels.

The panels continued to go up, and they drifted a few feet, just like they always did, like anything that heavy being lifted that high would drift. The crane was working perfectly. The rig was set perfectly. The panels were in wooden crates sealed with iron nails. At that point we'd lifted and installed hundreds of them. It was no big deal. Just part of our routine. n.o.body was watching, and I'm the only one who saw. I saw the nails slip out of the crate. I saw the back of the crate fall. I saw the angle of the crates change. I saw them drift. I saw the panel fall out. A ten foot by ten foot gla.s.s panel. Probably weighed a thousand pounds. I saw it fall.

It hit him on the back of the head and shattered. There was a huge noise, an explosion of gla.s.s. He got flattened. A total collapse. Everything stopped, everybody turned. There was a moment, a long hideous moment of silence, of never-ending f.u.c.king silence. Then the screaming started. I dropped the clipboard and started running towards him. Pulled my phone out of my pocket and called 911. There was no way he was alive. I told the operator a man had just died on my construction site and gave her the address. I could see the blood before I got there. It was everywhere. And there was gla.s.s everywhere. All I could hear was screaming. People were getting out of their cars, running, calling 911. And above me, for a brief instant, I saw the rest of the panels being pulled onto the thirty-fourth floor. There was no way that one should have fallen.

When I got to him, I was positive he was dead. The back of his head was crushed. There was blood and something else, I a.s.sumed it was brain fluid, leaking out of it. There were shards of gla.s.s imbedded into his entire body. He was literally shredded, blood pouring from his arms, legs, chest, stomach, face. There was f.u.c.king blood everywhere. I couldn't really even see him. I didn't know what to do, if I should touch him, move him, try taking the gla.s.s out of his body. There was no way to try to stop the bleeding with a tourniquet, or ten tourniquets, or fifty tourniquets. And I didn't believe in G.o.d so I couldn't pray. I just waited for someone to come who would tell me what do.

A crowd started gathering. The other workers tried to keep them back. Sirens in the distance. A group of women kneeling in a prayer circle. People still screaming. As they got closer and saw what I saw, they turned away, covered their eyes, a few vomited. And the blood kept flowing. I was kneeling next to him, and it was running around my legs, soaking my pants. I took hold of two of his fingers where there was no gla.s.s, and I started trying to talk to him. I had no idea if he could hear me. I thought it might help him if he could, it might comfort him, give him some kind of solace as he died. No one wants to die alone, even though that's how it happens for all of us, even though we pretend there's some other way. I thought my voice might make it easier. Calm him, make him less scared. I can't imagine how f.u.c.king shocked and terrified he must have been, if he was aware of anything. I told him that help was on its way and that he was going to be alright. I felt sick to my stomach while I said it. I could see his brains through his shattered skull. Literally see his brains. I just held those two fingers and talked to him and watched him bleed away.

An ambulance arrived. The crowd parted and two paramedics came rus.h.i.+ng through with a gurney. I heard one of them say Jesus f.u.c.king Christ, the other said no way this guy's alive. They dropped their bags and went to work. They started checking him, but they didn't seem to know where to start. One of them asked me what happened and I said a plate of gla.s.s fell on him. They checked his pulse, talked about how to proceed, leave the gla.s.s in him, get him out of here, let the surgeons deal with it if he's even still alive. He had a pulse, and they both seemed shocked. They lowered the gurney, asked me to step away. One took his lower body and one took his upper body. They lifted him onto the clean, white surface. Blood streamed off his body, stained the gurney, dripped to the ground. They started back towards the ambulance and I followed them. They asked me his name, I told them. They asked where he was from and I said he lived in the Bronx. They got him into the ambulance. I asked to come, told them I was his boss, that it was my job site. They said get in and I did and they closed the doors.

I sat on the bench near the door. One of them drove. The other worked on Ben. He put on a heart monitor, wove the wires around the shards of gla.s.s protruding from Ben's body. When it was on and working, he tried to stop the bleeding from cuts without gla.s.s in them, but there were so many of them it was almost useless. The monitor stopped, and the paramedic gave Ben CPR, and his heart started again. I don't know how long we were in the ambulance. It felt like ten seconds and it felt like ten hours, and Ben's heart stopped four or five times. He died in that ambulance four or five times, and the paramedic kept bringing him back. Something kept bringing him back.

