Chapter Three: I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, Part Two
***DISCLAIMER: For those that care, there is some harsh language in this post. Not that it probably helps, but where it occurs it isnt fabricated, but quoted from real life. Just a warning at any rate. Proceed at your own risk!****
Tonight is the night, then. Less witnesses, I thought as I pondered the sickness of two employees. Such a fortunate occurrence this was. An opportune contingency. But The Plan spoke in a small whisper, coaxing like a muse. It is not chance, it said, but a chain.
Two days ago, it spoke, there was a motion already begun, a labyrinthine trail unwinding; undercooked food was served at a small delicatessen, because activists had managed to block major shipments of meat that had come from cows nurtured with antibiotics. This restaurant in particular, The Plan murmured, found organic meat at nearly the last moment. The trucks were arriving literally in the midst of customer orders. I remembered vaguely reading about this in the paper, but I trusted The Plan anyway. It seemed so wise.
In the rush to produce the many orders, the small family owned restaurant began to deliver to its patrons hastily prepared food. (The Plan whispered of the untold eons of the evolution of E. coli but I told him I didn’t have that sort of patience.) And the bitter irony: the activists blocked meat in the name of helping promote healthier food, in tirade against the new cosmopolis of corporate control, but in fact their methods hurt a small business, and gave an unsuspecting patron food poisoning.
And more, the second employee of your restaurant was sick: two weeks ago (The Plan pointed) a chain of brief, flitting contact was initiated. A patient complained to the doctor of fever, the doctor, grazing her arm, gained the virus (The Plan asked, do you want to hear the history of influenza and its migration across Europe? I murmured No as politely—but also as firmly—as possible. I suppose even infinites need to be cut off somewhere or nothing would ever get started); The doctor spoke later to his nurse, who as he left returned to gossiping with the filing clerk, who went the next night to dinner on a blind date (Courting techniques of this sort have been…—but I cut The Plan off there, too).
A lovely meal, with small laughs, and soft faces glowing as the candlelight flushed, wrinkled, fluoresced. She hadn’t even wanted to go on the date, The Plan said, she was going to make up some excuse and go home early. But it was going magnificent. Their laughter stretched the night long. They made their way to a movie theater, where, in the effort to juggle popcorn and an oversized soda, the blind date laughed at the absurdity as he stumbled and popcorn began to cascade down his shirt. And in the expulsion of the laughter, the breath met an impatient woman who was migrating the opposite way through the narrow aisle, tired of waiting for her boyfriend (he probably had to work late, I said with the most forced of conspiratorial tones, he was probably one of the delivery guys rushing organic meats to local restaurants. The Plan didn’t laugh at my joke, which made me, for a moment, wonder if it was true).
She had seen the happy blind date couple and grew more furious and impatient then she had been, festering in the dark next to an empty seat. It was as if their laughter were lights thrown upon her, showing the rest of the theater she was there alone. It was unbearable for her, The Plan sighed.
Thus, promptly, she shuffled outside the theater to call her boyfriend, but like one last cruel barb the laughter of the blind date couple wound into her body the virus, that little replicating wound. In the anger and haste of her rush, her blessed rage, brushed the shoulder of the ticket attendant, who happened to a few minutes later shake the hand of your coworker, as he let him in, secretly, for free to the latest blockbuster. Jump. Jump. Jump. And the virus multiplied.
An accident, I said.
All for you, replied The Plan.
So I waited for him. I waited for your lover outside the place where you both worked (See? The Plan was simple. But in simplicity it was complex. What a concourse of events in the world had to pass to lead to this moment, that we two should intersect in this present darkness. The logic of conspiracy! Everything was a hinge and joint, a pathway or conduit channeling to this moment here under the cavern of the black November expanses. My hatred was the great story of the concatenation of history, the migration of viruses, the laughter of lovers, the great battle of Corporation and activist.) My hatred was a microcosm of the world.
I waited in the dark and the shadow boiling in the semi-darkness of the parking lot and the flickering street lamps. On this night, I would wait upon no weakness; I was Adam acting. Seizing for myself good and evil. Trying to become what I was not. On this night I was God. I wanted to be God. I declared myself, and wanted to be what I declared. I was worthwhile. I mattered. I was. I will destroy. Be destruction.
