Suicide by Cop
Let's workshop this confessional piece where a narrator grapples with internal darkness and self-centered fears, ultimately questioning what these disturbing visions reveal about his nature.
Suicide by Cop
Dedicated to Mike Shaw
My recurrent nightmares, where I am transported to the precipice of homicidal fury, typically manifest as lucid reveries tipping often into wakefulness as the climax nears. Two prime intensifiers, which have propelled me into many regrettable actions in my waking life, are responsible for these dreams failing to end on an otherwise much nicer note.
The first involves people disobeying some more-than-reasonable request of mine—a righteous request always vocalized, as is typical of a giving and downright boundary-folding person like myself, with sweetness and sorriness and beta deference but one that all social mores, all decency, demands must be heeded.
The second is the presence in these fantasized scenarios of a loved one: my son or my partner or one of my close friends.
These two coming together usher me to the brink. It is because I hate to look feeble in front of the people I cherish. And if the people I cherish happen to be responsible in some way for the situation (and especially if they join the chorus of defiance to my righteous request), it is furthermore because I hope to punish them with guilt made possible by our bond.
Let me give an example to make it more concrete. Say my girlfriend has friends over. Say they were supposed to leave no later than midnight, tops. Say it is 3am exactly (the time I said to myself was the absolute limit), as I well know having counted the minutes, the very seconds, in bed upstairs trying to self soothe, trying to quiet the throbs of heart and the other physiological signs that my body will be adrenalized for war to Tony Montana extremes. Say it is 3:30 and I am still—having once again failed to defend my boundaries—trying to contain that mounting energy (my toxic superpower since childhood, giving me control in a world rife with drugs and violence and shattered homes). Picture me still upstairs in bed—box-breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, pursed-lip breathing while repeating a mantra (“let go to love, let go to love, let go to love”) to keep my most sinister bosom companion from unleashing—even though I already know it is only a matter of time: this kinetic fury needs a destructive dissipation that no journaling, no making some fucking poem out of it, could ever satisfy. It’s closing on 4am and, although it has only just now been turned down, the music still seeps through the walls.
I grab my gun off of the turntables, set there perhaps by the machinations of my shadow. I slip it in my back pocket as I make my descent, an act I regret having done several times in my real life (although by some grace, some guardian angel, never culminating in too much tragedy—at least not too much according to the new bar that get established after I punch through doors or hold a gun to a lover’s head). As always I go down prepared to provide one final chance. All these chances I always extend, so I have wondered in recent years, are—looked at from the flipside—more like baited traps, more like the ruses of cops pretending to be prostitutes. The extra chance I tell myself they deserve is, in effect, just another chance for the monster’s righteousness to swell beyond any measure of control—its goal being liberation for as long as possible, distance from the from the cage as far as feasible even if it spells the ruin of the host (a ruin that will render its time back in confinement much more entertaining).
So I make my surprise appearance before them, kind of like Regan when she comes down from bed to interrupt her mother’s after-dinner gathering with a terrible forecast whispered by Pazuzu. And I say—trying to keep my quavering voice pieced together in a fluidity cloaking rage the likes of which they have only heard about on TV—“Hey guys. I’m sorry to disrupt you all but I have to ask you all to leave.” My inner wormtongue has me lay the contrition on thick. It also has me append an explanation, knowing that this will only increase its strength: “It’s getting too late.” Suppose, then, one of the guests—someone already perhaps discourteous to me earlier or perhaps someone resting his boots on my couch with insouciance—goes, in response: “Oh come on man, we ain’t bothering no body.” Say I go, “I’m sorry, but no.” And say my girlfriend counters: “It’s almost morning anyway. Let them stay at least to then. We’ll turn off the music.” And say that in my tongue-tied disbelief at the audacity the same guy chimes in, saying—in my very own house, which I am on the verge of owning outright from the bank—“Yeah, it’ll all be good. We won’t be a bother.”
Say I do what only strokes the supernova fury of the beast further. Say I put myself in an even weaker position, a position that is more like the retraction of a spring now to the limits of density, by offering more words of explanation to someone to whom I owe absolutely no explanation. My girlfriend like the malevolence within knows that my stuttering imprecision will only feed the apoplectic fire (as it has in countless times of violence), but say I go: “Well how?—For all you know I just got a call that my son—that there’s been in a crash or something like that. So please just everyone go now. I’m insisting. " Say the man volleys back with a tone of challenge discernible beneath a thin façade of concern: “Well, so has there been a call or, something like that.” The claws of the nameless juggernaut within scrape the floor in excitement. “Please, for your own good.” And yet no one moves, everyone’s gaze fixed on my girlfriend who for some reason in this scenario—despite firsthand awareness of my car-crashing insanity—does not get up to usher them all out as if their lives hang in the balance.
