When the Light Lay Still

by Charles J. Eskew

  PS4 was pretty dope, though.

  So, we did what any game could and bit back at the dogs. When we did, we were something to fear.

  There was the insanity of a few short years separating us from having any real power to do anything about it. A boot over your neck, your body tied to the floor and the passersby sighing at your inability to just stand up. It’s a hell of a place to be.

  TL;DR? Our generation fell somewhere during Kill the Poor, between Holiday in Cambodia and Anarchy for Sale, all parts dead or dying.

  “Ma, you don’t have to worry. I’m safe, I’ll always be safe, I promise.”

  I’d stood at the foot of my bed when I’d said it. Busted for trying to join the rest of my boxcar brethren in ‘sneaking’ me out, George’s fucking car constantly set to ear-hemorrhaging death rattle. I’d dressed neck to toe in black with a stocking cap in my hand meant to slide over my clump of afro, with its too-easy-to-identify hot pink line running from the front to the centre and ending in a blue starburst.

  Fifteen years old in 2018 was a tough time to call yourself safe.

  A hell of a year.

  A hell of a year filled with too many bad hairstyle choices, too many spins of my Bad Religion Spotify playlist, too many things we wish we could hold on to if we weren’t tricked into seeing them as absurd.

  It was the year Daddy died, not so much on a cross but during a bout of throwing his life away yet again. Much as I’d like to save you from the cliché of me—and we can at least circumvent the deets—it is important to mention he wasn’t around all that much. Mom said he gave me more weapons than I’d like to use; she wasn’t a very reliable source, though.

  Mom, like her mother, and her mother, and hers, and hers, and hers and hers all the way back to Eve, had been carrying that old tale. This misguided, miseducated, miseverythinged notion that by saving me from his darkness, only giving me those light-shimmered lies of who he’d been, in brief, staccato moments of teddy bears and belated birthday wishes, that I could have him, and he could have me back in a way he never earned.

  I don’t know why I’m setting it up as something that spurred the woman I never was. You’ll have likely assumed that all sadness can do to a woman is break her. We are only visible by our scars, flesh proud and preaching on the atrocities of the heroes in all stories.

  My father was never any of those things. After his absence I may have hurt, but only in the childish way anyone does after a supposedly broken heart before you learn that, at most, it leaves thin cracks to pick at.

  I appreciated the name he gave me. Momma told the story often enough, like a sticky salve to numb certain welts, even after my body had built immunity to it.

  “He can’t dance, he thought he coul’ and it was fuckin’ adorable, he slipped up behin’ me an’ ma girls while Rock the Boat was playin’. Usually I’da not given him a second look but maybe it was my exhaustion at all the busted dudes who tried and failed. Or, I have a weakness for big cuddly teddy bear niggas that try to look hard wit’ their Timbs laced up to the top.”

  The name was supposed to be a gift, but it was just their story, lacquered over my bones. Just narcissism.

  It’s probably the only beautiful thing he’s ever given me, though.

  There was a likeness we shared, and probably always will in being both too big, and having too-black-to-love-but-bold-enough-to-leave skin tone.

  “I luh’ you, so much, ’Liyah, I jus’ want you to be safe, I can’ keep you safe if you keep chasin’ down dis shit,” Momma said to me, as if it were something a teenager could comprehend.

  “I love you too.” It came out more like code, like everything we weren’t supposed to say without sacrificing something else, like blood in my throat, thicker than warmth could allow. I promised her that night, after she begged and pleaded and did everything short of holding me back, that I wouldn’t risk the part of him she hadn’t lost.

  Of course, twenty minutes after she was done dealing with the sight of me—and an additional fifteen minutes after I texted George to turn his damn engine off—I still went. I was a bit of a bastard in that way (and don’t read too much into ‘bastard’; we all have the ones we lose to themselves, mine just happened to be my daddy).

  If I’m being real, going that night to protest half-peacefully was mostly to do with making a tangible display of the fucks we no longer had to give, but if I’m also being real? My first girlfriend, Becks, maybe had something to do with it.

