I returned to the gloomy depths of Gehenna looking for answers. I’d been perusing Spinoza’s Ethics and Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Separated by three centuries, the philosopher and the physicist had both studied relativity, the first to explore the metaphysical realm, the second to postulate immutable cosmic laws. They reached broadly similar conclusions, among them that perception depends on vantage point.
Spinoza buoyed his argument by proposing -- swiftly earning him excommunication and centuries of Jewish and Christian antipathy -- that much of human consciousness is based, not on fact, but on how we are conditioned to interpret the occurrence of being. There are no wrong answers, he proposes, only divergent opinions which are themselves blurred by conformity to an acquired optic. In other words, truth is in the mind’s eye of the beholder.
Einstein also theorized that reality is merely an illusion, “albeit a very persistent one.” He went a step further. He declared that perceptions can actually alter the experience of reality. I had an opportunity to test this strange concept, not in the perfect geometry of space, nor in the sterile labyrinths of Cartesian logic, but in a realm that has grown and spilled over its own boundaries like a gangrenous sore, far from the synthetic harmony of Ein Sof where the well-to-do live in stifling isolation.
It was still dark as I worked my way to the bridge. I came upon sleepy-eyed children pulling heavy loads, sweaty cadaverous men packed like sardines in rickety trucks belching black smoke, half submerged under the garbage they were ferrying from one end of the chasm to the other. Perpetual garbage, I reckoned.
Huddled like newborn pups against the scurfy wall of an abandoned building, young boys slept, their arms crossed against the chill of night, their fingers clasping their shoulders. Others, stirring from a thin, turbulent slumber, were getting ready, in lieu of breakfast, to take the long and excruciating way out of reality by sniffing glue.
Further on, resting on a bed of filthy rags near the gutter, a woman dozed fitfully with an infant at her breast while an older child begged for scraps of food and wiped an ever-runny nose on the sleeve of a threadbare sweater. Ahead, past the bridge, in a huge crater-like depression teeming with vultures, I found toddlers and young teens feeding on garbage. Knee-deep in steaming mountains of waste and competing with the loathsome winged scavengers, another group of youngsters rummaged for a meal, a slipper, perhaps a broken toy to brighten an otherwise joyless childhood.
And when I ventured past the festering hollow, I chanced upon a living ghost. I have no other words to describe her. She has no name. Madness robs people of all identity. Madness, in her case, further sharpens the alienation, the anonymity. She has no name. She has earned the scorn of her own wretched kind and she will pass in this dimension and from this moment in time unnoticed, even by her fellow Dybbuks. Surely, a name, a common moniker would give her substance, if not legitimacy. But she’s been forgotten. Insanity and amnesia have mercifully yanked her from the clutches of reality. Yet she is real, irritatingly so, the symbol and victim of the dysfunctional society that spawned her. Shunned, loathed, she inspires revulsion, not mercy, for she is unrepentant, defiant in her grotesque cardboard palace, amid the debris, the scraps of metal, the offal on which she feeds, the useless memories that haunt her still, come rain or come shine, come hell or high water.
Her partner-in-grime, ageless, toothless, feral and mad, too mad to erect her own shelter, sits by her companion’s side or steals forty winks on the naked pavement, curled up in a fetal position, her two hands pressed together to form a cushion under her cheek. Wielding a yard of rubber tubing, or an old broom, she chases after man and specter with equal fury, a menacing fist raised against oncoming traffic and snickering children, striking the ground with anger and bewilderment, no, with exasperation, spitting at passers by, pelting them with invectives. Sometimes folly crests like an open flame and a torrent of tears drenches her grand-motherly face. Overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of her frustration, she calms down, tunes in briefly on the world around her, then resumes her silent vigil, a lifeless gaze now focused on an all-consuming void.
One day, a gang of thugs swooped down on Gehenna and smashed the paper, string and plastic scaffolding her friend had erected. Even a place of torment such as Gehenna, I mused, has its pitiless enforcers, its dim-witted disciplinarians. The woman put up a fierce battle but the enforcers prevailed. Trampled by uncaring feet, the decimated remains of her flimsy abode were carted away and thrust aside under the bridge where Ein Sof’s trash and raw sewage eventually end up. She was allowed to bed down on the bare ground and fend for herself.
