Do You Believe in Ben? (Chapter 1)

Mohammed Hassan I ‘The simple folk of R’ut’’ll’y Town can only see what they want to see, and they can’t see Ben because he is right in front of them.’

As The Transcendent’s junior investigative journalist, Allen Pick, finished typing the opening words to his latest piece, he held his fingers above the typewriter keys and slightly arched backwards in his chair, briefly giving way to the tempting possibility that maybe, he too, did not see Ben. But he did see him. He was there at the town’s courthouse, when Judge Rehd, who happened to be one of its most reviled residents, pointed at Ben’s direction and furiously demanded to know who was symbolically taunting his recent divorce from his disabled wife by leaving an empty wheelchair in the middle of his court – despite the fact that Ben was on the chair at the time. None of the townspeople could see him, but he was plainly visible to Pick.

There are no career journalists who doubt their own senses, he reminded himself. That is the lowest that bar will go. Upon inception, this piece was branded to inevitably be his most controversial yet, and he wanted to be absolutely sure that the opening lines will faithfully sum up his horrifying experience in that small yet confusing town.

He simply had no choice but to trust his eyes, and discard the dozen or so testimonies he gathered that indicated he shouldn’t. He refused to become a collateral victim of mass ignorance like Ben. He took a deep sip of his cigarette and continued typing, this time, his fingers pummeling the keys without hesitation.

‘Before I delve into the pseudo-disappearance of Ben, allow me to share his background, which is essential to understanding how he became the central figure of this bizarre phenomenon. Ben is a blind and mute albino who enjoys none of the luxuries we call our “senses”.

He might be able to hear, but with no way to say it or blink twice, who knows. His facial features seem to have lost all meaning. I would describe his physical mass as petite but I feel that wouldn’t do justice to the overwhelming percentage of disfigurement that pervades his body. Perhaps “incomplete” would be a more fitting term. There are no limbs missing, but every body part is riddled with enough malnourishment so as to render its purpose moot. Looking at him up

Do You Believe in Ben? close, the only real feature from which you can distinguish him as a person is his torso, which is not particularly adequate in size either.

During his birth, his mother suffered a string of fatal complications that left him with incurable muscle atrophy and an extreme congenital insensitivity towards any form of physical impression. His body and brain are incapable of registering any kind of physical sensation or regulating physiological episodes. Digestion, breathing, production of tears and sweat, feeling hot, feeling cold, urinating, and defecating are all processes that he could very well be experiencing throughout the day without his knowledge or consent. He exists, but with no means of communicating with anyone, and being sentenced to a lifetime of paralysis, he might as well not. I will say this about Ben, and I hope our loyal readers will believe that I mean it without an inkling of meanspiritedness or mockery: he is not shaped like a person, he is shaped like a square. A square with edges so thin, that when I implored one of the people present at the court to touch him, to prove that Ben is still alive and with us in the same room, his large meaty fingers connected with the wheelchair, skipping the dismissible frame of Ben’s shoulder altogether.

If you’ve read my previous articles, few as they may be, you will agree that I never compromise the integrity of my reports by putting myself in the position of influencing any of its related subjects. And although our magazine does make a habit of pursuing and examining strange occurrences, as a member of The Transcendent’s editorial team, I’m obligated by a code of honor to never outright declare any element in any article as supernatural, paranormal, or relating to a higher power.

To quote our Editor-In-Chief, “even if you see a ghost escaping a body, you can’t call it an out-of-body experience. You report what you see, not what you believe.” On the other hand, we are also not allowed to dismiss the notion entirely, so as not to inadvertently take a subjective position. My role is to serve as a vehicle for the story without dictating its path, and the readers can arrive at their preferred destination on their own accord. But that’s what struck me the most about this situation. I don’t need to think of a higher power to explain Ben. He is flesh and bones, little as they might be. And yet, I find the townspeople’s resolute decision of unanimously not registering his physical manifestation to be based on such an extraordinary level of faith, that I would have dared to call it an epiphany of a cult, had it not been for the previous

Mohammed Hassan restrictions I mentioned. But at the courthouse, I just couldn’t help myself. I was overcome by compassion. I was no longer a journalist. I was a man defending his fellow man from being willed into oblivion, from being buried alive. This was why we were at the court to begin with. Those miserable people had been convinced, somehow, as if by some magic spell that afflicted them all at once, that Ben, who they recently have had legally declared as missing and presumably dead, should have his yet-to-be collected inheritance distributed among rightful claimers.

