Thursday, June 26, 2008
To Suspend
NEW YORK CITY: At the American Natural History Museum in New York City there is a life-sized model of a blue whale suspended from the ceiling of The Irma and Paul Mistein Family Hall of Ocean Life, the length of which spans nineteen metres, the size of a creature beyond the limits of gravity. Installed in 1969, the model itself weighs 21,000 pounds and appears to dive down into the bottom floor of the blue-lit hall. Depending on the day of your visit, there are hundreds of strollered children with snot on their upper lips crying and running and pulling at the hems of their parent’s exhaustion. In the large hall, the sound of people echoes with the recordings of ocean waves and gurgling water and can be deafening. But the whale, this huge figure, silently hangs there absorbing the commotion like a cloud: an animal cloud with slow blood. Looking up at the figure amidst the screaming and terrestrial thuds silences and centres you. When I’m by myself I find that this is the state that I strive for. I want to move through the streets of the city and ride on its subways absorbing and steady. I am no whale and terrestrial existence makes things far jerkier than the fluid movements of the ocean, but as I walk through crowds of scurrying people and sharp motion, I strive to swim and suspend.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
The Boy Killer of Bird Rock
On a June night, that could have been December or August because months are simply names in Southern California, there grew a ballooning pool of blood on the sidewalk curb of Princess Street in Bird Rock, San Diego. There was even a small chunk of brain matter smooshed like wet egg noodles into a crease of the concrete. Thomas House had been killed. And Marcus Miller, Matthew Bankey and Carlos Fernandez were running to the only open space you can find in Southern California on this side of the border: the ocean.
Eva was beneath the Eucalyptus tree outside her front door on her way to school when a SDPD patrol car pulled into the gravel driveway. Two officers hitched up their heavy belts as they slowly asked Eva if they may please speak to her mom and dad, mistaking Eva for an age much younger than eighteen. The police had knocked on the Miller’s door once before when after Mom screamed at Marcus for spilling an entire pot of Top Ramen down the gas stove, he threatened her with a kitchen knife. A concerned neighbor who could see his armed silhouette in the window notified the authorities. Still, Eva hadn’t become accustomed to the sight of police officers beneath her eucalyptus tree and she knew something was not right. Her mind became focused so intently on the present that it was as if she started to record the event; consciously filming it in her mind so she could remember it. Light and the way it hit the foot of her mom’s bed and entered her expanding pupil became important. Sound as well: the crumple of sheets and the officer’s deep shaven voices saying explanatory phrases like, “…gang violence…”, “Manslaughter in the first degree” ,“…Windn’sea Beach” and “…Marcus’ skate shoe”. Eva was secretly filming the scene from the kitchen drinking a glass of sour orange juice when it became quite clear to Eva the inextricable differences between her and her twin brother Marcus . Eva was standing in a well-lit, Mexican tiled kitchen in her beaten up saddle shoes drinking orange juice while Marcus was sitting in jail suspected of murdering his old neighbor whom he did karate with in fourth grade.
Though this revelation had all of a sudden swept up into her head like wine or sugar, it wasn’t completely new to her. Eva and Marcus had never really gotten along. Even before they were born, Marcus was much too rough with Eva. The doctors in the emergency room were shocked to watch on the sonograph screen as Marcus somehow wrestled Eva and squeezed his way into the world with his umbilical cord wrapped around his sister’s neck. She was in an incubator for two week before she could go home and Mom says that’s why she has asthma and is so much frailer than Marcus. Marcus has never apologized.