  Six months of dating meant we were still filled with all the fire of a new couple, but made the mistake of thinking that we’d got to know each other. We stayed up late, talking about how we’d change the world. Stories we unlocked every time we played our game. We knew each other’s middle names. We knew the best parts of each other and only a fraction of the worst. We knew filters, and how they trick you with forever. We knew how much we loved to learn something new about ourselves, together.

  We weren’t exactly the prophetic anarchists our playlists had promised we could be, but we did aim to make noise. The thing is they talked, and talked, and talked so much about the importance of the future, of our votes and our vast numbers and our anything-but-lives to live. So, we decided the best way to be heard was by whispering an absolution to the one thing they supposedly cared about.

  Us.

  Just us.

  Our target was the Gospel Gut Mac’s Mess-’Em-Up Gun Shop out on Wabash. The plan was simple enough: we would break in, take what our nigh-voting-age arms could carry, and lay it out in front of the shop. Afterwards, Frank, who shook the whole drive, and shivered the whole time we’d moved the stores stock out front, would call the news station, and 911, in that order.

  The cameras did what they were supposed to, and captured us. The nearest news station was closer than the nearest police station, but even knowing that, we made sure to give them a thirty-minute buffer. We used the ignorance they thought we had and slapped on our buffawed, befuddled, be-ohshitdon’tcallourparents-ed faces before lining up behind the weapons. Those of us untouched by melanin held in each of their hands a rifle. They were empty, of course; we needed them to see how easy it was to seize their means, to take back the production of things that killed. I, and the only other POC with us, Felicity, held our hands flat and filled with bullets.

  Neither the reporters, nor the cameramen, nor anyone that wasn’t us dared cross the weapons sprawled out in front of us, nearly twenty feet long and filling the parking lot. We chanted our chants as they tried to call out their questions.

  Stop killing us!

  Why are you doing this?

  Stop killing us!

  Are you affiliated with any of the local street organisations?

  Books not bullets!

  What are you hoping to accomplish here?

  That last question almost caught me. This, sat on my tongue ready to pounce, but I swallowed it back. The police arrived in record time for the street we’d been on, and immediately tried to take care of the press when they arrived. It, thankfully, hadn’t worked. Local news hadn’t been much of an ally before, but it seemed if you give them a meaty enough story to bite, they’ll fall in line like any well-trained carnivore.

  I just wanted to be heard in all the ways no one has time for, and other drugs they couldn’t load us up with. It wasn’t exactly a take-to-the-streets-with-your-pitchforks-and-pain rebellion, but there was a message beneath all the romance.

  That message was nearly lost, though, when one by one we lost the twenty of us who’d gathered through the night. The revolution, it seemed, only took a few appeals to parental authority to dismantle. It was when the standoff had reached three hours that the first domino fell. Patrick Bradley’s dad had seen us, who told Lisa Fogworth’s uncle, who—well, dominos.

  One by one we were turned back to the children they wanted us to be. As each of us tapered off, in some fucked-up equilibrium, another local media outlet would find their way to us. By the third hour, when it was just Becks and I
left, hand in hand, the major networks started to spill in.

  In the end, though, under the tenderly livid but maternally sound threat of excommunication by her mother, Becks folded too.

  Becks, the last one holding a rifle in one hand—holding mine in the other—let both free, before crossing the picket line of guns and ammunition.

  The hardest thing about that moment? As they drew my first love, my first punk, my first kiss behind the Saint Nitchell Mance Recreation Centre (while snorting back a viscous ball of amber snot I’d coughed up at the worst imaginable time). The hardest thing was to remember all the YouTube videos I’d watched on making myself cry on demand a week before.

  You know what, how about you try it? Try to force yourself, right now, to cry. First, however, you’ll have to imagine a few things, dear reader.

  You must imagine that second-year senior George Ravinski called each of our parents at the appropriate time, selected in relation to their driving speed and distance from the gun shop to ensure the best staggering effect.