It is at this point that I brandish the handgun, which carries its own momentum (especially in the hand of my companion, at last in its craved spotlight). “Niggas best be out. I will fuckin’ niggas with the quickness." I cock the gun to make my seriousness, urging them to move quicker with screams diametrically opposed to the mousey quietness of all that came before.
It always gets blurry at this point. So many pathways open up. At minimum I shoot the wall. The thunderous paranoia that they think I’m all talk, that they are laughing inside, demands at least as much. I might even rob the backtalker. As they leave in a frightened line, I picture myself even groping one of the guest pussies and then smelling my finger as a pretense—no matter the actual scent—to give a punch to the mouth of its owner in a reprimand of twisted righteousness for letting it be so stinky: “Stinky bitch. Can’t stand a stinky cunt bitch. You sitting on my fucking couch with that? Where my goddamn son sits, bitch!” And if there is still resistance or any sort of critical face or attitude aside from naked fear, then yes: bodies with start dropping in these fantasies.
These visions really upset me. And I get them often: twice a month at least. I have come so close too many times from acting them out but for some good grace—like that of a friend who, unlike so many others who just sat back and watched the trainwreck, once disarmed my teenage fury with a hug after I picked up a kitchen knife at some house party where I felt offended. Toward the end of the these dreams, as I glimpse and play out the multiple paths branching out after I have committed myself with the weapon, I often cry out “No No No” with genuine tears.
For so long I have deluded myself that I scream “No” because I don’t want to hurt anyone. And that is what I have long told loved ones like my girlfriend who I explain all this too after perhaps waking them with my anguished screams: “I just don’t want to hurt anyone.” But the last time I had this dream, just this morning in the predawn hours, I plunged into deep introspective for some reason—likely merely to mine whatever I found for literary purposes. In my liminal wakefulness I asked myself, through the form of an imagined therapist hearing out free-associated fantasies, why exactly these scenarios upset me so much, why I scream “No” even at the mere idea of me going over the edge like this.
Two reasons have crystalized.
First, I am capable of such havoc. Part of me waits for it each day. I peer through my blinds with a pounding hear and a push dagger in my hand, waiting for the man picking through my curbside garbage for cans to make the mistake of not picking up all the trash he put on my lawn. I peer through my blinds, counting the seconds a car blocks my driveway. I pray the car will pull away in time. And relief washes over me when the bum puts everything back, leaving no trace of his scavenging. Yet some shadow in me craving provocation is almost disappointed. It is that shadow in me looking for a pretense to tantrum against not just the relatively superficial tragedies of daily life (the heartbreak and the job loss and the sickness and so on), but ultimately the very existential thrownness common to us all.
Second, and perhaps more disturbing, my tears and screams of “No” are, at root, merely for my own sake. These rage-out scenarios, despite the various branches as to how the climax plays out, almost always involve police. I merely shoot the wall and the overriding dread is that neighbors have heard and have made the call. And then in these dreams I start wondering how I can explain the shot. I start scrambling to conjure explanations that will keep me out of trouble. What I am trying to say, what I could say more directly if it were not so painful to confess, is that there would little hesitation for me going to the fullest extreme were it not for the reality of police.
Yes, I do care about my girlfriend perceiving me negatively. That holds me back too. But it is about me, ultimately—how I am impacted. I just know I would be right back to writing and cooking and cleaning and being sweet and serving my family (service is my love language) soon after the cleanup of bodies. The deterrent has little, it seems, to do with conscience. As much as it would weight heavily on me—at least I think, at least for awhile—to kill someone for no reason, these scenarios of disrespect are somehow different. The deterrent is mainly the possibility of being locked up. Yes, I don’t want my girlfriend to leave or my loved ones to see me in a negative light. But that in itself can be worked through. And if they stay around, soon enough I will expect them to move on with me and forget it all—knowing me, perhaps even to the point of giving them grief if they fail to. And if we are getting really real, might I even actually prefer that they not forget? Might I actually prefer that they recall it in a positive light as I smile at the dinner table that I have prepared for them—a sort of light like “Daddy don’t take no shit!”?
What does this all mean about me?