Once the monitor stopped and the paramedic didn't do anything. Just stared and shook his head. I didn't blame him. It seemed like a lost cause. Ten seconds pa.s.sed, maybe twenty, it seemed like forever. I just stared at Ben, or what was left of him, and tried to figure out what the f.u.c.k went wrong, how this could have happened. I started to say I'm sorry, as if apologizing to a dead man would mean something, though it seems that's how it works most of the time; we say the things that matter to people when it's already too late. Before the words came out of my mouth, the monitor started registering a pulse again. Something kept bringing him back. Something was not going to let him go.

We pulled into the hospital and they rushed him away. I followed them into the emergency room. I gave the administrators all the information I could. I filled out all of the forms as best as I could. I called back to the site and asked for a change of clothes because the ones I was wearing were covered with blood. Men from the site started showing up. We were all in shock. Just sat and talked about how we couldn't believe it happened, how awful it was. Media started showing up and trying to interview people. n.o.body said a word. We knew it wouldn't matter if we did, that the media was gonna write what they wanted to write regardless of their so-called ethics, and their supposed belief in truth. We just sat and waited to hear that Ben had died. We a.s.sumed it was so. Though I had seen what I had seen in the ambulance, at the time I didn't believe it was anything more than coincidence.

More men from the site arrived. The crane operator and window installers came in. They were deeply and visibly shaken. I sat with them, asked what happened. They didn't know. They claimed the crate was intact. That there was no way that gla.s.s should have come out, or could have come out. I told them I saw the nails fall, and saw the back of the crate fall. They claimed that was impossible. That the crate was intact. There was tape around it, tape that had been applied at the factory, and that it was unbroken. The crate was empty. They could tell that by its weight. But it had never been opened. I figured someone was trying to cover their a.s.s. Someone had f.u.c.ked up and didn't want to take responsibility for another man's death. Ultimately the responsibility would have fallen on me. But it turned out they were right. The crate was unopened and empty. City and state accident investigators all agreed. The crate was f.u.c.king unopened. How the gla.s.s fell has never been explained. And Ben didn't die. Somehow he survived. More than survived. So much more. Something kept bringing him back. Something wouldn't let him go. Something, or someone, or I don't know what, wouldn't let him die.

ALEXIS.

I was on break when the call came in, watching a baseball game with some of the guys who work in the cafeteria and were also on break. It was a Yankee game, and I love the Yankees, and though my schedule tends to prevent me from seeing as many games as I would like, I try to see two or three a week during the season, and I always watch during my breaks. I love the systems and the order of baseball, and I very much appreciate the cause-and-effect nature of the game. As a surgeon, my entire life is based in the systems of the human body, the systems of the hospital and a surgical team, the order or orders under which those things operate, and the cause-and-effect nature of trauma, injury, and the surgical attempts to remedy them. Though it often seems chaotic and anarchic and spontaneous, all life is system, order, and cause and effect. Try as so many do, it is impossible to escape them. I gave up at a fairly young age and decided to dedicate my life to the service of them.

The call was white male, late twenties or early thirties, ma.s.sive trauma, ma.s.sive head wounds, ma.s.sive blood loss, and then the unusual part, which was the first of so many unusual occurrences with Ben and his case, hundreds of shards of gla.s.s imbedded in his body. I'm a geek about my job, and after doing it for many years-I was forty-one when the case began-I still get excited when a case comes in that sounds different or challenging for some reason. At the time, I didn't even think about the human element of it, that someone had just undergone some horrific event and was experiencing feelings and emotions that are far beyond anything within the realm of my experience. I just thought about the potential medical and technical challenges involved and how I would solve them. Ben changed that for me. Now much of what I think lies within the human realm of the surgical experience, what the patient is feeling, what the people who love the patient are feeling, and how I can help with those issues as well. I understand that all of our lives revolve around what we are feeling at any given moment. There is nothing more human than emotion.

