A Novel
PM Press, 2009
Lives Less Valuable begins with the understanding that every time we activists figure out ways to use the rules of those in power to stop destructive activities, those in power change the rules. This book is about the process of trying to figure out what we can do to actually stop the destructive activities. I knew it was going to be blasphemy to modern students of literature, and especially modern teachers of literature, because literature is supposed to be apolitical. But that rule is complete bullshit, and with the world being murdered it’s beyond bullshit; it’s inexcusable.
The dream is always the same. It begins with the slightest feeling of unease, as from a misplaced sound or a sudden silence: the too-quick stopping of birdsong or the scolding of squirrels. Then from Malia a moment of hesitation, that inevitable aversion to the warning she knows she must heed, that resistance to acknowledging an unavoidable reality. Each time in the dream she pays attention not to the sound nor to the silence, but to the red-tinted lettuce leaves in her garden, and to her weeding. She pays attention to her niece Robin, and notices sunlight glinting off the twelve-year-old’s dirty-blonde hair. She looks at the ground and notices the stems and leaves from yesterday’s weeding lying shriveled in the brown dirt.
And then again she hears a sound from the forest across the pasture. Finally, always too late, she realizes that something really is wrong. Finally, always too late, she says, quietly yet firmly, “Robin, inside.”
Always the response: “When I finish this row.”
“Now.”
“Just a minute.”
A moment’s inattention. In the battle between composure and panic, so often indecision wins out, spurred by a strange desire to appear calm when everything inside wants out, and everything outside is falling apart. The desire to remain asleep, comfortable, warm, hidden safely from what you know. A belief that if only you can remain steadfast in the dailiness of your activities, your world will never collapse. And so again Malia pushes aside the sounds, stoops to pick up a basket at her feet. She tells herself not to run, not to let even herself know anything is wrong.
She straightens, and hears another sound, then more silence. At last she understands, and in so understanding realizes the unforgivable stupidity of having ignored the warnings for so long. She starts to shout, “Run, Robin! Run!”
But the words never come. They are always too late. There is a shot, or silence, and an explosion of blood, red on the dirty-blonde back of Robin’s head.
Always in the dream the basket falls, slowly, and Malia runs, slowly, for the house. Gunshots. So slow she can almost see the bullets. More shots, like fireflies in the distant forest. Closer, Robin lies in the brown dirt, the back of her head gone, her skull open, jagged like a broken glass.
The doorframe splinters from gunfire. Bullets whine above her head.
Into the house. And then the voices. Always the voices. Her parents, Dujuan, Dennis, Simon, Ray-Ray, and now Robin. “Run,” they say, “Run.” More gunshots. Men approaching. Room to room she runs in this dream, each room smaller than the last, until she squeezes into rooms the size of coffins, rooms the size of desk drawers, rooms the size of matchboxes. She hides from the men, hears the gunshots behind her, and always the voice of Robin, “Run, Malia, run.”
The dreams. A moment’s inattention. A single moment.
• • •
Dear Anthony,
I hardly know where to begin. Would “I miss you” be appropriate? After all these years, finally I write. After everything that’s happened, somehow it seems unfair for me to suddenly reappear in your life, especially when our contact will necessarily be one way. I can write to you, but you, for obvious reasons, can’t write back.
I hope you remember our relationship as fondly as I do, focusing not so much on its ending—which at the time seemed unbearably tempestuous to me, but now seems little more than a summer breeze—as on the time that made up its heart. Our relationship. It wasn’t my longest, but it remains my dearest, and by a long stretch my most passionate.
I hope that after all this time you can still decipher my handwriting. For that matter I hope you’re still living at the same place. I went to the library and looked you up on the Internet. Your address was the same. I’m glad for that, because that way I can picture you there, and I can picture us.
I can see you right now. You just walked to the corner to get the mail. It’s hot, and already the tall grasses are turning yellow and brown. Leggy sweet clovers cascade with blossoms, and the vetch has just started to add its purple to the riot. It’s dry. You kick up traces of dust with each step, and gravel rolls beneath your feet. As you walk, you don’t look at the first neighbor on the left, because you never much cared for him. He never liked you either (or me, if you remember), so today when he sees you coming he busies himself a shade too quickly under his hood, fiddling with the carburetor so the two of you don’t have to acknowledge each other. I remember these things. I remember so much about our time together. Little things, like this.
I guess the kids in the next house down don’t play foursquare anymore, unless something has gone very wrong developmentally. Most likely they’ve graduated to basketball and football. Or maybe by now they’ve graduated altogether, and don’t live there anymore.
