It’d been far too easy. Far too easy to slide into a new position at the University, to move his funds around off shore and gut the empty warehouse in Vodou, too easy, to find the right people to install the club downstairs. It was unsettling.

I looked on it as God’s way of smiling on my choice. The second floor converted into a flat glorious canvas on which to write, to think, overlooking the hovels of town, the broken trailer parks and the filth and scum of the city. For weeks I had done nothing but write, my hand cramped and calloused, cans and cans of discarded ink pens and ruined manuscripts. Even a single thought out of place. Sitting cross legged on the floor and shaking while writing, the sweat pouring down, keeping things hot, dank and warm. This was my night life, my free time.

Other times I spent time at the University. Sometimes I’d come in the dead of night, wandering the halls, fingers tracing the raised painted brick of old buildings, tasting young flesh and bright eyes. It was so lovely to have this here, this nestled gem within the broken and corroded, the glimmer of faint hope brought to light before it could be sucked out. I met a lot of students and heard stories, stories of troubled classes of predatory teachers. I listened and consoled. I was good at it too, really fucking good. I’d drop hints bait for just the right kind of kill to see if things came sniffing out during conversations, a student of an abusive family, a girl who had seen trauma, the signs of a boy angry and filled with rage. Sometimes they sniffed at the bait, took it, and our conversations went elsewhere. Lessons, training, mostly it was talking, it was exploring ideas together, opening their mind and breaking through the shell of the world around them they’d so neatly been encased in by doctors, loved ones, society. Taking the small hammer to them, each one their own beautiful blocks of marble, unmade, and fissures in all the right places to just be…opened right up.

A good majority of the time however, I wasn’t known as anything more than one of the more down to earth and engaging advisors on campus. I’d even had a bit of a “cool” moniker, the tattoos the quirky smile, the self confidence. Students valued real life insight, even when it reflected banal “live your dreams” bullshit I could spill all day. It was the same kind of confidence you built…well, as a confidence man. I even started to become known for walking during conversations, citing old Socrates ideas that walking helps engage your rote mind and freed the rest of you to wander and take in ideas. I no longer let myself be confined to the simple small square room of the classroom, I wandered, like a panther among a flock of gazelles.

But the reason I am telling you all this is….two nights ago, I had the most fabulous epiphany. It was raw, magnetic shit that made me realize why I was doing this. I have a student, a young girl I’ve been spending time with, and no, I am not fucking her as much as you might like to think I would be. I was helping her make sense of the sudden crash to earth you feel when you have no money and the world’s true face is revealed, broken and destroyed. Like being in a car accident, you tense up, your soul crimps back, shock happens. There were so many students, wandering in a state of highly toxic shock. Even in simple conversation helping to make sense of the ugliness, soothing them to relax, to let their bodies and minds open wide, to absorb the blow and roll, rather than tense up and cause more damage; to move with the pain rather than to resist it. And no, I kept the subtle sub-context to myself. It was none of their business unless they …were right.

The girl had found me on the corner, watching the Beta house in the darkness, leaned against a building. To everyone else it might have looked like I was peeping, but I wasn’t, I was watching guard, standing over what I had found to be a very choice group of…candidates. She had seen me and in naiveté only a young girl could have, or at least I had assumed, she looked past it and we talked. It hadn’t been naiveté at all, she was glazed over, bleeding, bruising, welted. My eyes widened quietly and for the first time I felt something stir. I had images of my daughter’s body in the photos, images of a child killed. Her face was no longer bright and optimistic albeit troubled, it was…destroyed. The mud on her cheek, one eye shot and bloody from being slammed against pavement….

She told me the story, some punk kid trying to earn his way into a gang, trying to show someone he was a man and not a boy. He’d stabbed her, slashed her a few times, she’d spent the last few hours in a clinic she couldn’t pay for and had run out the backdoor to keep from having the cops get her. She’d been raped, repeatedly, for an entire day. She told him of how he used her, in graphic detail, and…well, I had insisted, but she’d never know why. I sat on a bench with her, for hours, listening, talking, and feeling certainly…connected in a strange way I hadn’t expected, but, connected to her anger, so fresh, her rage, so immediate and I felt my body tense, the thunderous hum of voices talking. Whispering in my ear, the demon and the beast, a chance for vengeance, a chance to show this world there are consequences for ones actions, consequences for those who aspire to keep our minds locked in some furious state of pain and suffering, torn down around them all, chained and subverted. There were lessons to teach.