I got up and I said goodbye to my fellow Yankee fans and I quickly made my way to the trauma suite. Everyone was getting ready, the nurses, the a.s.sistants, the residents, and I was the last to arrive. At that point, and again this was before my experience with Ben changed me, because my position as the head surgeon is one of authority, I tended not to speak to any of the people I worked with unless I needed something from them or needed to discuss a specific aspect of the impending surgery with them, both of which were rare. While I scrubbed in and prepared myself for whatever it was that was arriving, I was silent.

The moments while a team waits for a patient can be very tense. You stand at the ready. While you have a general idea of condition, you do not often know what the specific medical issues are, and you have no idea if you will be there for ten minutes or ten hours, though there is rarely anything in between. Different surgeons handle it differently. I think of myself as a batter in a baseball game, actually in the seventh game of the World Series, with the bases loaded, a three-and-two count, down by three runs, in the bottom of the ninth inning. I have one swing to either succeed or fail and the result entirely depends on what I do and how I perform. Unlike in baseball, though, I cannot hit a single, a double, or a triple. I either hit a home run or I strike out, and the patient either lives or dies.

As I mentioned, I was intrigued and excited by the call, and had no idea what a patient who had shards of gla.s.s imbedded in his body would look like or what I would need to do to make that patient survive. When paramedics enter the hospital with a critical case, they are greeted by ER doctors and members of the surgical team, and there is a transfer of information related to the patient: the circ.u.mstances of the trauma, issues, if any, during transfer, a preliminary diagnosis, if one is possible. Once the transfer is made, the patient is brought into the trauma bay, where I, and the rest of the team, go to work. It is usually a fairly seamless process, and it is one that is repeated with great regularity.

Not so with Ben. The EMTS were covered with blood, as was the stretcher. They started to describe the scene, and one of them kept repeating something I myself said many times later, which was that there was no way the patient should be alive, and that he had no idea what was going on with him. The doctors and nurses, who were incredibly seasoned and experienced, and had seen all manner of horror and gore after years in a public New York City emergency room and trauma unit, were shocked almost into paralysis, and one of the nurses vomited. Each looked to the others for direction, which is not entirely surprising. In life we often look to others for simple, but difficult answers, despite the fact that we have those answers ourselves. They needed to get him into surgery, and they needed to do it as soon as possible.

One of them took the initiative and urged the others to act, and they started moving towards me and my team. We can always hear them as they bring the patient into the trauma bay, hear the wheels of the gurney, the various squeaking sounds it makes, hear the nurses talking to each other, sometimes the patients scream, cry out, or moan. As they get closer, I tend to become calmer, more focused, and more aware, and time slows down in a way that makes those few brief moments seem incredibly long and peaceful. I sometimes wish I could live forever in that state, and believe that those who find enlightenment, people like Ben, though he discovered so much more than that, live their entire lives that way.

The doors opened and he was brought into the trauma bay, and for the first time in my fifteen-year career I heard an audible gasp come from every single person in attendance. It was a surreal, unbelievable sight, like something out of a Hollywood horror movie, something that shouldn't have been possible and isn't possible, but was right in front of my eyes. There was blood everywhere. There were huge, deep lacerations everywhere. When I heard gla.s.s shards, I expected small pieces of gla.s.s, maybe an inch long at their longest. What he had in his body were not shards, but actual pieces, some as tall as ten inches, some as wide as twelve inches, and we were only seeing what was visible above the level of his skin. The back of his skull had been crushed, and there were pieces of it that appeared to be missing. We could not see his face at all because it was entirely covered in blood. Everything was entirely covered in blood.

The first stage of treatment in any trauma situation is the stabilization of the patient. Death from blood loss was the obvious first concern. If a patient has lost more than 40 percent of their body's blood volume, they are likely to be in decompensated hypovolemic shock, which usually results in multi-organ failure. While we checked his blood pressure, which was at 40 over 20, the lowest I'd ever recorded in a living patient, and checked his pulse, which was 30, again an absurdly low number, we gave him injections of epinephrine and atropine to jumpstart his heart and get his blood pressure and pulse up.

Simultaneously, we tried to get heart-rate monitors and BP monitors on him, but it was incredibly difficult because we were weaving the wires around gla.s.s shards that had very sharp edges. We inserted a central venous line and transfused him with type O negative uncrossmatched red blood cells. Though we wanted, at some point, to take the gla.s.s out of him, we needed him to be stable first, and we needed to figure out which pieces to remove first, and in what order the rest of them would come out.

