Anniston Bennet stopped shouting sometime the next morning. After driving Narciss to her car, I went down to the hatch and listened, but there wasn’t a murmur or sound. At first I thought about going in and checking on him, but then I decided that I should stick to my guns and make him wait the full ninety-six hours. I figured that he was still going to be mad no matter what, so I might as well do something worth him being mad.
I spent almost all of the next three days away from the house. The first night I hung out at Curry’s bar, lying about my business and drinking up a storm. In the morning I got up early and started worrying about the sergeant that Bennet had slaughtered in North Vietnam.
But we aren’t in Vietnam, I said to myself.
But he is a killer, I answered.
That morning I had made a date to go horseback riding for the first time in my life. I’d met a young white couple named Jodie and Byron. They were wealthy and invited me to come riding with them. I said that I’d never ridden before, but they promised that they’d show me how.
They had a girl they wanted me to meet. Extine was her name. She took me, along with Jodie and Byron, on a trip in woods around Southampton that I had never seen. Every inch of those woods is etched in my memory by the pain that saddle inflicted.
Jodie and Extine were cousins. Byron was Jodie’s husband. They lived in the Hamptons every summer and fall and then spent the rest of the year between Aspen and Maui. Their money came from their parents. Who knows where it was before that?
Extine had big blond hair and big teeth that she presented in a permanent smile.
Extine loved horses. She told me that she had ridden every day of her life since the age of twelve.
“I love horses’ hair and teeth and eyes,” she told me two minutes after we met. “When I was a girl I’d sneak out of the house at night to sleep in the stables with my mare.”
“It’s great that you had something like that,” I said. “I know a lot of people who never had something that they loved so much.”
I was thinking about myself—about how I had wandered in and out of the same front door for thirty-three years without ever knowing which way I should have been going.
“Boy just like a housefly,” Uncle Brent used to say. “So busy buzzin’ he don’t see the wall till it smack him upside the head.”
“You don’t think I’m crazy?” Extine asked with a sort of wonderment in her voice.
“I guess you could say that you were crazy,” I said. “I mean crazy basically means that you’re different from everybody else, and since you know what you want and most other people don’t have any idea, then they got to call you crazy. But only because they’re jealous.”
Extine loved me after that. She was a big physical girl, just like her mare. All she wanted was to gallop and romp up and down the hot trails around the Hamptons.
She liked my company because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with her obsession with horses. As a matter of fact I liked her because everything about her came down to horses. And a horse was an animal, like a deer.
Byron and Jodie took Extine and me to a cabin in woods connected to a property that was either theirs or a friend’s.
It was a large place, and soon after dinner the big blond horsewoman and I wandered off to a secluded part of the residence.
That night we kissed a lot, but she didn’t want to have sex. Extine was engaged to a guy named Sanderson who wouldn’t mind if she kissed somebody, but he’d draw the line at intercourse.
I didn’t care. My inner thighs were in deep pain. I was sure that I was bleeding on the inside. I fell asleep midkiss and didn’t wake up until noon the next day. My new friends were all gone, leaving me miles away from anywhere without a car. I spent most of the afternoon walking down paths in an abandoned apple orchard, trying to find a way down to the road.
It was a hot day and I had to remove my sweater and top shirt. I was still in pain and limping, very thirsty too, I remember, and slightly panicked that I might die out there in the woods. The dirt of the path was bone-dry. The blossoms of the apples had begun their transformation to fruit. For a long time I hadn’t thought about my prisoner, but on that desolate walk he came back to me.
A white man, maybe, who didn’t know one thing about his past. Pure evil in the way of business. A thief and a killer by his own admission. Why did he want to be caged, anyway? He never really answered my question.
I thought that maybe I should disappear to Aspen or Hawaii. Maybe I should let the white man go and take his money and vanish.
I made it to a back road and finally got a ride to Curry’s. There I sat and drank until closing time. When they kicked me out, I slept in my car and rose with the sun stabbing my eyes.
He could have been dead for all that I knew. But the deal was ninety-six hours, and I cracked the hatch on the second. The air in there was musty. I snapped on the light, and Anniston Bennet rose to his feet. He was bare chested but wore his bright-blue bottoms. Thick black hairs sprouted from his jaw, and there were gray bags under his eyes.
