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I just couldn’t stand it any longer.

I’ve been eyeing this guy who stays near my apartment for the longest time. He’s one of those messed-up guys: Early twenties, young wife/girlfriend and two kids, tattoos all over his arms and legs.

It isn’t just the look of him I couldn’t stand. I’m not the sort who’d pass judgement that fast. It began with his loud music that went on throughout the day and sometimes into the night. Another thing he always did was the wheel-spin thing whenever he drove his battered truck out of the parking lot. On weekends his group of friends would make the loudest drunken din. That’s not even what pissed me off.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed him taking his kids out. Two young boys, both blond and blue-eyed. Even from a distance I noticed his favourtism. It wasn’t hard to tell when he kept slapping the older of the two upside on the head for no apparent reason. They’d be walking side by side, and WHAP, he’d just strike the kid on the head. The younger one was never (as far as I’ve noticed) the recipient of such treatment. Truth is, I’ve even seen him buy the younger one an ice-cream, and only have the older kid look on.

The teen mother? She’s the petite kind who didn’t look as if she had much of a will left. She’d look on helplessly from the door whenever her punk of a husband took the children out for their “playtime”. She sometimes looked battered, and from what I could see she had been cowered into submission over time.

I’ve called the police several times, and so far they said that they were looking into it. Granted, I’ve seen more police cars patrol my neighbourhood and it’s worked somewhat. I’ll admit it - something about him just irks the heck out of me.

It consumes you, y’know? The more I dwelt about it, the angrier I felt and the more violent my thoughts became. They were just thoughts, until a few days ago.

I couldn’t take it any longer. He walked out of his apartment, beer bottle in hand and with his two sons, one of each side. He was shouting at the older son who was barely seven, hurling expletives. This kid was going to grow up warped, I remember thinking to myself. Then he grabbed the older son by the collar and dragged him back towards the door of the apartment. The boy stumbled and fell, and his knees scraped the rough tarmac of the parking lot. He let out an very loud yelp. His younger brother cried.

The father (it pains me even to call him this) picked him up by his collar again and threw, literally threw, him back into the apartment. He then slammed the door and headed out, leaving the younger son standing in the parking lot, still crying.

I had to do something.

It was easy to tell when Joe (that’s what I heard his wife call him) returned. It was marked by the very loud screeching of brakes and the smell of rubber on tarmac. I wished he stayed out longer than the forty-five minutes he did. I was still very angry and very upset.

My stomach fluttered with the wings of a thousand butterflies. I walked to the kitchen drawer and grasped the handle of a knife. Thank God I decided to put that away, for who could have known what would have been.

I took a deep breath and decided to go confront Joe. I went up to his apartment and knocked at the door. The smell of alcohol, even from behind a closed door, was suffocating.

No answer.

I knocked again. It was a while before I heard stirring from inside the house. A young woman’s voice could be heard. She was shouting. The cries of a boy played on like a broken record. I don’t know where the other boy was.

The door swung open violently and Joe stood there with a very nasty look in his eye. At this point, I was more concerned than angry, and wanted nothing but to talk some sense into him. But I saw that he held in his hand a junior baseball bat. Shorter than the adult-sized ones, but made of aluminium strong enough to do damage all the same. He grabbed me and told me to “get the f**k off his apartment”. My blood started to boil again.

Then it happened. Like a flash. I can’t even remember the sequence of events very clearly. I just snapped.

I broke his nose and swung his head against the wall. The baseball bat fell impotent on the ground and Joe lay unconscious beside the cheap sofa set that came with the apartment. Blood was splatted on the wall, and flowed down from his head unto the floor. I stood there stunned. In the corner of my eye I saw his wife, holding one son in her arms and the other against her side. I saw the horror in her eyes. There was no trace of gratitude.

The shock of it all slowly ebbed away and I saw what I had done. The wife had already called 911 and the police were on their way. I sat down on my hands, hoping that by hiding them I could somehow obscure the violent truth of my actions and find righteousness in my anger.

I spent the weekend in the lockup. Joe spent his in the hospital. As far as I know, he hasn’t woken up yet.

As I rationalise my actions inside my head I find more questions than answers. I wish someone would tell me that what I did was just, and that it was for the sake of the children, but Joe’s wife and kids are now without a husband and father. At least temporarily. Or permanently. I don’t know.

I don’t know anything anymore. I’m just sorry I didn’t update my blog over the weekend. I had a lot on my mind.

My contribution to The Fray’s question: “Where have these bookends found you?”. A reflection over what has changed from one Gulf War to the next.

