No more light! The ape has bitten through both my eyes, I am blind to my own death. I’m laying on a curb now, a murmuring pile of open wound and teeth scattered, and I feel replenished. It is coming soon, the moment in which I move from the languid heat of Aventura into a place of no light, no name. I will transition now, from my sudden annihilation under sun’s light into my death, a birth into silence, and all I can do is smile. I smile for the moments that led to this great end, three lights, three migraines induced by my Aventura, a hell in three acts. They come to me now, as I pulse towards oblivion. In the ebbing out of my blood onto the street, I hear a scream come across my face. I am back in the hour of my first death, the tender hour of five years-old, within Aventura.
“Oh, you sonorous tyrant!” launched Tyson from his high chair, the inflammatory three-year-old that he was.
It was horrorshow in the pizza emporium “Apple Jacks,” and I was caught between the appeal of parading the gift shop with my lei of tickets and the obligation towards Mother, whose coos now failed Tyson in his crusade. I looked on with the morbid curiosity of a toddler, waiting for Mother’s response to Tyson’s furor. The high chair’s plastic enamel stained green with his “Apple Jacks” ketchup and his tremors only grew louder.
“Lesson to our masters: we abolish our bondage!” screeched my brother, burgeoning from his “terrible twos” and then parroting the sermons overheard from the Spanish colonial church, repurposed Baptist, that rang opposite our home.
But for all his high diction, my brother's lambast fell on deaf ears. He was only three, let’s just put that out there. No matter how consonant his moods, Mother could only hear porcine squeals, noises so draining that Tyson’s rhetorical effort was gimped from his first soliloquy. This was further exacerbated by the approaching Grotesque of flesh, fiber, and copper wiring, a cast member costumed as the eponymous Apple Jacks, a Weimaraner with a hulking upper body covered in a short-sleeve button down and cargo shorts. Ugly in every possible manner. Whether it was his developing fever or the Weimaraner’s vacuous ice-blue eyes, Tyson reacted to the monstrosity by climbing from his high-chair, leaping onto Mother’s chest, and shielding his eyes. Apple Jacks, or the construction of his head, stared blankly at Tyson. My brother was horrified.
“Those great blue eyes! I’ve accidentally smiled at the great beast! He’s going to take me, he’s going to eat me!”
The Weimaraner’s dead, marble eyes drew closer to my brother, until they proportioned a mirror mere inches from his reddened face. I walked away to cash in my tickets. No, to be honest, I just let the spool of my tickets trail behind me, depleting to a stub as I wandered the games and parlors of the pizza emporium. Above me, children collided in plastic tubes as they charged towards the slide and ballpit. I kept on, because even then the smell of children’s spit coming off the ballpit made me feel as if I were left in the crib to die. Further on, in the back corner where the midday sun shone through the palm canopy outside and tired children lay grazing crushed sugar, stood the dinosaur hunting game. It worked like this: you shot at a screen with virtual dinosaurs and your seat shook in adventurous throes. Because we didn’t have many tokens back then, I could never shoot past the opening monster. Or maybe I did, but successive migraines under the sun’s glare bleached all other memories. I’m saying I have a memory and this is what repeats: a gate opened, a dinosaur—the king—charged at me, shook my chair as it rushed towards me, and all I could do was shoot fire into its mouth, to slow it down briefly. Arcade games are designed to require multiple players and many more coins, so the dinosaur ate me no matter my efforts. My seat shook as its gnashing teeth slammed against the screen and my fingers cramped pulling the trigger. I don’t remember playing any other game there, I continued to place myself in retreat of that flaming maw. The sun’s rays wavered outside as wind rocked the palm fronds, casting a reflecting light against the dinosaur’s amber eyes, whose retreating from and diving towards me left my own eyes watery. Whether it was mine or Mother’s tiredness, we left for home.
“Come on, honey, let’s get going before it’s too hot to start the car.” said Mother with her outstretched hand, two small, silver rings adorned her finger.
