Breaking the Cycle

by Zane

  As the boys rushed up to Tisha, they named mothers and teachers and big brothers—and even cartoon characters. Soon, the huge teddy bear came out; then, at Tisha’s behest, the boys leapt at it, their little fists flailing, their legs kicking. Some of them bit the bear and clawed at it. The boys were screaming now. They weren’t merely boys anymore, but dispensers of justice and righters of wrongs—all this, under Tisha’s celestial gaze. I looked on from the periphery. When Tisha smiled at me encouragingly, I got up and went over to the fray and found an unoccupied piece of the bear to kick. However, I really wasn’t into it and Tisha seemed to realize it as well, because she practically ignored me for the rest of the afternoon. While the boys punched the unfortunate doll, I returned to the periphery, still waiting for her to come to her senses and banish the others. Of course, with all the flailing limbs, one of the boys got punched in the face. Being the righter of injustice that he was, he leapt at the offender and the two soon began to fight. The others, more intrigued with others fighting among themselves than with righting wrongs, soon began to cheer. Within moments, one of the boys was bloody and crying, but Tisha stepped up quickly and pulled the little boy to her chest, so that the whimpers faded away and the boy found himself ready to fight again. In fact, now the boys were all ready to fight, because they soon began sparring with one another. The boys didn’t even pretend to be motivated by justice anymore; they were now only dispensers of violence. Tisha urged them on from her seat of honor. The boys loved these games—and they loved Tisha more completely than I could have. She sat before them like Caesar directing competitors. She urged them on to the full realization of their bestiality. She quieted their cries; she dabbed their bloody noses with tissues and kissed their wounds… but she never curtailed their fights, and the boys loved her for this.

  As one might expect, a crude hierarchy developed as a result of all these gladiator battles—but not in the way one might think. Usually, under such circumstances, the strong rose to the top. However, as Tisha’s kisses only went to the beaten, bloody boys, in time, the boys began to lose on purpose. I’m almost certain of it. They put out their faces to be punched. Many a baby tooth was loosened that afternoon. It became a strange mark of honor. Also, after a while, the tired boys realized that they could forego the worst of the battles and go straight to Tisha’s affection if they gave up and cried after a few blows. Both boys in the conflict would run to her begging for comfort, so that for much of that afternoon the basement constantly rang out with the cries of little boys.

  I left them and walked off in a daze. They didn’t notice my leaving. It was all a bad dream. As I walked away, I was desperate to convince myself that none of it had actually happened. In stepping away from the basement I was emerging from a bad dream; and like someone awakening from a nightmare, all that I could hope was that the next time I closed my eyes and returned to the dream world, it would be the wonderful fantasy I had had before.

  However, when I stepped away from the basement, it was as though I had entered a time warp. Everything was rushing ahead now, as though speeding toward the inevitable conclusion. Soon, I was entering the basement again. Tisha and the boys were there, but the boys were listening silently—intently. The boys were sitting on the floor; Tisha stood before them, holding a mannequin. I have no idea where she got it from, but she was using it to demonstrate the tenets of her religion. It was a religion based on hate and dolls, and she was telling them that if their hate was true, then the people they hated would be replaced by the mannequin. It was a strange offshoot of voodoo dolls, I suppose. Instead of the person merely feeling what you did to the doll, now, in exacting vengeance on the doll, the doll would become the person. The little boys were mesmerized—I was mesmerized. Yet, as the boys sat there rapt (as though in Sunday school) I looked on from the periphery. Tisha saw me but said nothing… and I almost wanted to cry.

