iii. points of impact

I got very angry. Over the summer spent training for football, I had
slimmed down, gained considerable muscle mass, and worked up a healthy
appetite of unchecked aggression. When I think back on football, I
remember the mindset it put me in. When at first I was apprehensive and
distant, tossing in witty asides and cracking wise, I was later
borderline bloodthirsty and hair-trigger. I did not know my limits. I
strained to push myself harder and further than I had ever known. I'd
run for miles, knowing no end to what I could actually accomplish. I'd
gained my breath and got the beat down like it was a musical
performance I knew intrinsically. I could go and go, and sometimes it was
all I did.

I learned how alone and empty I was on the inside, I
strained to fill that interior space of myself with connection,
knowledge and beauty. To know myself, I'd push on into fringes of
not quite exactly normal.

What happened was this. Our first two games,
not to count our pre-season exercises, were away games. We actually
won our first two without much fanfare. In between victory, the pep
squad left us little
handmade offerings on our lockers. We wore our jerseys to school and
puffed our stuff. It was all a bit of a show, as we had two star
players who made up for the relative lack of experience all around and
made the rest of us look
good. There were many happy accidents on the away fields, as well the
early teams we played were far more rural and lackluster than the
pride and joy of Small Wood. The Friday night of our first home game
was raucous. The crowd was electric, the turnout
left the minority of town still at home, and the game began beautifully.
One, two quarters passed with us doing a bit more than nudging ahead.

Coach Kordowski humbled things down in the locker room, trying to
exercise a modicum of restraint and beat it into our heads the game
was far from over. Near the end of his impassioned plea for
level-headedness, an assistant coach came up and whispered into
Kordowski's ear.

Kordowski took a moment, raised his hands as if to
strangle or hug, than lowered them, his face washed red. He
tried choking them back but the tears came anyway.

He told us in a plain voice that two girls were killed in a hit and
run accident just two blocks from the stadium near the start of the
first quarter. Everyone on the team knew the dead girls by name except me. The
teenager was named Erica and despite sharing class together, I'd never
really noticed her. She was walking her developmentally disabled
sister, Monica, to the game when a motorist ran into them at a speed
that tore their bodies to pieces. Later on, details would emerge that
he was drunk and the gore of the impact so shocking he stopped and
tried to throw the scattered remains into the drainage ditch and cover
the bodies and flee. He made it to a motel before he broke down, wept
himself sober and over the phone turned himself into the police.

Fast Forward

Four years later, I was attending a nearby state university. Living in
the farm house was a family of four. The husband employed himself as a
full time metal sculpture artist and part time handy man. The wife
sold chicken eggs by the side of the road. The rent on the place
wasn't much, and they managed the day to day life just fine. They had
two cute young daughters who were smitten with the farm life.

One day, the husband and father began over-reacting to every little
thing. Something in his voice betrayed a hidden anger. He retreated to
his workshop and tore apart metal, twisting the original forms beyond
comprehension. He stayed there all day and all night. His wife and
mother of his children brought him food and drink and a blanket, which
he didn't need in the heat of composition.

Inside the home, the wife put the children to bed. She read them
stories together, and when the smaller girl was asleep, read to the
older one individually. She put on reading glasses halfway through the
hour long ritual, and sipped at an ever cooling mug of hot tea and
honey.

She pushed the edge of the blankets under and over the tiny forms
tight and checked the windows for cracks. The mother and wife closed
the door, leaving a sliver of light to cut into the warm space. She
walked down the stairs, grabbing an afghan blanket off the banister.
She put her cup in the sink of the kitchen and ran it under water. She
looked out the kitchen window, past the fruit-bearing trees and saw
the light from the workshop.

She went into the living room and turned on the small, barely working
television. Local reception was spotty, more radio than video. She
tuned into public broadcasting, interrupted the middle of a raucous
British imported sitcom. She sat with the blanket on her lap and
slowly drifted off to sleep.