Security drove by, his white pickup truck sweeping the lot like a searchlight. I was sure he would come up to me, tell me to leave. To go home. But no force would stop me. After I spit out his bones, I would continue my vigil. His light passed on without event.
And I was left there with that thunder in my heart, alone. My skin and knuckles and fists and teeth splitting with all of the awful things you said to me, with your betrayal.
I even bought a ski mask (and more matches to burn it). But this was a hard decision. I wanted him to see my face. But did it matter? Or was I faceless to him, too?
It was getting close. It was long after midnight.
I parked far away from the cameras, which I had watched to gauge their pan and elliptic. I had another friend on security in the mall complex your restaurant sat in, by chance (providence?) who let me once, long ago, briefly see the video displays. Twenty little black and white eyes unblinking. If one was senseless, and like an idiot approached from within the lot, the cameras could find you. Oh, hello there, they would whisper, their gear and frames whirring, clicking into focus. But on the periphery, in the corner, you could stand in the outer darkness, beyond the panopticon. Right outside a business that had suffered a fire a few months before (No doubt another great chain of events, I thought). Its only existence in the night was now the flicker of lamplight. On, off. On, off. Appear. Disappear. Present. Absent.
I could take that chance.
An hour passed.
I wondered how this would all go. I wasn’t exactly a skilled fighter; variable upon variable compounded in my mind. What if I lost? That could not be an option. I would die before I lost. They are not the same, of course. Dying and losing. Death finds everyone and everything (I wondered if The Plan and Death were one and the same; I asked it, but was left to remain in curious silence). The difference between winning and losing then comes down to Death finding you as you plant your flag, or as you crawl into your cave. I heard that once, at least. It is thus the choice of how to die. How to live. I could only die. I would not lose.
I had only been in one fight before this, so long ago in high school. It was my sophomore year (Your junior year, The Plan corrected) I had been walking home from the gym that was directly across the street from my highschool, and to which I went everyday. The Police report would say that three college aged kids, wearing a motley assortment of sports jerseys and baggy jeans, began to close in as threats escaped their lips buried beneath the shadows of baseball caps as I walked past them. They smelled like smoke. They were drunk maybe, I hypothesized; having never encountered a drunk before in my life one might suspect this was an unfounded observation. And the police report went on to say—as I diligently spoke to what I can only describe as titanous officers, standing at least six inches taller than myself, and whose presence was inflated, as the frame of policemen always are, by the bulk of bullet proof jackets underneath the uniforms—that the kids that accosted me, for reasons unknown, wouldn’t let me pass as I neared them. And as I tried to keep moving anyway, (I just wanted to go home, officers) the one in the red baseball hat with a spiral tattoo on his neck (I told the police it looked ridiculous, but they said that, as true as that may be, this wasn’t quite the description they needed for their report) wound up, and took a swing at me.
And so I hit him. With all the menace my Junior frame (which the gym had helpfully begun to augment) could muster. It was a lucky swing, I remember. I hit the sweet spot at the intersection of cheek and nose and mouth. And I caught him off balance. I felt our bones grinding together; felt my bones victorious. No one tells you how the impact of a punch feels. First there is the tremor, from your feet through your hips, if you do it right. Like the earth is grounding you, propelling you. The fist is only a small part. You embody the Gnostic mythology of creation; the fist is only a lesser creator god, a demiurge, propelled from a greater body, the Profundity (Bythos). All the steps and angles now fling sequences from you. With every swing you create a world. But focusing on the fist is idolatry, not to mention wasting a good punch. The fist isn’t the direct emanation of its source; it follows hips and spine, shoulder and its blade, elbow and wrist. The most complex forms, in Valentinian or Basilidean Gnosticism (or the Sephiroths of Kabbalistic Judaism) just so, there are many emanations. After your Body moves there is the silence of the air (Sigê, Silence) and the Truth of your decision, its Aletheia, its unveiled nakedness in assault, which is now the new meaning, the very Logos and force of life, Zoê plummeting and exploding through you. You, the vessel through which the motion flows. The Aeons and Enumerations of your joints follow in the Emanation of your mind (Nous), expulsing, discharging like fullness flowing from a fountain.
