I am Falun Gong - excerpt II (Jeremy)

Jeremy and his friend Benjy were sitting on the living room carpet watching an old Godzilla movie on T.V. when Jeremy's father walked in. Unfortunately for Jeremy's father, his entrance corresponded with a scene enacting Godzilla's immolation of a young newspaper boy as he ran in terror from the giant radioactive lizard. As Jeremy's father began to cry at the sight of the burning boy on the screen, Benjy, oblivious to the drama going on behind him, sang the chorus to a popular Blue Oyster Cult tune he had heard via his older brother: Oh no, they say he's got to go! Go, go Godzilla! Oh no, there goes Tokyo! Go, go Godzilla! in the falsetto befitting a 12-year-old boy.

This day born from a night many prior: in the twilight suffocating heat, the gritty air and wave of weight wrapped around his face and body; Jeremy's father stolen, then returned, broken, given to emotional outbursts of just this; outbursts hidden from Jeremy until now, but dutifully reported on by his older sister, “I think Dad's gone retarded,” and clear in Jeremy's mother's ever-growing impatience with her husband's damaged psyche.

The screaming, flailing Iraqi boy that rushed from the alley; the boy screaming on fire; a boy not much older than Jeremy, if one could make such a fine distinction through the flames and screaming melting flesh; screaming fire, arms akimbo and waving in agony, running aflame. The six other men in the Humvee, charged with anxious, cautious energy, until the immediate danger abated whereupon they began to laugh in great exploding bursts at the comically flaming boy that danced in the night. The boy closer now, his great black eyes visible through the flames that ate his face; Jeremy's father could smell the boy and feel the heat of the boy on his face as he clutched his rifle through the laughing. He wanted the boy to stop, the noise of the laughing men to stop, and the heat to stop, both the heat that surrounded him every day and the heat that escaped the boy and touched his face along with the laughter. Jeremy's father aimed his weapon at the flaming boy and heard singing.

Jeremy, accosted by the sounds: the screaming boy on fire, his singing friend, his sobbing father, tugged at his hair and started to weep too. Benjy, with gradual awareness of the scene that unfolded behind him, stopped his song and turned his head and on his face was a look more of fear than mocking at the one man and the one boy, both with thick tears streaming down their face as the boy on television crackled and spit in the lizard's wrath. Benjy, fully aware now, stood quickly, sputtering, “Dude, I gotta go,” and just as quickly left the room and the house and never returned though never spoke of what happened and in later years thought it had only been a dream.

At his friend's exit, Jeremy felt his desperation even more keenly and now unconflicted rushed to his father, whom he loved like any young boy loves his father, a sensible mix of fear and adoration uncomplicated by song: the burning boy's absent screams replaced by the sound of lizard falling buildings which he could not hear, his father's arms wrapped tightly around his face and ears and he was overcome with a melancholy joy as his father's rough cheek touched his smooth own and their warm tears mixed and fought for the space between their cheeks; his father clutched him with strength and tenderness and they cried a puddle of tears upon Jeremy's shoulder that overflowed onto his father's shirt and spotted his paisley tie.

And while Jeremy could not have been aware of the scene in the far off Middle Eastern city, it was clear to him that something had occurred, or was occurring within his father at that moment so far away; he kept grabbing the boy, clutching the boy's face in his hands, contorted in weeping and shaking; it was as if in some kind of expression of eternal loss; as if during that night the skies and the stars opened before Jeremy's father and in his dreams there had been light and planets above the essential night; some cultivated energy escaped through generations of oppressive inertia and converged in the lizard's gross actions and then within Jeremy's father's mind as his tongue stirred and he screamed great guttural things in his son's ear, and Jeremy, having known the hideous actions of men, would then, and for the rest of his life, be the master of his days.