By now, I’m hoping you’ve guessed correctly that Ben was left a sizeable fortune from his father, who inherited it from his own father, and so on for a few generations into the past. Yet another notch in Ben’s streak of horrible luck. Not only will he never enjoy the luxury of being born wealthy, he will never even have the luxury of knowing who stole his fortune. He will never have the luxury of recognizing, understanding, and having an opinion on the mere concept of theft. He will never benefit from being born. I will explain the inheritance controversy in detail once I have explained the townspeople, which form the supporting cast of this farce.

Now, to understand the peculiarity of Ben’s pseudodisappearance, we need to understand the peculiar people who willed it into reality. Perhaps calling these people peculiar would be an understatement. ‘Relentlessly bizarre’ would be a more suitable fit for their character profiles.

R’ut’’ll’y is a place mired in disagreement. Disagreeing is the primary course of action for its residents in every second of every minute of every hour, throughout the day and well into the night. When an agreement happens, that is the exception to the case. It forms the bulk of their conversations, and the anticipated basis of their actions. A townsman here would only stop speaking for the sole purpose of hearing the listener’s objection to what he’s saying, an objection that he knew was coming well before he started speaking, and may have even been the reason why he started the conversation in the first place.

And when I say objection, I don’t mean disagreement in the normal convention, as we do when we disagree with a political statement or an opinion of a book or a character of a person. Their disagreements are on all matters, including what’s not up for debate. They don’t just disagree on whether it’s cold or hot, they disagree on whether it’s day

Do You Believe in Ben? or night. When they’re going somewhere, they don’t just disagree on whether they’re going left or right, they disagree on whether they’re leaving or if they’ve left already. They disagree on whether one is speaking or one is not listening, on whether it’s a house or it’s a declaration of homelessness, on whether water is water or water shouldn’t be water. Everything is up for an opinion grab once the ‘no’ comes out. Their lives are rooted in negativity, and the roots are firmly clinched to the soil.

They even disagree on their own town’s name. If your curiosity is anything like mine, the first thought that struck you when reading this piece were the oddly positioned apostrophes in the name of the town.

R’ut’’ll’y. Well, there’s a very simple explanation to their existence: I put them there.

In my quest of interviewing the residents, which culminated into one of the most frustrating experiences of my life, I have heard their town’s name pronounced as Roughtle and Ursurly, Rattling Mercifully, Rightling Nursery, Rooster and Northwesterly, Resting Easily, R. S. N. Early, Brat Elling and Mr. Fely, among dozens of others. Each person who shared a name was utterly convinced that it was the town’s real name, and had a background story on-the-ready to share with me on how that name crystallized. I’m not exaggerating when I say that each one of those stories sounded as convincingly real as my own biography.

So, to remain fair to all points of view, and to retain what’s left of my sanity, I decided to subject myself to the painstaking task of writing down each and every name I heard and, as if carrying out a mathematical operation, subtracted the letters that were used least often in all the interpretations and kept only the most reoccurring ones. What I ended up with was Rutlly (pronounced Rutt-lee), which is what my photographer and I started calling this hell. Now is the time for you to ask me: if you already removed all the letters that weren’t repeated, what are the four apostrophes supposed to denote? Typing this, I was dreading when we’d come to this part, because I know that no writer, teacher, or scientist will be capable of giving this phenomenon its due explanation, however, this humble journalist will try his best.

The apostrophes in R’ut’’ll’y denote a new type of letter that holds no literary identity and contains a number with an unspecified numerical value. This letter-number is only functional when it’s placed within a string of other numbers or letters. For example, if you place it

Mohammed Hassan between 1, 2, and 4, it becomes 1234, however, if you place it before the 1, it becomes 21234. If you add it to the sentence “big boy likes to play”, it can turn it into “one big boy likes to play”, or “big boy likes to play once”, or “this big boy only plays one at a time”, but if you insert it into “true”, it can only be “perspective”. The result depends entirely on the intentions of the listener or reader, and not on the speaker or the writer. However, it doesn’t work in all cases, only when it needs to change the meaning, and its value can never be zero, because its insertion is predicated on changing the result. So how would you know what it is? You don’t, if you’re an outsider. Only those who were born and raised in R’ut’’ll’y will know what it should be. I only managed to gleam this invention by examining the various signs on the town’s shops, which look old enough to be a century old. The resemblances and the differences between them struck me as somehow familiar in both cases, and I employed my mathematical subtraction method once again to dwindle it down to this invisible character (a system that I applied to almost every piece of information I received while I was there and accounts for everything that I’m sharing with you about R’ut’’ll’y in this article). I suspect that this invented character is a relic from a time long gone for the town, and did have a form and pronunciation in the beginning when a resident suggested it, but got torn to pieces over time between the bickering townspeople who undoubtedly came up with their own versions, which each one, of course, adamantly believed it was the right one. With no consensus on how to pronounce it, how to write it, and how to see it, it simply disappeared from their consciousness over time. Much like Ben. Now that you’ve been well-acquainted with his townspeople, it’s time to go back to explaining the situation regarding Ben’s inheritance.