The summers of North Miami beach are unbearable. The sun is so bright and the heat so torrid that any behavior is excused between May and September. The way home had my eyes bouncing along the constructed horizon, up and down the interstate ramp, past the cardboard palettes surrounding Aventura Mall, glancing away from the nondescript club Dean’s Gold, and obsessively flipping my head in either direction of the train tracks we always crossed to home. I was barely awake, but I remember the cool air of the drive-thru grocery store Mother spun around as she gathered cereals and milk. By the register, the wax tips of children’s soda pop glistened in the heat. My lips rooted against the windowpane at the sight of the bluish, sugary water encased. I remember stretching both of my tired, wavering arms out towards the nape of Mother’s neck from the backseat of our van, because she knew how much I wanted something, anything sugary. My brother surmised as much.
“Deliver us, production value one! We are vacuous, voracious, null! Send us up the river to milk and honey, rather than the languid lot we’ve got.”
Mother responded, not to his words (remember, he’s not even potty-trained!), but to the general clamor only a mother can translate from.
“We just left Apple Jacks, boys, our one gift for the month. We don’t have enough until Daddy gets back from his trip,” Mother sang logically and calmly, but that only roused me to my brother’s rapport.
I launched my feet from my safety chair and against the back of my Mother’s seat, pushing her forward enough she hit the steering wheel. It was not that my kick was so forceful, but Mother was already protruding forward, carrying my sister in the cacophony of it all. When I heard our car honk, I knew what would follow, and dared not meet Mother’s glare, a punishment so visceral it was almost capital. I lay sunken, defeated, the entire ride home while my brother elucidated unaware for the five minutes left of our ride. I was led, wrists in Mother’s hand, to my room, where I fled her with my backside to the wall, fearful of the flat hand. The palms and oak outside my room prevented much light from leaking in, so that the silhouette of Mother was heavy, imposing with its low center of gravity, as if she were an ape ready to bash my skull.
“When someone treats you to a nice day, you do not hurt them! If you do not start being Good, the police will take you away!”
“No! No police! I’m Good!” I cried, without knowledge of what Police or Good were, but I had not yet learned to speak, and so my voice was a perceived protest of Mother’s will.
My protest was not enough. With a deep shriek Mother strode towards me, her swollen feet a deafening roar against the tile floor. I cried out and collapsed in the same motion, curling my body up like the dried bugs I found in our small backyard. Though I was not struck, the possibility of it felt just as painful, each imagined blow a trumpet burst in my ears as I willed my face closer to the floor. But the will to die is not necessarily so. I laid there more concerned with the appearance of submission, and sobbed myself exhausted, into sleep, into dreams. All during this, Mother later explained, she attempted to console me, lifted my arm in an earnest effort towards bed with Tyson, until I finally gave in and instead joined her in bed, where I held her belly close.
“There, there darling, it’s going to be alright.” Mother cooed as I drifted into the rhythm of my sister’s heartbeat.
It was only during the sleep produced by my face sunken against her womb, ashamed, horrified, that my childhood progressed, as if increments of days and weeks were experiences of trauma. The dull ache of my sinuses, swollen and sore, throbbed in tandem with the languid heat of Miami’s sun and the sound of wind lilting between the dark green of my house’s floral canopy. Perhaps these senses are not so crystal as I’m supposing, something you’ve supposed but never thought I’d be brave enough to concede. I figure this because of how similarly the color of my growing pains complexioned my brief stint at the local Jewish preschool, from which I was expelled, from whom I received the diagnosis “mentally retarded, a threat to mankind.” Harsh words towards someone who could neither read nor speak English, but so couldn’t many other executioners in history, so the correlation stuck with me. Perhaps the diagnosis came from the day I struck my classmate, a particularly nebbish, bloated tick of a child, in his small fat face with a jagged rock until his eyes and nose required corrective surgery. I never learned his name, which means, upon reflection now, it was not the particular fool I maimed, but something represented in him that I rebelled against. It must have been during the first of our recess breaks this occurred, because naptime followed and gave the teachers time to gather their wits.
“Of all the places to commit this crime, why must our jungle gym be stained with a pure child’s blood?” I suppose the teachers cried altogether, afraid of my will.
