Verse Four

Seventy Times

Chapter 7: Verse Four

Sunday.

The same chairs. The same men. The same coffee in the same foam cups with the same sugar packets obtained by the same slow institutional theft that the men had elevated into a sacrament of hospitality.

Ezra arrived at seven-forty. He set up the main room. He preached for thirty minutes on Romans 8:28 — And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him — and he preached it the way he preached everything, which was honestly, which meant he told the men that the verse was easy to say and almost impossible to believe and that he was not going to pretend otherwise.

After the service, eighteen became seven.

Not eight. David had been transferred to a medical facility in Virginia for a procedure the prison medical unit could not perform, and the chair he usually occupied sat empty with the particular emptiness of a chair that had recently held someone — not the emptiness of absence but the emptiness of interruption, which was more noticeable and harder to ignore.

The men arranged themselves. Ray in the corner. Khalil across from Ray. Jerome by the door. Tyrell and Marcus and Curtis B. filling in.

Ezra poured the coffee.

He opened Marcus's Bible.

"Verse four," he said. "Philemon."

He read it aloud:

I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers.

The words entered the room and the room received them the way the room received everything — without judgment, without performance, with the willingness to hold whatever was placed in it for as long as the placing required.

"Paul is in prison," Ezra said. "Writing to a man who is free. And the first thing he says, after the greeting, is I remember you."

He let the sentence stand.

"What does it mean to remember someone," he said, "in a place like this."

The question opened the way questions opened in this room — not like a door but like a wound, slowly, and with the understanding that what was inside might be worse than what was visible from the outside.

Tyrell spoke first. Tyrell was thirty-eight, fifteen years into a twenty-year sentence for a RICO charge that had swept up eleven men from his neighborhood in Baltimore, three of whom had been involved in the organization the prosecution described and eight of whom had been involved in the neighborhood the organization operated in, a distinction the jury had not been asked to consider. He was built like a man who had once been larger and had been reduced by the facility into something more compact and more precise, the way a river reduces a stone.

"Remembering is dangerous," Tyrell said. "You remember the wrong thing at the wrong time and it takes you out for a week. I got a system. I remember forward, not backward. I remember what I'm going to do when I get out. I don't remember what put me in."

"And if someone remembers you?" Ezra asked. "What does that cost?"

"Costs everything," Tyrell said. "If my daughter remembers me as I was, that's one thing. If she remembers me as I am — that's a different thing. And if she stops remembering me at all — "

He did not finish.

The room did not ask him to.

Khalil leaned back. "In Islam we say dhikr — remembrance. It means to remember God constantly, not as an exercise but as a state of being. Paul is saying the same thing here. He is not saying he occasionally thinks of Philemon. He is saying Philemon lives in his prayers the way breathing lives in the body — without interruption, without choice."

"That's beautiful," Jerome said, "but I don't think that's what it means for most people in here."

"What does it mean for you," Khalil said, not as a challenge but as a genuine inquiry, because Khalil treated other people's theology with the respect of a man who believed his own faith was strong enough to survive the encounter.

Jerome looked at the table. His hands were around the foam cup. He was twenty-four. His daughter was three. He had been incarcerated since she was a year old, which meant he had no memories of her that were not mediated by photographs and phone calls and the particular cruelty of a system that allowed a man to hear his child's voice but not to hold her hand, as though the voice without the hand were sufficient to maintain the bond that a father and a child require.

"Remembering is what keeps you human," Jerome said. "But it's also what makes the time feel longest. The days I don't think about Keisha are the days that go fastest. The days I remember her — what she sounded like on the phone last week, the picture my mom sent of her first day of preschool — those days have no end."

"So you'd rather not remember," Ray said.

"No." Jerome looked up. "I'd rather the remembering didn't cost so much."

The room sat with this.

Ray picked up his Bible. He had been inside for thirty years. He had entered at twenty-eight and was now fifty-eight, and the distance between those two numbers contained a life that had been lived entirely within the Bureau of Prisons and that he discussed with the calmness of a man who had long ago made peace with the facts without making peace with their meaning, because the facts were finished and the meaning was not.

"Paul remembers Philemon," Ray said. "He remembers him in prison. In chains. In a place where remembering a free man could break you, because the comparison between your situation and theirs is the kind of comparison that eats a person alive. But Paul doesn't remember Philemon with resentment. He remembers him with thanks."

Ray looked at Ezra.

"That's the hard part. Not the remembering. The thanks."

Ezra held the look.

He held it because the room required it and because the men deserved it and because the particular truth of what Ray had said was a truth that applied to Ezra's situation with a precision that Ray could not have known and that Ezra could not acknowledge, because the room was not the place for the chaplain's burden and the chaplain's burden was not the room's to carry.

"The thanks," Ezra repeated.

He did not elaborate.

He did not need to. The word sat in the room with the weight of something that had been placed on a table and could not be moved until everyone present had agreed on what it was, and the agreement was not forthcoming, and the room held it anyway, because that was what the room was for.

They worked through the rest of the verse. They discussed prayer. They discussed what it meant to carry another person in your mind when your mind was the only private space the institution had not claimed. They discussed the word always, which in the Greek was pantote, and which carried the sense of every time, at all times, without exception — a word that left no room for the selectivity that made remembering bearable.

At nine-thirty Ezra closed the Bible.

"Next week," he said. "Verse five."

He paused.

He did not tell the men that next week there would be a new person in the room. He did not say Washington's name. He did not prepare them because preparation, in this context, would have required explanation, and explanation would have required disclosure, and disclosure would have placed his own history at the center of a room that existed to hold theirs.

The men stood. Cups in the trash. Chairs pushed back.

Jerome stopped at the door.

"Chaplain."

"Yes."

"The remembering. Does it get easier?"

Ezra looked at him.

"No," he said. "It gets more honest."

Jerome nodded once and left.

Ezra wiped the table. Rinsed the hot plate. Stacked the cups.

He stood in the empty study room and looked at the seven chairs and the one empty chair that David had occupied and that would, by next Sunday, be occupied by a man whose name Ezra remembered in a way that had nothing to do with prayer and everything to do with the sealed room in his chest where the facts of March were kept in the order that made them survivable rather than true.

He locked the room.

He crossed the yard.

The September light was the same as it had been the Sunday before, because light did not observe the schedules of human crisis and September in Tennessee did not pause for the men who walked beneath it carrying things they had not yet learned to set down.