I… I was compelled, yes, it was just as obvious that while I knew my lessons could teach a person the true ways of God and this world, that….those who disobeyed must be punished, they must meet consequences for their actions and truly repent for their sins. My mind swirled as I let her lean against my body, my eyes glazed over and distant I watched the horizon, thinking about the boy, the now “man”. I asked a few questions, enough to know where to find him, and how to find him.

It took two days. The greasy child in a back alley, not the man perhaps he hoped to be. He wore a bandana and had a baseball bat over his shoulder, no doubt a knife somewhere on his body. I walked down the alley not heading towards him but passed him, the silent clip of rubber soles on the trashy scum of an unkept cove of shit. The imagery made such a wonderful allegory for the entire City. I could feel his eyes on me, lazy and high, barely an adult, still pimple faced, pock-marked from heroin use and boney as his body grew into the 18 year old frame. He said something casually, I couldn’t remember for what, a handout, a light, food, directions. I couldn’t remember.

I had wondered if darkness had left me. I had wondered if in those moments of building I had lost my taste to break or if I had ever had one. In all this time helping young ones reflect I was, in fact, also reflecting. I had felt for the first time in a long time, cured, saved, saved by the voices of God that I had once thought were demons that kept me shackled to the memories of pain and anger, of betrayal and destruction. It was in this moment, I realized that God was far more canny than I had expected him to be, and it seemed that there would be a use for darkness afterall. And there was a sweet, sweet gasp of being alive when my body unleashed and my fingers dug into the boy’s throat, not simply crushing his windpipe, his drugged and lucid body unprepared for such an assault, but piercing the skin and nearly ripping his airway out. I screamed, my eyes glazed over with anger and pain, her pain, my pain, I was vengeance, I was incarnate, I was the hand of God himself. The boy’s eyes, wide with amazement turned stark with pain. He felt it, his blood filled arteries sprayed my own face, my mouth, my eyes. I let go and was stunned, as if looking at my own body from outside, was I truly capable of this? Was I truly able to….it was not me. It was God, the God who had written with me, sat with me in the empty room, guided me with the students, it was his, our will. He was mine, my secret confidant. I would never ask them to understand, I would not portend to speak for him, but simply to do.

The boy crumbled clutching, squirming and writhing. I knelt beside him, taking his hand and stroking is palm, I let him bleed out, and I told him that he would be forgiven, and that in his next life, he would understand and learn this lesson, his soul would grow, it would be mindful and awake, it would not sleep as it did now. I forgave him and warmly kissed his bloody forehead. I looked and saw a large piece of concrete, the pavement broken into chunks. Squatting down I gripped the craggy chunk of gray cement….and stood over him, he looked up, and I looked down, and in that period, we shared reflection together. There was a sound of the concrete opening him like a monkey opening a coconut on a rock, a clunk and a smash of wetness and then it was over. I stood there, vigilant that his soul would leave and I wanted it to know my face. Covered in his blood I could smell him, and I felt as alive as I had in ages. I felt the entirety of the circle, the growth, the end, the guiding, the punishing, the circle moved like a lazy river and he ran his fingers through the current in that moment.

I took a rag from a dumpster, wiping my face slowly, cleaning out any of the blood and sighing softly, looking down one final time and saying a prayer. I was at peace, though I would never tell the girl, she was not one that would understand, I’d simply, do the work, every day, fostering the return of what could only be as beautiful as a broken toy could be. A broken toy was more beautiful than anything that was pristine and fake. This world, I knew, was nothing more than Purgatory and here there were those that needed to be judged, and those that needed to be saved. I would devote everything to those ends; the shepherd in the valley of Purgatory.