Your hand feels a great freedom. If you are like me and had never really punched like that before, its like your arm takes flight. You feel the air between moments of striking. Do not feel the weight and drag of the material. Bythos, the Profound One, cannot know Achamoth, the base body of the world. And in that fleeting moment neither can you. If you do it right, the air is your only target. You don’t aim at what you want to punch. You aim through it. You don’t want to stop at the object; you must punch as if your fist was meant from the day you were born to be on the other side. The attack is a spiritual, not a physical, exercise. You must be in the strike the enlightened, the Gnostic, the Pneumatic (spiritual, enlightened, but also in etymology, air, wind, breath, storm) not the Hylic (base, matter, heavy, dull).
Yet always, suddenly, the infinite lines of flight find their impasse in the cheek, and the caressing air becomes solid, suddenly a swelling skull, halting, stopping, slowing, crunching, wrenching, faltering, gnawing, jarring. It is sin. The impact is the Gnostic vision of sin; base matter asserts itself over the air, the pneumatic spiritual flight; dragging you back to earth in pain and emotion. And you feel the impact in your knuckles, but even more (at least for me) in the wrist. The odd angles of the face snap and arrest your joints, schism and oblique trajectories engorge the veins and nerves with their odd momentums, free and radical upon the impact. You feel the bend: your fist twists off axis from the wrist; the horrible energy travels down your forearm into your elbow which flexes under the strain, even if ever so slightly. Your nerves buzz electric. You feel your bicep pull, your triceps still exploding forward but now being driven backward at the same time.
Then your shoulder in this single connecting motion explodes into a sphere, and you feel the anterior and posterior deltoids desperately try to stabilize the sudden errata. But now the infinite form of flight, the freedom of your arm, it becomes your enemy. It, in impact, reverses and flows freely now back through you, disregarding tendons and calcium and marrow, threatening to shiver and splinter you apart from within. This roaring tremor. A shrieking ghost shaking cell and Radius. Like the sympathetic vibration that suddenly moves a crystal cup to fracture and blur. And unless you fight everyday, your shoulder fails to completely correct the flow. It has no resources to compensate. The only way to be good at war is to war everyday. And if the paradox is true, to make peace one must prepare for war, peace is war everyday. (God help us, said The Plan).
When you strike, it is the Devil shaking your soul’s house. Shivering his way through you.
And then there is the pain. In the movies you can punch people all day and just get stronger. My arm, in reality, became only its negative outline; it was a blank unusable length of space. The bones had fused and compacted and seized. And everywhere, there was heaviness.
The heaviness of my fist as my muscles ached even with this one motion.
Heaviness as his body seized; as I felt the variable weights of his head, his eyes, is brain, lurch and pulse back at slightly different speeds.
Heaviness as even the base of my spine was in the end struck with this motion. Even the tips of my toes.
And the police report, like any good Positivist, wrapped up with the empirical descriptors. Three on one. The fight ended with one down, two stunned, one running away in the shock of the deed just done. Getting away before the two remaining companions could come to their senses and pounce. That is what the report said. Therefore it was true.
Thin and true.
Am I in trouble? I asked.
The two mountainous police laughed.
No, they said. They’re not going to try and report that one guy tried to pick on three of them at once. No one is that stupid. You defended yourself, you were brave. You are fine.
One clapped me on the shoulder. I guess in admiration. I had never been admired by a mountain before.
And so that’s what the report said.
But something was missing. The thickness of the event whittled away.
The report didn’t say: I enjoyed every minute.
The report didn’t say: that they didn’t try to stop me randomly. They knew my mother and sister.
Your mom is hot.
Your sister is hotter.
We’re totally going to fuck them. Did you hear that?
I want to fuck your mom and sister at the same time!
I heard. I heard that my whole life. A familiar chant and taunt. It just so happens these poor souls finally got a response from me.
So the report didn’t say I walked over to them. Cocky, as all juniors are when they first see results from the gym they keep going to. Angry, as everyone is when their family is made light of.
I didn’t tell the police because I knew they wouldn’t see it as self-defense. One, in fact, was now picking on three.
You know how the saying goes: the best defense is a good offense. And even better offense is to go utterly, entirely, mad.
I told no one else because I was ashamed I lied to the police. Because the police were a symbol of truth. I wasn’t a liar. I wanted to defend truth. But here, it was ironic, truth and truth conflicted.
My mother and sister’s honor needed to be defended. Truth. The idiot’s taunting did nothing that warranted physical violence under the law. Truth.