Eva has had many incidents where it should have become clear to her that her and Marcus were not meant to view each other as human beings. There was one she filmed in her mind’s eye much like she was doing now in the kitchen when they were at Horseshoe beach where the waves crash big and hard right on the sand. Marcus was with some ratty friends of his and Eva wanted to go boogie boarding with them. Mom said it’d be fine as long as Marcus kept an eye on her. The trick was not so much to ride the waves but rather avoid the pummeling you would receive if you attempted to ride one. Eva was good at this because she’d bob up and down with the smooth swells way on the outside. Marcus and the boys were closer in chucking seaweed at each other and ignoring Eva (which wasn’t hard to do), until Marcus reached out to her, “Hey sis, check this out.” They were nine years old and Marcus had never before called his sister “Sis”, and because she was nine years old, Eva was naïve enough to think that Marcus actually meant it. Her smile was big and salty as she paddled closer to the gang of boys. “Dude, look down there- there’s a dead shark,” Marcus pointed. Eva looked down through the green water and he wasn’t lying. There floating just above the ocean floor was the white up-turned belly of a small sand shark no bigger than but just as vulnerable as a human thigh. It was swaying gently in the undercurrent swells like Eva was swaying on the surface. Perhaps he had planned it all along, perhaps the “sis” embarrassed him, or perhaps because the shark and Eva looked so much alike just then, but suddenly Eva’s head was plunged closer to the dead shark. The pressure and salt stung her eyes and her lungs after the first few seconds began to tighten. She could feel their capillaries in her chest crack and throb. She tried kicking up at the water but quickly found the foam of her brother’s board and his fingers tangled in her hair pushing down on her head. Through all her thrashing panic, she couldn’t not watch the silent shark. As the hand continued to push and as she gradually lost the need to fight back uselessly she calmly thought to herself, “I don’t want to float like that, way down there. I don’t want to.” She didn’t have to. Without the pressing foam of Marcus’ board or his forceful hand she bubbled up to the air, gasped in the salty air and swam quietly to the shore. Mother couldn’t do anything to punish Marcus anymore and so Eva didn’t go and whine to her, she simply sat in a ball in the sand and watched the white water suck at the sand. She should have known Marcus meant nothing by it. And she should have known to drop him completely then and there, but it took nine more years and a boy’s brain matter caked into the tread of Marcus’ shoe for Eva to completely give up on her brother.
Her mother on the other hand was helpless. After the officers left, Mom got on the phone to cry. She called Gram and Grandpa and told them she needed help. They would meet up downtown. Then, away in her bedroom, thinking Eva couldn’t hear, she called Dad in Florida and blamed him for everything. It wasn’t a long conversation.
The police station had speckled tile floors that looked dirty and green fluorescent light that showed all the dirt. Gram and Grandpa were there already drinking sour coffee out of Styrofoam cups in the waiting area. There was also a man in a suit standing beside them looking tanned and serious: a lawyer. Mom cried a lot and hid her head in Grandpa’s shoulder. The same officer from their gravel driveway and eucalyptus tree took them all to a holding room. Even before they entered, Eva knew Marcus would be behind the solid gray door sitting in some wooden chair, his head drooping, his eyes maybe red. And he was. But the bright orange suit they had him wear strikingly strayed from Eva’s film image and mocked the severity of his crime. Mom was sobbing and her whole face looked translucent with the salt water streaming from her eyes when she asked if she could hug him. With a stern but defeated grasp she hugged her child. It was a long hug and no one said anything.
Eva watched her mother cry onto the bright orange fabric couldn’t imagine loving someone that much and somewhere in the film she was making in her mind there is spliced a scene where she has dark hair tied up in a bun and she is standing over a white crib in the sunlight of a blue baby room. It’s a boy who breaks things or kicks other babies or simply doesn’t smile and she wonders if she could love him. Could she love anyone like that? She’d be either a saint or stupid. And with the maternal gene of her baby room blurring into the image of the speckled tile prison, Eva saw her mother as both saintly and stupid.
When the officer asked them to wrap things up, Eva was the first to leave and she waited in the hall. She wasn’t going to float belly-up in pity for her brother. She reasoned that it wasn’t her responsibility.
