ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Kong Angal is a writer and worker raised in, and currently living in Seattle, WA. Angal is currently laboring on his first full-length book.
I think now of my father. I know that within him I perpetuated a fear–a primal fear which pre-existed myself and that he believed to be bigger than him. I’m thinking of a specific day–I saw in him a weakness and a fear, and a recognition that he viewed me as a predator to whom it would be pointless to confront. Or maybe I’m conflating things. I don’t know what he saw in that split second before my own expression digressed to fear as well. Fear of being caught or recognized–even in youth, being caught is what it was.
I had bitten the ear off a kid who had thrown woodchips onto my Legos. He had gotten dirt and detritus in between the bricks and had fouled them so they wouldn’t connect to each other properly anymore. Even afterwards I remember washing them and being unable to completely remove the grime from their innards, and so when they would be stacked or interlinked they’d click greasily, wouldn’t mate flush, or the paper-thin scratches on the faces of the bricks were permanently marked brown, black. It was a set of Star Wars Legos. Anakin and his speeder bike in a simulacrum of his encounter with the Tusken Raiders from Episode II. I loved the scene in the movie and would recreate it often with the Lego set, although the set hardly did it justice: just two Tusken raiders and Anakin with his chrome lightsaber and speeder, the little translucent blue glowstick stuck to the end of it the facsimile of this platonic ideal, this ionized length of iridescent violence: blue if it’s the good guys, red if it’s not. The sort of binary you can get behind as a seven year old. And you see this binary bent or a little warped when you first watch that scene: really, it’s the first time Anakin does something evil to indicate the development of his slow transformation into Darth Vader. A vivid scene: the blue light illuminates in the darkness of the village and the Tusken murmur in fear at his presence, themselves understanding only vaguely that they were in the presence of a power beyond their comprehension, like deer in headlights, frozen and almost, in a sense, willing to meet their own demise. I can see my own puerile visage, mouth agape, in that theater, 2002, the reflection of his lightsaber in my little eyes before the screen cuts to black, implying the violence which occurs hence, which was the subject of my actual intrigue–some carnal instinct sated vicariously as my mind’s eye reeled to recreate the gritty details, each rendered limb and choked scream of the little imps, who, in retrospect, were created to be unsympathetic, faceless (literally), small, ghoulish, and fully deserving of their deaths–a comforting transition from good-guy Anakin to kid-killing Anakin, who in the next installment massacred actual kids, human kids. The Tusken Raiders were designed, visually, to be perfect vehicles for an idea which, during Attack of the Clones’ limited runtime, was supposed to ease you into Anakin’s distorted psyche, his confrontations with his own insecurities, his often juvenile attempts at resolution that play out brutal, messy, and are a far shot from the more measured anger of his older and suit-clad self.
But anyway. Back then, the idea of Anakin–the idea of Tusken raiders–resonated with me to the quick of my soul. Some great and dark wing stirred in me. The idea pestered me into its constant recreation through what vehicles I could access. When I discovered the Lego set existed, in a Star Wars feature in Lego Magazine, I was enraptured–I was delighted. Begged, cried, tantrummed, to no avail, and then behaved–spoke politely, ate my vegetables, did my chores, combed my own hair, tucked myself into bed at an appropriate time and to no fanfare, obsequious. They knew what I wanted but didn’t know why I was so keen for it. The set couldn’t’ve been more than ten dollars.
There was some concern when they purchased it for me. A bit of parental prudence, maybe bordering on some paranoia of a behavior they’d never previously witnessed from me. I wasn’t big on toys and destroyed most of them: this set, however, I regarded with utmost care, with a sort of sacrosanct and delicate handling–even in playing with it I was gentle, calculated, so as not to truly damage the pieces. When Anakin would behead the Tusken I would carefully disembody the ugly little aliens into their constituent parts and lay them scattered on the ground like some neat little crime scene. In this I achieved some primitive form of what I would later realize, through therapy, was catharsis: an expulsion of necessary energies, an actuation of a compulsion I had not fully realized in my youth. I would kill them with Anakin’s lightsaber via soft taps, slashes to their small plastic heads to a rush in myself whose comparator could only be something vaguely psychosexual. And then I would put them back together again.