He shut down three times in my care, went into full cardiac arrest. We defibrillated him, which was difficult because of the gla.s.s, and on one occasion I absolutely know the defibrillation worked, but on the other two his heart appeared to start functioning again on its own, which was both surprising and confusing. We kept putting blood into him and he kept bleeding and we kept putting it in. I don't know the actual amount, but it became something of a game, a game where a man's life appeared to be at stake, and in which I and the other people in the room were working with incredible urgency and resolve, making sure we were transfusing more blood in than he was losing, a game that we knew would result in death if we did not succeed. What we could see of his skin was white, and I don't mean the Caucasian white, I mean truly white, alabaster white, like he was carved from marble. And no matter how much blood we put in, his skin didn't change, and his body showed no indication that it was actually maintaining the blood.

While we were stabilizing him, I also needed to cover and protect his head. He had sustained a comminuted skull fracture, which means it had broken into a large number of small pieces, through which I could clearly see his brain. I a.s.sumed there was intracranial bleeding, most likely subdural, epidural, or intraparenchymal, and even if I could keep him alive, he would suffer from ma.s.sive brain damage. We applied compression dressings using sterile surgical bandages, gauze, and surgical tape and moved his head as little as possible. We found pieces of his skull that were the size of nickels and bagged them in case we might be able to use them later.

Two extremely long and stressful hours after he arrived at the hospital, his heart rate and blood pressure were stable, or at least stable enough for us to attempt to start removing the pieces of gla.s.s from his body. I took a step back and took a deep breath and looked at what was ahead of me. There were three IV lines transfusing blood into his body. We were applying pressure everywhere we could, but blood was still coming out of him at a rather alarming rate. We had been able to clean him up and cut away his clothing, and his skin was still deathly white. There was gla.s.s protruding from his legs, his arms, his abdomen and chest, there were smaller pieces in his face, and there were a number of large pieces that had been deeply imbedded into his back when he hit the ground.

I tried to identify pieces of gla.s.s that had nicked, punctured, cut, or potentially severed major veins and arteries: the jugular veins, carotid arteries, and subclavian arteries and veins in the neck, and the femoral arteries and veins in the legs. I wondered what I couldn't see, possibly damage to the aorta, the inferior vena cava, or the pulmonary vasculature, which are deeper in the chest and torso and were beneath my field of vision. While the conventional wisdom of a non-medical professional might say it would be best to remove the pieces of gla.s.s from those veins and arteries, there was the very real possibility that they were tamponading further bleeding and had sealed areas that had been damaged or destroyed. Getting through this part of Ben's treatment would be part luck and part strategy and, if successful, part miracle.

I had a vascular surgeon and his fellow join me and offer their opinions. I felt they might have something to offer that would help me, and help Ben, in some way. None of us had any idea where to start, or what to do, or what path to take, or what we might have in store for us when we started to actually remove the pieces. So I just started. I had three residents with me, and I had two of the residents prepared with suture in case sutures were needed, and I had the other prepared with a bipolar bovie, which is an electro-cauterization instrument. We had two surgical nurses with suction and another with an aspiration wand that delivered an anticoagulant. There were other nurses monitoring his vitals and continuing to transfuse him.

Once we started, we moved very quickly, because every movement, especially removing the largest pieces, resulted in blood loss, sometimes fairly significant blood loss. If we hadn't moved quickly, Ben would surely have died. There were a number of scares, and a number of times when his vitals dropped dramatically, and a number of times when we couldn't stop the bleeding in what I considered a timely manner. But Ben wouldn't die, and now, at this point, after everything, I believe that what we did that day probably didn't matter very much. Ben was not going to die.