The dogs are with you of course. Two. They were puppies then, and now they must be very old. Surely they’re walking more sedately than before, maybe arthritically. I hope they’ve not died. One way or another there’s been too much death these last few years. Theirs would add too much to the weight.
You reach the mailbox. A strange envelope. A typed address, and no return. You check the stamp: yes, first class, so it’s not junk mail. The postmark. You stop and stand in the middle of the street, wondering who the hell you know in Odessa, Texas.
Well, no one now. I’m mailing this on my way out of town. I’m sure you understand why I can’t say where. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to leave the next place. Several months ago I moved here, on the run from the latest—and worst—of the deaths. I needed some relief. The first day I asked a woman at a restaurant, “What do people do for fun in Odessa?” She said, “They move away.” I’ve saved a little money, so it’s time for me to go.
You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to write you, or come visit you. My family is all dead now. All of them. I don’t have anyone anymore.
And I really don’t have you. I did once, and I feel stupid for giving you away. I know that’s not how I saw it at the time, nor maybe how you see it now, yet that’s how I see it. But even that isn’t so simple. If we’d stayed together I don’t know if I would have followed this path, and despite it all, I’m not sure any other path would have been appropriate.
I don’t know why I’m writing. It’s stupid and dangerous. Yes I do. I need to talk. God, you don’t know how I need to talk, and despite our problems we always knew how to listen to each other. But once again it’s not so simple. It wasn’t just our listening that was so beautiful about our conversations; it was our back and forth. Do you remember that night at the top of the stairs in the public library, interpreting each other’s dreams, then describing the sexual play we each had in store for the other when we got home, only to learn to our horror that the stairs formed an echo chamber for the stacks? Knowing that everyone in the library had heard the details of your dream about the hermaphroditic tadpoles and the sixty-foot clam went a long way toward explaining the looks we got on the way out, though not quite so far, I’m sure, as the by-then-general knowledge that I was no longer wearing panties. And there was that time you got the book on the White Rose Society, and we stayed up all night talking about German resistance to Hitler. Do you remember? What was the name of that girl who was beheaded with her brother for distributing anti-Nazi literature? Sophia, I think. Isn’t it too much that the Nazis beheaded a woman whose name means wisdom? I remember how beautiful she looked in that black and white photo. Those conversations are why I’m writing to you now, not just because we listen to each other, but because we hear, we understand, we mostly agree, and as happened so many nights, we anticipate each other.
I’m tired, and I want to come home. I can’t, so this is as close as I can get.
If you are still friends with Charlie and the gang, please give them all a hug for me, especially Charlie. Of course do not tell them it’s from me. I wish I could deliver it in person. And I wish I could give you a hug. I miss you.
I love you. I always have.
Malia
• • •
Perhaps the story begins, as so many stories do, with water. Perhaps it begins with a stream, and perhaps it begins with a little girl spending summer days as long as lifetimes playing near this stream, getting wet, getting muddy, and when she gets tired, sitting on the banks to listen in on conversations between trees and frogs, grasses and water. Always water. Perhaps it begins with evenings overflowing with the sounds of crickets and early mornings heavy with fog. Perhaps it begins with this little girl watching water condense in tiny drops on leaves, then watching these drops join others to drip off the ends and into the stream.
Or perhaps it begins much later, still with water. Perhaps it begins with a river.
The river was not always this way. Once the river was full of fish: shad, river herring, sea lamprey, sturgeon, eel, trout, striped bass, salmon. The Atlantic salmon, long as an arm, swam seemingly with one goal in mind, to come home, where they would spawn. The fish—so many they kept you awake at night with the flapping of their tails against the water, so many that people were afraid to launch their boats for fear the fish would capsize them by their numbers alone—hurled themselves up waterfalls, and failing to make the top, hurled themselves again and again until through force of will they made it, battered, bleeding, exhausted, home. Now the salmon are gone. So are the bass, the eel, the sturgeon, the lamprey, the river herring, the shad. A few trout hang on, but not so well.
Once, you could drink the water. Once, there were no signs posted telling people not to eat the fish, no signs telling them not to swim in the river. That, too, has changed.
Perhaps this story starts with Malia sitting by this river. She comes to this spot often, because just right now, just right here, in the early evening sun, feeling against her skin the warmth the stones have stored through the afternoon, she can almost forget. Here she can pretend there is no city, no poison, no cancer, no dying children. Here she can pretend the fish still swim, only deep, where she can’t see them.
She watches a dozen swallows dance over the surface, twisting and climbing and diving so suddenly that her breath comes in catches of surprise. In front of her, thin stems of willows quiver in the current. Some move slowly, in rhythm with the river’s waves.