So when this little asshole decided I was a good target for some juvenile bullying, an unexpected rage came over me–never had I experienced a confrontation over something I truly loved. Loved being used liberally, here. This all happened on the playground at a park that my dad often frequented with me. He would leave me to play and talk to the mothers that would be watching their children. Seeking a companionship that at the time was foreign to me–I just figured he was being friendly. He would sit next to them at park benches and speak to them in lowered tones and make them laugh. In retrospect how clear it is to me that his relationship to my mother was already fractured at that time: she was beginning to regress into what she’s become today, long before he had ever left. She was never really fully there to begin with, from my understanding, although I have very little to reference the sort of person she used to be, before we had all ruined her. Only in pictures, in distant anecdotes from unaffected relatives could you source an idea or conjecture the life that this woman once had. A sparkle in her eyes in a high school yearbook, a quaint kepness, a quiet prettiness that was gone by the time of my waking memory. And my father: who knows. People say that I was like my father. That I look like him, or that I possess mannerisms they recollect he once had. No one really knew him, though–no one actually knew him. My mother didn’t know him. My brother certainly didn’t.
My father’s parents were both largely absent, and from my understanding he just appeared in her life, no background, no story. Like some looming specter sent from beyond the pale, or ravager, unintentional or no, to put fingers in pudding, to curdle things. His tainted seed poisoning whatever good was left in her and souring her. Some people just drift through with no regard for those affected in their orbit. They come through like tumbleweed arcing across the broken macadam, aimless and void of meaning and then gone.
In my tedious recreation of the events of Attack of the Clones I began to garnish additional elements, using those early and untested rudiments of my imagination. Crude elements. I found that you could take apart the little cupped hands of the Lego figurines, and so discovered another point of amputation. I reimagined the scenario in such a way where one of the Tusken Raiders managed to get its hands on Anakin’s lightsaber, but he would overpower them and kill them with the force. I had him running over them with his speeder. I had them destroying his speeder with their little laser muskets, had him stripping them of their weapons and executing them. And so on.
I remember exactly what I was doing when this kid ruined my fun. I was forcing Anakin to torture the Tusken. He had them at the point of his lightsaber and was forcing them to fight each other to the death. In my head these faceless mongrels beat at each other with bandaged fists, kicked and ripped at each other, bit and clawed. The kid asked what I was doing and I told him very clearly I wasn’t interested in playing with him. A cursory look around the park showed there were no other children present. My dad was gone as well, to the bathroom or around the corner with one of the mothers. This kid wasn’t having it. He wanted to play. I told him no again: no thank you.
I don’t remember what started it but there was some restless or nervous energy to him that had to be expended. If I wasn’t going to play with him, he was going to play with me. He picked at the pieces without permission and then suddenly grabbed Anakin, spinning him limp-fingeredly in his hand, inspecting the translucence of his blue lightsaber, the chrome hilt. What’s this, he asked. His eyes lit up. This is Anakin?
I was indignant. I told him to give it back. He would not. He was just a bit bigger than me. I don’t know how old he was. His arm held the figurine up to the sky as if proffering it to God. As if testifying to the heavens the sin the object carried, complicit in my revile. An idol or golem I had been using to enact my own jejune voodoo. This angered me but I remember it also scared me. There was something to the movement of his hand sticking straight up to the sky that seemed almost preordained or scripted. The dark smile on his face one of knowing, though he did not know and could not know. In his own way he was my diametrical opposite and at that point in time not only had I felt discovered but I saw him as some paladin or holy warrior come to pass judgment or act as a Hand of God.
I yelled and bullrushed him but he was too quick for me. Tears came out of me, big fat rolling tears, but I was careful not to yell too loud for fear of alerting my father. We ran laps around the park, him running up the big playground equipment and slipping down fireman poles or going down the slide. I tried to cut him off but he was smart, crafty. I chased him in silent circuits, sweating and crying through gritted teeth, this horrible asshole kid who was touching my beautiful Anakin.
Eventually as I chased him he came round to the scene where I had originally set up shop, with my Tusken Raiders and Anakin’s speeder bike, and he kicked it, smashed it into the woodchips, and he had enough time before I caught up to him to turn his heel into it, laughing evilly.
