The Final Testament of the Holy Bible (29 page)

As he was doing all those things to me, I heard Mariaangeles come into the room and laugh. I opened my eyes and I was really embarrassed. Ben was the only person except for my parents who had ever seen me naked. I started to get up but she
shook her head and smiled and kneeled next to me and put her hands on my shoulders and held me down and started kissing me. Something in me said it was wrong, but it wasn’t. It felt as good as it did with Ben. And I did it back to her. Even though I had always been taught that being gay or doing gay sex things was against God’s way, it didn’t feel that way. God doesn’t care if a man kisses a man, or a woman kisses a woman, or a woman and man kiss. God doesn’t care at all. It’s just love. Kissing or touching of any kind is just an expression of love, and it doesn’t matter who is doing it. Anybody who says God believes something else doesn’t know what they’re talking about at all.

We were together for the rest of the night. On the floor in the dining room and then upstairs in my bedroom and then in the bathtub. What a night it was. My oh my, I saw God over and over, and I saw eternity, and I felt complete peace and understanding, and I felt loved, boy, did I feel loved, more loved than just about anybody on the whole earth that day, I think. When it was over, we all fell asleep together, right in the same bed. Ben was in the middle, and me and Mariaangeles were on either side of him. I slept really great and didn’t even have any bad dreams. When I woke up in the morning, Ben was gone. Mariaangeles was still sleeping, but Ben was gone.

I got up and went to work, same as I did every day. When I came home, more projects had been done, like there was some wood stacked up and the barn was being cleaned out. Ben and Mariaangeles
and me and Mercedes all had dinner together, and Mariaangeles put Mercedes to sleep. When she was done, we all went to my bedroom and did the same thing we had done the night before. We touched each other and we kissed each other and we licked each other. And we made each other feel wonderful. And we loved each other. That was what it was all about. What life is about. Loving each other. A man who was Jewish who could talk to God and a black Dominican girl from the Bronx and a fat white cashier from the middle of nowhere. We didn’t care about color or religion or money or what kind of school we’d gone to or what kinds of jobs we had had or what our families were like or even what our bodies looked like. We didn’t care that we weren’t married. Or that we were sinners. Or that some people would even say we were damned to Hell. We just loved each other. For what we were. Which is how it’s supposed to be. True love isn’t about anything other than how it makes you feel. And if it makes you feel good, keep doing it, regardless of how other people may think of it or feel.

We fell into a routine. I would go to my job. Ben and Mariaangeles would work around the farm. We would have dinner together and go to bed. He was never there when I woke up. I asked one day where he went at night all alone. He said sometimes he went into the woods or the barn and had seizures, and sometimes he laid in the grass and stared at the stars, and he said sometimes he walked to town, which was three miles away, and went looking for things other people had
thrown away, like food and clothes and stuff. I told him he was being silly and that he didn’t need to do that anymore because I could buy everything we needed at the store with my employee discount. He said he didn’t want bought things. That buying things just fed the system that was destroying the world. I asked him if he really thought the world was being destroyed and he smiled and said
yes, it is, and it will be final soon
. I asked him if he was mad that I worked at the store and he laughed and said
of course not
. He kissed me on the cheek and said that it wasn’t his place or anyone else’s to tell me how to live. I told him I wouldn’t mind quitting my job and he said I should do what I wanted to do, that my life was my own, and when it was over, it was over, and that I should do and see and try and feel and experience everything I could and everything I wanted to. I told him I didn’t know what I wanted, and he smiled again and said
yes, you do, we all do, we just need to be honest with ourselves about it, and stop being scared of it
. Fear, he said, ran all of our lives. Fear, he said, after religion, was the most destructive force in the world.