The officer described to the mom, grandparents, tanned lawyer and Eva the events of June ninth in stark detail. Apparently, Thomas House had been at Windn’Sea Beach earlier that afternoon surfing when he cut off Carlos Fernandez. Matthew Bunkey and Marcus Miller were surfing there as well and started verbally harassing Thomas House. House exited the water. Miller, Fernandez and Yankee followed him in and continued to verbally harass him. The taunting almost became violent until a local lifeguard stopped it. Both parties were made to leave the beach by different staircases. Later that night Thomas House was at the bar, The Shack, on Nautilus Street. Miller, Fernandez and Yankee entered the bar intoxicated and began to physically harass House. House retaliated and injured Yankee’s left eye. All four males were ejected from the bar at about eleven fifteen. House, who lived walking distance from the bar in his mother’s rental on Princess Street, was walking home when Miller, Yankee and Fernandez attacked him. House refused to retaliate and a witness who saw the event from their kitchen window says that Yankee and Fernandez, after the initial attack, refrained from any further violence against House. Miller, on the other hand, repeatedly pummeled the victim. When House had fallen to the sidewalk Miller then repeatedly kicked the victim. At a certain point, Miller grabbed House by the shirt and threw him down on the sidewalk. The angle at which House hit the curb split open his skull at the base of his neck killing him instantaneously. The fracture was so large and the impact so forceful, the back lobe of the victim’s brain was spattered onto the sidewalk. It is then that the officer suspected that Marcus got the brain matter on his shoe. Miller, Fernandez and Yankee fled the scene after realizing the victim was dead. Early the next morning the suspects were called in on a Disturbing the Peace violation at Windn’Sea Beach.
The room was silent. There was nothing the Miller family could say to defend themselves.
Eva tried to turn her mind off of the film, turn it to numb nothing, but she wasn’t able to. It kept recording and at the same time replaying in her head. It made her up-turned palms white and her thin wrists heaved with blood. The images kept playing and kept coming into her head. She remembered Thomas House had a trampoline in his backyard and mom always told her not to jump too high or she’ll fall off and break her head. And the springs squeaked and squeaked in rhythm when they jumped on it and Marcus’ fists kept squeaking and squeaking the same way and the trampoline springs squeaking and squeaking like the blood in Eva’s wrists squeaking and squeaking and then a foot into a soft stomach squeaking and squeaking and squeaking and then the trampoline stops. And kids run away.
* * * * * * * * * * *
There was nothing they could do at the station so Grandpa told Mom, Gram and Eva to go home and rest. Mom didn’t want to go but she folded quickly and within the hour, we were pulling into the gravel driveway with the eucalyptus hanging over our heads. Gram started baking because that’s what she does when she’s nervous and Mom with her translucent face sat at the kitchen table to watch her. Eva sat across from Mom and asked her if she wanted water. She didn’t see her and said no thank you. The sky outside was covered with a thick marine layer and the grayness seemed to slip past the dry grass outside and into the kitchen. They were all quiet until Eva asked if she could go for a walk. Mom looked at her and thin-lipped said, “Yeah, Eva.” She said, “Thanks Eva.” Eva said nothing and on her way to the door went to hug her. Mom felt limp in Eva’s arms but she still held on. It was as though Mom was sighing, exhaling and drifting away, but with the last of her air she whispered to Eva, “Love you.” She thought her mother was stupid for exhausting herself over a son who didn’t deserve it.
Eva closed the front door. She had wanted to walk towards the ocean and found herself three miles away at Windn’Sea beach. She wasn’t quite sure how she got there. The gray sky was thicker the closer to the water and Eva could feel the pressure tighten on her ears. She sat in a ball in the sand and watched the swells.