Nine hours after we started, we tied the last suture. He had a total of 745 st.i.tches, both internal and external, and an additional 115 external staples. We had used 40 units of blood, which is approximately double the amount any human has in their body at any given time. We also gave him multiple units of platelets and fresh frozen plasma. And for him, the day was far from over. There was a team of cranio-facial surgeons and neurosurgeons standing by to deal with his skull and brain injuries. As I stepped back from the table, I saw one of his hands twitching, which I took to be a good sign, and I stepped over and took hold of it, hoping that somewhere, on some level, he might find it comforting. To my great shock, his grip was very strong, very firm, and I immediately felt something similar, but deeper and more profound, to what I feel in those moments just before surgery, an intense calm and sense of peace and contentment. It was unreal, and obviously unexpected, and it ultimately changed my life in so many ways. I didn't want to let go. I didn't want that moment to end and I didn't want that feeling to ever leave me. But all things leave us, all people, all feelings, no matter how we want them to stay, no matter how tight we hold on to them. We lose everything in life at some point. I lost that moment the instant I let go of his hand.

After he was hemodynamically stable, he needed a CT scan of his head to determine the extent of intracranial injury. Moving a patient as critical as he was can be very difficult, very complicated, and very slow, so I knew I had some time to take a break, and I needed one. I went to our break room and took a shower and tried to take a nap but couldn't fall asleep. I was extremely awake, felt electric. I imagine I felt the way people feel when they take cocaine or ecstasy, though I have never used either of those or any illegal drugs. I got dressed and found Ben back in the OR, where the surgeons were now working on his brain, and I gowned up so I could watch the procedures. They had basically completed what was already a craniotomy, and evacuated both epidural and subdural hematomas. I watched the surgeons do some skull reconstruction using t.i.tanium plating, though they appeared to leave much of his skull as it was in case of cerebral edema, swelling of the brain, which can lead to brain herniation downward and death. Four hours after they started, Ben was taken to the post-anesthesia care unit.

He was later moved to the surgical ICU, and even though he was stable, he remained on life support: supplementary ventilation, intravenous therapy with fluids, drugs, and nutrition, and urinary catheterization. He was kept sedated using propofol so that we could monitor brain swelling and function. The ICU took over his day-to-day care, though I would continue to treat him, as would the cranio-facial surgeons and neurosurgeons. When I left the hospital, I felt very good, given the extreme nature of the situation and the trauma, about the care we had provided and Ben's prospects for some type of recovery. It was very early in a case like this, and normally it takes quite a while for us to really know how and if a patient is or is not going to recover. I a.s.sumed that I would come back the next day and everything would be more or less the same. I should have known better.

When I arrived, there were no urgent cases, so I went to the ICU to check on Ben and see if there were any new developments. I picked up his chart, and I noticed immediately that his name had been changed from Ben Jones to John Doe, and that his date of birth had been changed to unknown. I placed the chart back into the wall file and went towards the ICU offices, where I saw the ICU attending standing with two uniformed police officers and another man who appeared also to be a police officer but was wearing a suit. The attending introduced me to the men and told them that I had treated the John Doe when he had first arrived and had performed the first surgery on him. I asked them why he was being considered a John Doe, and they proceeded to tell me that his name was fake, his driver's license was fake, his fingerprints did not show up in any city, county, state, or federal databases, and that they could find no records of a man named Ben Jones born on the date listed on his driver's license in any of the city, state, federal, or law enforcement databases at their disposal. Needless to say, I was surprised. I told the officers that I didn't know anything beyond what was on his chart and what I'd experienced with him in surgery, and I had no idea who he was or where he was from. I also suggested they speak to the men who had been gathering in the waiting room, who had said that they worked with the patient on a construction site. They said they had spoken to those men, and that all of them knew him as Ben Jones, and they had examined all of the paperwork the site manager had on file, and that all of it contained the same information that appeared on the fabricated driver's license. Again, I told them I knew nothing. They asked if anybody else had asked about the patient, or if there had been any other inquiries about him. I said not that I knew of, but that I had been either performing or observing surgery with him for almost twenty-four hours and normally didn't have that type of contact with individuals looking for information on patients. They said thank you, and they left.

I went back to Ben's room with the ICU attending and we started talking about his case, his prognosis, and started exchanging ideas about treatment. He had ordered an electroencephalogram to test brain function and was hoping to get a quant.i.tative electroencephalogram to fully map Ben's brain and see what areas had been damaged and how badly. When he left, I had a moment alone with Ben and I reached for his hand, the same hand I had held before, but there was no reaction. It was limp and cold and felt like the hand of a corpse.