Others resonate with a different frequency, responding to a pulse she can’t see.
Quick movement makes her look again to the swallows, and she follows one as he beat his wings, coasts, then flutters out of sight behind a pine downed in last winter’s flooding.
Life, she thinks. It’s not so fragile as sometimes we fear. We all want so much to live. The downed pine’s branches point upward, and the light green of this year’s growth shows the tree hasn’t given up. Its torn roots still clutch at the soil, and its branches still reach toward the sky. It still produces cones, the next generation’s attempt to carry on.
Once, an amusement park covered the far bank. That was long ago. Almost no sign of it remains, at least at this distance. Malia wonders how long it will take for the same to be true of the city as a whole. She hopes within her lifetime.
A pair of mallards wing their way from her right to her left, and she barely hears the whistling of their wingtips above the roll and whisper of the river.
She’s been coming here for years, ever since she went to work for the Council Against Toxics—or CAT as they sometimes call it, or more often just the Council—but each time she comes, it’s harder to go back.
It’s getting late, though, and she has work to do, and she can’t stay here forever, not this time.
Still she sits. A gnat lands on her hand. She looks closely, careful not to breathe. So tiny, the gnat could be crushed even by an accidental exhale. It opens and closes its wings slowly, and she reconsiders her position on the fragility of life. Life is supple and tenuous, she thinks, evanescent and tangible.
The gnat leaves, and she inhales deeply of a sweetness that takes her home. Childhood. Backyard. Picnics. Her parents. A locust tree. Climbing. A treehouse filled with the scent of locust.
The smell reminds her of her niece, Robin. Eight years old. Conceived under a locust tree out back at her parents’ farm. Malia’s sister Helene had brought a boyfriend up for the weekend, and they slipped away in the middle of the afternoon. Robin. She was named after the locust tree, Robinia pseudacacia, so that no matter where she went, she could take the tree with her. Helene died, and Malia and her parents raised Robin as their own. Malia has no children—she’s never wanted to bring a child into an industrialized, overpopulated world—and so loves Robin all the more, fiercely, like a daughter.
Time passes, and still she sits. Even in the growing dark of early evening she can see a small school of minnows in the shallows at her feet, and to the side a scuttling crawfish. It’s all so unfair, she thinks, so damned unfair.
It is this recognition, or rather remembrance, of the fundamental unfairness of what is being done to the river and to the people who live nearby that finally gives her the will to stand, stretch, and begin the long walk back to the office.
• • •
Or perhaps the story begins with someone else, with a young man named Dujuan sitting with his mother in a doctor’s office, listening to the doctor—the white doctor—talk about Djuan’s little sister. “Sometimes,” the doctor is saying, “in advanced cases of leukemia, parts of the blood necessary for clotting are lost. Bleeding occurs more easily.” The doctor tells them that his little sister, his mother’s youngest child, had bled into her brain. Dujuan’s mother grasps Dujuan’s hand so tight her fingertips turn from brown to burgundy as the doctor describes Shameka’s skull filling with blood, her brain being forced through the only open space, near the spinal column. “She suffered no pain,” the doctor says, “because she was fully unconscious.” And then he says, “All things considered, not a bad way to go.”
In this moment, sitting across from the doctor in the doctor’s office, Dujuan wants to kill him. Dujuan sees himself stand, sees himself pull out his knife, sees himself lean across the doctor’s desk, sees himself cut the doctor’s throat. Perhaps first, he thinks, he should knock the man unconscious, so he will feel no pain. Then he could say to the doctor’s family—the white doctor’s family—“All things considered, not a bad way to go.”
But he doesn’t move. He sits there and looks at his mother’s face, brown, beautiful, tired. He continues to hold her hand. He holds onto the outrage as well, directed not so much, after that initial rush, at the doctor, who is the messenger, as at the death, and especially at how it happened.
• • •
He’d been there when she died, actually seen the life go out of her body, out of her. He hated that image of her body taut, every muscle straining as if to tear her apart, her eyes rolled back in her head, and then the convulsions, the rhythmic flailing of her arms and the arching of her back. A primitive groaning had emerged from her throat.
Dujuan had yelled when her body went rigid. That was when the doctors and nurses came. They’d pulled him from the room so they could work on her. But before they took him out, he saw her one last time, her body seizing. This was not his sister. Not any longer. She was gone.
• • •
The worst part for Dujuan, except, of course, for the death itself, was that she knew. All along Shameka had known she was going to die. Soon.
