Beaten to a Pulp

We interrupt our usual Monday morning considerations for something equally literal.

Scene: Subway, inside a Walmart in a midwestern city

Time: 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning in Christmastide

As customers pass by, their thin plastic bags wishing against parkas and jeans, two black men sit in Subway.  One of them is asleep, the other one talking on his cell phone in a firm, intense, though not a loud voice.

Man: … I’m telling you, he was beaten to a pulp.  You’ve gotta understand that.  People just don’t know.  He was beaten to a pulp.  You ever seen a lamb, slaughtered?  That’s just what he was like.  He was beaten.  None of the people standing by … they didn’t do anything, nobody lifted a finger to stop them, they just let it happen.  He was beaten, man, beaten to a pulp.  All beaten and bloody.  That’s just what it was like.  You’ve gotta understand.  He was beaten to a pulp, so bloody … all his face and everything were so bloody you couldn’t even recognize him when you saw him.  You couldn’t recognize him.  That’s how badly he was hurt, and he was beaten.  And he was just like a lamb, that’s how they slaughtered him, like you kill an animal, he didn’t do a thing, didn’t lift a finger.  … You ever seen the Passion of the Christ?  That’s what it was like.  You see it, you see when they beat him, they’re taking flesh out of his back, I mean digging the flesh out of his back.  They beat him, and he got up again, and that’s what he did, and they beat him to a pulp.  … That’s what he was, he was both God and Man, but see as he was Man he was beaten to a pulp.  That’s what I’m telling you.  He was God, but he was also beaten.  When you see him, you are not going to know him, because he was beaten to a pulp …

No one else notices; and after about fifteen minutes of this, his conversation concluded, the man gets up and leaves behind a clean napkin on the Subway table.