A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden Read Online Free Page A

barely restored, it is already time for me to help him to form a narrative of the crime, to gain an understanding of the facts. Good luck.
    As I walk through it with him, recollecting the carnage, it is the faces that emerge most clearly. Bank employees, unfortunate customers, the innocent bystander, the elderly couple in their apartment: the fright in their eyes, the bewildered expressions. And finally, the masked and goggled Emergency Response Team. I didn’t ever see the actual faces of the ERT officers, but their feet left a lasting impression.

    In the years prior to my arrest I had been both a volunteer and a paid worker in an area of what’s commonly referred to as Restorative Justice. I had served on numerous boards of directors for organizations such as the John Howard Society, LINC, B.C., Prison Arts Foundation, PEN Canada, Spirit of the People, and Journal of Prisoners on Prisons . I lectured to crime students, taught creative writing in prisons, and conducted victim empowerment workshops. I was a paid contract worker for Corrections Canada (I had Advanced Security Clearance), helping long-term offenders find their way back into the community. I’d prepared pre-sentence reports, moved prisoner’s wives into low-cost housing, driven their children to visits. I was an assistant at parole hearings, I refereed diversion programs for young offenders, moderated victim reconciliation sessions, and participated in healing circles.
    In the latter three forums the victim and the offender are brought together in an informal and neutral setting. The objective is to establish a moral relationship between the offender and the offence and to meet the needs of the victims. These sessions were where healing could begin to take place for the parties in conflict. It was an approach to criminal justice wherein anger, shame, and hurt could be transformed into fairness, generosity, and accountability. It was sometimes a way through the anger and the hate. It was often the beginning of hope.
    One particular session left a clear impression on my mind. It was not the sad tale of addiction and violation that was unfolding before me — these were all too common — but as I sat there, comfortable in my own chair, a witness to the human clumsiness that passed between this victim and this offender, I experienced a sense of liberation. I felt confident that I would be forever beyond the sad and humbling awkward ritual of accountability. I was so sure in that moment that I would never again be brought before the brass rail, made to stand, and be confronted by my own criminal failure.
    And hey, look at me now, I can’t even meet the eyes of my lawyer, my friend.

    He writes it all down. He turns the pages as I peel off layer after fresh layer and sink deeper into the territory of my crime. It is like collaborating on a book: I draw images, he writes the text. Early in the draft I think — why couldn’t I have been an alcoholic instead of a doper? At least an alcoholic is blessed with blackouts and memory losses. But a cocaine psychosis is nothing short of a chilling distillate; it was as if I had memorized a Quentin Tarantino movie.
    The queer part is that “me” — the “I” in the parade of events as they happened — had little or no emotional memory. Cocaine, in a full-blown psychosis, causes an utterly pure detachment. The moral relationship, ironically and sadly, belongs to the person I am this day. The moral compass, the remorse and the shame, are present in me through memory, through me reliving, reattaching myself to the events of that day. Unlike an insane person, I am responsible for my condition and unlike a psychopath I can attain an authentic sense of responsibility.
    Still, I wish there existed a meat cleaver I could simply hand to some sort of metaphysical butcher who could lop off the part of me that committed these crimes, and who could send that part off packing to the