She had only cried about it once. Dujuan remembers a night about two months before she died. He’d gotten up about one in the morning, and walking by the room Shameka had shared with their sister, he’d heard her crying. He had stopped, stood, listened. He had wanted to go in and hold her, but hadn’t known what to say, what to do. So he hadn’t gone inside.
Since that night Dujuan has known that if he could do one thing differently it would be that night, and if he could change one thing about her death it would have been to make it so she didn’t know, and didn’t have to be afraid. He would have made it so she went out suddenly, like a light switch. Nobody deserves to die afraid, he thinks. Nobody.
• • •
Dear Anthony,
Immediately after the first murder, things stayed fine. Nobody talked. Our lives continued. Dennis, my coworker, was more brittle and spoke to me a little less, but until the whole thing broke and he killed himself I never was sure how much he remembered, not only because he was drunk that night, but also because he always had a stronger capacity for denial than most of us.
I’ve seen Dujuan and Ray-Ray a fair amount in the intervening years. They told me that drugs undid us. They told me about Simon, about the drugs, and about Simon talking to people he shouldn’t have.
That brings me back to the question I’ve been asking about beginnings, only this time slightly differently. If Simon hadn’t used drugs, would we have gotten away with it? If Simon had used drugs but hadn’t talked, would Robin still be alive? If Simon had talked to someone less eager to collect the reward, would Simon still be spending the rest of his life in prison?
There are probably thousands of lessons here, but I’ve learned two hard ones. The first is to know whom I’m working with. If I were to choose three people from a thousand on whom my life would depend, in retrospect I’d put Simon somewhere between one thousand and, oh, one thousand. The second, and of course I’m violating this with these letters, is that if I’m going to fight back against the full power of the state, I need to keep my mouth shut about it.
I’ll write more later.
Love,
Malia
• • •
Malia sits at her desk, working. She is in her office at the Council. The Council occupies a suite of five rooms plus a central lobby on the first floor of an old building near the river.
Her walls are bare except for two posters. The first is of Che Guevara, with the quote, “Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” The second is a blown-up photograph of a grizzly sow standing on all fours in a meadow.
She hears the door to her office open, and by the time she spins in her chair to face the entry, Dennis is halfway across the room. He reaches for one of the room’s other chairs, a sturdy padded roller with thick wooden arms, and drops into it. He leans forward, eyes bright, and says, “Guess what?”
“What?”
“It’s on.”
She hesitates. “What?”
He looks around, then eyes her closely. “We got bugs?”
“What?”
“Bugs. We got any?”
Malia finally understands. “We’re clean.”
“Good, because we just scored a huge victory.”
“What happened? Did you blow up Vexcorp headquarters?”
“No, really. I just got the call . . .” He stops abruptly, then says, “Don’t say that, there might be bugs.”
“I swept last week,” she says. “Besides, what the hell do we do that’s gonna scare the Feds?”
“Vexcorp’s my worry.”
“Same difference,” she says. “What’s the story?”
Dennis, in his late thirties, began working as CAT’s attorney a few years after Malia began there. About six feet, with dark hair, he’s handsome in a clean-cut, energetic sort of way. Too handsome, Malia often thinks, or at least too attentive to his looks. Or perhaps just too theatrical. Malia has frequently seen him pause outside windows at restaurants for one final check before smoothing his hair and making his entrance.
Dennis says, “Guess.”
“Shit, Dennis. Come on.”
He pauses a moment, then says, “60 Minutes is going to do a segment.”
“No!”
“This story is so sexy,” he says. “It’s got everything. Poisoned kids—” He interrupts himself, says, “—Poisoned poor kids—” He interrupts himself again, “—poisoned poor inner city kids, bought politicians, cancer rates through the roof, the fucking river’s probably gonna catch fire like the Cuyahoga back in—”
She talks over him, asks, “How much time did they give you?”
Dennis keeps talking: “God, wouldn’t it be great if it caught fire when the film crew was here? I can just see it. And we can juxtapose their denials with that handwritten cost-benefit analysis—”
She interrupts again: “—I need to take a look at that—”
Again he continues, “—showing it was cheaper to . . .” He trails off, says, “What? They said about fifteen minutes.”
“Is that enough?”
His voice quickens again. “Enough? We’re talking 60 Fucking Minutes. The roving eye of American attention is gonna fall on Vexcorp, and the company is gonna feel the heat.” He pauses, then says more slowly, “Fifteen minutes is enough. Besides, any more and people would get bored.”
He stands and begins to pace. He says, “If enough people just know what’s going on . . .”
“They do know, Dennis.”
“But now it’ll be undeniable. Pictures. Right there. TV’s stamp of approval.”
