Chapter 48
FORTY-EIGHT
ISAAK
All the faces I see are wailing.
Our ancestors and theirs, wailing and wailing with their mouths open and screaming. The sinew of their necks stretches while skin falls from their bones. So much violence and sand and dirt and blood, and I see it—I feel it—all at once.
But more, I understand. In shocking, deep waves that bowl me over as I crouch here and weep.
Understanding upon understanding.
My mother. Desperate and beautiful and wanting so much more. Wanting out, but she couldn’t get out. Or at least, before she could, she caught the eye of my father, a dumb and brutal local gangster. But even as I point the finger of blame at him, understanding smashes into me as I see the string connected to his back.
He must’ve been a little boy once, too. I see the bright being he might have once been. But then, like me, he was pressured to fight his whole life because of our big, brutal size. I don’t even know who my grandparents were on his side. I just have a vague memory of Abuelita saying they were trash junkies like him. He was part of an MC that worked with a gang peddling poison in our neighborhood, and he got my mom addicted.
She thought he was a way out, but he was only a worse option that turned her all but feral sometimes in her desperation for her next fix.
Then Abuelita. Her husband beat her, so she fled with her daughter here in search of a better life. And this was what happened. More violence and a daughter who lost her mind to poison so bad that she left her own son at the local daycare.
Maybe because she didn’t want the responsibility. Maybe because whatever shit she’d shot up had been mixed with something bad and she OD’d. I don’t even fucking know .
“Isaak?” Kira asks. “Are you still with me?”
I grab the sheet to wipe my dripping nose and nod, then realize she can’t see.
“Yes.” Eyes still closed, I look at all their faces. So clear and glowing in front of me. “I’m not ready to come back yet. I see it all. Can’t talk.” There’s too much understanding for words. It’s too big. Too much.
“Okay,” she says. “I’m here if you need me.”
I keep watching the faces morph. First, my mother, in all her screaming pain, changes to my grandmother in hers. Pain all the way until her death. And then the string yanks us all back further.
To her ancestors and my father’s ancestors, who came here on ships from a distant land and the horrified faces of the first peoples they met here. Met with violence, and disease, and death. My distant righteous holy fathers.
Those strings combine with the ones that yanked me forwards, landing me in the sandbox. As if we were all children playing with paper guns and pretend bombs.
My mother’s face morphs, and now it’s mine. Screaming, “I just want to get out! I just want to get out, like she never did!”
But they put me on airplanes, and I landed in a desert I never understood.
Elmer’s wanted to stick to me like glue, but for once I was dressed just like everybody else, and I had friends. I was normal . For fucking once. It wasn’t like when I was a little kid or even when I was the weird kid bouncing between foster homes and group homes.
I was finally fucking normal. I was tired of sticking up for all the other worse-off kids. And why did it always have to be me , anyway? I had friends now, and so what if when my friends laughed at Elmer’s-stick-to-my-ass-like-glue, I didn’t stand up for him?
Even though it woulda been so easy to jostle Art over and make space for Elmer’s on the bench. There was room.
There was fucking room .
’Cause there was a reason everyone loaded up in the back transport: If there was a buried IED in the road, the front one would run over it first.
I wasn’t thinking about that when I sent Elmer’s to the front truck.
I swear I wasn’t.
It was just something we always did at that point. Like calling shotgun. Everyone knew you tried to load up in the back transport first. It was a reflex.
“I swear I wasn’t thinking about it,” I whisper right before another sob takes me hard. “I’m fucking sorry, Elmer’s. I’m so fucking sorry.”
Because that day finally came, after seven years and spending most of my time clearing brush and moving sand so we could build another road.
I’ve been waiting for “that day” for so long, I’m fucking shocked when it actually comes.
It’s so loud at first, but then everything goes silent at the same time. Silent with the loudest fucking buzzing ring.
It’s so silent, I can’t tell what’s happening. But my eyes burn when I try to open them. People shout and pour out the back of my transport. I can’t hear any of them, even though in some distant part of my brain, I get it.
It’s finally happening.
Today is the day.
My feet take me to the end of the truck, and my arm feels disconnected from the rest of my body as I grab the bar to jump down to the sandy road. I barely hit dirt before I’m choking on air full of burnt rubber and gasoline fumes. The world tilts sideways as dark smoke churns on the road in front of us where the front transport used to be.
The one I saw Elmer’s climb into just twenty minutes ago.
It was just there.
Now, there’s only twisted metal and blood and the bottom half of a body, guts falling out of it like sausage links?—
I run forward but arms grab me, holding me back. I’m bigger, so I fight them off. More bodies tackle me to the ground right as a smaller burst from the fuel tank sends a fresh wall of fire into the air.
“Elmer’s!” I scream as my eyes and throat burn from fumes, even though I know he’s gone.
It’s only ten in the morning. This sort of thing can’t happen at ten in the morning before I’ve even managed to pinch out a shit.
That’s all I can think as I turn over, hurl up my breakfast, and punch my fists into the sand. It’s only ten in the morning. It’s just ten. People don’t die at ten in the morning.
But as I punch the road again, it’s like my fists sink further than just into the sand.
And I feel the string yanking me back.
Suddenly, I’m both in the moment and further behind it, seeing how everything is connected.
The hundreds— millions —of strings that all crossed to create this combustion of violence.
My mouth opens in the same pained scream of wailing grief it did that day, and the sinews of my neck strain.
Flesh burnt off the bones of my comrades in front of me. The blood of the people we’d come here to spill. Their fury at us erupts in today’s blood instead.
And back behind me in a yawning stretch of retribution and revenge. Backwards, and on and on forever forward.
So many strings not even birthed yet.
I’m just the smallest speck of dirt on the smallest rock of the universe. The product of so many strings tugged and yanked. A consequence of consequences.
None of us are innocent but at the same time, it’s all so terribly understandable.
Every punch I’ve ever thrown.
Every wrong decision I’ve made.
All the worse decisions I chose not to make.
And at least, with the understanding, I can suck in a deep breath that feels like it finally, finally fills up all the space in my lungs.
It’s as if I’ve broken free of something, even if I’m not sure what. Some lie, maybe, that’s held me hostage for a long, long time.
Do I think my mom wanted to be there for me?
Yes. I think she would’ve chosen me if she could. But she couldn’t. And it didn’t have anything to do with me. She was caught in the consequence of a million other consequences.
There I am as a boy, and now, another boy is standing beside me. It’s me as a teenager, for some reason. As clear and glowing as the tattoos on Kira’s skin were.
The teenager puts his arm around the boy.
Choosing him.
I feel the message deep in my soul.
I’m not alone anymore.