The movie in her head slowed its playing and she was able to relax her mind from focus. She saw the reef wasn’t snagging any waves and the grass roof shack on the beach looked tired. The palm trees above the cliffs were catching the off shore wind and their fronds were swaying back and forth like a sea anemone would do in the water’s current. Eva felt the wind like a current around her knees and she slowly started to sway in its cradle. Marcus didn’t come to the beach for this reason she thought to herself. He came to tag the rocks and drink and smoke and fight. She swayed. She couldn’t love a person like that or anyone who could love a person like that. Again she swayed. It’s naïve to trust someone like that. She was floating in the current. It’s stupid and dangerous and she couldn’t stand that she was even related to Marcus Miller. The current bumped and she bumped with it. She wouldn’t stand in the way if he had to be put to death for his murder, no she prayed that he would be killed for his murder. She could feel from her rigid teeth to a deep pit in her stomach that something heavy was growing and hardening. She came to firmly hate her brother, the boy killer. Eva was now floating just above the ocean floor belly-up in the current, vulnerable and pale and even if she wanted to reach the surface thrash against the water, there she stayed, hating the boy killer.
Eva was beneath the Eucalyptus tree outside her front door on her way to school when a SDPD patrol car pulled into the gravel driveway. Two officers hitched up their heavy belts as they slowly asked Eva if they may please speak to her mom and dad, mistaking Eva for an age much younger than eighteen. The police had knocked on the Miller’s door once before when after Mom screamed at Marcus for spilling an entire pot of Top Ramen down the gas stove, he threatened her with a kitchen knife. A concerned neighbor who could see his armed silhouette in the window notified the authorities. Still, Eva hadn’t become accustomed to the sight of police officers beneath her eucalyptus tree and she knew something was not right. Her mind became focused so intently on the present that it was as if she started to record the event; consciously filming it in her mind so she could remember it. Light and the way it hit the foot of her mom’s bed and entered her expanding pupil became important. Sound as well: the crumple of sheets and the officer’s deep shaven voices saying explanatory phrases like, “…gang violence…”, “Manslaughter in the first degree” ,“…Windn’sea Beach” and “…Marcus’ skate shoe”. Eva was secretly filming the scene from the kitchen drinking a glass of sour orange juice when it became quite clear to Eva the inextricable differences between her and her twin brother Marcus . Eva was standing in a well-lit, Mexican tiled kitchen in her beaten up saddle shoes drinking orange juice while Marcus was sitting in jail suspected of murdering his old neighbor whom he did karate with in fourth grade.
Though this revelation had all of a sudden swept up into her head like wine or sugar, it wasn’t completely new to her. Eva and Marcus had never really gotten along. Even before they were born, Marcus was much too rough with Eva. The doctors in the emergency room were shocked to watch on the sonograph screen as Marcus somehow wrestled Eva and squeezed his way into the world with his umbilical cord wrapped around his sister’s neck. She was in an incubator for two week before she could go home and Mom says that’s why she has asthma and is so much frailer than Marcus. Marcus has never apologized.
Eva has had many incidents where it should have become clear to her that her and Marcus were not meant to view each other as human beings. There was one she filmed in her mind’s eye much like she was doing now in the kitchen when they were at Horseshoe beach where the waves crash big and hard right on the sand. Marcus was with some ratty friends of his and Eva wanted to go boogie boarding with them. Mom said it’d be fine as long as Marcus kept an eye on her. The trick was not so much to ride the waves but rather avoid the pummeling you would receive if you attempted to ride one. Eva was good at this because she’d bob up and down with the smooth swells way on the outside. Marcus and the boys were closer in chucking seaweed at each other and ignoring Eva (which wasn’t hard to do), until Marcus reached out to her, “Hey sis, check this out.” They were nine years old and Marcus had never before called his sister “Sis”, and because she was nine years old, Eva was naïve enough to think that Marcus actually meant it. Her smile was big and salty as she paddled closer to the gang of boys. “Dude, look down there- there’s a dead shark,” Marcus pointed. Eva looked down through the green water and he wasn’t lying. There floating just above the ocean floor was the white up-turned belly of a small sand shark no bigger than but just as vulnerable as a human thigh. It was swaying gently in the undercurrent swells like Eva was swaying on the surface. Perhaps he had planned it all along, perhaps the “sis” embarrassed him, or perhaps because the shark and Eva looked so much alike just then, but suddenly Eva’s head was plunged closer to the dead shark. The pressure and salt stung her eyes and her lungs after the first few seconds began to tighten. She could feel their capillaries in her chest crack and throb. She tried kicking up at the water but quickly found the foam of her brother’s board and his fingers tangled in her hair pushing down on her head. Through all her thrashing panic, she couldn’t not watch the silent shark. As the hand continued to push and as she gradually lost the need to fight back uselessly she calmly thought to herself, “I don’t want to float like that, way down there. I don’t want to.” She didn’t have to. Without the pressing foam of Marcus’ board or his forceful hand she bubbled up to the air, gasped in the salty air and swam quietly to the shore. Mother couldn’t do anything to punish Marcus anymore and so Eva didn’t go and whine to her, she simply sat in a ball in the sand and watched the white water suck at the sand. She should have known Marcus meant nothing by it. And she should have known to drop him completely then and there, but it took nine more years and a boy’s brain matter caked into the tread of Marcus’ shoe for Eva to completely give up on her brother.