This is the hope, Malia thinks, that allows every activist to go forward: the belief that if only people could be given the right information, they would do the right thing. Malia long ago concluded this hope is essentially false. She says, “People either don’t care or they don’t know what to do.”
“We’ll tell them what to do.”
“Write their fucking Congressman?” This is a sore point with Malia. The solutions presented by environmentalists, including her office-mates, including herself, are never sufficient to the problems. Getting poisoned by toxic effluents? Write to the head of the company requesting it change its practices. Democracy not functioning? Write your Senator begging him to not follow the money. She continues, “That guy doesn’t take a dump without Vexcorp’s OK.”
Dennis stops pacing.
Malia stands. She asks, “Or maybe they should write letters to the editor. Of the corporate newspaper. Or maybe they should call the local TV channel. I read Vexcorp’s board is interlocked with Viacom.”
“Don’t start.”
“I also read Viacom holds four million shares of Vexcorp.”
Dennis glares. “Just don’t fucking start already.”
More weary than angry, she says, “Viacom owns CBS.”
He begins to pace again. “Can’t you let me have five minutes before you start? Things are bad enough without your hardline bullshit.” He stops, turns to face her, says, “People get turned off by your doom and gloom. They want happy. That’s what sells.”
“Like poisoned kids and a dead river?”
Patient, as though talking to a child, he says, “That’s the great thing about this 60 Minutes gig. I have an angle.”
They stare at each other.
Finally, “Aren’t you going to ask?”
“Of course, I’m just waiting for you to tell me.”
“Jobs,” Dennis says.
They stare at each other again. Malia is not going to ask what he means. She is not going to ask what he means. She is not going to ask what he means.
Having built up the suspense, he volunteers, “Vexcorp’s going to clean up the river—”
“Shit,” Malia says under her breath.
He continues, “—in one of those public/private partnerships. I heard Cash is going to introduce a bill—”
She interrupts, “Great name for a Senator.”
He laughs. “There is a God.”
“And She’s got a sense of humor.”
Dennis says, “Anyway, a source told me he’s going to announce the bill’s introduction tonight at a fundraiser.”
She stares into space, then looks at him sharply, says, “Let’s go.”
Silence.
“To the fundraiser.”
“Get serious.”
“I am.”
“I don’t think you understand. It’s a fundraiser. It costs fifteen hundred dollars just to sit down.”
“Then we’ll stand. We can make up some papers to look like a subpoena, or we can make a citizen’s arrest for treason.”
“Are you crazy?”
“We’ll figure out something on the way.”
Dennis takes a deep breath, then continues as though she hadn’t spoken, “The unemployment rate in this slum is above fifty percent—”
Malia interrupts softly: “—Dennis—”
“—and this is going to create over 400 jobs.”
“Let’s go.”
He says, “The Feds are going to provide the money.”
“To Vexcorp, of course.”
Dennis asks, sincerely, “What do you care who gets the subsidy, so long as the cancer rate goes down and the river gets clean?”
“You’ve been doing this too long to believe this bullshit.”
“That’s where 60 Minutes comes in. We publicize the hell out of it, and Vexcorp can’t back out.”
“They won’t back out. They’ll just take the money and do nothing.”
He shakes his head. “When are you going to learn you can’t always fight them head on?”
She looks away, then back to him before she says, “You know, we’ve never even tried that.”
He stares, blinks twice, slowly.
She knows she lost him. She continues, “We push paper around. They’re not scared of us.”
“You bet they are. Why do you think they plant bugs?”
“They’re bored, paranoid. How would I know?”
“They plant bugs because we’re effective,” he says. “Just last year do you remember the legislation—”
“—Eviscerated in committee, and turned into an industry initiative by Cash . . .”
“It almost worked.”
“That’s one reason we always lose,” she says. “We consider our losses near-wins.”
“We got the message out. Right now that’s what matters.”
“No. Stopping the poisoning is what matters.” She doesn’t want to be having this conversation. She may as well be talking to an answering machine. Press one to hear We must never be emotional. Press two to hear We must present only reasonable demands. Press three to hear Our tactics must fall within bounds declared acceptable by those on the other side. Press four to hear We must not call the other side “the other side” because the language is too divisive.
She wonders if Dennis, too, feels unheard. Perhaps he does. She sees clearly that in order for him to keep at the work, Dennis has to focus on one particular task. When he maintains that focus, he’s effective at achieving his goals. Whether the goals themselves accomplish anything is an open question. Malia sometimes wonders, too, if what she perceives as seeing the system clearly for what it is—a maze with no exits—in actuality is a way to allow her, too, to keep working. Perhaps she is as wedded to lost causes as Dennis is to superficial productivity.