After that I don’t really remember what happened. I just remember coming to and I had bitten his ear off and he was screaming, screaming loud for his mother. He had certainly fought back but I have no recollection of it: my nose was bleeding freely but I figured it was from his ear, which was pouring a great arterial stream of blood on the brown red chips, those permatemp chips always with the flecks of cotton or hair or the ripped plastic ends of Otterpops or whatever, the detritus of children, steeped and smeared in the blood of this kid as he clutched at what remained of his ear, screaming unintelligible vowels and plosives, no words other than mom, the language of the conquered, a language of pain. I had pissed myself. The rush was like nothing I’d ever experienced since. No random act of violence thereupon had ever so completely captured me as it had in that moment. Some frisson in the gore, a jubilee in the mutilation that I had captured in the analog’s parallel. My own Tusken to kill. He was blowing big snot bubbles out his nose and the tears were coming hot and liquid down the side of his cheeks. He wore an expression of pain and confusion and fear that turned the face into something nigh unrecognizable. Not an expression you’re used to seeing on a child: real fear. Never before confronted with something so mortal or permanent and maybe only barely grasping the implications of it. His ear was gone, torn to shreds and stubs which hung loosely in his bedraggled hair. He said: I can’t hear. He screamed.
The elation was short-lived. When I turned, there he was. My father. Like I said before, to go back and reimagine and relive what occurred over and over again, the details get conflated. I may talk myself into one thing or another to skirt the truth, but it’s always there. Like a shadow ignored in the corner of an unlit room. I could taste his fear. I could see what he saw: I was discovered. I could see what he saw in my own face. It was embarrassing: something so carnal, and so young.
He asked me what I did. I didn’t say anything. He ran over and pulled me off of the kid but he did it gingerly enough to let me know he was unsure of how I’d react to his touch. He was gauging, ensuring that I was no threat to him. Me, his seven year old son, like some mindless zombie in a horror flick, afflicted with bloodlust and divorced from any sense of identity. Not to mention the size difference.
Where’s his ear, he asked me. I told him I didn’t know. The honest to god truth was that I didn’t know but he knew immediately where the ear was and I would find out soon enough. I’d eaten it. Some of it had caught in the back of my throat and I thought it was snot and I had bits of it in my teeth which is how he knew. He saw that I’d pissed myself and he got angry and cursed and became frantic, or erratic. I stopped responding to him.
In the far-off of the park I saw something. Some shadow or splay in recurve whose presence was discernible only in the right light. Maybe it was just how my vision blurred. It hung in the space between the branches of the trees, in the latticework of the foliage. Something which if you tried to look at it and place it against a known comparator to make sense of each individual piece of it, mouth, eyes, limbs, you would confuse yourself into thinking it was naught. Just earth and concrete and whirling bark and leaves. Only if you were seeing double, red eyed and crying and young and had not yet had the world’s schemata imposed on you could you make sense of it. Only if you took it in whole, all at once. Then the pieces seemed to all fit together. A lurid mass of broken lineaments wimpled in the black green verdure. A beast with one wing and one arm and one leg. Eyes mercuric and which seemed to pore through the red scene before it with a genteel solemnity. A shut mouth which hung open and then shut again, the movement of the sun against the clouds. The bared teeth therein comprised of diamond patterned bark, browned fangs shifting in mastication as if recollecting the taste of the boy’s ear. I stood stock-still and did not dare to breathe. My father was attempting to stymie the flow of blood from the stump in the boy’s head: he was catatonic. He (my dad) yelled for the kid’s mother, who at this point was running over from either the little restroom in the opposite corner of the park, out of my sight, or some similar area. I could hear her screaming the name of the boy but I don’t remember his name. The thing was mostly wing, was obscured by it. You had to look at it just right.
It cocked its head and put its eyes on me. Cat’s eyes, reflective. Effervescent. Slit pupils narrowing as we recognized each other. It didn’t look surprised. I could sense nothing from it other than that it knew I was there. I began to think again of how my father had looked at me and how that was a serious and real-world thing. And how in comparison this was something I had conjectured in my brain, and thus was of little consequence. The look my father gave me was one that allowed insight into his mortal heart and what I saw was fear. Revulsion. These emotions were to be tithed by some arbitrary punishment he would dream up or pull out of his ass and he had the leisure of doing so indefinitely. What exactly that punishment would be was in question, but I had no doubt our relationship was permanently affected. Even from that young age I knew what he’d seen had crossed a line which would never be retread. He would look at me differently. And how would I deal with that. I knew he no longer loved me. If it was ever a question before, in his half-lidded stare, his cheap dismissal of me, his general negligence of both myself and my brother, it was obvious now.