But this was a trial. A symbol. The paradox begging to be resolved. A sign of my life that transpired everyday back then. I had two beautiful family members, and it escaped the notice of no male. I heard about it everyday. Like they were two supermodels, two actresses, who were famous and the adolescent fantasy of every guy I ever encountered. It sickened me. And that’s who I was. I was the brother of the hot girl, the son of the hot mom (did I have a name? Even I don’t remember). It was even worse sometimes because my mom would chaperone our lunches at high school, because she loved me and wanted to be a part of my life. But this meant also that she was part of every guy at my high school’s life, and they loved her. She was their fetish, their totem. The erotic draw of God shown through her. Their perverted minds carried her like a relic. This multiplied when I shared the same lunch with my sister.
A small trial, to be sure. How many worse poxes can accrue to a life, I wouldn’t even want to guess. But this was my stress. What is a young boy to do? We are taught as men to protect our family. This is the value of the masculine, it is said. To protect, to be strong, brave. But society also frowns upon violence. The caricature that is paraded as the natural effect of manliness is the opposite of the simultaneous ideal held up as politeness. Enlightenment. In my savagery, I was lucky. I had no time for philosophy.
The report did not say: they did not stop me. They were on the other side of the street.
I stopped them.
The report did not say: I walked up to them like a pillar of storm.
The leader smirked. But then, a small moment of fear.
And he tried to push me. Not punch. Not attack. To my everlasting shame.
But what is done is done.
And as he push I broke the flow of his arms. But my arm, it erupted.
And as shock and shame took me as he went to the ground, I turned to face what I thought would be more attacks from enraged friends. But they were in shock.
The report said I left as fast as I could after that, because I was worried they would attack me, two on one. It was a reasonable, tactical retreat. A lie.
The report did not say: I feared no attack. I left as fast as I could out of shame.
The last thing I saw was his face broken on the ground.
And that’s when I said, A story must be made.
But tonight all that mattered was I won. I won.
And I would win again.
It would certainly be a mistake to try to discover what could have been said of madness at a particular time by interrogating the being of madness itself, its secret content, its silent, self-enclosed truth; mental illness was constituted by all that was said in all the statements that named it, divided it up, described it, traced its developments, indicated its various correlations, judged it...But one would soon realize that each of these discourses in turn constituted its object and worked it to the point of transforming it altogether. So that the problem arises of knowing whether the unity of a discourse is based not so much on the unity of the object as on the space in which various objects emerge and are continuously transformed...the unity of the discourses on the subject 'madness' would not be based upon the existence of the object 'madness'...or the horizon of objectivity...; it would be the interplay of the rules that make possible the appearance of objects during a given period of time...the unity of discourses on madness would be the interplay of the rules that define the transformations of these different objects [of madness variously defined at various different times], the internal discontinuity that suspends their permanence.
-Michael Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage House, 2010) pp.32-33.
Tonight is the night, then. Less witnesses, I thought as I pondered the sickness of two employees. Such a fortunate occurrence this was. An opportune contingency. But The Plan spoke in a small whisper, coaxing like a muse. It is not chance, it said, but a chain.
Two days ago, it spoke, there was a motion already begun, a labyrinthine trail unwinding; undercooked food was served at a small delicatessen, because activists had managed to block major shipments of meat that had come from cows nurtured with antibiotics. This restaurant in particular, The Plan murmured, found organic meat at nearly the last moment. The trucks were arriving literally in the midst of customer orders. I remembered vaguely reading about this in the paper, but I trusted The Plan anyway. It seemed so wise.
In the rush to produce the many orders, the small family owned restaurant began to deliver to its patrons hastily prepared food. (The Plan whispered of the untold eons of the evolution of E. coli but I told him I didn’t have that sort of patience.) And the bitter irony: the activists blocked meat in the name of helping promote healthier food, in tirade against the new cosmopolis of corporate control, but in fact their methods hurt a small business, and gave an unsuspecting patron food poisoning.
And more, the second employee of your restaurant was sick: two weeks ago (The Plan pointed) a chain of brief, flitting contact was initiated. A patient complained to the doctor of fever, the doctor, grazing her arm, gained the virus (The Plan asked, do you want to hear the history of influenza and its migration across Europe? I murmured No as politely—but also as firmly—as possible. I suppose even infinites need to be cut off somewhere or nothing would ever get started); The doctor spoke later to his nurse, who as he left returned to gossiping with the filing clerk, who went the next night to dinner on a blind date (Courting techniques of this sort have been…—but I cut The Plan off there, too).