  It was then, at the climax of her sermon, that Tisha sat the mannequin in a chair and handed out steak knives to the little boys. Here, she probably decided to give me one last chance to redeem myself, because she called me over and gave me a knife as well. Soon, we were all stabbing the mannequin—the effigy of those we hated… And I did feel hate then. I hated the outside world in a way that I can’t even begin to explain. As my knife penetrated the hard plastic of the mannequin, I wanted everything to disappear but Tisha and that room. I wanted things to return to the way they were that first time. I wanted to get rid of the other boys, and Binzo, and my aunt, and my guilty thoughts about my mother. I wanted all of that to be effaced from the Earth. And when one of the little boys came too close to me, I punched him in the face and kicked him savagely as he lay on the ground crying. The others looked at me, as if just noticing me. When the boy tried to run to Tisha, I slapped him in the face and threw him in the corner. I still held the knife, so it’s a miracle that I didn’t eviscerate him in my fury. The others looked at me, cowed. Tisha looked at me as well—but there was a smile there that two decades of obsessive consideration on my part hasn’t been able to come to grips with. I don’t know what I felt at that moment, but I knew that I had risen to the hierarchy of the boys—that I had reset the natural order by surrendering to my brutality.

  Tisha came to me then and hugged me—perhaps for restoring the natural order—and I stood there triumphant. I had succeeded where Binzo and all the others had failed, because she had come to me. Yet, I was only a six-year-old boy, and once we parted for the day (again at Binzo’s behest from his car) the madness I had felt in the room ebbed somewhat and I felt like someone struggling with the after effects of a drug binge. Even while I shuddered at what I had done, my body and soul craved the drug—was willing to do almost anything to feel that wondrous high again. I even had a headache—as if I actually did have a hangover. I shuffled home like a drunk struggling to get his bearings… Williams was still at his throne; the neighborhood children were again playing their games; and seeing that the world continued in its usual way, I had a momentary pang of courage when I thought of going cold turkey—of never returning to Tisha and the room in the basement of the crack house. That room still seemed magical to me, but in the face of what had happened that afternoon, it now seemed beset by dark magic of the sort that claimed one’s soul. Unfortunately, while all drug addicts had such infinitesimal spurts of courage, the drug’s imprint on their souls never allowed those spurts to be long lived.

  Williams looked at me uneasily as I ran past him and up the stairs. In the darkness of my mother’s room (which was still mine by default) I lay rigidly in bed. Mr. Johnson came home and started up his usual antics. Elsewhere, radios were turned up high—either to counter Johnson or to mask their own quarrels or whatever the case may be. Once again, I grew terrified of the collective noise of my neighborhood. Each seemed to be a new wellspring of madness. Each seemed to be calling me to my doom and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to escape. I missed my mother, suddenly and desperately. As yet, I hadn’t taken back the hateful things I said to Tisha. I had to find a way to curtail the spell that had been put in motion—and all the spells that bewitched us. I thought about going to Madame Evangeline again, but as had been the case with Tisha after our first parting, I grew terrified by the prospect that she wouldn’t be there, and that this irrefutable evidence of my total isolation would extinguish whatever reason I had to go on living.

  I slept in fits and starts; several times I emerged from semi-conscious states with a shudder or a muffled cry. However, about two in the morning, I had a wonderful dream, in which my mother had returned. Upon awakening, I jumped out of bed, looking for her bags—for any sign that the dream had been true. Hearing the TV on in the living room, I rushed out, thinking that maybe she had stayed in the living room in order to avoid awakening me. However, with each step I took toward the living room, the euphoria of the dream faded. Then, when I reached the doorway, I saw my aunt’s morose form on the couch, staring at a late movie—but with eyes that seemed to see nothing.
She had stopped trying to be happy—had run out of the energy necessary to keep the farce going and was back to her old self. I sneaked back to my room and lay there silently until again possessed by my dreams.