The thing broke from the tree. It became distinct, its own tangible shape, of its own dimensions. No longer an illusion, it possessed borders, a depth and texture. Grey-black and spangled with mottled lesions that upon closer inspection revealed themselves to be vestigial eyes, mouths, pieces of faces like stigmata, lolling, burned across its surface, loose and dead. Its wing coiled up into itself and its solitary arm bore its weight like a leg should. Its leg tensed against the greenish earth. Thus it looked lopsided yet bipedal, broken or injured and yet dignified in its impediments. It was a thing of considerable size. I’ve never told anyone this because even from that young an age I was convinced I hallucinated the fucking thing. When it peeled itself from whatever metaphysical layer beyond the world’s shell and became an actual thing, I was convinced this was some epiphenomenon of the violence, but at the same time I was warily not. I did not want to take the risk of exacerbating anything further by being killed by this thing in broad daylight. I was arrested.
Its mouths seemed to smile at me. It faltered to its elbow and proffered its spined hand as big as my head and opened its fingers slowly and bowed its head and its wing shook uneasy in the summer breeze as if parchment thin. I could simply not believe what I was seeing. In its new posture I saw, as if transposed, an image of my father’s face. Its extended hand contorted against its trunk to from the rudiments of a jawline, the splay of its fingers formed his stunned mouth, and its head in repose exposed thin featherlike ridges that assumed a nose. The jut of its spine, its shoulder blades were the arch of his brows, the crepuscular wing his hair. The eyes were missing but I could see them there anyway. I remember thinking something my dad had sometimes said: it’s just the damndest thing.
The mother came rushing up and made no notice of the beast. In my periphery I watched as she shoved my father off her son and he was left to stand there and she asked him if he called 911 and he said he didn’t have a phone on him. That was before everyone had a cell phone on them all the time. He asked her if she had one and she said she did not and so he turned to me and picked me up off my feet and began running. We were running back to the house. It wasn’t so much that he was carrying me as it was I was just being held by the midriff and jostled and shook as he ran. I could hear the mother screaming to her son, asking him what happened, and he didn’t say anything. As my vision shuddered to the quake of my dad’s beating steps the beast became obscured, faded, and disappeared. I never saw it again.
When the pandemonium had finally subsided, it was determined I would withdraw from the school I was attending. Maybe the other children were bad influences on me. I was no longer allowed to watch movies that had not previously been screened by my mother. I was to be supervised around my brother, who at that time hadn’t been born yet, and whose existence was entirely speculatory. My mom had a history of miscarriages, both before and after me. She was only a few months pregnant at the time, the beginning of term. Part of me secretly understood that the birth of the child would thereupon reduce any scrutiny of my own actions, and I welcomed it with open arms. They repeatedly asked me what I did and I told them I didn’t know. They tried to whup it out of me but when my answer didn’t change they started to wonder if I really didn’t know what happened. They began to question the possibility that I had entered some sort of fugue, that what had occurred was some Jungian shadow or split personality which had assumed control. Obviously I had to see a psychologist. In their frustration and confusion they ended up punishing me pretty hard anyway. I’m not in a good place to look back and say it was justified, even now. But that night all they did was lock me in my bedroom closet–they propped a drawer up against the knob so I couldn’t get out. I listened as they tossed around various ideas, my fate being discussed in heated and low tones, both trying passively to shift the blame for this on the other. I sat there silently crying and lay waiting for them to come get me. They didn’t, but I was too afraid to say anything. Eventually the kid’s mother called and asked what happened and the dread made my stomach boil and I pressed the palms of my hands against my closed eyes until little dots of light began to appear like watchfires spread across a shifting horizon. Little beacons. If only I could go wherever they led me. Out of this damn closet. My mom started crying. I could see the look on my dad’s face, too, plain as day in my head. That look of muted consternation and caught breath, not knowing what to tell this lady on the phone who was already in hysterics. Admittedly it would be hard to tell anyone for sure that your son ate their son’s ear. I could hear the tinny echo of her screams through the receiver from the bedroom closet. When my dad got off the phone with the lady, the arguing started again, and this time with another edge. How did you not stop our kid from doing this turned into: what were you doing? With her? And slow relief bloomed in me as some of the attention was taken off of my actions.
They decided to leave me in the closet, and no dinner for me. When I woke up it was dark through the slats. I didn’t remember falling asleep. I suppose even when the situation is dire, if one is left to idle for too long it’s easy to fall asleep. It was boring in there, in the dark, with no stimulus except for the nagging dread of my impending future. I didn’t like that.