Dennis shakes his head in a way that signals the topic closed. “This is a win-win situation. Vexcorp wants money. They get it. We want a cleanup, and we get that.”
“No justice.”
“Fuck justice. I want a clean river, and I want the kids to stop dying of cancer.”
He has a point, if it will work. If.
They’re both silent. Finally he says, “You have a special way of puncturing people’s balloons, you know that?”
Dennis is right. This isn’t the time to have this conversation. Not on the heels of his good news. And Dennis probably isn’t the person to have it with. She says, “I’m sorry. Really. What you’ve done is great. I don’t think anybody else could have done it.”
He looks at her.
She thinks, Time to mend some fences. She says, “I sure as hell couldn’t have pulled it off.”
He isn’t having it: “I don’t know.”
“No, absolutely. You’re a genius. Brilliant.”
He smiles a little, says, “Well . . .”
She asks, “When will they be here?”
“In eight weeks.”
Neither speaks for a few moments, before Dennis says, “Say, you want to grab a bite to eat to celebrate?” Another pause, very short, before, “Like old times.”
They had dated briefly right after Dennis began working for the Council. For Malia, the relationship had been at that boundary between the forgettable and regrettable: neither bad enough to regret nor good enough to remember or mourn. It seems to her that Dennis felt their relationship more important, in ways she was reasonably sure he couldn’t articulate.
She says, “Thanks, not tonight.” Then she gestures toward the document on her desk. “Friday’s the deadline to appeal this EIS, and I’ve still got a half-dozen arguments to tear apart. Besides, I should crash the fundraiser.”
“Want some help?”
“With the fundraiser?”
He points at the document.
“No thanks,” she says. “How about a raincheck on dinner till next week, and also, can I borrow your Vexcorp files? That’s where you’ve got the copy of that cost/benefit analysis, right?”
“It’s on my desk. I’ll get it.”
Dennis leaves, then returns with a bulging file folder. “You can hang on to it for now. But don’t lose it. I’ll need that stuff when 60 Minutes shows.”
He turns to go, then turns back and says, “Are you going to be all right here?”
“If I get into trouble I’ll yell and the wiretappers will rescue me.”
“Don’t joke. You gonna be all right walking to the bus?”
“I do it all the time.”
“I worry all the time.”
“Thanks. I’m a big girl.”
Dennis leaves. She turns back to the document on her desk, rubs her eyes with the palms of her hands, and gets to work.
• • •
Dujuan sits at his mother’s kitchen table, his father’s .38 snubnose in front of him. The feelings are coming back. They began to return even before he got out of the car. He can’t make them stay away. Sorrow, rage, emptiness, confusion, and most of all an indescribable weight. No longer can he carry his mother, nor his brother and sister. No longer can he carry the memory of Shameka.
He can’t run away. Where would he go? How would that help? The feelings would follow close behind. Nothing helps for long. Drugs are useless, because he comes back down. Alcohol is no better because he eventually sobers up. After sex he still has to deal with another person. Sleep doesn’t work because he always wakes up, and when the dreams follow him, even there he gets no rest. He had hoped that violence—not just violence used to achieve an end, but violence to which he can give himself up completely—would make the feelings go away, but it did no better than anything else.
He needs to talk to Montrell, to Boo. He doesn’t know what to do to make himself feel better, or failing that, to make himself feel nothing at all. Boo would know. Their father would have known. Where is he when Dujuan needs him? Dujuan needs someone, and he knows he can’t turn to his mother: he doesn’t believe she would know what he’s talking about, and in any case she has enough trouble just keeping Shane and Ketheia fed. Shameka’s death hit her as hard as it did him.
And she doesn’t know how hard he’d been hit, because he couldn’t let that show. Had he shown it to her, she would, he was certain, have felt the need to take care of him, something she couldn’t do. Not now. Maybe not ever.
He looks at the gun on the table, then watches his hands fumble open the box of ammo and pull out one bullet.
“Chickenshit,” he says out loud. He’s too damn chickenshit to take responsibility for even this decision.
He breaks out the cylinder.
He would never have done this here if his mom and the kids were home. But they’re gone for the week to his grandma’s for her birthday. This way his mother will never see the mess. Ray-Ray will check on him tomorrow or the next day, and walk in like he always does. Then he will take care of things. Like he always does.
The table and floor will be cleaned up by the time she gets back.
He inserts the bullet, then sees his hands reach for two more: one in six isn’t good enough odds for him.
The sharp snap of the gun fitting back together—which would normally have been barely audible—echoes through the room and through his head. He hears it all down his spine and into the hard wooden chair on which he sits. He hears it in his feet and back up his legs. As he spins the cylinder every click of its ratchet makes its way into his bones.