  Those dreams were undoubtedly turbulent, because in the morning I woke up on the floor of the bedroom, entangled in the sheets. I woke up in a strange terror, fighting to get free of the sheets—as though they were a monster. When I was free, I lay on the floor panting. There were sirens in the air, but I didn’t pay them much attention at first. I merely thought of them as a byproduct of my headache. I shuffled to the bathroom. Next, I went to the kitchen where, looking out of the window, I saw the police cars and ambulances that had blocked off the street. The night before the Johnsons had had a particularly bad fight—which I hadn’t heard in my daze. As I looked on from the window, the police dragged Mr. Johnson out of the building in handcuffs. He was screaming something, dressed only in his drawers and a pair of slippers. Mrs. Johnson came out on a stretcher—but she was screaming as well. She was a huge woman. In contrast, Mr. Johnson was as slight as a stick. I remember thinking that he looked like one of those starved stray dogs that I often came upon while wandering through the neighborhood’s vacant lots. Johnson’s ribs protruded horribly, seeming to want to burst through his skin as his enraged screams echoed through the morning air. He was trying to turn around to yell at his wife. In the meantime, the EMTs were trying to put an oxygen mask on Mrs. Johnson, but she kept brushing it aside to scream aspersions at her husband. Both of them were bloody. It was all a sick joke, of course. Besides the police and the ambulances, dozens of spectators were on the street; people were hanging out of windows to get a better look. I don’t know what to say about the Johnsons. A day later, they were back home screwing one another. They, of course, had an abusive relationship, but it was silly to say that Mr. Johnson was Mrs. Johnson’s abuser. Their relationship was the abusive thing. Their way of communicating—and maybe even of loving—was the abusive thing.

  I went outside about half an hour later. My aunt, who was a heavy sleeper, hadn’t awakened yet. Outside, the streets were relatively clear by now—just like a cinema 10 minutes after the movie was over. I rushed to the basement—probably because I knew that nobody would be there and I needed to remember the room as it was—without little boys and their strange games. However, to my amazement, Tisha and the boys were there. The boys were stabbing the effigy again. When I entered, the boys looked at me diffidently, still acknowledging the hierarchy that had been established the day before. However, Tisha still seemed to be rushing ahead, as though running out of time. Shortly after I entered, she gave us some money and told us to go and get some ice cream while she made “preparations.”

  She told us to come back in about 45 minutes and kept looking at her watch. Actually, she gave the money to me, since I was still the top dog, but outside the building, beyond the magical confines of the room, I knew that I didn’t want to be with the boys. I gave them the money and pointed them toward the store. I had an impulse to go to Tisha and help her in her preparations—or just be with her—but in the end, I walked away by myself. I was halfway down the block when I realized that I had lost my amulet. I retraced my steps to the basement, but when I got there, Tisha screamed at me in a strange rage that was tinged with terror, telling me to come back in 45 minutes. I left her—I ran as though fleeing for my life.

  Madame Evangeline’s warnings about the amulet—and about the vulnerability of my soul should I lose it—made me tremble. I ran back to my room and was relieved when I finally saw it lying on the ground—entwined in the sheets I had fought with during the night. However, even as I held it in my palm, I wondered if it was already too late. I sensed a difference in myself—maybe the dawning maturity I had alluded to before, or a sudden awareness that the forces of evil had already taken my soul. When I remembered how Tisha had screamed at me, I wanted to cry; and in this disconsolate state, Madame Evangeline again seemed like the last chance for my soul.

  I ran to Madame Evangeline’s shop. I, like Tisha, was running out of time. As I held the amulet in my hand, I considered that maybe we were all trapped in the same spell. The amulet, which had allowed my miraculous escape from certain death, and which had brought Tisha into my life, conjuring her from the yearnings of my soul, was like all things spawned by evil, wrought with hidden consequences—dire tradeoffs that were even then amassing on the horizon.

  I again found Madame Evangeline’s door locked; succumbing to the accumulated terror of the previous days and weeks, I banged on the door, screaming out, “Madame, help me! Help me, please!”

  The old man who lived on the second floor came to the window angrily. I was crying by then, screaming hysterically for Madame to come and save my soul.

  “She went back to Haiti!” the old man screamed, spraying me with spit in the process.

  I looked up at him in shock: “What! For good?”

  “Do I look like a goddamn information service to you?!”