Their jungle gym had modestly consisted of monkey bars and a swing, but by that time of day the metal could blister your hand, so we all gathered under the shade of the tree, picking at the synthetic grass and vivisecting the occasional, unfortunate grasshopper to cross our path. Now, this kid I bludgeoned until I was pulled away, had always bothered me with his attitudes, but that day he dared shame himself by projecting his anxieties onto me. Let me explain. It is well known the nature of a Jew in a land that has yet to genocide him is to appropriate its culture, wear it like a patchwork overcoat. I’m not denying the need to conform to survive, but one better pass boldly! The boy was already a great hodgepodge of Miami and American cuisine, evidenced by how the Sephardim among us called him “Gordito,” but he thought us collectively too young to catch his outright thievery. That day, after sitting at lunch next to me, his four-course meal and my packed cheese sandwich, he announced poetry as imported cicadas buzzed above us, the glint of his auburn pebble eyes alight with deviancy.
“A squirrel eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?” he quoted incorrectly to the least Semitic looking girls among his crowd, who giggled at his wordplay.
Squid! Not a squirrel, but a squid! The fool ruined the entire effect of his theft by depleting the line of its imagistic quality. As the girls laughed and his head rocked mirthlessly with pride, I could not tell if his stupidity intentionally modified the lyric, or if he was simply a fool with no memory. I knew I could not speak, but I tried all the same, because his appropriation marked a grave change for our people. Were we to wear our master’s masks without care, like he did just then, it would not be me who caught him next, but a Pharaoh or practitioner of astrology, whose alarm would raise an entire nation in revolt against us, again, and many would perish before finding another people to play minstrelsy for, until yet another fat fuck believed the white lie we swallowed. And all this I knew and saw and comprehended, but I had no words to express. Instead, I garbled a series of lisps and grunts in his direction, loud enough for the laughter to distill into a line of tension which crossed our eyes like a thread. He reached his hand out to me while looking towards the lesser educated.
“I think he tried to speak. I don’t think he liked that line very much, though. It’s okay.” And at this he approached me and held me under his arm, despite being several inches shorter.
“When the youth cry, I feel like an eagle. An eagle flies in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out. Like the eagle, I fly in the night,” and at his he looked first towards the girls and then to me, “over my own misfortune.”
In his eyes lit three lights, in a row seemingly drawn towards the recesses of his pupil. In order of proximity, lit the light of recognition that I knew his thievery, then the conspirator’s flame that he would get away with it, and last a light that ached to be recognized, so bright and tremulant my head swelled with anger. That deepest light was a bluish white, the brightest of flames, and it was the light of my own eyes reflected deep within him, and within his eyes I saw my own thievery and stupidity and failure and our eyes remained locked as I brought the sharp rock against his face and pressed him against the synthetic earth, my elbow against his neck and my voiceless noise erupting in spittle that mixed with the flow of blood that erupted from his nose and eyes, which gleamed beautiful in that morning sun, whose rays brought upon my sinuses such a violent throbbing that only the thrust of rock against beady eyes and the outpour of my mucus on his wounds alleviated me of such a paralyzing sense of annihilation, self.
“You’ve got to lay quiet here, now, because the police are coming and I don’t want them to take you away,” said Mother from the entrance to her room, heavy and tired and half-believing the lie she was telling, collapsing next to me to serve as pillow, pacifier.
I was back home, brought back by Father, who had, as his flight from Cape Town landed, received a call from my preschool that I was being expelled for my violent display, and after a reunion with Mother by argument, now lay on the living room couch depleted of energy. The scene hardly produced guilt in me. But how could I understand the significance? I was just coming down from an aesthetic high, replaced by the fear of an omniscient, looming police who sought all that was not good. Horrified, I imagined the front door would be broken down at any moment with dog whistles and sirens, though I now realize this as Mother’s use of negative reinforcement to instill me with a sense of public civility. But what a mean way to teach a brute! I waited in my parent’s bedroom, clutching Mother’s stomach with eyes widened, my terror pulsing through the blood vessels of my cornea. When I remember this moment, these three moments overlapped along the womb, I can remember the specific question I asked myself, clutching Mother: “Was my eye going to pop out?” Let me explain. Just the previous summer, at another preschool I was once a member of, I had decided to engage in a dialectical swordfight with another student, who I can now only remember as Amiri. We each picked up a hockey stick and would swing at our opponent’s stick while shouting our argument. Amiri opened with a riposte, a piercing of the safe topic that was Columbus Day.
