I'd put it all together, sitting alone in my cell, and what I knew drove me back out into the hall again, only not like before but now like a dead man walking, shuffling my feet along the floor, the same ten steps one way and then back, eyes fixed on the floor, the arms hanging limp, the shoulders stooped like an old man's and what must have been on my face the look of a corpse because everyone stayed clear of me. Everyone except Reverend John. He was from one of Colson's prison ministries and would walk freely among us every day, taking men aside, one by one, whispering to them, opening the book and pointing at it with his insistent finger.

And I guess he knew right away I was one of the ones who'd read the parts in red, over and over, long into the night when the only light left was from the moon, and feel the tidal pull of a compassion so inconceivable that soon I couldn't wait to tell him "yes yes I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior," weeping and saying it over and over while he held me in the thick embrace of his bear-like arms. And I tried, tried to hold onto Jesus later when I felt him slipping away, no matter how hard I tried to feel his love, tried to hold onto the Reverend too even after I saw that it was all about power for him. He wasn't interested in the questions I was asking now, only in what came later when the beckoning of his sad eyes told me it was time to confess again and sob how thankful I was to him and Jesus for forgiving me, again and again. No, goddammit! I couldn't forgive myself and didn't want to. I'd done the most terrible thing a human being can do. 'Forgive yourself," he said 'even as your heavenly Father forgives you.' Only that doesn't bring back a life. The dead are the only ones who have a right to forgive-and they can't. Their eyes say something else. That death is a horror in which there's no comfort or forgiveness. Only nothingness, pitiless and final--and as your life slips from you the last thing you see is that nothingness, triumphing over every hope and illusion. Besides, the afterlife and the great banquet of forgiveness. It undoes everything. As if all the evil and suffering we do doesn't matter finally. Life's a shell game to amuse something vindictive in us that wants to call itself God.

It got so I couldn't stand to see him coming down the hall with that sad look in his eyes. I didn't want his fucking pity. I wanted Judgment, Judgment pure like hammer strokes

And I knew there was only one way to get it. Back into the cell, into the books, the one's that had been the hardest to crack. Books with a finality that cut away everything but what I could use to forge a hammer I could bring down upon my life the way you crack a walnut so that all the pieces shatter and nothing is left but what's at the center. I was reading again, all day, but now like I wanted to finish something not start it and so needed only the few books, the ones I'd struggled against that had defeated me the first time. Like Spinoza. Not because he was difficult but because he's pure. For weeks I read the opening sentences, over and over, paralyzed by their clarity. And then step by step the great movement of thought that follows. But I had to understand each sentence-understand it from the inside-before I could read the next one. I'd hold a sentence in front of me, days at a time, until I grasped the inevitability of it. One sentence after another, for I don't know how many months, with all existence purged away except the iron march of thought toward total clarity. Pure concepts in a pure order-from bondage to freedom-and then as I raced to the breathless close of it, I felt it, what everyone says, how he becomes a wind, a great wind blowing through your whole life, scattering the dross like leaves in autumn, leaving nothing but the truth apprehended in its perfect symmetry, each individual piece known in its necessary connection to every other, what happened to my mother and my father, the things I did, each piece infinite in depth and complexity yet bound to every other in an intelligibility total, unchanging-and thus beyond rage. Forever beyond rage.

And so I waited in the purity of that knowledge for what I sought to happen. And nothing did. I saw my life, that's all, like dirty bathwater whirling down a drain, taking everything with it into that terrible sucking sound it makes at the end.

It'd stay this way forever. I'd know it all-in perfect comprehension-and nothing would change. Ever. I looked up one day and I'd been on the Row for 9 years. It would have stayed like that, another decade or more, mere time, if it hadn't been for the black man.

I could feel him staring at me through the back of my head long before I saw his eyes black with rage burning into me, saying "This is how it'll come down, any day now motherfucker. And you won't see meThere'll be just the shiv in the spine --and then I'm the last thing you'll see, my eyes, watching you die."

It was like Shakespeare says somewhere, I was distilled into a jelly with the act of fear. It was in my legs every time I tried to stand and walk, in my hands shaking like a junkie in need of an angry fix. In me and outside me, lurking in the cell, even after it was locked "I know how he gets in! He doesn't need the guards to open the doors. It's a key, he's got it hidden in that gold tooth that gleams at me when he smiles. Tonight, that's when he'll come, after I can't help it anymore and fall into sleep. I'll wake, my throat already slit, the blood starting to gurgle, his great hands around my ears almost like he's going to kiss me-- and his eyes like huge suns on fire with hate." It got to where all I could do was lay in my cell, balled up in a fetal position, trembling and crying like a baby. So I did it-the one thing you can never do here. I dropped a kite. On myself. I'm sorry, a kite, that's what we call it when you slip a note to a guard ratting on somebody. "Save me. He's everywhere now, his dreadlocks like snakes with eyes at the end-eyes like fangs."