A lovely meal, with small laughs, and soft faces glowing as the candlelight flushed, wrinkled, fluoresced. She hadn’t even wanted to go on the date, The Plan said, she was going to make up some excuse and go home early. But it was going magnificent. Their laughter stretched the night long. They made their way to a movie theater, where, in the effort to juggle popcorn and an oversized soda, the blind date laughed at the absurdity as he stumbled and popcorn began to cascade down his shirt. And in the expulsion of the laughter, the breath met an impatient woman who was migrating the opposite way through the narrow aisle, tired of waiting for her boyfriend (he probably had to work late, I said with the most forced of conspiratorial tones, he was probably one of the delivery guys rushing organic meats to local restaurants. The Plan didn’t laugh at my joke, which made me, for a moment, wonder if it was true).
She had seen the happy blind date couple and grew more furious and impatient then she had been, festering in the dark next to an empty seat. It was as if their laughter were lights thrown upon her, showing the rest of the theater she was there alone. It was unbearable for her, The Plan sighed.
Thus, promptly, she shuffled outside the theater to call her boyfriend, but like one last cruel barb the laughter of the blind date couple wound into her body the virus, that little replicating wound. In the anger and haste of her rush, her blessed rage, brushed the shoulder of the ticket attendant, who happened to a few minutes later shake the hand of your coworker, as he let him in, secretly, for free to the latest blockbuster. Jump. Jump. Jump. And the virus multiplied.
An accident, I said.
All for you, replied The Plan.
So I waited for him. I waited for your lover outside the place where you both worked (See? The Plan was simple. But in simplicity it was complex. What a concourse of events in the world had to pass to lead to this moment, that we two should intersect in this present darkness. The logic of conspiracy! Everything was a hinge and joint, a pathway or conduit channeling to this moment here under the cavern of the black November expanses. My hatred was the great story of the concatenation of history, the migration of viruses, the laughter of lovers, the great battle of Corporation and activist.) My hatred was a microcosm of the world.
I waited in the dark and the shadow boiling in the semi-darkness of the parking lot and the flickering street lamps. On this night, I would wait upon no weakness; I was Adam acting. Seizing for myself good and evil. Trying to become what I was not. On this night I was God. I wanted to be God. I declared myself, and wanted to be what I declared. I was worthwhile. I mattered. I was. I will destroy. Be destruction.
Security drove by, his white pickup truck sweeping the lot like a searchlight. I was sure he would come up to me, tell me to leave. To go home. But no force would stop me. After I spit out his bones, I would continue my vigil. His light passed on without event.
And I was left there with that thunder in my heart, alone. My skin and knuckles and fists and teeth splitting with all of the awful things you said to me, with your betrayal.
I even bought a ski mask (and more matches to burn it). But this was a hard decision. I wanted him to see my face. But did it matter? Or was I faceless to him, too?
It was getting close. It was long after midnight.
I parked far away from the cameras, which I had watched to gauge their pan and elliptic. I had another friend on security in the mall complex your restaurant sat in, by chance (providence?) who let me once, long ago, briefly see the video displays. Twenty little black and white eyes unblinking. If one was senseless, and like an idiot approached from within the lot, the cameras could find you. Oh, hello there, they would whisper, their gear and frames whirring, clicking into focus. But on the periphery, in the corner, you could stand in the outer darkness, beyond the panopticon. Right outside a business that had suffered a fire a few months before (No doubt another great chain of events, I thought). Its only existence in the night was now the flicker of lamplight. On, off. On, off. Appear. Disappear. Present. Absent.
I could take that chance.
An hour passed.
I wondered how this would all go. I wasn’t exactly a skilled fighter; variable upon variable compounded in my mind. What if I lost? That could not be an option. I would die before I lost. They are not the same, of course. Dying and losing. Death finds everyone and everything (I wondered if The Plan and Death were one and the same; I asked it, but was left to remain in curious silence). The difference between winning and losing then comes down to Death finding you as you plant your flag, or as you crawl into your cave. I heard that once, at least. It is thus the choice of how to die. How to live. I could only die. I would not lose.