I continued to follow the case over the course of the next week. There was a fairly significant amount of press related to the accident-it was a controversial building being put up by a high-profile developer-and it gave the newspapers and blogs a few days of salacious headlines. We had hoped the coverage would help with an identification, but no one came forward. I got hara.s.sed by a couple of reporters who waited outside the entrance of my apartment building and stuck tape recorders in my face, hoping to get me to say something they could write about, but I knew to keep quiet, and that despite the tape recorders, the reporters would write whatever they wanted and the newspapers would print whatever they felt like printing. My truth is in the life and death I witness at the hospital every day. Ultimately, life and death are the only form of perfect truth that exists in the world. Everything else is subjective, and subject to an individual's perspective. I don't look for truth in the media.

Aside from the mystery of his ident.i.ty, Ben became a medical mystery. His lacerations healed in a remarkable, unheard-of amount of time; after a week we were able to remove all of the sutures, all of the staples, and his wounds were closed and starting to scar. He was weaned down on the respirator, and we continued to feed him intravenously. The electroencephalogram results were erratic and unexplainable. At times he appeared to have suffered brain death, where there is absolutely no activity of any kind registering on the EEG monitors. At other times he appeared to be in a persistent vegetative state, where cycles of sleep and some base awareness, but not cognition, were recognizable. Once or twice a day he went into a state of extreme brain activity, centered in two regions of his brain, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, which is one of our emotional centers, and the right middle temporal cortex, which is often a.s.sociated with auditory verbal hallucinations. The activity was extreme to the point that it was almost immeasurable, and the neurologists working on his case had never seen anything like it, especially with someone who had experienced such severe brain trauma. The initial worries related to brain swelling, bleeding, and intracranial pressure disappeared, as his brain seemed to heal itself as quickly, and miraculously, as his body did. He would also, at times, twitch, shake, convulse, and make guttural noises, which should not have been possible with the levels of medication being used to keep him sedated. At the end of his first week with us, he had a second major craniofacial procedure, in which t.i.tanium plates were used to seal and close the remaining open areas of his skull. The surgery went well, and he was returned to the ICU. Two weeks later we learned his real name, or rather, we learned the name he was given at birth. He was still in a coma, though no longer medically induced. It was some time after that, probably a year or so, that I learned who he was, and that his name, or any name any person could have given him, was meaningless. He was, and that is what is important. He was and he will always be.

ESTHER.

My brother Jacob did not allow the mainstream media to, as he said, infect our home. There were no newspapers, there was no television, unless it was Christian TV. We could only listen to Christian radio stations, and our computers had filters on them that prevented anyone using them from accessing MSM websites. He believed, and still does, that the mainstream media is anti-Christian and anti-family, and promotes a liberal h.o.m.os.e.xual agenda in direct conflict with the teachings of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and G.o.d Almighty.

Jacob was head of our home. My father had pa.s.sed away when I was six and Jacob was sixteen, and he had stepped into my father's role. A few months after my father's death, Jacob was born again into the Kingdom of the Christian G.o.d. Shortly thereafter, my mother was also born again, and when I was eight, I was as well. Life changed dramatically, and very very quickly. We had been Orthodox Jews. My father had always said we were part of an ancient family, that we were Davidic, which meant we were direct descendants of King David, that we were, in a way, Jewish royalty. Life with him was tense, and he didn't, for reasons I didn't know until later, have a good relations.h.i.+p with my mother. They fought all the time, or my father didn't speak to her. I never knew why or what she did, it was just the way it was. And when my father wasn't at work-he was a kosher butcher-he drank, read the Torah at the kitchen table, or sat in our living room with our rabbi, and later with Jacob. When the rabbi was over, all of the children were required to go to our rooms and stay there until the rabbi left. At the synagogue, the rabbi was always happy and friendly and very welcoming. When he was with our father, he was very serious and full of intent.