Other people also started coming to the house. At first it was just one or two a week. I don’t know how they knew Ben or how they knew where he was. They would be there when I came home, or they would knock on the door. They all seemed crazy or sad or sick or on drugs. Ben would walk with them. He would go walking into the fields where my daddy used to farm. The fields were overgrown and scary.
Even though I knew better, and I was grown up, I was always sure there was something evil in them, like a monster or something. Ben would walk in there with people, and sometimes they would come back in five minutes and sometimes they would come back in five hours, but the people were always better. I didn’t really know what to think about it. Something was going on out there, but it was hard to really think about it for real. Miracles were something people talked about, and I would read about in the newspaper, and people would pray really super hard for, but they never really seemed to happen, or if they did it was like one in a billion times. But people kept praying for them, millions of people did it, every single day they did it. Some of them were going to get lucky. And that was really all it was for them, and for their praying for miracles, just dumb luck. Something good is bound to happen like one in a billion times. Really most of the people who prayed for miracles were just wasting their time. It was silly. They begged and pleaded for some kind of help that never came. They should have spent the time having fun or something. Especially if it was for health reasons. They could at least have some kind of fun before they died instead of praying. And when these not really real miracles did happen, there wasn’t really any reason for them. Like the people involved couldn’t say what had happened or why it had happened. Not for real, at least. But with Ben it was different. Sick people would walk into the fields with him, and they would walk out healthy. Drug addicts would walk in with him and come out without wanting drugs anymore.
People on crutches would come out running. I saw a couple of people with sunglasses and white canes come out smiling and blinking. A man in a wheelchair skipped across the lawn. It was crazy. And beautiful. It was miracles for real. Not praying to some thing that wasn’t even there and couldn’t even listen. Not praying for some promise in a book that never made any of its promises come true. But having someone actually do something that changed someone. Knowing that because you met this one person, and he did something, that your life was totally different and totally better. That was a miracle. And Ben could make miracles happen. He could make prayers, which really are pretty useless considering how many there are and how little they actually do, he could make prayers actually come true. I don’t know how he did it, except to say that he was the Messiah, and he had the same powers that that Jesus Christ man had, if that man was even real. He could make miracles. I’ve never heard of anyone else who could do it. But he could, for real. And it wasn’t like it was easy or just some little thing. After he did it, he would always come out looking worse than when he went in. Like whatever he did took something from him. Like he was giving something of himself to the people so they could be better. Sometimes he didn’t come back at all. The people would say he’d told them he was going to have a seizure and they should leave him. Or he’d walk out of the field and just have the seizure right in the yard. They were really terrible scary ones. He’d shake and grunt and spit and stuff would come out of his mouth. I’d get really worried and want to go
help him, but I knew he wouldn’t want that, so I’d usually just bite my nails on the porch. Once I asked why he did it, gave people the miracles. He said he did it because he loved them, and that miracles aren’t done, miracles are given. And that anyone could do it. If people were willing to love enough, and to give enough, that anyone could change someone’s life. And that that was the easy way to describe God on earth. People changing other people’s lives. Not some heavenly being, or some made-up superhero, but people changing other people’s lives.

After they were done with Ben in the fields, most of the people would leave. Some of them, though, would stay with us. It was pretty funny. They weren’t like normal people. Or at least that’s what I thought at first. They were men who dressed up like ladies, and ladies who looked like men, and they were people who were gay and people who liked men and women. They were homeless people who were on drugs, and they were black people and Hispanic people and Asian people and Arab people and people who were so mixed up I didn’t know what they were. There were women who had definitely done some dirty things, and maybe even sold themselves for money. There were men who were the same way, even. There were criminals and drug dealers and beggars and people who had nowhere else to go. If I had seen these people on the street, I would have definitely been scared of them. If I had seen them in my town, I would have hoped the police were somewhere really close. All the God-fearing, church-going
people I knew would have said they were damned to Hell for being sinners. They would have said these people were going to Hell for sure. But when they were in my house I loved them. And I loved them because I saw Ben loved them. I saw him hug them and kiss them. I saw them cry in his arms. I saw him spend hours listening to them and talking to them and laughing with them. I saw him heal them and change them. I saw him treat them like they were real people, which almost all of them said hadn’t been done in a really long time. I saw Ben have sex with them, and all of them wanted to have sex with him, and he with all of them, and saw him marry them. Some of them came to the farm together and were in love or fell in love while they were with us. Men and men and women and women and men and women, every combination you could imagine, gay ones and straight ones. Ben told them that marriage wasn’t about a man and a woman being together, it was about people in love being together. And he said that laws and restrictions against love and marriage, regardless of who was in the marriage and who they loved, weren’t the way of God. God didn’t care about those things. God was beyond those things. Marriage is a human issue, and all humans should be allowed to participate in it, regardless of how they love. And I followed his example. I talked and laughed and listened and hugged and kissed and had sex. I went to the weddings and cried and cheered, I was so happy for everyone, and I danced after, danced until my legs and feet hurt like crazy. I didn’t think about anything except that I was loving
people. That that was what mattered. That we were all human beings and we were loving other human beings. And that’s God. Not some silly man with a beard wearing a robe, sitting in a gold chair in the clouds. Not some angry man who knows everything and says what is right and wrong. Not some old man in Italy talking nonsense, or some crazy man in the American South judging everyone. Not some man in Pakistan who thinks he has the right to kill, or some man in Israel who thinks he has the right to oppress. God is not a person or a man or even a being of any kind. God is loving other human beings. God is treating everyone you meet as if you love them. God is forgetting we’re all different and loving each other as if we’re all the same. God is what you feel when there’s love in your heart. It’s an awesome feeling. And it’s the real God. The only real God.