I had only been in one fight before this, so long ago in high school. It was my sophomore year (Your junior year, The Plan corrected) I had been walking home from the gym that was directly across the street from my highschool, and to which I went everyday. The Police report would say that three college aged kids, wearing a motley assortment of sports jerseys and baggy jeans, began to close in as threats escaped their lips buried beneath the shadows of baseball caps as I walked past them. They smelled like smoke. They were drunk maybe, I hypothesized; having never encountered a drunk before in my life one might suspect this was an unfounded observation. And the police report went on to say—as I diligently spoke to what I can only describe as titanous officers, standing at least six inches taller than myself, and whose presence was inflated, as the frame of policemen always are, by the bulk of bullet proof jackets underneath the uniforms—that the kids that accosted me, for reasons unknown, wouldn’t let me pass as I neared them. And as I tried to keep moving anyway, (I just wanted to go home, officers) the one in the red baseball hat with a spiral tattoo on his neck (I told the police it looked ridiculous, but they said that, as true as that may be, this wasn’t quite the description they needed for their report) wound up, and took a swing at me.
And so I hit him. With all the menace my Junior frame (which the gym had helpfully begun to augment) could muster. It was a lucky swing, I remember. I hit the sweet spot at the intersection of cheek and nose and mouth. And I caught him off balance. I felt our bones grinding together; felt my bones victorious. No one tells you how the impact of a punch feels. First there is the tremor, from your feet through your hips, if you do it right. Like the earth is grounding you, propelling you. The fist is only a small part. You embody the Gnostic mythology of creation; the fist is only a lesser creator god, a demiurge, propelled from a greater body, the Profundity (Bythos). All the steps and angles now fling sequences from you. With every swing you create a world. But focusing on the fist is idolatry, not to mention wasting a good punch. The fist isn’t the direct emanation of its source; it follows hips and spine, shoulder and its blade, elbow and wrist. The most complex forms, in Valentinian or Basilidean Gnosticism (or the Sephiroths of Kabbalistic Judaism) just so, there are many emanations. After your Body moves there is the silence of the air (Sigê, Silence) and the Truth of your decision, its Aletheia, its unveiled nakedness in assault, which is now the new meaning, the very Logos and force of life, Zoê plummeting and exploding through you. You, the vessel through which the motion flows. The Aeons and Enumerations of your joints follow in the Emanation of your mind (Nous), expulsing, discharging like fullness flowing from a fountain.
Your hand feels a great freedom. If you are like me and had never really punched like that before, its like your arm takes flight. You feel the air between moments of striking. Do not feel the weight and drag of the material. Bythos, the Profound One, cannot know Achamoth, the base body of the world. And in that fleeting moment neither can you. If you do it right, the air is your only target. You don’t aim at what you want to punch. You aim through it. You don’t want to stop at the object; you must punch as if your fist was meant from the day you were born to be on the other side. The attack is a spiritual, not a physical, exercise. You must be in the strike the enlightened, the Gnostic, the Pneumatic (spiritual, enlightened, but also in etymology, air, wind, breath, storm) not the Hylic (base, matter, heavy, dull).
Yet always, suddenly, the infinite lines of flight find their impasse in the cheek, and the caressing air becomes solid, suddenly a swelling skull, halting, stopping, slowing, crunching, wrenching, faltering, gnawing, jarring. It is sin. The impact is the Gnostic vision of sin; base matter asserts itself over the air, the pneumatic spiritual flight; dragging you back to earth in pain and emotion. And you feel the impact in your knuckles, but even more (at least for me) in the wrist. The odd angles of the face snap and arrest your joints, schism and oblique trajectories engorge the veins and nerves with their odd momentums, free and radical upon the impact. You feel the bend: your fist twists off axis from the wrist; the horrible energy travels down your forearm into your elbow which flexes under the strain, even if ever so slightly. Your nerves buzz electric. You feel your bicep pull, your triceps still exploding forward but now being driven backward at the same time.
Then your shoulder in this single connecting motion explodes into a sphere, and you feel the anterior and posterior deltoids desperately try to stabilize the sudden errata. But now the infinite form of flight, the freedom of your arm, it becomes your enemy. It, in impact, reverses and flows freely now back through you, disregarding tendons and calcium and marrow, threatening to shiver and splinter you apart from within. This roaring tremor. A shrieking ghost shaking cell and Radius. Like the sympathetic vibration that suddenly moves a crystal cup to fracture and blur. And unless you fight everyday, your shoulder fails to completely correct the flow. It has no resources to compensate. The only way to be good at war is to war everyday. And if the paradox is true, to make peace one must prepare for war, peace is war everyday. (God help us, said The Plan).