He sees a hand draw the gun closer to his head. He doesn’t know whose hand it is. Shameka’s? His father’s? Boo’s? The man’s from the street tonight? He sees tattered skin above one fingernail, then a freckle on the ring finger, and recognizes the hand as his own. He sees the finger squeeze, the hammer pull back. He has not yet reached the point of no return. The finger keeps squeezing. He wants to put the gun down, but can’t make the hand do it. He closes his eyes to not see the flash.
It seems there is no one moment when the hammer stops going back and begins to come forward. There is a single smooth movement until the trigger stops resisting his finger and the spring-loaded hammer strikes, with a force weak enough that it could have been stopped by a finger and strong enough to blow apart someone’s world.
There is a sense—perhaps even the deepest sense—in which it doesn’t matter whether the firing pin strikes a cap or an empty cylinder, because someone is going to die this night, this moment. The only question is whether Dujuan’s body will die as well.
• • •
Later, on the way home, what Dujuan remembers most is how good it felt to finally stop feeling, once the violence began. Until then he’d been edgy, holding down an anger that rose and rose inside of him. He’d snapped at Ray-Ray, and especially Simon, and he’d complained about the cold, but his anger wasn’t directed at them. Nor was it directed—specifically—at the man who eventually stopped to see if they needed help, whom they robbed and whom Dujuan beat—shrugging off Simon’s and even Ray-Ray’s attempts to stop him—more severely than he’d ever beaten anyone. Dujuan knew, even as he heard again and again the thud of his booted foot against the man’s ribs, and heard the grunting of the man’s involuntary exhalations—the man long since having lost volition—and even as he felt the solidity and rightness of the impacts traveling back up his own leg, that he felt no unique anger toward this man as an individual. He didn’t know this man, had never seen him before, and would never see him again. He didn’t care to know him. He didn’t care about this other’s pain. What he cared about was how good—yet at the same time painful—it felt to feel the texture of the air at the moment the man realized he was in trouble, and to draw out that moment, feeling the other man’s fear and tasting his questions, so tangible Dujuan could pluck them out of the air above the man’s head: Will I live? Will this hurt? How much will this hurt? Will I humiliate myself in the pain? He cared about the crack in the man’s voice, but only because it revealed a crack in the wall that in Dujuan’s mind separated the two men. Dujuan accepted his own rage, his own violence, as part of who he was, and as a necessary response to his surroundings. And he somehow knew, as certainly as he knew his sister was dead, that who this man was and what he represented—though Dujuan didn’t know what that might be—were based on violence against Dujuan and all he held dear. Dujuan could not have said how this was, but he knew it to be true. And so he beat the man, and continued to beat him.
He stopped when the air turned sour and he knew they had to leave. He hefted the man’s shuddering body from in front of their car, dropped the hood, and dashed to the driver’s side. He got in and started it up. They had barely pulled away when a police car passed them—presumably a random patrol, or perhaps officers called by the man on a cell phone before he stopped to help—coming the opposite direction.
Dujuan looked in the mirror, and the last thing he saw before he turned down a side road were the headlights of the cop car shining on the man he had just beaten. He did not feel a thing, and for that he was glad.
• • •
They continue to drive. Ray-Ray still thinks about violence. The man in the alley isn’t the only person he has killed. Ray-Ray killed his cousin Ricky, too. But that doesn’t count: that killing was more gift than murder, more an expression of familial responsibility than violence.
Ray-Ray thinks back to last summer, in the back bedroom of his Aunt Claire’s apartment.
As he does almost every afternoon—and toward the end it becomes several times each day—Ray-Ray enters without knocking, and makes his way down the hall. He passes the living room and notices that today Claire isn’t watching television; she sits silently on the couch. For a moment, he considers going in to talk with her, but instead he walks into the kitchen and turns on the tap. He waits till the water is hot, then partially fills a glass. He pulls a spoon from the drawer. The silence in the apartment disturbs him, and he thinks again about asking Claire what’s wrong. But he guesses he knows, and if so, it’s better, he decides, to just not talk about it. He walks out of the kitchen and to the rear of the apartment. The door to the back bedroom is slightly ajar, as it is each time he comes.
Ray-Ray slips inside. He doesn’t turn on the light. While he waits for his eyes to adjust, he listens for the soft sound of breathing that will tell him Ricky made it through another six hours.
Ricky grew up in this apartment, in this room, then left to live on his own, and at thirty-four came home to die. He has cancer, as his father did before him, and also his uncle. Cancer has become something of a tradition in this family, a sorrowful birthright that comes to them by way of where they live.