A few years had passed since his dad’s death was announced (and I’m sure they all bickered as to how he died), and judging by the few matching statements they’d given me, it’s clear that the townspeople wasted no time in bringing up the subject of divvying up his assets to the Judge, who was more than willing to accommodate their request, insisting it had nothing to do with the fact that the two were the most vocal of opponents. It turns out, Ben’s father was not only a businessman, but a central figure in the town, his family being credited with establishing its infrastructure. His grandfather set up the town’s only bank and his great grandfather was the one who laid the railroad

Do You Believe in Ben? tracks for the old train to pass through the town, exposing the residents to travelling outsiders for the first time in its history. Judge Rehd had often accused him publicly of caring more about preserving his family’s wealth instead of caring about the overall benefit of the town and its residents. He considered him an outsider to the town, just like the handful of people that passed through in that old train. Ben’s father was not exactly one to shy away from accusations, and publicly shamed the Judge by saying the source of his dislike is fueled by racism. Ben is an albino in skin, but in ethnicity, he belonged to an Irish father and a mother of East Asian origins whose country I couldn’t surmise. Judge Rehd is also Irish, but the town on that continent where his family had lived for generations had garnered a reputation of being too comfortable with singling out people of Eastern Asian lineage for ridicule, bullying, and the occasional hate crime, something that Ben’s mother would’ve no doubt been subjected to during her time. It seems their feud had generated supporters and detractors in the town, as half of its population came to the defense of Ben’s family, and the other side stuck by Judge Rehd, citing his patriotism and genuine concern for the welfare of all over the selfish greed of the capitalist banker. It’s remarkable how nothing is ever left undecided in R’ut’’ll’y. If a topic springs up, opinions will immediately be formed. There will be a lot of nos and the rare yeses, but there will never be any maybes or I don’t knows.

Incredibly, in spite of their natural tendencies to be at odds, all the townspeople did emphatically agree on one thing: ‘escheatment’ rule applies to Ben’s father’s property. For those readers who are unfamiliar with the laws of inheritance, ‘escheatment’ is the transference of a deceased person’s entire property to the governing authority on the condition that no living heirs are found to inherit the fortune. And I don’t mean no sons or daughters, I mean no relative, however distant, can be located to receive the inheritance. In R’ut’’ll’y, the law, according to Judge Rehd, dictates that any unclaimed or abandoned assets must go to the local governing body. Now would be a good time to mention the significant side note that each and every male resident in R’ut’’ll’y holds a position as Judge’s Support Staff at the court, a position that has enabled them to be appointed by Judge Rehd as members of what’s called the town’s Court Support Committee, which has been set up to aid the court in carrying out its daily duties and given

Mohammed Hassan a vast number of privileges, including serving as a delegate to the Judge, making it a local governing body of its own. This means that when Ben’s family’s bank and assets go to the governing authority, it will effectively be going into these people’s pockets. The honorable Judge Rehd, of course, claims he’s just carrying out the law, and that’s the extent of his involvement. His lies are painfully obvious to the average person, but I’ve yet to see one of those in that town.

I believe that the only reason Ben is still alive today is because of his lifelong caretaker, a character affectionately referred to by the townspeople as Baby Cecil. It seems his father was the one who hired this Baby Cecil and entrusted her with the exhausting task of tending to his son’s needs. It could not have been easy for her to provide care for someone with Ben’s condition. There’s no method of communication or any display of emotion to indicate the need of assistance. That meant she must have kept her eye on him at all times, changing him when he soiled himself, feeding him when she assumed he was hungry, reading to help him sleep without knowing if he’s sleeping or not. How she managed to do it will always be a mystery to me.