  You have to imagine that a month prior, Greg, Thomas, Jacqulyn, who were down for the cause enough to bleach and blacken their hair like the good ol’ untroublesome White youth Mac would speak in length with, made entry and exit a breeze.

  You also need to embrace a reality in which Tammy Jean made her way into the CEO of Stronghold LLC’s home, or more importantly his rolodex and media contacts. This was thanks to her mother playing golf with the wife of his second cousin’s polo instructor, who’d been tennis companions with insert-other-white-privilege-nepotism-shit-here.

  You need to imagine that I hadn’t fought Becks tooth and nail to be the last of us standing in the end. You need to imagine a world where I didn’t tell any of them I was ready to die.

  “Put the bullets down!”

  You need to imagine a world where, okay, I’m not telling you I wanted to die, but I saw the gain if shit hit the fan on my body over one of theirs. I hadn’t told them about my father, how he was gunned down by a police officer while running, unarmed, after buying a pack of cigs for some seventeen-year-old. I didn’t mention how I couldn’t bring myself to see him at the funeral, when I’d seen him so little elsewhere in my life. I didn’t say how his story didn’t have enough bite, or enough merit to be much of anything on its own.

  Shit ain’t easy, right?

  I let the bullets spill from my hand, all except one, which I held up between thumb and forefinger.

  “Fuck you! You want us dead so bad, don’t you? You want us dead so fucking bad, how about I just do it for you!?”

  As I raised the bullet to my lips, I glanced to Becks, who as expected grew her eyes twice as large as I’d ever seen them. It was off book, far from the derivative shit Ronald ‘Well, I am in AP English, Aaliyah’ Vickston came up with. I closed my eyes then, just in case, so I at least had something beautiful in her, saved to crop on the wallpaper of my eyelids if they’d never open again after.

  I could have told them, or even just Becks, at any of our twenty meetings, about the research I’d done, about discovering just how likely I’d be to pass a bullet and what it could do to me. I could have told them that I wasn’t so much being brave, just confident in the medical professionals who’d discussed the topic online thanks to the unabashed ignorance of the few who had done so for far less meaningful reasons.

  “Aaliyah, don’t!”

  I could have told them that every tear was spilled not from panic but from a lease on my poppa’s bones. That the last thing he gave me was something to pick at inside, an emptiness in me, a maddening frustration at the world we’d never stay alive long enough to inherit.

  “Crazy ass bitch.”

  I could have told them all the steps it took to become their Bullet Bitch.

  It had to ring true, though. The problem with a movement is that you have to do something truly fucking dumb to get people to move in the first place. The truth was there, in the margins, in the things that led me there, but everything else was just a show. They wouldn’t see our calls, they wouldn’t see our blog posts. They wouldn’t see the empty caps, the still-packaged gowns. They would only see what we shoved down their throats, even as they complained about our immature tactics the entire while.

  Granted, in the end even that didn’t do much. It got me in front of a few TV screens, and a full ride scholarship, and a less-than-regal moniker. Eventually, everything about that night faded away into upvotes. It did remind a few people, though, that we wanted our lives back, and maybe that much made it worthwhile.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wednesday, June 30th 2038

  11:52

  “SO, THIS IS the worst mistake of my fucking life, how about you?” Judge Jones screamed at the deputy beside him, not that either of them could make anything out over the roar of gunfire.

  While Ezekiel’s training at the Academy had taught him much, he’d learned this trick—to feign a connection with what amounted to a glorified citizen with a gun—much earlier in life. The two were crouching—cowering—behind a row of shattered lockers, and Jones was trying to calm the kid who’d insisted on getting involved in the Judge’s business. It might have worked, if not for the glint of death in the officer’s eyes. It was a look that reminded Ezekiel that nothing at the Academy could possibly undo the one truth of the world: stupid will always find a way.

  MCCANDLESS HIGH WAS among the last remaining 2A Schools, which armed educators with semi-automatic weapons to protect their students. Ezekiel had found himself in the midst of a D- decision over a C+ student.

