This I didn't learn from Damien Echols, this I learned on my own. I learned how to act. Actually, I had learned quickly how to act with the skill of Meryl Streep at Jim’s memorial service – I would watch myself pull off a stage performance of pleasant accessibility and gracious hostessing, only to pull back into a snarling and hellish dark corner and bare my teeth at everything the moment no one was looking at me. I was now doing that everywhere: at the office, while running errands, around the apartment complex. I had turned into an unapologetic, habitual liar wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask.
Everything else had stopped. The Daybook I had been working on with such pride had stopped. Damien Echols, who, as you’ll recall, dashed off to New Zealand and was inaccessible for a while, had taken over his own Facebook page ... and then disappeared. I’d been so used to being inspired by his daily prison journal and using it for my Daybook, that it was another small sense of loss, not having his daily commentary when things began to go so wrong ... and trust me when I tell you: if there’s one guy who has first-hand knowledge of things going terribly wrong when you least expect them to – and then coming out the other side of darkness intact - it’s Damien Echols. But he had disappeared as well.
Losing his voice wasn’t exactly the equivalent of the overwhelming grief that I was going through after the death of my brother ... just a mild malaise brought on by spiritual loss. True, I wasn’t ready to contemplate anything spiritual right then, but I still missed listening to Damien.
I stopped checking his Facebook page to see if he’d said anything interesting, so unfortunately might have missed the moment when he said, "Eureka! Screw Facebook! I’m gonna tweet!" (actually I don’t know what he said about it, and I’m too lazy to go look, so I shouldn’t put words in his mouth.) Bottom line was: one day I discovered that he was on Twitter, and for the first time in quite a while I was back to paying attention to Damien, which helped because that meant I wasn’t focusing on anything else. Oh yeah – and I now knew how to tell him he’d hi-jacked my psychic reading if I wanted to. I was still hiding behind headphones and writing sonnets every day. The sonnet cycle was up to something like 30 poems. I was still religiously clapping Piero Barone’s voice over my ears.
Then I noticed that Damien had been to Salem, just half a month earlier. Home of the 17th century witchcraft trials, yes, but also the home of Salem Hospital (surgery), the place where my brother had complained of heartburn – though it was not really heartburn and I paid no attention to it and therefore killed him; and the place where I had returned alone to have my stitches clipped (and had to pull off the road repeatedly because I was sobbing so hard) the very same week that Damien was there. I was unaware of that until later.
But the one thing we do share is that neither of us believe in coincidences. I read his past tweets, looked at the words he wrote about Salem, looked at the day he posted the comments, felt ice crystals BEGIN to start crackling in that chasm where my heart used to be, and burst into tears – again. Then pulled myself up short.
After what I’d done, or had allowed to happen, in my abject narcissism, my heart was not allowed to heal, so it felt like some sort of unwanted kindness from the Universe. By that point, I no longer trusted the Universe to do right by me and was battling an intense fear of leaving the house because I fully expected something horrible to happen. Why wouldn’t something horrible happen? I’d killed my own brother by not paying attention to him when he needed me to.
Still, it could have been a lot worse, if Damien Echols hadn’t somehow managed to travel all the way up north from West Memphis, Arkansas to the bowels of Arkansas prison system, to New York City, the only place in the world I feel safe and still do, even after fleeing death on September 11th, and visit Salem, Massachusetts at the time he did. I knew there was some sort of meaning or pattern behind it; whether I was ready to accept any kindness from the Universe or not. In truth, I still wasn’t, but it almost felt like the Universe was using him, shining samurai sword that he was (imagery courtesy of Henry Rollins), to lay some groundwork. He was still "Mr. Signpost".
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