Ray-Ray hears Ricky say, quietly, “Still here, bro.”
Ray-Ray has a hard time hearing the words, and can just barely make out a dark form on the bed.
“Your stuff,” Ricky says, before taking another breath, “It don’t work . . .”
Ray-Ray doesn’t say anything.
Ricky continues, “It hurts.”
The ticking of a clock in the hallway. Ricky’s breathing, shallow and uneven, and Ray-Ray’s own, too loud in the quiet of the room. Finally, Ray-Ray says, “We got to—”
Ricky cuts him off, “No hospitals.”
Chemo. Surgery. He’s been through it all. Nothing has helped. Nothing except the shit Ray-Ray hooked him on, and which he now gives him several times a day. It was enough of a struggle to get Ricky to go to the hospital in the first place: his father died in one, hands tied to bed railings to keep him from pulling out the feeding tubes.
Ricky says, “Too late.”
“No—”
“I talked to Mom . . .”
“No.”
“You said . . .”
Silence, until Ray-Ray says, “I know what I said.”
More silence. The clock, the breathing, the sound of his blood pounding in his ears. It would be easy for Ray-Ray to walk out right now and never come back, to pretend the pain in the room is nothing to him. It would be easy, too, to try to talk Ricky out of the decision, as Ray-Ray and Claire had talked him out of it before. But the first isn’t an option: it’s not how family acts. As for the other, it’s pure selfishness: to put off Ricky’s death for another day or two or three would be doing no favors to Ricky. But Ray-Ray hates to do this. He hates to be the one.
“Cover your eyes,” Ray-Ray says, and turns on the light. He looks at Ricky and hates what he sees. Hollow cheeks. Protruding forehead with deep hollows at the temples. Stick-like fingers covering sunken eye sockets. Ray-Ray looks away.
He puts the glass on the nightstand, then reaches into a drawer beneath, which he resupplied only a few days ago. He pulls out the plastic that holds the tar heroin, and unwraps it. He nearly retches at the bitter, vinegary stench, as happens each time he opens the package. He wouldn’t do this for someone else. The heroin is dark, and tacky to the touch. He uses a pocket knife to scrape a dose into the spoon. He triples the dose just to be sure.
Between breaths, Ricky asks, “You know how much?”
“Yes,” Ray-Ray lies, and triples it again. He considers giving him the whole damn chunk. No need to save it, since Ray-Ray doesn’t use, Claire sure as hell doesn’t, and there’s no way he’s going to feed any of Simon’s habits.
Neither speaks as Ray-Ray rewraps the chunk, then pours a little hot water into the spoon and stirs it to dissolve the tar. Then Ray-Ray draws the liquid through a piece of cotton as a filter into the syringe. But there’s too much junk for the gear. He’ll have to slam him a couple of times.
Ricky extends his arm—a useless gesture, since the veins are gone—and Ray-Ray says, “There’s gonna be a little prick here, Ricky.”
Ricky says, “’Sides you?”
The same joke every day, and this is the last time. Silence. Ray-Ray begins to sweat. He says, “Are you sure?”
Ricky nods.
Ray-Ray asks, “Want me to get your mom?”
“She knows,” Ricky says. “We talked.”
“She don’t want to hold your hand?”
“Fuck you,” Ricky says. A long breath. “Don’t make this hard.”
It already is, Ray-Ray thinks. And suddenly he understands Claire’s absence. It would be one thing to be present at your son’s death, and quite another to be there for his killing.
Ray-Ray finds a vein in his cousin’s neck—as is true of his arms, the veins in his legs have long-since collapsed—and injects the heroin. Afterwards, Ray-Ray draws up more of the junk and injects Ricky again. He does it a third time. If he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it right.
He looks away to pick up the spoon and the tar, and out of the corner of his eyes he sees Ricky shudder, once, and then sigh. Trying not to look at the body, Ray-Ray cleans up the nightstand—later that night he’ll throw all the paraphernalia and shit into the river to have it out of his life—and leaves the room. He goes to tell his Aunt Claire. The whole time—even holding her as her whole body shakes—he doesn’t let himself feel. He doesn’t let himself feel until much later, and what he feels then is not so much rage or even sorrow as it is an emptiness that swells up inside of him until it’s bigger than his heart, bigger than all of him, bigger than the whole damn city and everyone in it.
Ray-Ray never talks about the specifics of Ricky’s death—not to anyone—but when anybody asks if at least it had been peaceful, Ray-Ray always replies, “Not for me it wasn’t. Not for me.”