Up the road, in the narrow, slop-splattered alley that hugs the flanks of an old church, a man writhed in drug-induced agony. Frothing at the mouth, his eyes on fire, he crumbled to the ground and let out a blood-curdling wail. Clawing at the demons that tormented him, thrashing about, he rolled into the gutter and narrowly missed being hit by a speeding garbage truck.
Safe in their pews, the faithful were being treated to the grand spectacle of a pre-dawn mass. “Dominus vobiscum,” said the priest. “Et cum spiritu tuo,” the faithful responded, mercifully unmindful, if only for a brief moment in their beleaguered lives, of the pervading godlessness that surrounds them.
Around the corner, propped against a fence, a group of cripples flaunted their grotesque infirmities. Unruffled, passers-by, the faithful, the penitent, the aimless and the lost, the discarded and the redundant, stepped over them like so much rubbish. Across the street, a young woman sprawled on the ground breast-fed her newborn as three older daughters, sired by three different men, plied the beggar’s trade.
Who are the mad, I reflected, and who are the meek who inherit the wind? As I pondered the question, I nearly tripped on the cadavers of several children. They lay prone, splotches of dried blood streaking their faces. They’d been bound and gagged and shot, gangland-style, in the back of the head. Even Gehenna has its pariahs.
The only thing that separates “God” and its creation is a dissimilar perspective. Relativity prevents either from switching places. In Gehenna, as in Ein Sof, where heaven and hell coexist in perilous proximity, right and wrong are less sharply defined. For the powerful, the privileged, the favored, the free, the well fed who squander their freedom by abdicating to the tyranny of orthodoxy, truth remains the stronger of two or more conflicting views. For the poor, the disenfranchised, the forgotten, the unloved, the Dybbuks and the ghouls and the zombies that haunt the conscience of the Perpetuals, the truth is a useless paradox, like relativity. Don’t look for answers, I kept telling myself. Don’t look for reason. All you’ll find is nature, cruel and unmoved, further debased by the aggregate interests and avarice of the dominant power base.
*
It was now nearly dawn but the sun had yet to rise behind Gehenna’s battered ramparts. An ashen darkness still clung like a shroud over its higher elevations. Up since the cocks’ first crow, Gloria (I gave her that name to memorialize this fleeting apparition) raced down the sheer, narrow footpath leading to the murky waters of the creek below. Pressed to her bosom, swaddled in an old piece of cloth and still asleep, her infant daughter was oblivious to it all. The course is overrun with hazards but Gloria knows every crag, every loose pebble, every muddy ledge along the way. She’s made the perilous trek a thousand times or more since the birth of her baby, six months ago, and she negotiates each obstacle with the agility of a veteran climber.
Laden with her precious cargo, a pail of water now balanced atop her head, she turned around and clambered back uphill. Midway, she stopped to catch her breath. She must manage her strength. She’s pregnant with her second child and she’s hardly eaten in the past three days. But Gloria is no stranger to privation. Pain no longer daunts her. She has her baby to care for. Another little one is on the way in five months or less, she’s not sure.
Slowly, night’s inky mantle dissolved, baring a pale orange sky. A new day had dawned, bringing a fresh surge of anticipation and energy. Emboldened, she resumed her arduous climb.
Gloria is fourteen.
Reaching the summit, winded by the grueling ascent, Gloria wiped her brow and surveyed her surroundings. Before her, barely visible in morning’s timid glow, stretched, familiar and inescapable, an unobstructed view of utter barrenness, of squalor and malignancy and evil that the thick haze failed to conceal. Behind her, balancing precariously on the edge of a narrow bluff overgrown with stinkweed, rests the ramshackle hut Gloria calls home. Straddling a scaffolding of rotting wood pylons and corroded iron beams under which cower a small emaciated dog and a palsied cat, the windowless shack stands defiant in its vulnerability, a symbol of the paradox that is Gehenna.