Her mother on the other hand was helpless. After the officers left, Mom got on the phone to cry. She called Gram and Grandpa and told them she needed help. They would meet up downtown. Then, away in her bedroom, thinking Eva couldn’t hear, she called Dad in Florida and blamed him for everything. It wasn’t a long conversation.
The police station had speckled tile floors that looked dirty and green fluorescent light that showed all the dirt. Gram and Grandpa were there already drinking sour coffee out of Styrofoam cups in the waiting area. There was also a man in a suit standing beside them looking tanned and serious: a lawyer. Mom cried a lot and hid her head in Grandpa’s shoulder. The same officer from their gravel driveway and eucalyptus tree took them all to a holding room. Even before they entered, Eva knew Marcus would be behind the solid gray door sitting in some wooden chair, his head drooping, his eyes maybe red. And he was. But the bright orange suit they had him wear strikingly strayed from Eva’s film image and mocked the severity of his crime. Mom was sobbing and her whole face looked translucent with the salt water streaming from her eyes when she asked if she could hug him. With a stern but defeated grasp she hugged her child. It was a long hug and no one said anything.
Eva watched her mother cry onto the bright orange fabric couldn’t imagine loving someone that much and somewhere in the film she was making in her mind there is spliced a scene where she has dark hair tied up in a bun and she is standing over a white crib in the sunlight of a blue baby room. It’s a boy who breaks things or kicks other babies or simply doesn’t smile and she wonders if she could love him. Could she love anyone like that? She’d be either a saint or stupid. And with the maternal gene of her baby room blurring into the image of the speckled tile prison, Eva saw her mother as both saintly and stupid.
When the officer asked them to wrap things up, Eva was the first to leave and she waited in the hall. She wasn’t going to float belly-up in pity for her brother. She reasoned that it wasn’t her responsibility.
The officer described to the mom, grandparents, tanned lawyer and Eva the events of June ninth in stark detail. Apparently, Thomas House had been at Windn’Sea Beach earlier that afternoon surfing when he cut off Carlos Fernandez. Matthew Bunkey and Marcus Miller were surfing there as well and started verbally harassing Thomas House. House exited the water. Miller, Fernandez and Yankee followed him in and continued to verbally harass him. The taunting almost became violent until a local lifeguard stopped it. Both parties were made to leave the beach by different staircases. Later that night Thomas House was at the bar, The Shack, on Nautilus Street. Miller, Fernandez and Yankee entered the bar intoxicated and began to physically harass House. House retaliated and injured Yankee’s left eye. All four males were ejected from the bar at about eleven fifteen. House, who lived walking distance from the bar in his mother’s rental on Princess Street, was walking home when Miller, Yankee and Fernandez attacked him. House refused to retaliate and a witness who saw the event from their kitchen window says that Yankee and Fernandez, after the initial attack, refrained from any further violence against House. Miller, on the other hand, repeatedly pummeled the victim. When House had fallen to the sidewalk Miller then repeatedly kicked the victim. At a certain point, Miller grabbed House by the shirt and threw him down on the sidewalk. The angle at which House hit the curb split open his skull at the base of his neck killing him instantaneously. The fracture was so large and the impact so forceful, the back lobe of the victim’s brain was spattered onto the sidewalk. It is then that the officer suspected that Marcus got the brain matter on his shoe. Miller, Fernandez and Yankee fled the scene after realizing the victim was dead. Early the next morning the suspects were called in on a Disturbing the Peace violation at Windn’Sea Beach.