“We celebrate a day that established our contemporary hell, from which we can imagine no other future! The lives lost, the music silenced, the histories swallowed up! Columbus was a monster, the antichrist even! I am against the day, it must be expunged from our vocabulary. Silence!”
And—wouldn’t you know?—I actually strung along words in a sorrowful parry, aware of the weaknesses my stance carried, but an honest strike beneath the evening glow all the same.
“I agree! He was the antichrist. But what kind of antichrist can construct a world where we could trade contemplative blows, and what is the antichrist, actually, if not a Jew? No, not pure shylockery, look! In this document by Columbus’ son, we find that the great monster’s funeral was concluded with the Mourner’s Kaddish. Columbus was a Marrano! Now that excuses nothing, nothing! But what does that mean, when we view him as not just a monster, but a man who identified the annihilation of another people with the brief salvation of his own? What does that mean, when we now review the number of Jews in Miami who record and testify on behalf of those civilizations that cannot? What are we aware of and, quite possibly, atoning for? I say yes, do not celebrate the day, but recall on that day a result like Miami, the result of great horrors throughout history. And, might I not remind you,” I held my arms in an open, receptive hug developed from my inappropriate leap to “who the first slaves were?”
A logical and strategic fallacy, an appeal as bold as my defenseless posture. Amiri felt rightfully indignant, so he struck with torpor, his stick connecting with my right eye, sent me sprawling against the pavement and sobbing, with only a treacle of blood diluting my tears, tawny colored as the sun shone down on my frail, naïve frame. Shamed at my failure to commence brotherhood with Amiri, I chose not to share the incident with Mother and Father, a poor choice which led to confusion at the dinner table when my right eye rolled into the back of my head, me a smile, unaware and uncanny, to my eyes, balls of blue and white that reflected light over a meal of discount chicken and rice. A week after that, I went under for surgery, but my right upper eyelid continued to hang precariously low.
“No one’s going to notice if you keep your chin up.” Mother advised the day I returned from surgery, drugged and sore, to her and Father’s bed.
It was in that earliest moment of their bed that I felt the faint swell of music. Pulsing, resonant, steady were the cautious heartbeats of my sister, who I felt against my face as Mother spooned my damaged body. That same pulse became the thread that connected each of venture in Aventura, a performance in throes, my revulsion, Aventura’s dominance. And through it all was the consonance of my arriving sister, a new life amidst that great blinding noise of the city’s sunlight, such beautiful music to quell the throbbing migraines that city forced on me.
“Do you hear that? That’s your youngest sibling. Listen, they’re excited to see you.” said Mother in each moment, from my surgery to my expulsion to my violence after the arcade, all memories overlapped alongside that gravid womb.
And each moment convalesced into a single terror as the migraine of Aventura threatened to burst from my blue eye, pushed forward by Mother’s threats of Police and Good. In that bed, haunted by the possibility my life would be ended by a police officer’s friendly Pitbull, my right eye throbbed outward, until I could tolerate no more and called out for Mother’s help. In the act of crying for help, my body confessed to its fatigue, and my eye receded back into my skull. At some point between my outcry and collapse into sleep, Mother’s palm swept my sweated head.
“Hush, hush. It’s going to be okay one day, just be good and lay here,” she cooed with an open palm against my damp head, “there’s no monsters—police—here. They’re not going to take my baby as long as I’m around.”
And, as rotund and ungainly as she was, Mother wrapped her body around mine, my body curled around hers, my sister’s heartbeat felt underneath my fingertips, a gentle thrum and swish as distant as my own when Father recorded my pulse for research. I had had what is called a “silent murmur,” a harmless arrhythmia found in restless children, which Father first sensed underneath his forefinger when he rocked me against his chest. My heart’s rhythm was recorded, uploaded, and distributed worldwide under the cautious warmth of Father rocking me to sleep in that laboratory, my calming heart echoed by the room’s speakers, a sound then recollected as I metered my sister’s development in utero, against me in that midday glow, the low hum of air conditioning conflicting so well against the intolerable heat that lay outside our home’s walls. To recall this moment, so pristine and innocently sensual, gives me respite from the fatal progression from things thereon.