She was woken suddenly by the sound of glass breaking. Coming out of
first stage sleep, she initially shook it off as the remnants of a
near dream. But then it happened again, the sound coming from outside.
It was barely there, muted by distance, then again in her right ear,
hardly registering. She stood and went to the window, but saw only
darkness past the light cast from inside. She felt like a tiny ship at
sea, the moon hidden behind clouds, and pulled the afghan closer. Time
passed and she waited, keeping watch. Nothing happened.

She walked to the service porch, pulled on a jacket and unlocked the
door. The smashing, shattering sound of glass again, this time from
right outside in the garage port not twenty feet from her. The wife
and mother got very afraid now. She locked the door back up and
retreated into the living room. There were two large picture windows
that killed the heating bill, but provided a gorgeous view of the
valley. She looked out from behind, like a second pair of glasses, the
feeling of desperation and inaction overtaking rational thought like
the quickening of her breath.

She heard the sound of broken glass, the tinkling of the shards
against the floor, now from inside the house. The small service porch
window, she rushed back to it, just peeking in. A clump of metal was
still coming to a rolling stop. She locked the secondary service door
and rushed upstairs, one hand in front of her mouth, the other
swinging and grabbing and pushing. She was crying, tears were coming
fast down her face, but she made no sound. One of the picture windows
imploded as she went up the steps, not looking back.

The mother went to her children, who were already awake and confused.
She pulled them from their blankets and they all went into the master
bedroom, with its two stairwell hallway doors and connecting bathroom.

The sound of breaking glass continued. The mother phoned the police,
who were calm and even. The mother tried to match their rationale
tone. It occurred to her that they were separated by so much. The
voice on the other end was sympathetic, casual, and assuring, trained
to relay information, to be a presence, but the two worlds the mother
and the dispatcher occupied were far apart and could never be bridged.

One was safe, away from harm, comfortable and emotionally distant.
Whereas the mother was suffering a shock induced breakdown, her home
invaded and raped by brute force, her children contemplating their own
mortal danger perhaps for the first time, her own very life perhaps in
the balance. What was in her ear, alien, calm and constant, a flood of
reassurance and it's alrights it's okays. The mother knew the voice on
the other end could not hear the tinkle of glass, the crunch of
footsteps over the ruin, the bass of whole house beating to the sound
of approach.

His voice called out to them, the husband father's. He said he was
bleeding, that he'd cut himself, that he needed help. The mother wife
kept talking into the phone, her children close to her in silence,
erratic breathing in their tiny chests, not sure what they should be
doing. They played with each other's hair.

He pounded his fists against the hard wood door. When it would not
give way, he tried kicking it. He persisted for minutes, screaming
obscenities and threats of violence, pleading love and death in the
same bloody roar. Eventually he collapsed, weeping, shaking the door
with his sobs.

When the police arrived, he came back to life and took to defending
his home from the authorities. He was subdued and sedated and put in
the back of the police car until the ambulance arrived. When the
officers assured her it was over, and that she could come out, the
mother wife and her daughters emerged, shaking but pacified calm.

There were smears of gore all through the house. The father husband
had cut himself pretty bad on his hands and arms. It was revealed that
he punched out his car's windows first, with his bare fists. When he
noticed how badly he'd cut himself, he wrapped them and continued
punching out windows with his bandaged hands. For the windows he could
not reach, he threw his works of art through.

The husband father was not a bad man, he just for some reason forgot
to take his medication. The mother wife and her daughters stayed at an
anonymous women's shelter in the woods for three weeks while he
recovered, served a small stint in jail, and went to counseling. All
the while I helped my grandmother with the repairs to the family home.
The mother wife felt so incredibly horrible and understood that no
simple apology or explanation would do. The family vanished to another
town, another rented home and prayed to god something like this would
never happen again.


