Sparagmos

I wanted to punch the young dude in the face the first time I saw him. It wasn't rational; I didn't have mystical hunches or anything, but I felt a demiurge towards violence. I saw his creepy, vaguely Tartar blue eyes, and I had to choke down a strong, pleasing compulsion to punch him in the peepers until he bled from his ears.*

Lots of motherfuckers could use a punch to the face bones; it's not like I think I'm the one who has sanction to deliver the fist shaped gift.

My wife, upon meeting him several weeks later, told me that she was pretty sure there was something wrong with him. "Dead eyes," she said. "Dead motherfucker inside."

I told the weary boss man, a friend of more than two decades. He chuckled a bit, but I could read the perturbations in his brow. Shut up, shut up, shut up broadcast in forehead wrinkles.

"There's something about him," I said.

"Nah. I think he's a good kid."

"Nope. I'm telling you, he's all bunched up wrong inside."

"Leave it alone, Jack."

"Okay, man, but..."

...Wandered in to work, end of last week, trying to figure out how I managed to get an extra shift on the next few weeks.

Mr. Creepy was off the schedule. Staff talking in euphemisms. I didn't want to know. I don't need clutter in my brain space. I get results on Friday, maybe a death sentence. I don't need to care about why a fish-eyed leerer isn't coming to work anymore. Whole shift passed, and I manage to elude the whispered gossiping.

"Matter of public record," a co-workers tells me, today. I don't normally have to work Thursdays. Was trying to get ahead of the deliveries, figure out what I needed to do different. Mr. Heebiejeebies comes up, 'cause I'm covering a shift for someone covering his shifts.

"I don't want to hear scuttlebutt," I said. "Don't care. Don't want to know." But I can feel it's something. Something which validates the original need to break his face into puzzle pieces of former facial features.

"Matter of public record."

Fuck me. I know I'm going to google-fu his name, the minute I'm told.

I get through my day. Youngest to karate we can't afford. Oldest harangued into playing his instruments. Me, finishing laundry.

All the chores done, kids to bed, wife off her feat and trying to sleep - I sit down to type his name into little window with the magnifying glass, top right on the screen.

Rape. Of a minor younger than thirteen. Forcible rape. Assault and battery. On a child. Rapes which go on for four years. According to the court documents, it takes her a decade to work up the courage to report him. It takes another six years for the case to wind its way through the courts, until a decision is reached which allows him to be prosecuted. Six more months before he has to go home to face his accuser.

Fifteen years. Fifteen years that girl had to wait to seek the pale shadows of justice and make her peace with the leavings left to her.

I'm an anarchist. I don't think in terms of cops and judges and lawyers and calibrated punishment. I prefer the unmediated. The immediate. I reject the sham of justice, the same way I dismiss the damaging fictions of gods and money and the State. Believing them makes material, but that doesn't mean they're concrete.

Fifteen fucking years.

Fuck that. That shit is cruelty made flesh.

Maybe I'm too facile about violence, but fucking aye, I can't help but believe that giving her the space and the acceptance for whatever retribution suits her needs is so much better than sacrificing more than half of her life in the pursuit of a fiction of justice. She ends up the sacrifice, that way. That's the way of justice. To sacrifice the victims again and again, as a justification for the power accrued to those who arrogate for themselves official punishment.

She has had to endure, while he wanders free.

He got fifteen years of respite and reward. She got what?

I know some of what she's had to face. The way it weighs down on the medulla itself. How thoughts and emotions are reshaped around the seed of violation. Living with the death of trust. With the intimate knowledge that nothing is restored. Love transmuted into vigilance. Vigilance always sharing a border with violence. Playful touches faked, because it's all so much labor.

It took her a decade to accuse.

That can't be held against her.

But his fifteen years of unearned life can be held against him. They ought to be. Maybe not with prisons and worm eaten words about justice.

I'm thinking the guillotine. Or a noose. Or being repeatedly run over by a forklift.

Maybe, instead: a sacred place. Made holy by its profanity. A place where victims can bring their violators. Where they can, like Maenads, tear Pentheus limb from limb over and over again. A single Pentheus. A thousand thousands of them.

A whole new religion, even. 

Spreading like spilled wine and wilding fires.



* - in the interests of disclosure, he is belligerently Jewish. You know the type. Militantly Hebrew. With anti-drug paraphernalia on his personal items of clothing. A straight edger Zionist. But that doesn't usually fill me with the need to launch an uppercut. I write about the justifications for violence, but I'm fairly shy, retiring and measured out in the meat life of public existence. Angry Jewishness doesn't offend. It embarrasses, like a bad joke told poorly and with no sense of timing. Comedic schadenfreude might follow, but not violence.