Gloria blows out the quivering flame of an old kerosene lamp and fans away the acrid emanations. She lays the sleeping infant on the floor, gently propping her head against a cardboard box where she keeps all of her possessions. There’s a rag doll, an old discolored dress, a small bundle of used baby clothes, an old photograph, a broken comb, a tin of cereal, a jar of brown sugar in which tiny yellow ants have taken residence, a cross fashioned from popsicle sticks, a faded prayer book frontispiece in which an enraptured blue-eyed blond Jesus is seen levitating above a sea of mesmerized disciples.
Gloria strikes a match, ignites kindling in the hollow of a cinder block and stirs a thin gruel of rice and water into a pitted metal bowl. She stopped breast-feeding her daughter when she became pregnant with her second child. Underweight, her ashen skin pocked with mosquito bites, the baby girl suffers from malnutrition. Gloria looks at her daughter with a mixture of tenderness and apprehension as her own childhood, barely tasted, irretrievably lost, comes back to haunt her.
Gloria is the embodiment of innocence undone, childhood compromised and corrupted by poverty, neglect and hopelessness. Soft-spoken and unassuming, she reluctantly relives the nightmare by evoking it at my urging. Her narration, despite the horror it inspires, is childlike and flat. Her voice betrays neither anger nor sorrow. She smiles timidly instead, perhaps to hide the shame and pity she feels, not for herself, but for those who so sadistically deprived her of love and dignity.
I asked her what she desired most and felt instantly shamed by the vacuity of my question. Fixing a gaze of unfathomable emptiness at some distant point in space, giving me time to ponder my lack of tact, then turning tenderly to the toddler nestled in her arms and patting her own belly, the child-mother replied, “I have nothing and I have everything. I can’t ask for less or for more.”
In the world of Dybbuks, nothing and everything are usually too much to bear.
Morning alit, or something akin to morning. A faint gray glow crept out of an overcast horizon. The glow was not bright enough to disperse the misty tendrils of fog that hung like wispy ghosts over the desolation.
*
Gehenna, like fungus, has spread tentacle-like, sprouting squalid slums along muddy ridges and down the slopes of dank garbage-strewn ravines.
It’s in one such slum, nicknamed Limón by the locals because of the jade-green stream of sludge that runs through it, that I came across Angela. I found her sitting at the edge of a cot, her feet pitted by insect bites and glistening skin lesions, in a shed under a leaking corrugated sheet metal roof held up by rotting wooden beams.
In a corner of the room, under the pallid rays of a bare 40-watt bulb around which a squadron of flies and moths kept circling, propped on a table littered with rags and old newspapers, rested a tall, garishly painted plaster figurine, a Madonna and child whose introspective, tortured gaze, frozen skyward where God is said to dwell, exuded pain and disillusionment, betrayal and stupefaction. Every once in a while, almost mechanically, the girl cast a forlorn glance at the holy icon, perhaps for reassurance. But in her large brown eyes all I saw were false hopes and broken promises.
This time I said nothing. Assailed by a jumble of emotions, I just looked at her cherub face. I wanted to hug her and, in so doing, to absorb her within my being for warmth and reassurance. But I didn’t dare. I took her little hand in mine and kissed it. Angela blushed, looked at the bare concrete floor and sighed.
“Take her away from this place,” her mother pleaded.
Take her? Where? How? What do I know about the transmigration of souls? When was the last time I rescued anyone from a nightmare? What if this was a trap? What if this Dybbuk was an incubus, an evil spirit? I understood what sophistry can do to distort judgment, to cripple reason, to inspire fear, to justify cynicism. And as I looked at Angela’s innocent face, I chose discretion instead of valor. I ran out and burst into tears.
Outside, the vultures, the ever-present vultures, resumed their abominable vigil, gliding overhead like black-winged demons at a Witches’ Sabbath, awaiting death, smelling it, almost tasting it. Surely I reflect, even God must find Limón a very bitter fruit.