Rewind

A simple statement, over and over. I'd sing it to myself for hours at
a time, alone in bed at night. I was struck with insomnia. Most nights
I was up till three or four in the morning, up at six-thirty for
school. When I could sleep, I'd often wake up hours early and not be
able to fall back asleep. I made up a song and sang it to myself,
hoping I'd rediscover a natural pattern. I felt most alone at these
hours. Often I'd just keep reading from twelve at night until the next
morning. I didn't let me family know about it, my school work did not
suffer; my performance on the field never mattered enough.

Often I'd just look out my window, at the moon on the night horizon,
falling behind the many trees, I'd listen to noises of animals and the
lands surrounding. I worked myself into a state of extreme paranoia
and anxiety. Thoughts overtook me; I'd consider what ifs that made me
shake. The song, the mantra, the statement was my key to fighting the
night terror, but it would only work once or twice in an evening,
after that I was left to fight my way to dawn, until the shadows
pulled back and wet covered the earth.

It wasn't simply being afraid of the dark; it was more the thought of
the overwhelming horrible pit of despair I'd see people sink into, it
was about me coming to terms with the total otherness that existed in
the world. I lived on the edge of darkness, and I peered into it every
night. When thousands of stars were out in force, I was afraid of the
alien unknown, how very small and pointless I was, how over-powering,
all encompassing it was in relation. When the clouds covered and all
was a foggy haze, I was afraid of what looked just out of view, the
tangible barrier between here and there, to lose yourself inside and
never come out.

All around me was fear, and I never let on how just afraid I was. What
really made my blood run cold was the idea that for every genuine
terror that hit me, there were a dozen more out there I'd never even
considered. Just the sheer enormity of me being unfamiliar and
uncomfortable in Small Wood hit me, and it hit me hard. I was coming
to understand and appreciate the true transition to adulthood, could
feel the impending weight of responsibility and decision. And that
scared me. So I stayed up late, my eyelids not my enemy, but doing me
no favors.

From September to December, my thoughts turned grim. My classmates
gave me the nickname Morbid, though I never really saw myself in that
light. I always felt my tone far more diffusive and joking than
serious, but I knew my nighttime thoughts were overtaking my daytime
interactions and it was reflecting on my habit and nature. There was a
lot of bad going on in the world that first fall in Small Wood, and
this was the very first time it got through to me, affected me in ways
beyond my understanding.

Tender was the flesh of the left and right edges of my mouth, the seams between my lips. I needed a shave and I'd been rubbing out of habit. The home game, my helmet off while I stood on the sidelines. When I first started practicing, before we got suited up, I was afraid for my safety. We weren't supposed to be hitting each other like we were, and minor injuries were frequent and noticeable. At the end of the day we could grimace a smile and compare our wounds. In hindsight, the week without pads was probably to toughen us up and weed out the players who couldn't grin and bear it. But the pads were like the best thing ever, I felt like a rubber ball, like I could bounce off anything. It was as much mental padding as physical, and without having to worry, the body could do some pretty crazy stuff. Gross physical injury placebo is what it was.

We were getting walked all over the third quarter. The news of the hit and run had sobered everyone to the point of detached introspection. There was no big whoop do it for the dead girls speech, only silence and tears. We were short two players who'd left the game to go to their dear friends, the family in shock and mourning. There was an understanding that a football game was not life and death tonight, that no one would be able to concentrate on winning after such a great loss. But we played and we won, I'll save you the suspense, as that wasn't the goddamn point. It was our last victory of the season, the rest downhill, each game far more humiliating than the last.

I just remember the final touchdown, the final ticking away of the clock, our victory assured. When it was all over, they flashed R.I.P. on the scoreboard and people filed out and away into the night. It was a Friday night where the players agreed not to get trashed and make trouble in the supermarket parking lot, where parents talked by their cars about finding the human filth responsible and doing unspeakable things to him, where religious types and the sympathetic souls held a candlelight vigil at church across the street, and where I went straight home to take a shower, sit in silence and stare out the window at the coming storm.