I saw Ben on the front page of a newspaper. I was walking to church for Bible study and was walking past a deli. The headline said Miracle Man and there was a picture of him lying on the ground with a man in a hard hat holding his hand. There was gla.s.s sticking out of his body and his head was bleeding. There was blood everywhere. It looked like someone had taken the picture with their cell phone. I stopped and looked at the paper to make sure I was seeing it correctly. I hadn't seen or spoken to or heard from Ben in sixteen years, since my brother had told him he had to leave. It was hard to tell exactly, so I went inside to buy the paper. I was uncomfortable. I didn't normally go into places like that, especially if they sold any media other than newspapers, especially magazines, which Jacob often said were the books of the Devil. The man behind the counter asked me if I had read the story and I said no. He said it was pretty incredible, that the man had gotten hit by a gla.s.s plate that fell from thirty stories and had lived. He was a Muslim man. I had been taught to hate Muslims, that they were evil. I gave him fifty cents, making sure not to touch him, and left.

Outside I read the article, and it said the man's name was Ben Jones, and that he lived in the Bronx. I knew then it was Ben, our Ben, our missing Ben, our exiled Ben. It said he was in a hospital in Manhattan in the intensive care unit. It was only a few miles away. I couldn't believe that after all this time he was only a couple of miles away. Jacob had tried for years to find him. He never said why he sent him away or why he wanted him back, but he desperately wanted him back. He talked to our church elders, and they hired a private detective who spent a year looking for him. They didn't find anything, not a single trace of him anywhere, and they looked all over America, and all over Canada, and even some places in Europe. So Jacob prayed and watched for signs. He hoped and believed that someday Ben might return.

I didn't know what to do, if I should tell Jacob or go see Ben myself or just let him be. Part of me wanted to obey and honor my brother as head of our home and as a pastor at our church. Part of me thought if Ben wanted to come back he would come back, and if the Lord and Savior deemed it so, then so it would be. Part of me was just scared, really scared, and I didn't know why, and normally I would have thought it was the work of Satan-that is what Jacob would believe and what they would have taught me at church-but for some reason it didn't feel like that was the case this time. I put the paper in a trash can, and after Bible study I stayed at church and prayed to Jesus for some direction. I stayed all day, and I prayed all day. Normally if I stayed away from home Jacob would get angry with me and tell me my place was at home helping Mother with the cooking and cleaning. The exception was if I was at church, and especially if I was praying. Jacob believed that all things could be achieved through prayer, and at the time I believed that as well. I prayed real hard that day. I kept asking Jesus to show me the way.

I didn't see any signs or experience any revelations, so I decided I would continue in a similar way. I bought a newspaper every day and read about what was happening with Ben and I went to church and prayed for most of the day. It was hard on Mother because she was used to having my help around the apartment. And Jacob was very curious why I was praying so hard. I told them I felt like I needed some guidance from the Lord as I moved into womanhood and was on my knees asking for it. They both approved of that and let me keep doing it. I saw it in the paper when they figured out Ben Jones was not Ben's real name. I read about how they were trying to find someone who knew him. I saw him when they showed his driver's license picture and I knew for sure. He looked just like he did when he left except that he was older, and I stared at the picture for a really really long time. Me and Ben had always been really close when I was little. My father and Jacob never liked Ben, and they were always mean to him. I didn't ever know or understand why, but they blamed him for everything that went wrong and yelled at him all the time. Sometimes my father hit him, and sometimes, when it was just the kids, Jacob would hit Ben. And as he got older, they hit him more, and they hit him harder. I would hear him in his room crying, and I would go in and give him hugs and tell him I loved him. He always said I was the only person in the family who loved him, and he would tell me I was the best little sister in the world. My father and Jacob mostly ignored me, and my mother was always worried about my father, and Ben paid the most attention to me, so I was closest to him and loved him most.

Each day there would be updates, and new stories. Ben was improving faster than the doctors had ever seen. He had another brain surgery. He was stable but still in a coma. There were protests at the construction site, and people were talking about lawsuits, and the developer was saying it wasn't his fault. I couldn't believe how much attention it was getting. I thought somebody who knew our family when we were Jewish, before we accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, would recognize him and come forward, but no one did. The papers just kept calling him the Miracle Man. It was really the first time in my life that I had ever read newspapers, and I could see why people hated them. They didn't seem dangerous, though, just sort of silly.

I kep