He’d left long before they found him there at the playground under the basketball hoop. I understand. He took his time leaving, from the moment he opened his eyes for the first time to that night, when he pulled the thick rope out of a cardboard box in the garage, coiled it around his hand and elbow, noiselessly lowered the metal garage door, not quite all the way, and set off for the playground. He wasn’t himself anymore, just a painful little knot, all that was left of him, he had been dissipating, on his way toward the metal hoop with its tattered net ever since the earliest days of his childhood. He took his first steps toward that night many years before, when he walked into the stuffy kitchen where they all lived, thinking how strangely quiet it was and that something odd and electric was in the air. Before coming in he’d been sitting with his older brother on the old walnut tree at the back of their yard, smoking for the first time. He was nine years old and felt he’d finally done something like a man, something right, and he was determined to walk into the house with the smell of tobacco on his face and fingers so his mother would slap him lightly across the mouth, and then he’d announce, gaily, that he could no longer live without cigarettes, he was hooked, and like all the men in the household, now he was a smoker. There was a little pantry off the kitchen, and he thought he heard noise in there. When he cracked open the door, he saw a bizarre sight that stopped him in his tracks, at first, with its lack of logic. His mother’s legs in brown, plaid slippers hanging some ten centimeters off the floor, twitching slightly and his father’s big hand, his red-white fist that was squeezing her around the neck and pressing her up against the wall. His mother was gasping, his father growling, his mother’s eyes huge, and his father’s pressed in a thin line of mindless rage. This lasted a second and then, like a panther, he threw himself on his father’s back, howling and tearing at his vest. The Old Man sloughed him off with a single movement and tossed him forcefully in among the sacks of onions and potatoes. When he launched himself at his father, his mother slumped to the floor and the Old Man turned to go. When, a few days after this, the Old Man went to the hospital for stitches because something sharp had lodged under his ribs and he’d almost bled to death, the boy told no one that while hiding his pack of Kents under the mattress on his mother’s side of the bed he happened to see a small pen knife that he recognized as the jangling bulge in her apron. Supposedly his father had been injured at his construction site on a sharp blade-like wire protruding from a slab of poured concrete, this happens, everybody knew that. The only thing that was a little odd was that he came lurching into the hospital before dawn, at the darkest part of the night. His second step toward the playground happened when he saw my hands plunging into the wash basin. I know that. Not because of the scene, not because of the sickening sight that likely provoked disgust, maybe even disgust for me, no, he took the step because he did not fling the filthy water at the Old Man’s face, because he did not grab me by the hand and pull me up from where I was kneeling, because he didn’t pack us up and curse his parents, because he didn’t take us away to another, lighter darkness. Instead he waded even deeper into defeat. He sank in a little deeper yet that early morning when he returned from the night shift. I was sitting on the edge of our bed and his little son had spread himself across the whole mattress, his head bandaged, breathing loudly in deep, painful sleep, the way children sleep after a fierce, humiliating thrashing. At first he thought the boy had fallen off his bike, that he’d tumbled off the scaffolding he was always climbing around on, he circled around me, alarmed, and with his eye on the child slumbering under the covers he whispered, what happened, what happened? Your mother. That’s all I said, and he sank, taking more steps on his path toward the playground. I was calm, unfeeling, decisive in offering him a choice for the last time: us or them. After a lot of silence and another few years he seemed to have chosen us, but by then we were already much less ourselves. He came even closer to the playground and the basketball hoop when she was born, when he began, for the first time in his life, to sense what it is to be a little girl. When he thought, though only with a corner of his mind, how there would be someone coming after her, someone who teased her, someone who grabbed her by the tits and ass like they always do, someone who shamed her, someone who shat all over her, someone who locked her up forever, someone who lifted her ten centimeters up off the ground, by the neck. Maybe he realized then that I, too, had been a little girl.
He came very close to the square on the plywood that held the basketball hoop at the moment when his father and mother said they would always be ashamed of him if he didn’t volunteer to fight in the war. He never actually chose us. He took the gun and came yet another step closer to the shadow of the metal hoop. Here he stood for a time, and he saw the mutilated bodies, the torched houses, the madness, he saw himself with his own hands pressing someone’s bluish intestines back into the warm hole of their gut, it was unreal, he wanted to go back, he wanted to choose us, but the choice was no longer there for him.
When he came out of the coma, out of the nether worlds, when he came home from the spa, one night I lay down next to him in bed. With a mixture of sorrow and excitement, I groped for him under the duvet, and when I mounted him with all my love, while my mother was lying in the next room with only half her body, while our children were growing up to become unfamiliar, alien people, I desired to save only us, but he had already gone numb. He didn’t budge. He couldn’t anymore, too much darkness had moved into every corner of his soul and body. Then he threw the rope over the hoop. Placed the noose around his neck, where his skin still pulsed but his heart no longer beat. He tightened the knot and bent his knees.