Return to Left Curve no. 25 Table of Contents

Home

In Flames

by Daryl Glenn

A live television evening news broadcast shows a solid wedge of rioters moving down the middle of the street and suddenly splintering in all directions as though from a detonation of rage. The Channel 7 Eyewitness News "Streetcam" zooms in on the dazed expression of a heavy-set young man left standing alone as the mob scatters. He appears to be momentarily disoriented to find himself so abruptly exposed on the sidewalk. Perhaps in an attempt to focus himself, to collect his thoughts and pull himself together, he engages in an act requiring an effort of concentration and will, hurling a garbage can through the window of a Circuit City electronics store.

At the black bend in thinking where the tributary of sleep flows into a river of dreams, Rendal Johnson, (known to his friends as Ren, thinly tall, no-nonsense brown eyes, a nose that somehow appears sharp in profile but is blunt in full frontal view; black hair cut so short on the sides and in the back that it's grainy, but a texture like unrefined silk, a texture between curly and coarse where, in the style of the day, it's longeron top; slightly angular jaw line often flexing a small sinew of tension, as though he might be absently chewing on a small, hard, sour nut; 180 pounds, the weight of walking carried not in the flat of his feet but lithely, beginning in the hips and terminating in the balls of his feet, a motion that carried him smoothly across long distances when he was a cross-country runner in high school; editor of a magazine highly respected in certain academic circles, Black Discourse; married and the father of two boys, Schakim, 6 and Ammarah, 8) Ren, nodding off in the living room recliner while watching the news, feels his own identity widen, as though subjected to the pull of a magnet, then contract in shimmering waves and dissolve; feels himself melt into the very last image his eyes register before closing. He becomes--but not wholly, it seems--the heavy-set young rioter, leaping through the shatter so quickly that the garbage can seems to hang in space for an instant as if waiting for the rioter's airborne feet to alight before resuming its unwieldy somersault and bursting open against the ground.

Ren, inside the man, leaps through glass-spangled space on feet as agile and determined as the ravenous paws of a jungle cat pursuing its prey. They (Ren/rioter) jiggle a boxed Kenmore stereo off an overhead shelf and, arms trembling with the uncompromising weight of it, stumble back out onto the sidewalk filling quickly with people who have fallen through the trapdoor of their outrage, down, down into this bottomless frenzy of looting. But they discover that the box is far too heavy to carry for more than a few feet at a time without stopping to rest and decide against the risk of heightened vulnerability to police; reluctantly, they toss it into the street, where the box splits open and the components erupt violently into view, like massively muscled flesh bursting, cartoon-like, through clothing too tight to confine it.

Laughter, then a percussive and incomprehensible chanting fills the air.

Rioters grapple with police cocooned in the sleek Teflon of riot paraphernalia.

Tumbleweeds of flame roll through the streets.

Ren's confused by the almost festive swirl of pandemonium he and the rioter glide through, confused and repelled by the raw synaptic jolts of pure exhilaration sparking through his brain. Because he knows it's wrong to feel this way. He always tries to do the right thing, has always been aware that there's a heavy responsibility that comes with being black. It's his responsibility to emerge unscathed from the scrutinizing fire of color-obsessed eyes, to be impervious to the judgment leaping from the depths of those gazes, to strip away the tattered fabric of the hand-me-down stereotypes they dress him in; his responsibility to grimly stand as a paragon forever representing his race, unfailingly above reproach, not merely equal to his white counterparts, but, painfully, better. (When Ren was a child, his father explained that to perform in such a way as to be considered equal in intelligence, resourcefulness and talent to someone white would not be sufficient to close the gap created by prejudice; that to be extended the same opportunities whites commonly enjoyed, Ren would have to be "better.") He can never just be Ren, a man struggling each moment to overcome the demons of his own personal limitations. He must wear the mask that obliterates his individuality, the impeccable mask thatıs permanently affixed to the surface of his skin; always, always, he must prove himself. And now this--to be a part of this insanity, to burn and destroy with the very people whose motives, sentiments, ways of thinking and living would normally disgust him, elude his understanding... no, he's never before removed that mask, and now that it has been violently torn away and the blood rivers down the shredded skin of his liberated face, he's horribly free, lost in freedom, sinking in the treacherous quicksand of freedom, hideously and gloriously free.

At an intersection an aura of flame dances around two battered, overturned cars, and white coffins of smoke shimmer above the wreckage, rising into the dead spaces of the starless night sky.

Smoke coats the throat with the ghostly taste of combustion.

Sirens are heartbeats accelerated to a slur and heard through the amplifying stethoscope of panic. Sirens are adrenaline made audible.

Cornered by two riot police, a young Hispanic girl backed against a wall launches windmilling limbs, executes with vicious centripetal perfection the reverse crescent kick Ren had tried in vain to learn years ago when he had taken Tai Kwon Do as a frail young man of seventeen. One of the police officers crumples as though made out of cardboard; the other stumbles, falls, shatters like glass into jagged pieces. They liquefy, flow moaning down a sewer drain.

Now Ren feels the young girl's sense of intoxication humming through his veins, and he receives the gift of incandescence she now receives at having escaped becoming a victim. No longer inside the man, Ren's now embedded somewhere deep inside the girl, sexlessly deep, and they run with no sense of destination. Running, licked and tasted by the vertiginous tongue of the wind, even the merest scintilla of either past or future absent from the eyes, panting loudly, chewing the air, swallowing the moonlight, ingesting the night.

Running.

As he runs, the soles of his feet peel off in the same way that stamps with insufficient adhesive peel limply off an envelope.

The faint whip-like crack of distant gunfire. Glass breaking, an impotent and almost comical sound miniaturized by distance. Closer, several dogs bark as though quarreling at a card game or a back-alley crap shoot. A man somewhere screams, as if relieved to be screaming his last scream.