The room was silent. There was nothing the Miller family could say to defend themselves.
Eva tried to turn her mind off of the film, turn it to numb nothing, but she wasn’t able to. It kept recording and at the same time replaying in her head. It made her up-turned palms white and her thin wrists heaved with blood. The images kept playing and kept coming into her head. She remembered Thomas House had a trampoline in his backyard and mom always told her not to jump too high or she’ll fall off and break her head. And the springs squeaked and squeaked in rhythm when they jumped on it and Marcus’ fists kept squeaking and squeaking the same way and the trampoline springs squeaking and squeaking like the blood in Eva’s wrists squeaking and squeaking and then a foot into a soft stomach squeaking and squeaking and squeaking and then the trampoline stops. And kids run away.
* * * * * * * * * * *
There was nothing they could do at the station so Grandpa told Mom, Gram and Eva to go home and rest. Mom didn’t want to go but she folded quickly and within the hour, we were pulling into the gravel driveway with the eucalyptus hanging over our heads. Gram started baking because that’s what she does when she’s nervous and Mom with her translucent face sat at the kitchen table to watch her. Eva sat across from Mom and asked her if she wanted water. She didn’t see her and said no thank you. The sky outside was covered with a thick marine layer and the grayness seemed to slip past the dry grass outside and into the kitchen. They were all quiet until Eva asked if she could go for a walk. Mom looked at her and thin-lipped said, “Yeah, Eva.” She said, “Thanks Eva.” Eva said nothing and on her way to the door went to hug her. Mom felt limp in Eva’s arms but she still held on. It was as though Mom was sighing, exhaling and drifting away, but with the last of her air she whispered to Eva, “Love you.” She thought her mother was stupid for exhausting herself over a son who didn’t deserve it.
Eva closed the front door. She had wanted to walk towards the ocean and found herself three miles away at Windn’Sea beach. She wasn’t quite sure how she got there. The gray sky was thicker the closer to the water and Eva could feel the pressure tighten on her ears. She sat in a ball in the sand and watched the swells.
The movie in her head slowed its playing and she was able to relax her mind from focus. She saw the reef wasn’t snagging any waves and the grass roof shack on the beach looked tired. The palm trees above the cliffs were catching the off shore wind and their fronds were swaying back and forth like a sea anemone would do in the water’s current. Eva felt the wind like a current around her knees and she slowly started to sway in its cradle. Marcus didn’t come to the beach for this reason she thought to herself. He came to tag the rocks and drink and smoke and fight. She swayed. She couldn’t love a person like that or anyone who could love a person like that. Again she swayed. It’s naïve to trust someone like that. She was floating in the current. It’s stupid and dangerous and she couldn’t stand that she was even related to Marcus Miller. The current bumped and she bumped with it. She wouldn’t stand in the way if he had to be put to death for his murder, no she prayed that he would be killed for his murder. She could feel from her rigid teeth to a deep pit in her stomach that something heavy was growing and hardening. She came to firmly hate her brother, the boy killer. Eva was now floating just above the ocean floor belly-up in the current, vulnerable and pale and even if she wanted to reach the surface thrash against the water, there she stayed, hating the boy killer.
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