“Morning, Mr. Bennet,” I said. “You ready to get outta here?”
His eyes, I noticed, were black, not blue. The absence of his contact lenses seemed to be saying something that I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“I screamed for a whole day after you dropped that door,” he said. “I kept it up like a chant. Must be pretty soundproof. After that didn’t work I sharpened that can opener you left on the floor outside the cage. Then I made a slingshot out of the elastic in my other pair of pants. I was going to wait until you walked in and then I was going to shoot you dead.”
I felt a drop of sweat as it went down past my left ear.
“But then I had to wait too long for you to come back, and the blood lust drained away.” He sat in his red chair. “It’s dark in here, you know. Black, actually, and the air gets thick when you don’t open the door.”
He passed the fingertips of both hands lightly over his eyebrows, then looked up at me. “You made me think about the things I came here to pay for. You made me wonder about the life that I thought I could repent. Little Malo from northern Uganda. A small chest of diamonds in Rwanda. There were tens of thousands there. But Malika, I think her name was Malika, was just one.
“You know, I’ve walked past death so many times that you’d think I’d somehow end up dead like that, but I haven’t. Maybe I went a little crazy. I know a man in Connecticut who is willing to kill anyone anywhere in Africa or South America. He says he won’t kill in this country or Europe, but life down south is open season for him. I know a man in the kidney business and another one who deals only in hearts.”
“Is he black?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The assassin.”
“Yes. Yes, he is. But that doesn’t matter. He could be a white man. The fact is that he has become an individual, a man who takes actions solely from his own decision. Just like me, he is what he makes of himself. Maybe one day he’ll fall apart too, but that won’t matter either. You can never take back your life.”
I didn’t believe Bennet. His sorrow and self-pity, I thought, were a trick somehow. The only thing I couldn’t figure was what he had to gain by fooling me now.
“Are you ready to go?” I asked.
“No.”
“What you mean, no? You want another four days in the hole?”
He clasped his hands in front of his face as if in prayer and said, “I haven’t done anything else wrong.”
“What do you want from me, Mr. Bennet?”
“One time I walked into a room in Amsterdam wearing a polo shirt and khaki pants and changed the future of a nation” was his reply. “I once gave a nine-month-old infant as a present to a man’s dog. The man wanted to see if the myth of wolves raising men could be true. I walked through a city of the dead, in Rwanda, guarded by soldiers who were paid in dollars. Everywhere men and women had lain for so long that their bones had softened and they had become deflated bags of maggots. I retrieved enough money in diamonds to rebuild a nation, but instead I took those jewels and put them in a titanium box in the Alps.
“I’m still a bookkeeper behind enemy lines. Do you understand that, Mr. Dodd-Blakey?”
“No, I don’t.”
“What did you do while I was down here?”
“I learned to ride horses and I got drunk and I got laid.”
“Did you hear me screaming?”
“Sometimes. Not much though. You sounded like a moose who got stuck in some briar about a mile or so from here.”
“Did you worry that I might die?”
“Some.”
“Did you worry that I might kill you for treating me like that?”
“No,” I lied.
“Have you ever watched a child being murdered, Mr. Blakey?”
I shook my head and squinted.
“I once made ten million dollars because I was willing to deliver one million to a man hiding from the communists in Nicaragua. That’s the American way.” He laughed.
“Why are you here, Mr. Knosos?”
“Last summer I had a deal fall through.”
I had gotten up to the gate and now I was shaking, too afraid to go further.
“You know,” I said, “I don’t think I need to know this.”
“Let me stay a little bit longer, Charles,” Anniston Bennet said. “You can take away the books and just feed me bread and water if you want. You can keep the lights off all the time, but please don’t ask me to leave here.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No. No, I’m not crazy at all. As a matter of fact I’m very sane. That’s because I stopped for a minute and looked around and saw what it was that I was doing. All of a sudden I realized what was happening, what I had done was so, so . . .”
“. . . evil,” I said, thinking that I was finishing his thought. “You realized that you were evil?”
Bennet was rubbing his fingers along the rough surface of his chin, considering my words.