People kept coming. And some who seemed to know Ben from before. A lady doctor from the city who said she had treated Ben in the hospital. A man who used to be his boss when he was working at a construction site. A sweet gay boy who was as pretty as any girl and who used to live with Ben’s brother and who loved Ben and who Ben loved, and they kissed a lot and spent a lot of time in bed. An
FBI
agent who hugged Ben and cried and said thank you over and over again. Some people would stay for a day or two days, some would come and go, and some never left. Pretty soon people filled up all the bedrooms, and the attic, and the basement, and the living room, and the
TV
room. They were everywhere, really. And then they
started sleeping outside. In the barn and in tents. Over the course of a couple of months, we went from the four of us to thirty or forty people, all living on my farm, and even more kept coming. I couldn’t believe it. It was super fun. The house had never been cleaner. We started growing vegetables. And some of the people brought money and I’d buy things like food and blankets and fruit with my store discount. All day people would do jobs. Some would clean or make dinner or plant food in the garden. People would take care of Mercedes. People would go into town at night and go through dumpsters. And at night we would all sit around the front yard and Ben would talk to us. I wouldn’t say it was preaching. Preachers are always trying to convince you they’re right. Preachers are always trying to make you believe what they believe. Preachers are always trying to tell you if you don’t listen to them you’re going to pay some price. Ben didn’t care if we believed. He said everybody should have the right to believe whatever they wanted. He didn’t need to convince anybody. All anybody had to do to be convinced by Ben was look at him. When you saw him, you knew he was different from the rest of us. You knew he was special, or even something really beyond special. He was divine. He was what people prayed for and begged for and spent their whole lives worshipping. He was the real Prophet. He was the real Son of God. He was the real Jesus Christ born again. He was the real Messiah. He was everything all of the crazy religious people all over the world had been praying for and waiting for for all of these thousands of years. He was God. He was God.

And even though he told us all, every single one of us, that we didn’t have to believe what he said, we did believe it, we believed everything he said, even when it was kooky. I remember the first night it happened. The sky was clear and there was no moon and it was warm. There were millions and billions of stars out, so many I couldn’t even begin to count or guess how many there were. Ben had been in the house, having a seizure. Everyone knew to leave him alone when that was happening. Even if it had been happening in the kitchen or where we could see him, he told us all to leave him alone. He was having this seizure in the living room that night, right on our old carpet. He had been talking during it, talking in some weird language that sounded really old and scary and serious. Everyone had left the house and gone out to the lawn. We were just sitting on the grass, looking up and not saying anything because it was so beautiful we couldn’t even believe it. It was when there were only eight or nine of us at the house. Me and Mariaangeles and Mercedes sleeping in her arms, and a gay man and two transvestites and a woman who had been a crack smoker when she came but wasn’t anymore, and maybe someone else. Ben walked out and sat down with us. He took the crack lady’s hand because she was having a really hard time being off her drugs. He kissed her on the head, and she smiled. One of the men asked him if he was okay, and he said
yes
. He asked if he knew he was talking when he was having his seizure, and Ben said
yes
. The man asked if he knew what he was saying, and Ben said
yes, I was speaking to God
. Everyone was
quiet for a couple of seconds. Like they couldn’t believe it, or maybe like they could believe it and did believe it but it was awesome and there was nothing to say. Me and Mariaangeles both knew already. The others looked at each other and one of the men smiled and said I told you, that’s what I heard, that’s why we’re here. The other man asked Ben what God said to him, and Ben smiled and said
God wanted to tell you hello, and to make sure you know you are welcome to stay here for as long as you like
.