I woke up with a sense of renewed purpose: a conviction in my actions against the kid. Fuck him. He was an asshole, like dad would’ve said. Now maybe he would learn to stop fucking with other people’s shit. I remember thinking an approximation of those words. Maybe he’d learn to stop fucking with people’s shit, or something like that, some agglomeration of fucking and shit in that order. Now that I had committed this cardinal sin, this casual mutilation, I felt like I shouldn’t shy away from swearwords. I was older than Dad, in a way. Dad was afraid of me. This hurt me deeply, a lot more than any pang of guilt over what I did to this kid. I felt nothing negative about that except for the sting of consequence. It was the opposite: it was empowering, invigorating.
I discovered the drawer had been removed from the closet door and so I opened the door and walked out. My room was the same pitch dark as the closet but the dark was different now. It was reinforced by the true black of night; it was not the false dark of an enclosed space in the day, where the light can seep into cracks and slats and allow you something to see your hands by. This was real night. No lights were on and my door was shut.
Suddenly I experienced a moment of stunning clarity: I had to leave. I couldn’t make my departure known. It’d have to be surreptitious, undramatic, and quick. I imagined myself in the shoes of Calvin and Hobbes, marching towards an uncertain future with a bindle on a stick, except I had no Hobbes to keep me company. I was sure my parents would be relieved come the next morning to find that I had disappeared, and suddenly the problem was out of their hands. Thinking about that even now makes me wonder.
I gathered a few things as quietly as I could. Some changes of clothes, a little plastic water bottle, a big toy flashlight with a low cone of half-assed luminescence, a backpack. What do poor people eat? Bread? I took some of that from the pantry in the kitchen: anything in the fridge or up high on a shelf or cabinet was too risky. I could end up making noise. I snuck out the front door and walked into the night.
I knew I had to go back to the park first. My first objective was to recover Anakin and his speeder and the Tusken torture subjects.
There was still blood on the woodchips. It showed black and dry in the streetlight where it had pooled and turned chitinous in the heat. The intermission of sleep made it all seem so long ago but there it was, action made material. I sat and sifted through the ruined chips with the lazy beam from my flashlight looking for the telltale gloss of the Legos. They weren’t there. Once or twice I glanced over at the trees where I saw the apparition but the shape I had seen before was gone. There was no semblance of its trace. No recreating the conditions in which I saw it originally, the light, the color. Maybe the kid had taken the Legos. Small payment for his disfigurement. I walked around the park, kicking chips, looking around in the nearby grass, going up on the toy set and checking there, on the slide, rooting through a trash can.
Eventually in my aimless search I made my way over to the tree where I had seen the being. Scrutinizing the tree it occurred to me there was no possible way this thing could’ve taken shape from it. It must’ve been some hallucinatory byproduct, a result of the trauma, my little brain trying to block out what had happened. I sat in the grass and thought of what I had seen.
Whatever I had seen was surely evil. In comic books and in R-rated movies I watched while my parents were at work, there were bits and pieces, inferences to it or things with which I could attempt to compare it. Those attempts were inefficient, and still are. I believe that any analog one could draw would be a shadow of a thing nonpareil in nature. It looked like some spawn come straight from hell to retrieve me. A great and ominous thing full of portent, inhuman will, inconceivable objective. It was like nothing my mind could conjure, then and now. It was surely evil and yet it seemed to lower its head in deference. It seemed to find communion with me. Some alien sympathy imparted in gesture, in its outstretched claw.
This was when I saw it. Where it had been standing, in the approximate vicinity of where it had moved and genuflected, were my Legos. My beam revealed them in a neat little pile in the grass, fully reconstructed. Anakin on his speeder bike, the telltale glimmer of his chrome coated lightsaber, the two Tusken and their little radio tower. I shuddered, gasped. I was reluctant to touch them. I looked away. When I looked back they were still there. Silent and sematic as they glistened in the light and implicatory of some darker association. I thought of the golem’s outstretched hand and what lay within and the low wind chilled me and I stood planted again in my feet as I was hours earlier and felt my little balls shrivel up in me and I held my breath. And then a wave of relief washed over me: I had found what I was looking for, after all. I ran over and grabbed them and threw them in the backpack. And then I turned around and slowly plodded home in the caliginous nonlight of the neighborhood. House after obscured house in the quiescent night. And I looked up and saw the stars. And I wondered at the marvels which they held and which existed in the millions of lightyears of nothing between them, and in that nothing and past it that intangible force which drove the gears, which underpinned the mechanics of the world, and suddenly I knew things like good and evil and power and will were forces, real things which existed, which were inculcated in the hearts of men who then wrought these forces upon the world in some interminable exchange, and so on, and that I was some piece or fragment of this giant transaction to whose sum I would witness and know only a fraction of a fraction, essentially nothing.