From my window I can see that the good light which has been so absent at last washes down along this gentle valley to the west of the foothills which stretch from vague haze into vague haze and on again unto the curved edges of the civilization of which I am a part. Barn swallows dive and soar and pirouette effortlessly between the crown of the maple and the fringes of space. Tiny yarrow blossoms burst up from the sidewalk flower bed like hot magenta clusters of mescaline fireworks for no particular reason save gratuitous beauty. It is late afternoon and the easy warmth of early summer streams down from the house of the sun and brings all the garden’s growth to its green zenith.
Out back of the cyclone fence, Pradeep tends to the tomato bed with his new friend César, a migrant seminarian whom he met while reading books up at the Mt. Angel Abbey library during a rained out day last month. And though I should be outside trimming back blackberry vines with my loppers, I’ve spent the day sitting alone at my desk watching YouTube footage of interviews where a repentant Susan Atkins – of Manson Family fame – tries to convince various interviewers, aggrieved family members, and parole board officers that she feels remorse for her actions, that she understands the damage she’s inflicted upon her victims and their loved ones, that the nature of her heart has been transformed during her nearly thirty-nine years behind bars. And somehow, these conversations resonate deeply with me. Somehow I find myself drawn through the full range of intense human emotions via the testimony of this aging butcher. Somehow I hate her and feel sympathy for her all at once.
For some reason – not entirely clear to me – this woman’s horrific situation has pulled me in just about as far as any spectator can be pulled. Since reading six hours ago that she is being considered for compassionate release due to a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer, I’ve been sitting here soaking up every piece of information that I can find on her, trying to wrap my head around the gravity of the damage she caused in her youth, trying to come to terms with how I feel about the possibility of someone such as her being freed for any reason, trying to sort out whether she deserves my compassion, trying to figure out whether she could have actually changed from a belligerently young-demonic-pretty murderer to a sixty year old woman of deep introspection and good intention, trying to get a grip on how she could ever prove that her latest words and motivations are worthy of any kind of belief, trying to understand why I even care.
At this point – out of all of the emotional background noise which studying her case has brought up within me – I think that I’ve uncovered why I care, what has been responsible for drawing me into her story on such a gut level. Susan Atkins pleas have carried to me - in novel form - a question which has tortured me for most of the years of my life. How can one person ever truly prove to another that they are worthy of belief and good faith and trust? And more specifically – will I ever feel safe trusting in whomever holds my heart in their hands?
Twenty-eight years ago I caught a man I loved very much cheating on a woman I loved very much and in that moment of discovery a measure of innocence and faith and trust fled my heart and turned to anger and abiding suspicion. Something beautiful and fragile was frightened away on that goddamned day in the mountains which I’ve all but given up trying to revive within myself and for twenty-eight years it has been my unshared secret and I’ve never mentioned it to another soul and never spoken to the one who failed me of the damage inflicted upon me that afternoon. And it seems as though that one betrayal has been the watershed from which all my fear and controlling and manipulation has sprung and that I’ve never recovered what I knew so naturally before and that the most important moment of my childhood was that long-planned special weekend which became for me an emotional crucifixion.
And as I sit here wondering why I'm typing this, I know that there is a part of me somewhere which died back then, an entombed part of me which wishes for the strength to roll away its stone, a part which still awaits its resurrection...
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