I tried my best to track down this Baby Cecil but I was always lost after every first step. Not so much because of the lack of information I could gather, but ironically, because of its abundance, something I’ve come to expect by now. But this one was on a whole new level. The unlikely combination of the ludicrous disparity in the townspeople’s physical descriptions of this particular individual, which is too insane for me to mention, and their unexpected universal agreement on how she earned her nickname, which is apparently because of her immature behavior, makes me conclude that Baby Cecil is either this town’s most well-guarded secret, or a figment of imagination that they all share in common. Both notions I have to reject, because Ben is still here and someone must have been responsible for that.

It had dawned on me while carrying out the slew of interviews that all the townspeople have colorful nicknames they had earned based on their prominent features. Judge Rehd because of the reddish skin of his neck and cheeks. Lance Begbills, the grocer, because of his big lanced lips. Friendly waitress G’nyes (pronounced Gahny Eyes) because of her puffy eyelids. And Baby Cecil because of the alleged baby-like behavior and apparently just that. Only Ben was Ben. And my literary

Do You Believe in Ben? subtraction method didn’t generate a name for his father. Ben is Ben and Ben’s father is Ben’s father.

The exception in Baby Cecil’s case might have something to do with the deep-seated sexist views R’ut’’ll’ians have for women.

Women in R’ut’’ll’y are there only to fill roles of servitude. Maids, waitresses, cooks, and caretakers like Baby Cecil are the only jobs they had and the only ones appropriate for them to have. Perpetual disagreements aside, these are old people, and as we all know, old people tend to like keeping things simple. Men do this, women do that.

Except for secretarial work. They don’t seem to have any female secretaries, which explains why the Judge’s Support Staff positions are entirely filled by old men. Undoubtedly, a semi-conscious decision by them to get closer to profiting off of each other somehow.

If I had to guess, and going by appearances alone, the average age of residents in R’ut’’ll’y is around late sixties to mid-seventies. It seems all the young people have moved out to find better lives elsewhere – or maybe they preferred to live among people who could also see Ben instead of living in blind bliss. When I did ask a few of the residents about their children, they all agreed that they left the town, but none of them agreed it was the best decision for them to take. They yakked on about how they would never do this to their families back when they were their age and how they regretted going against their family’s wishes at certain times. They all seemed to wish they could go back in time and change their actions so they’d be enjoying a happier life by now.

So there it is. This is all there is to know about the one-in-a-million odds that are R’ut’’ll’y Town and the story of Ben’s pseudodisappearance. The thing is, nobody seems to have a problem with believing that Ben once existed upon a time, but everybody refuses to believe he’s still alive and with them today. Nobody seems to remember an intimate anecdote involving Ben, but everybody is convinced he was here at some point and had gone somewhere and never came back.

These old folks must have thought their so-called “simple” town was visited by a madman when I stood in the middle of that courtroom right in front of Ben and yelled with all the might in my lungs: ‘But he’s right there!’ I still say that line over and over again to myself, and I seem to scream it the loudest in my silent thoughts. I couldn’t handle

Mohammed Hassan the frustration. Rage won at the end. At the time, I didn’t understand how they can’t see what the rest of us can plainly see. It’s not just me who could see Ben either. Had our photographer not been there with me, I could just as well have convinced myself that the wheelchair really was empty, but luckily, he was accompanying me as always, and helped me retain most of my sanity by simply saying: ‘I see him too’ while his camera was making that gratifying clicking sound. You can see the pictures he took of Ben right next to the columns on these pages.

Strange as he might look, you’ll agree that he still exists in human form.

So how come only the fine citizens of R’ut’’ll’y town can’t see him? It haunted me for the few but torturous days that I was staying there until I finally understood.

They can’t see him because they can’t perceive him. How could they? He has no audible opinions to be opposed, no gender to be stereotyped, no visible ethnicity to be sided against, and no specific features to nickname in ridicule. He has no past decisions to be lamented, and no present plans to be disparaged. There have been countless explanations about him that all ended up explaining why he can’t be explained. He was torn by disagreements from all sides until he became nothing, and his caretaker had been ‘gossiped away’ into legend. The only difference is that Ben left a very damning clue to his existence: himself.

Do you now see the position I’m in? I have been forced to write a piece of journalism based on conclusive evidence that cannot be corroborated. I am an eye witness to a crime that was never carried out by the criminal or felt by its victim. I tried to be of some use and stop the injustice being inflicted upon a fellow human being for the fault of being born. I failed and went back to my comfortable surroundings. I know it wasn’t enough. I know I should’ve done more. I know I’m just as bad as those people but it’s out of my hands now.

Ben, I know you can’t and never will read this, but I sincerely hope you will find some form, even a semblance of solace, because I can only imagine what you’re imagining the world to be right now.’ ***