Justin stood before the mirror, wet and nude, still dripping from the shower. The mirror stared back at him almost caustically, as always. The truth was, he felt intimidated by the mirror. It stood before him, a larger than life reflection of who he really was, and all that he knew himself to be. The mirror was also a judge, a harsh one.

The mirror was arranged so that it stood at a tilt toward its viewer. Otherwise Justin might not have been able to see all of his diminutive body at once. Still, it bothered him as he stood before it. It was quietly making comment. Oh, he had grown accustomed to this. Over the years, he had come to loathe the mirror, almost as much as he loathed himself.

Had it all stopped with the mirror, it would have been the kind of thing he might have tolerated. As it was, Justin was also suspect of those around him. He knew, or thought he knew, that he was often laughed at, was being ridiculed. He could hear the taunts and jeers even if he attempted to close himself off to them as he walked to his classroom at the university.
He had taught Swahili for fourteen years, always struggling for some kind of academic recognition.

It wasn’t just the faculty, his “colleagues,” went the cheerily facetious terminology which shook his sensibilities. What they did was in fact minor league stuff, like placing telephone books in his chair before departmental meetings. That sort of thing might even pass for humor in a more humanistic setting, Justin thought.

Had it ceased with dry witted pranks, he could have weathered it. But it had not. It was even more pronounced with his students. More often that not he would be approached in hallways and slammed against a wall, his books tumbling to the floor. He knew well the sound of his glasses being crushed on the linoleum floor. It happened often, and he was powerless to react to
the constant siege of brutality aimed squarely at him.

He could not act or resist. He was impotent to do anything because he believed, down in the terra core of what he was, he deserved it all. And perhaps more. That he possessed this knowledge, this belief, made his life bearable. He was thankful that he was made to suffer so well and so often. He suffered gladly.

Since childhood, he had been entranced by the very thought of Jesus. In bible study he had developed an almost maniacal devotion to Christ. In his wallet, he still carried a tattered old postcard of Jesus holding a baby lamb aloft, high above the innumerable torments on the ground below. As Jason grew older this obsession became larger and darker. He realized that
Jesus had in fact gotten a greater bargain than any mere human.

Yes, Jesus had been made to give up his life. But he had only done so for the empirical price that, for all the time in eternity, he would hold humanity in the palm of his hand. Humanity would always be in his debt, and always unable to repay it. What could be better, Justin wondered.

For Justin, this was a life to emulate. He decided that he would raise himself up, like Jesus had the lamb. He, in fact, would offer himself as a sacrificial lamb to others. He would sacrifice himself, no matter how much pain and suffering it might cost him, and then ask for nothing in return, for all of eternity.

He began looking for the people to whom he would sacrifice himself. He preferred a people who had been trod upon mercilessly. He desired a people that had been held inferior to the rest of mankind. In his heart he would make it up to them, the meek, the long mistreated.

It wasn’t long before Justin discovered his chosen people. He had grown up in a small Southern town, the heart of which was cut in half by Main Street, with white people on one side and blacks on the other. Life there was built on separateness, from water fountains to lunch counters to bathrooms to seats in the lone movie house.

If you rode a bus, your destination might be reached a few seconds faster, or slower, depending on the color of your skin. It was a simple plan designed by men who were unable to think deeply, or maybe even to think at all. Entire matters of life, and even of death, were decided by this same hateful handful of men whose thinking never delved deeper than skin deep.
Over time, laws changed many of these things, but not all. For this reason, Justin decided that he would suffer for his newly chosen people, the blacks. He sought them out whenever he could. He slid into the pews alongside them at their Sunday gospel sessions in the white clapboard church on their side of Main Street.

He believed that by placing himself at the very center of their lives, he could begin to understand them. In doing this, he could give his own life meaning. With this in mind, he went about his work. He began preaching to anyone that might listen. He crossed farm fields to talk to workers, and spoke to old men fishing on riverbanks. He told them he would suffer for
them all to take back the suffering they had endured in the past. People listened to him on dusty roads on hot afternoons, and evenings from dilapidated porches, the air rich with the smell of turnips boiling. At one house, there was the iron smell ofblood as a hog was being butchered. He breathed deeply the scent of ultimate sacrifice.

In time his voice was hoarse and his feet calloused from all the miles he had walked to reach his flock. His clothes were torn and dirty. He felt the weight of the cross every step of the way. But there was a problem. Most blacks thought him crazy. They listened with interest, and politeness. They listened because they had never heard a white man say the things he said.
But after he left them, they would shake their heads. They thought he was a madman.

*

Justin was fond of looking back on those earlier years, his missionary period, he liked to call them. They were not to last. His crusade, once so fervent and well focused, began to blur. For a long time he failed to notice his dream begin to break apart.
On his annual summer pilgrimages to Africa, he no longer felt the zeal he once did. The people there thought he was possessed and would have nothing to do with him. Consequently, these trips became little more than souvenir safaris. A crudely carved mahogany bowl, an eating utensil that resembled a tiger’s forearm, a squat chair made from crocodile skin, bark
drawings of leopards, and religious icons used in fertility rites. His collection grew and grew.

But it was not enough for him. He chastised himself for becoming so obsessed with material objects. When he stood nude in front of his mirror, he could feel and see the guilt that he could not escape, that would not wash away. He realized that he had forgotten his true calling, to be sacrificed as a lamb.

It was then that his crusade acquired a more somber tone. He knew he had not endured true pain. He would have to in order to understand his personal sacrifice. So he began to seek it out in places where it lived, for a price.

He began to frequent trade bars for black hustlers. In the beginning, bar owners, fearing police, would ask him to leave. But his small size was assurance that he was not a policeman. He was gradually accepted. He made no secret of the amounts of money he would offer for a night with a hustler, and he soon found recruits. Every night he suffered abuse from another man.
The hustlers, paid well, didn’t mind beating him or degrading him per his requests. Sometimes they would leave him battered and unconscious. Mornings, he would examine his wounds and think of his salvation.

His teaching began to suffer. It was called to his attention that he was in danger of losing his tenure. But at this point, what was teaching when compared to salvation? He no longer rose promptly in the mornings when his alarm clock rang. Twice he had to be admitted to the hospital for internal bleeding. In his death fervor, he had ordered his masters, the name
he gave to the hustlers, to use the tribal fertility rite devices.

Justin would be a martyr, and he would see God soon. His bed, in his mind, was little more than a stone altar ready for a sacrifice. All this loomed in his thoughts on his final night, when he led a particularly violent stranger into his bedroom. He laid out an especially large pile of bills on the dresser, and repeated his specific instructions to the hustler. There could be no room for error. Then he went to the bathroom to stand nude before the mirror. He was now ready for the final judgment. He returned to the bedroom, stood before the hustler. Justin stretched out his arms and he said, “I am the lamb.”

Christopher Woods is the author of a prose collection, UNDER A RIVERBED SKY, and a collection of stage monologues for actors, HEART SPEAK. His play, MOONBIRDS, about doomed census takers at work in an uninhabited Third World
country, was produced in New York by PERSONAL SPACE THEATRICS. He lives in Houston and in Chappell Hill, Texas.