  I turned and ran. I was sure that the 45 minutes Tisha had specified had passed by then—and that I had run out of time. I rushed back to the basement, numb with terror, and yet still hoping beyond hope that I would be able to stop the evil I sensed all around me now. It was in the breeze; I felt it emanating from the ground, and shining down on me like the sun. It was everywhere and in everyone. I saw it in the eyes of the people I passed; I heard it in their voices—even in their laughter. I ran for my life—for all our lives. Even when I cramped up and my lungs felt as though they were on fire, I shuffled along, like some kind of cripple.

  On the wobbly steps to the basement I cramped up again and promptly tripped, toppling down the staircase. I lay unconscious on the ground for a while; then, in those strange moments between unconsciousness and full consciousness, I heard the laughter of the little boys. However, now, it sounded like the laughter of angels. I lay on the ground listening to the melody of it. Minutes seemed to pass as I lay there dreaming of angels and peace of mind. Maybe I had died in the fall, I thought. Maybe I was dead now and my life of fear and vulnerability was over. However, just then, an inflection in one of the boy’s laughter drew me back into the real world. I looked around in a daze, seeing the dark, dour confines of the basement chamber. The laughter that had once seemed angelic, now seemed cacophonous. It was like a jarring alarm bell. I had the impulse to run away right then, but some morbid streak seemed to seize me, and I stumbled to my feet. My muscles were still cramping up, so I shuffled along toward the magical room that had before seemed like the fulfillment of all my fantasies.

  Just as I made it to the doorway Tisha was handing out the knives to the little boys. They had been playing before, but she called them to order before the freshly prepared effigy. It was a mass of rags and tape, covered from head to foot. Yet its proportions were unmistakably that of a man, and when I looked closer, I noticed that it wore Binzo’s expensive sneakers….

  My mind puttered along; I was so weak from all my running and terrors that I could only lean against the doorway. Tisha was saying something now; she was talking so quickly and anxiously that I could barely understand her. However, as I listened closely, I recognized the tenets of her religion: the precept that if one hated someone strongly enough, then when they took out their revenge on the effigy, the person they hated would take its place. For some reason, I gasped; as the boys and Tisha looked in my direction, I gasped again, because I swore that the effigy moved. However, Tisha was rushing ahead now, telling the boys to take their revenge. I stretched out my hand in a last futile gesture to stop them; but the boys, seeing me falter, rushed ahead to claim my place in the hierarchy—to show that they too had brutality to unleash and deserved to be the sole beneficiaries of Tisha’s affections. Her face wore the blank expression of a sleepwalker who, while walking about in this world, was seeing the horrors of another world. When the first knife went into the effigy, the body tensed up and blood spurted out of the wound. I screamed—or at least tri
ed to—but in their madness, none of the other boys seemed to notice. Spurred on by Tisha’s religion, the boys were stabbing the effigy savagely now. Tisha, still entranced, only stood staring blankly. The little boys were covered in blood by now—and laughing at their triumph over the supernatural world. I went to take a step backward—to retreat from the room and its madness—but by then my trembling was so extreme that I tripped and fell to the ground. In the closed room, the noise seemed like an explosion. Tisha jumped and looked at me; the little boys, covered with blood and with knives still in mid-air, looked back at me with the madness still shining in their eyes…

  God, I ran! I ran like I had never run before. Maybe it wasn’t even the reality of what I had seen and been a party to that made me run. I was beyond sight by then—beyond the horror of what had happened in the room. Also, even as I ran, I didn’t run toward anything: I didn’t go home—or to any place where I might expect comfort. Of course, there was no one I could go to. I ran to a neighborhood I had never been to before. There, I sat on the curb, crying—terrified and alone. I swore that I could still hear the laughter of the boys and the sick sound of knife blades slicing into flesh—and all the other lonely echoes of my youth….

  After a while, an old woman came along; seeing me crying, she asked if I was all right, but I ran off again. Hours later, when I finally made it back to the tenement, Williams was on the stoop. A slight drizzle had started up and he was about to go inside; but seeing me enter the block with that strange expression on my face, he stood watching me curiously. I have no idea what I looked like by then. I doubt my mind had had two cogent thoughts since I ran from the basement.