  The call that’d brought Judge Ezekiel Jones and Deputy Einstein together was one of the many, many wounds left by a former president. Unfortunately, the details of that time are murky at best, and those who are keen on mental disability and development history know why, although the illness known as “Collective National Ubiquitous Trauma” wouldn’t be described and named until decades later. The disease is marked by a selective amnesia, sudden bouts of existential dread whilst looking up, and uptake in dopamine production when snapping tiki torches in two.

  Far on the other side of the hallway, the student who’d kicked off the whole ordeal after flashing his side-strapped pistol at his English teacher was a mouthy GenSlag Gang member. Roy ‘Fuck Y’all’ McElroy had decided to educate his teacher, Mr. Reynolds, with the back end of his pistol after a subpar grade for his paper on Samuel J. Battle.

  Bullets thundered, and tore. They shattered. They forestalled any chance of communication.

  “I… I think we should charge, sir—or, um, Judge, sir? I—I—I can take out the one on the left if you—” Deputy Aristotle was stopped when the side of a ricocheting bullet clipped a chunk of his ear off. Judge Jones snatched at the Deputy’s neck, yanking him down below the line of fire.

  “You mean my left, the fifteen-year-old with a pea shooter? Or your left, the English teacher who has, at best, three shots left, and hasn’t stopped shooting to realise we’re not with the gang member who probably isn’t even here any more?” Judge Jones asked Deputy Sagan, who trembled, and shook, and held onto his bleeding ear.

  “Well?” Judge Jones asked even more loudly, but still, Deputy Newton didn’t have an answer. He let the young man stew in his embarrassment; embarrassed was a whole hell of a lot of heartbeats better than the alternative. It also hadn’t hurt to give the English teacher a chance to run out of bullets.

  When he had, Judge Jones unclipped his helmet and hurled it at the student, who’d apparently figured out how the safety worked on the gun he’d claimed.

  The student shot his embarrassingly small load of bullets and stopped short of anyone’s lost life—and, to Ezekiel’s satisfaction, not a scratch on his helmet.

  Judge Jones hopped up in the bullet-broken air from behind the lockers and bolted as fast as he could for the student. He slammed into the GenSlag runt, shoulder first, full of force and a dash of nostalgia from his offensive line days back in college. The chump slumped, wincing the whole
way down. When Ezekiel turned to the teacher, a thirty-something with a tweed blazer, the man twitched and clicked at the trigger in nothing like logic.

  Deputy DeGrasse Tyson sprung up from the hiding place, mimicking a guy who knew what the hell he’d been doing, his pistol clutched in hand and his sanity slipping free. He aimed it at the teacher, who naturally had another firearm tucked underneath his tweed jacket. He yanked it out, ready to fire. Ready to make mistakes of them all.

  Ezekiel was tired of mistakes.

  Maybe he shouldn’t be so hard on the old guard, or the young genius. It was one of their tools which Fargo took control of that brought him to the 2A school in the first place, after all.

  “Shots fired.” It was the automated voice system chirping to life in Judge Jones’s helmet that had brought him to the school. Back sometime before 2020, the Chicago PD had instituted a system that responded to the noise of bullet fire. The system, Shot Spotter, utilised an amalgam of audio and visual surveillance set up in key areas throughout the city to respond faster to gun violence than eyewitness reports.

  When the Judges came to the public, one of Fargo’s first initiatives was to place his new avatars as the primary gatekeepers of all such technologies. Like everything the plebs couldn’t process, there was a resistance to the new oversight. There was that hope again—hope that swelled their superstition of Chief Boogeyman Fargo—that he was amassing too much access, too much technology that was meant for the masses, and not for a trumped-up army of vigilantes. The truth of the matter, though, was that they were all playing a part: that Fargo had stuck to the same ideals that had—bit by bit, bullet by bullet—garnered him the popularity he’d needed to become Chief Judge under President Gurney. Judge Jones learned that well enough at the Academy, where he was free to learn all he’d ever wanted about Fargo.