Life Expectancy

put at the mercy of the state, sent to an orphanage or foster homes… or maybe claimed by relatives of Konrad Beezo every bit as crazy as he was. And all his life people would point and say, That's the son of the murderer. I knew what good honest people Rudy and Maddy were, and I knew the love they would shower on their boy, so I did what I did, and Lord Jesus forgive me if He thinks I played God."
        After closing his eyes and absorbing the nurse's tale in silence for a half minute or so, Punchinello turned his attention to me. "So what happened to the real you?"
        I didn't at once understand what he meant. Then I realized that "the real you" was Mom and Dad's lost infant.
        "Charlene had a huge straw purse," I said. "She wrapped the dead baby in a soft white cloth that night, put him in the straw bag, and took him from the hospital to her minister."
        "I'm Baptist born and raised," Charlene told Punchinello, "one of the joyful denominations. I'm a Sunday-go-to-meetin' girl dresses better for church than for Saturday night, from a family likes to praise the Lord in gospel songs. If my preacher had told me I'd done a wrongful thing, I would have undone it, I suppose. But if he had his doubts, compassion swamped his judgment. Our church has its own graveyard, so my preacher and me, we found a pretty corner there for Maddy's baby. Buried him with prayer, just the two of us, and about a year later, I bought a little headstone. When the spirit moves me, I go there with flowers, tell him what an admirable life Jimmy here is living in his place, how proud he'd be of the fine brother Jimmy has become to him."
        I had been to the cemetery with my mom and dad, and had seen the headstone, a simple two-inch-thick rectangle of granite. Carved in it are these words: here lies baby t. god loved him so much he called him HOME AT BIRTH.
        
        Maybe it's our free will misdirected or just a shameful pride, but we live our lives with the conviction that we stand at the center of the drama. Moments rarely come that put us outside ourselves, that divorce us from our egos and force us to see the larger picture, to recognize that the drama is in fact a tapestry and that each of us is but a thread in the vivid weave, yet each thread essential to the integrity of the cloth.
        When I stood before that headstone, such a moment took me like a swelling tide, lifted me, turned me, and brought me back to shore with greater respect for the un mappable intricacy of life, with more humility in the face of mysteries unresolvable.
        Bitter cold compressed the snow from flakes to 'granules that clicked against the prison windows as if the ghosts of the inmates' victims haunted the day and tapped for their attention.
        With Charlene having told all that she had to tell and having returned to the hallway, Punchinello leaned toward me and asked with apparent earnestness, "Do you sometimes wonder if you're real?"
        The question made me nervous because I didn't understand it, because I worried that he would take us off on some crazy tangent from which we could not comfortably approach the request that had brought us here.
        "What do you mean?"
        "You don't know what I mean because you've never doubted that you're real. Sometimes I'm walking down a street, and it's like no one sees me, and I'm sure I've become invisible. Or I wake up in the night convinced there's nothing out there beyond my window, nothing at all but darkness, a vacuum, and I'm afraid to open the drapes and look, afraid I'll see a perfect emptiness, and that when I turn from the window, the room will be gone, too, and I'll cry out but won't make a sound, just float there with no sense of touch, no taste or smell, deaf and blind, the world gone as if it never was, me with no body that I can detect, no heartbeat I can feel, and yet unable to stop thinking, thinking, furiously and frantically thinking about what I don't have and what I want, about what I do have but want to be free of, about how I am nothing to anyone or anyone to me, never real and yet all these memories, these churning, insistent, hateful memories."
        Despair is the abandonment of hope. Desperation is energized despair, vigorous in action, utterly reckless. He was telling me that everything he had learned from the use of guns and explosives to the German language, from the rules of law to Norwegian grammar, had been learned in