Free Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou

act of original sin, and my son set about me with the whip they used for their disgusting sport, then punched me in the guts and in the head, honestly, all over, Broken Glass, and then I passed out and they called the police, and they told the police I’d gone mad and my two daughters, who were playing out in the backyard were crying, Broken Glass, and I swear to you, when I woke up the next morning I didn’t know what was going on, I was in some kind of madhouse, an asylum, yeah, an asylum where time passed really slowly and people dressed in white coats were in constant attendance, pushing me round in a wheelchair like an Australopithecus , and they’d shaved my head and bound my hands because they were afraid I’d smash the place up, and the other inmates were all making fun of me saying ‘hey guys, come and listen to this one, look at that lunatic over there, never stops shouting, thinks his kid’s screwing his wife, heh, heh, he really is crazy,’ and they put me in the special section for dangerous lunatics who spend the whole day shouting, so I did start shouting, because in the special bit for dangerous lunatics you have to shout or the other lunatics beat you up, and I tried to explain that I wasn’t mad, my older son was screwing my wife, that my Nether Regions were his Nether Regions, that I had come across my wife and my son naked, naked as earthworms, one on top of the other in the poor Christ of Bomba position, and I said they even had a whip and my wife was the one holding the whip, like someone practicing philosophy in the boudoir, I heard people laughing in every corner, and that was when a negro woman in a white coat came up and gave me a glass of water which, on a sudden impulse, I upset, which sent my wheelchair hurtling down to the far end of the main room of the building, and the chief doctor came running up, followed by at least a half-dozen nurses, and I heard the chief doctor order,
with all the lofty authority bestowed by his State doctorate in psychiatry, ‘tighten his restraints, I told you not to leave him alone for a second, we’ll double his medication, give him a jab, that’ll quiet him down once and for all for God’s sake’ and then gave me a jab to send me to sleep because they reckoned I was delirious, repeating the same thing over and over, they thought I’d made up the story about my wife and my son, because Céline told anyone who would listen that I’d gone off my head, I was a drunkard, I beat up my son, who had of course backed up Céline’s lies, and so I was given an injection to stop the ranting and raving, and I must have slept for a long time, because when I woke up I couldn’t remember anything, I really thought I must have died and gone to heaven, because there were clouds everywhere, and butterflies of a thousand different colors fluttering about at low altitude, so I said I wanted to speak to God in person, not to his angels, I said I’d only speak in the presence of God the Father, and all these angels and other celestial underlings could fuck off, and they looked at me askance and told me to calm down, they said God the Father would be ready to receive me shortly, that was the plan, I had made it to paradise, and then I saw before me a black man the size of a sculpture by Ousmane Sow, no longer young, dressed in a white coat, he walked in solemnly, like someone about to say mass, and told me he was God Almighty and I started like a young goat when I heard that, I became angry and said that was a serious insult, an unpardonable heresy, I said this guy was not God, no way, I said God was not black, and they all looked at me very shocked and sent for another man in a white coat, and he was tall too, also with grey hair, and a thick beard, blue eyes, and very white skin, and I felt myself going into a real trance, with real shuddering and shaking, like I was possessed by the Holy Spirit, and I began to