“No, and yes. What had happened was evil. The child torn apart and half devoured by a dog in the night. Procuring a heart or a kidney for a man who I might need as a business contact one day. The act is evil.” Bennet’s face contorted to grapple with the concept he was explaining. “Yes. And my actions were also evil, criminal. But it was not me; it was the world around me. Not me but the commerce and the language of our world.” He scooted up to the edge of his plastic chair and held his hands out separately, pinching the fingers together. “Death and starvation are integral parts of our language system, our form of communication. Do what I say or else. Do your job or you’re fired. These words carry consequence. To avoid pain we comply. Or we don’t and then we die. Our logic is evil, so the smartest and the most successful are devils. Like me. I am a good citizen and the worst demon. I realized it when a deal fell through. I failed and I had a dream and in the dream, I had done the right thing—failing.”
“And so you’re punishing yourself because you did good?” I asked.
He laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes yes. I did the right thing and the whole world, my whole world, fell apart. I realized that the fact of my failure was good in one way. But even though thousands may have been spared, that is not important. In order for man to survive as a species, there has to be people like me. People have to die for others to produce. The deaths are wrong, but the continuation of the world is more important.”
“So then you have been doing the right things. So there’s nothing wrong with you. And if that’s true then why would you feel that you need to be punished?”
Bennet sat back in his chair with all the certainty and fear of a despot awaiting his long-overdue execution.
“I was arrested once in Uganda. There was no trial; I was just taken to prison. I was beaten and tortured”—he leaned forward to indicate the scars on his shoulder —“and then left to contemplate my sins in a small cell. Pain is a part of life and I’ve always accepted the fact of death. But the time I spent in that cell, though I hated it while I was there, was like a gap in the thoroughfare that had been my life. Like the road just stopped and then there was a forest. A black forest, thick and dark, with no promise at all.
“My life stopped in that cell. And my worst enemy was everything that I knew. The blood work I’ve done. It was the worst experience I ever had. As the days went by, I got sick on the magnitude of what I had done. When they released me, I had to be hospitalized. I gashed my own thigh with a bayonet so that no one would realize how precarious my mind had become.
“As bad as that time in prison was, I wanted to go back—to face the evil and accept the accusations in my own mind. That’s why I came here. I had no idea that you’d do the dictator one better by turning out the lights.
“I came here hoping to make a statement to myself. To isolate and punish the part of me who sees the evil. The only real way to be punished is to recognize and pay for your deeds. But when I was in that darkness, hating you, I saw everything all over again. I remembered checking the situation in Rwanda every day for over a year. We knew it was going to blow up down there. And then I remembered walking along the streets of the dead. In the darkness here, I can almost feel them. My own body odors are reminiscent of the smell of death. I could understand how the sweat and gasses become stronger when you die and then they leak out of you. And it’s so dark and your heart is still beating, but death might be like that.
“I could not have stopped the massacre of the people there. I could not have changed the history set in motion centuries ago. And if I tried I would have lost all my power. I would have become like an ant under the foot of another man like me.”
“I still don’t get it, Mr. Bennet. Why here? Why me?”
“At first it was just a joke. Not a joke on you, Charles. I like you. You have a lot of potential. I chose you so that Anniston Bennet, the whitest white man that I could think up, would be jailed by a black man who really was a blue blood in American history. But then, when I got to know more about you, it seemed that you were my opposite in many more ways. You have done very little with your life, haven’t you? No profession, no job. You have never completed one project. You’ve never made a woman pregnant or voted, as far as I can tell. You quit school.
“Your whole life could be called a failure. Every second up until this moment has been wasted. But still you are truly innocent while I, who have changed the course of nations, am not worthy to call you friend.”
There was a fanatic tone to Bennet’s words. Because of this I didn’t pay much attention, at that moment, to the insults he gave me. Later on, after he was gone, I thought about what he had said. There wasn’t much that I could disagree with. He was evil and I was a failure; maybe that was the difference between the good and bad people of the world.
“Can I stay?” he asked again.
“What do you expect to get out of staying down here?”
“I just don’t want to leave yet, Warden. I need a little more time to think about all this.”
“It sounds like you got it all figured out already,” I said. “To save the world or whatever, you’ve got to be a badass.”
“The words I say to you are just words. But the child I sold into death, the corpses I robbed—these are the truths that I can no longer avoid. I have to make peace with them. I have to make peace with them or I’ll go crazy.”
You’re not too far from that already, I thought to myself.
“Just another week,” he said. “Just seven more days.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Thank you, Charles. Thank you,” he said.