I was never one who embraced change. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, I was enraged. A 14 year old, it was hard enough trying to pass geography at that time without national boundaries changing on you. Watching the news, I couldn’t help but feel angered that the madman of a large country would run over the people of a little country. I was from a little country too, and felt a duty to stand up for the underdog. I was glad the coalition put together by the United Nations stepped in and ended the invasion. I’ll never forgot how amazing a technological wonder those tomahawk cruise missiles were. Able to hit a mailbox from 2000 kilometers away! Even my hero Isaiah Thomas of the Detroit Pistons couldn’t shoot a basketball that accurately from the free-throw line. I was convinced that the United States, with its technological prowess, could somehow bomb a building, killing only the Iraqi invaders, while somehow protecting the Kuwaitis from physical harm. Being the better informed among my contemporaries, I found it disturbing that my Muslim Indian friend took offense to my enthusiasm and admiration for the allied forces that had won such an astounding victory. The look on her face still lingers with me even today, and it is only in recent months I fully understood the helplessness and seething indignation she felt that day.

Just watched the new Al Pacino movie Simone today.

It is basically a story of a disgruntled movie director who invents a movie star using digital technology. It was intriguing to see how the huddled masses of pop-culture sheep blindly followed the virtual Pied Piper in Simone.

Character invention is not new to us. I, for one, have fallen in love many a time with well-written fictional characters. But our generation stands at the threshold of technology, half embracing it, and half afraid to leave the familiar things we know hold true.

As we grow wiser, we become more wary of people “met” on the Internet, the golden rule being what is unseen is uncertain. Yet now there exists the power to defraud sight itself. To the artist, like Pacino’s character, it is the tool by which one can liberate the imagination.

A person’s vision is best kept to a singular source. Too often standards become compromised for the sake of collaboration. We are unable to communicate our original vision with total accuracy, or the people we work with are unable to produce it. Technology gives us the key to display our individual souls in its entirety. Even as you read this, it is the work of one unedited.

Al Pacino in the movie says, “I have created every nuance of the human being; the human soul”. The story then consumes him and changes who he is.

In this craft of writing, it is essential for the writer to see that control is but an illusion. It is often the story that begs to be told. The story uses the writer as the tool. She owns the writer, completely and utterly. The story chooses the writer.

It is she that writes him.

He stood there. The world seemed silent to him, as if the moment had decided to defy time and stay a little longer. He had waited so long and so hard for this, and now coming face to face with reality…he was lost. Yes his heart cried. No words came out of his mouth.

He had lived with the pain for far too long to leave its grasp. Where once he might have considered it freedom, this freedom now came to him as fear and trepidation. There was a security that came with this pain. Its companionship was something he had learnt to depend on, something that was constant. Faithful. Reliable. He wasn’t going to trade it for anything less. The loss of this steadfast friend was a cost too high to pay for something as unsure as her.

He had paused for too long. She had already turned away, for to her the answer was found in his silence. He closed his eyes and lay his head on the bosom of his old friend. He wept. His friend understood.

Her tears ran down her cheek, mascara stains streaking down her eyes as she stood there in the rain. He turned around and left her there, his brown trenchcoat’s rustling growing softer and softer as he walked away in the distance, leaving her standing alone amidst the bustle of the square. The neon lights flickered falsely, reflecting into a million variations of itself in every street puddle, unable to give light in the suffocating darkness of the night.

Her life. It had been a lie. All twenty three years. The clues had always been there - insignificant coincidences, she thought. People would come up to her and tell her how she looked so much like a friend they had, or another someone in another street. Her friends told her that she had one of “those faces”. A face that people found familiar, comforting, like that of someone they knew from a long time ago, or a place far away. She didn’t take heed of these things till the night she saw her own doppleganger. In that one fleeting moment, her existence seemed as if it were ripped in two.

That began a personal quest that lasted four whole years. Four years of asking questions and not receiving a reply. Until tonight.

Twenty four years ago she was made, not conceived. She was placed, not born into a family. She was unlike any person around her, only because she had had her uniqueness stripped away, one double-helix at a time. She could almost remember the needle piercing into her cells, injecting into her what would be her personality, her looks, her being. Her makers had meticulous hands, not minds. They had not seen her heart - how she would feel being part of their little game. They had not asked her consent. They had forcibly invaded her life, leaving the indelible mark of their fingerprints on every cell. Almost a quarter century later, they had left her on her own to battle the silent ghosts, the dopplegangers that would haunt her the rest of her life.

The headlights came fast and she had little time to react. There was a deep silence in her mind as she fell to the ground. The muffled murmur of the crowd was incoherent to her. She was unlike them. Her pain was beyond their comprehension. Her pain. Hers. She guarded her sole possession fiercely, and as she drifted away from consciousness, she knew that only the skies would weep for her that night. She was no one.

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Rivers of gold and silver streak the dark rock below. Divine cloud above us man-made by our side, we fall.

A turbulent struggle then a slight rumble and I hear the voices of their hearts no more. I stand under the light of the man-made moon. I am one of the million. My friends, for so brief a time, are no more.

A poem which I wrote during my short transit in Taiwan. The landing at CKS Airport sort of evoked these feelings. Landing at L.A. had a different feel - a more urban, suffocating effect.

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