They took me to the white room. That's when it really got bad. When I was safe. After they strapped me down on a bed like I asked them to-and I was free, free to rave. I didn't need him anymore. It was all back inside me, but torn loose from all the ways I'd tried to contain it. I could feel it, something ravenous, scooping out chunks of my heart, devouring them: like that passage in the Bhagavad Gita when all mankind rushes into Krishna's mouth to be chewed to pieces, the crushed heads stuck between his teeth, all creation, moths to the flame, rushing headlong to the one sea, burning, burning in Krishna's flaming jaws. "No" I screamed when they told me they were going to medicate me. "No motherfuckers you can't, not without my permission. I know my rights, even here." Somehow in my raving I knew that this is what had to happen. What I had to go into wherever it took me. The only thing I had to hold onto-my madness. The only thing left that was mine. Mine--even when they put me down in the hole.

That's where it happened, what I'd always sought, deservedEverything drifted away-even the images. I was left with only the one thing. Emotion. That's what we are. All we are. Something happens and an emotion is formed. Later something triggers it and it returns-in all its fury. Then it's like what Spinoza said-an emotion can only be replaced by another emotion and the strongest always wins. Hate, fear, love, rage-each the pure product of pure and brutal experiences-warring with each other. Emotion-the thing that tears us apart. And so we try to blow it out into the world. Inflict it on someone else to get some relief. But it always returns to its source. Life nothing but the process of being blown with restless violence from one emotion to another. But always in the end rage, only rage

Let it come, I said, feeling the sweat of it pouring over me rocking myself back and forth in it making my body a cradle for it. For rage so pure it'd consume me, rage raging in me until it burst into remorse-- remorse becoming love-- a terrible love, ripping me apartThen again nothing but the panic of feeling myself-what you'd call my soul-dying within. Then reborn, reborn in rage. I felt it claw at me: not I it, I said like that play of Beckett's, only I knew it was I and II felt myself vanish into ituntil there was nothing but one emotion after another searing my flesh. Time went away and space. The room went away. I was utterly alone, with nothing left between me and what I was.

Most of the time it felt like I'd never come back. That rage would claim me so complete and entire that I'd run and dash my brains out against the padded wall. Or that I'd dissolve in a love that was nothing but pity, pity for a loss so deep that one morning they'd find me gone in a weeping that could never end. Or that the panic would seize me"yes that's how it'll end crying out against myself for the Meds, begging for them, pleading with them please please I'll do anything just take the pain away." Or fear, the worst fear, that I'd become my deed-but without remorse-my deed and nothing but a monster raving kill kill kill, living only for horror, wanting it, more of it, unable to get enough of it, hurt and hatred and revenge.

I felt each emotion blow down white hot all over me. Burning itself up in me. Renewing itself through me. And in the brief interim, when the whole thing would pause and turn on itself like a ferris wheel about to run backwards-Dread-- the cold sweat of dread all over me, knowing this might never end yet knowing I had to sustain it because otherwise I was truly lost. Do it to yourself, I cried. Be it, rage, hate, terror, despair. Assault yourself with yourself. Make each emotion a spike driven through the brain straight into the heart. That's the only way, I cried, and in that cry I became a young girl in Nepal sold into prostitution, raped and beaten by two men; a woman in New York bleeding to death in an alley 10 feet from home, the neighbors gawking through closed windows; then little girls, dozens of them, sexually abused children crying out of me for it to "stop." Stop!" And that's when it began, what had to happen, though I had no way to know it then, all the emotions bleeding into one another, out of their clash refining themselves into something else that I no longer felt would crush or swallow me but out of which something new might come to be.

I lay there like a corpse feeling the whole process moving across me the way a rat down here sometimes crawls across your chest in the night, slow and tentative, almost delicate, like it was your companion and didn't want to wake you. Don't move, I said. Hold yourself still in the still of this. Wait. Wait. And then I felt it, my whole life, coming back to me, all the images, every event, but like there was finally room in me for them. Like I'd created a womb in myself and something was being born there. All I'd felt, done, suffered, all the violence of my passage through life, was being transmuted into something else. Like I was giving birth to myself. Out of myself. Feeling in myself something I'd never felt before. Not pity or remorse but grief, a grieving for my life and out of that grieving a new way of being beginning in me. Only I couldn't reach out and grab it like the brass ring, but had to wait, wait for it to open in me. I wept then, but in a way I never had before. There was no desperation in it. The tears were warm and slow-streaming down my cheeks-and full of what I can only call gladness. But grief too, real grief. A grief for her deeper than any I'd felt before when the panic to deny who I was got all mixed up in it. No, this was real grief. Grief for someone I never knew-someone who never had a chance like mine to know herself. For a life that never was. Unforgivable-to take that from someone. And so for the first time I could really say it ­ to her: " I'm sorry, sorry for your lossfor taking from you the chance to discover who you were." (breaks down and weeps.)

And that's when I felt it, love spreading out from me like spokes of some great wheel, blood red spokes running across a wheel as big as the sun, turning, turning in love for all of them, for my mother just a little girl all all alone down in that basement and my father all alone, forever alone, in that room full of men. And Sis, the beautiful one, who

Somehow knew from the start that there's one commandment we must live by-the refusal to pass it on.

Something like what you'd call peace descended on me. Not forgiveness, but something else. A feeling--I don't know how to put it any other way--that I was ready to resume my life. That I'd carry it all, but in a new way