When you strike, it is the Devil shaking your soul’s house. Shivering his way through you.
And then there is the pain. In the movies you can punch people all day and just get stronger. My arm, in reality, became only its negative outline; it was a blank unusable length of space. The bones had fused and compacted and seized. And everywhere, there was heaviness.
The heaviness of my fist as my muscles ached even with this one motion.
Heaviness as his body seized; as I felt the variable weights of his head, his eyes, is brain, lurch and pulse back at slightly different speeds.
Heaviness as even the base of my spine was in the end struck with this motion. Even the tips of my toes.
And the police report, like any good Positivist, wrapped up with the empirical descriptors. Three on one. The fight ended with one down, two stunned, one running away in the shock of the deed just done. Getting away before the two remaining companions could come to their senses and pounce. That is what the report said. Therefore it was true.
Thin and true.
Am I in trouble? I asked.
The two mountainous police laughed.
No, they said. They’re not going to try and report that one guy tried to pick on three of them at once. No one is that stupid. You defended yourself, you were brave. You are fine.
One clapped me on the shoulder. I guess in admiration. I had never been admired by a mountain before.
And so that’s what the report said.
But something was missing. The thickness of the event whittled away.
The report didn’t say: I enjoyed every minute.
The report didn’t say: that they didn’t try to stop me randomly. They knew my mother and sister.
Your mom is hot.
Your sister is hotter.
We’re totally going to fuck them. Did you hear that?
I want to fuck your mom and sister at the same time!
I heard. I heard that my whole life. A familiar chant and taunt. It just so happens these poor souls finally got a response from me.
So the report didn’t say I walked over to them. Cocky, as all juniors are when they first see results from the gym they keep going to. Angry, as everyone is when their family is made light of.
I didn’t tell the police because I knew they wouldn’t see it as self-defense. One, in fact, was now picking on three.
You know how the saying goes: the best defense is a good offense. And even better offense is to go utterly, entirely, mad.
I told no one else because I was ashamed I lied to the police. Because the police were a symbol of truth. I wasn’t a liar. I wanted to defend truth. But here, it was ironic, truth and truth conflicted.
My mother and sister’s honor needed to be defended. Truth. The idiot’s taunting did nothing that warranted physical violence under the law. Truth.
But this was a trial. A symbol. The paradox begging to be resolved. A sign of my life that transpired everyday back then. I had two beautiful family members, and it escaped the notice of no male. I heard about it everyday. Like they were two supermodels, two actresses, who were famous and the adolescent fantasy of every guy I ever encountered. It sickened me. And that’s who I was. I was the brother of the hot girl, the son of the hot mom (did I have a name? Even I don’t remember). It was even worse sometimes because my mom would chaperone our lunches at high school, because she loved me and wanted to be a part of my life. But this meant also that she was part of every guy at my high school’s life, and they loved her. She was their fetish, their totem. The erotic draw of God shown through her. Their perverted minds carried her like a relic. This multiplied when I shared the same lunch with my sister.
A small trial, to be sure. How many worse poxes can accrue to a life, I wouldn’t even want to guess. But this was my stress. What is a young boy to do? We are taught as men to protect our family. This is the value of the masculine, it is said. To protect, to be strong, brave. But society also frowns upon violence. The caricature that is paraded as the natural effect of manliness is the opposite of the simultaneous ideal held up as politeness. Enlightenment. In my savagery, I was lucky. I had no time for philosophy.
The report did not say: they did not stop me. They were on the other side of the street.
I stopped them.
The report did not say: I walked up to them like a pillar of storm.
The leader smirked. But then, a small moment of fear.
And he tried to push me. Not punch. Not attack. To my everlasting shame.
But what is done is done.
And as he push I broke the flow of his arms. But my arm, it erupted.
And as shock and shame took me as he went to the ground, I turned to face what I thought would be more attacks from enraged friends. But they were in shock.
The report said I left as fast as I could after that, because I was worried they would attack me, two on one. It was a reasonable, tactical retreat. A lie.
The report did not say: I feared no attack. I left as fast as I could out of shame.
The last thing I saw was his face broken on the ground.
And that’s when I said, A story must be made.
But tonight all that mattered was I won. I won.
And I would win again.
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