Swept down a side street, caught in the pungent tide cascading from the sweat glands of a group of thirty or so youths of all colors and races. Windows shatter, cars overturn. Bumble-bee-yellow fires buzz with wind-fanned heat, pollinate the air with fertile sparks, dead ash. The youths loot shops that tremble to the ground from the collective force of their footfalls, the buffalo-herd thunder of their rampaging feet.

And now Ren is nowhere, in no body but his own, but curiously weightless, unconcerned--he's unconcerned that his wife, Kenya, who tries to pour a palatable salt on the dry bone of his ambition, is nowhere in the crowd; unconcerned that he must finish editing two-hundred pages of an operations manual for Valley Corporation, a job he's taken on the side, his thirsty eyes crawling through pages of desert prose without oasis; unconcerned that he's a young man years from his prime, with blood pressure that percolates straight up into his brain on certain days, transforming his head into an old-fashioned coffee potıs seething glass bubble; unconcerned that undoubtedly within about five years he will have a small bald spot at the crown of his head thatıll reflect an embarrassing, oily light.

Ren's eyes sweep the scene to find that girl with the gift of incandescence, but she's disappeared.

He's in the parking lot of a supermarket "one stop" discount warehouse, watching pillagers fill shopping carts to the brim with tawdry merchandise. Spiders of broken glass skitter, crunching beneath his feet, as he runs backward to escape a sudden explosion of flame and heat that fans out from an overturned Coca Cola delivery truck burning at the side of the building.

Ren listens to the ragged litany of the poor, their empty-pocket voices turned inside out and spilling the lint of their words everywhere:

- Do they worry what me and my baby eat and wear? That's why Iım getting me this case of Similac and these coats and all this shit!

- They can go 'head cut my electricity off--when it back on I'll have me this twenty-eight inch Zenith to plug in!

- Go on, Margarita! Take them dolls for little Rosita and some Tonka trucks for Renaldo! And when you say your prayers tonight, tell God you didn't have nothing last Christmas, and don't ask Him for no forgiveness, 'cause He needs to forgive the ones that keep you this way.

- I'll never be nothin', never be allowed to have nothin', my mama and daddy didn't have nothin' neither, but I got me somethin' today!

And Ren listens to the ones who have intimately known plenitude, the groaning comfort of an overfilled stomach, the taken-for-granted warmth of a well clothed body, the shallow pride of ownership in ephemeral trinkets; and, while the chorus of their voices strikes a different chord, the plangent song of disillusionment and rage is the same:

- Fuck the system and fuck the police too!

- You don't need the almighty dollar to get what you need!

- Corrupt bastards!

- My father owns this place--burn it down, burn it down, burn it down!
The jagged laughter of exploding glass.

"Ghettobird!" shouts a white man wearing a T-shirt with Huey P. Newton's picture on the front, pointing into the sky. "They wanna napalm the streets because even though they created the streets, they can't deal with the streets. They wanna torch the rats in the cage, take the experiment to the next level!" As he bounces up and down in the manner of a child unable to contain his excitement at witnessing some act of forbidden violence, his shoulder-length blond hair, matted into dreadlocks, obscures his face almost completely. But his eyes can be glimpsed now and again, pale-green jewels flashing splinters of hard mineral light.

A police helicopter hovers above them, strobing its lance of light into the crowd. A voice booming through a loudspeaker sedately orders the crowd to disperse.

- Did you hear that shit? Disperse? Disperse to what!? the blonde man shrieks in a rage.

But Ren, as if on cue, undergoes a sort of molecular dispersion as he listens to the police's hypnotic repetition of the word, feels his identity dissolving again like a cake of soap in hot water. His eyes open abruptly and he rises from his almost-horizontal slouch in the recliner, standing on feet still filled with dream helium, watching the room resolve itself into familiar angles, patterns, colors. The Eyewitness News at 7 droning on about the riot-in-progress momentarily deepens, then lessens his sleepy disorientation. It strikes him that he has been sleepwalking through his life until now and that it was there, at that dark juncture, in themadness of those flames, that he had been jolted fully awake. He hears the clatter of plates, loudly fragile rather than comforting, and the airy tuning fork of the silverware, dimly sinister rather than familiar, as Kenya arranges everything on the dining room table.

"Ren? Call the boys and come to the table. Dinnertime," Kenya shouts from the next room.

"I'm going to eat in from of the TV tonight," he calls back. But he notices the picture on the television has disintegrated, the screen has filled with the feline hiss of jagged, raw, black-and-white signal. He kneels before the TV stand and adjusts controls for a long time, but the picture is still a nest squirming with vipers of static. In frustration he begins to slap the side of the set with his open palm sharply.

"What do you mean, you're going to eat in front of the TV?" says Kenya, wiping her hands on a dish towel as she steps into the living room with brisk irritation. "What are you doing?"

Ren is dully aware that Kenya is standing in the room talking to him, but the importance of coercing the bits and pieces of static into a coherent picture now seems to supercede everything, everything and everyone who has managed to safely sidestep the grasping embrace of the flames.

He closes his palm into a fist and, perhaps, if the blows are heavier, more substantial, more like a gavel striking the sound block with brutal finality, he can force the return of the broadcast. He keeps pounding his fist against the side of the TV, desperate to get a picture.

Daryl Glenn is a writer whose work has appeared in American Writing: A Magazine, and in the E-zine Ceteris Paribus. He lives in Duarte, CA and works as a content writer for an Internet company. Apollo Ubani is a Southern Californian artist, musician and writer--a millennial "Renaissance Man."

Return to Left Curve no. 25 Table of Contents

Home