“Everything’s going to better from here,” were the last words I always heard before my slumber beside her.
What I mean by this is that Mother died in the delivery of my sister, who would have been named Leah, had the hospital let Father deliver his daughter, as both my parents wanted, but instead by a student in residency, who has since sent Tyson and I Valentine’s day gifts each year, which I find touching but altogether of poor taste, because we have also switched addresses multiple times in accordance with Father’s travels, though I now suppose Father has allowed this ritual, for that holiday was also their anniversary.
“Dr. Cioran sends her regards,” said Father as he leafed through the well wishes, advertisements, and taxes that pursued him from Miami to all territories, that particular time in the Austrian alps.
My transient life since has not been without its awe, curiosities, and warmth among us three, but the torrential heat of Miami still visits me, recollects itself in the chill that suddenly pervades my body each time I gaze upon the sun. No matter the land I walk, whether within the basin of Kyoto, stretched upon the shores of Lido, or even under the translucent evenings in Juneau, looking upon the innermost bluish white of the sun produces a paralyzing sense of impending death. Perhaps this chill began—no, it certainly did, why hide it now?—on the eve of our departure from Miami.
“Where should we go on our last day in Florida?” optioned Father, whose sense of parenthood could now only be conveyed through entertainment.
“How about we visit Parrot Jungle Island? It’s closing for good tomorrow” I asked, as I had finally learned to speak at the age of seven “I hear the zoo is throwing the apes out.”
Parrot Jungle island is not really an island, but only an islet given a gross amount of thought.
“But where will the apes go?” asked Tyson as we drove towards the park.
To this, Father could not answer, but he bought our tickets and treats just the same. Again, the heat of sun at midday conflicted with the exterior air conditioning of the zoo, but where the sense had once calmed me, it now unsettled. The air was too humid outside, so that the shift from drenched in the heat to cool air caused a shiver where the sweat trailed my body. I wore flamingo-gilded sunglasses, from the gift shop, but the sun’s intensity gave me a migraine all the same. Among the animals we visited were a flock of blue heron, two hippos mating (the male’s tongue stuck out the entire time), and finally, the chimp cage. The cadre of chimps squatted low with their knuckles pressed against their knees, chewing at their lips and staring out at passerby. Among them one heavily pregnant ape sauntered with her children in tow. Where would these apes go when the zoo shut down? Who would take them in, or would they be left to wander the streets at night, among the pedophiles and dilettantes? The older of the two sons stopped to meet my gaze. He produced an audible gruff from his throat.
“I heard that smiling is an insult to them, chimps,” remarked Tyson, who read information from the nearby podium, “they take it as a sign of challenge and weakness, a duel to the death.”
The chimp who stared back at me had such blue eyes, pupils like scintillant crystals, and he rose from his hunched position to meet my height. Again, he grunted, this time clapping his fists together. These eyes had no flames hiding behind them, just a vacuous black din, into which I saw nothing of myself, or perhaps everything, perhaps my own end. Perhaps he too saw his death in my blue eyes, which I revealed by removing my sunglasses. He understood my intent and walked towards the steel chain-link between us, grunting loud enough that all the apes surrounding us turned towards the confrontation. I lowered my head, so that my lazy right eye visibly disconnected with our stare, and I smiled. The cages around us burst into a frenzy of screeching and hooting, while the chimp launched himself against the cage. His teeth chewed on the wiring, his cock erect and slipping through the grating, his voice alternating between a low hoot and a high shout, his knuckles as blistering white as the sun above us, the blue of his eyes now swollen rings as the chimp’s adrenaline rush willed him to destroy me. Alarmed, afraid, Tyson pulled me from the Ape exhibition, but as my arm was tugged away I kept contact with the ape’s eyes until a throng of zookeepers emerged from behind security doors and sought to quiet his will, of his great blue eyes. Years and continents have divorced me from this moment but in each glare of the sun, I am returned to this moment when I met my annihilation. I smiled in the face of death and in doing so welcomed it, urged it towards me. Sometimes, in the span of time between turning off the bedroom light and sleeping, I hear the ape’s hoot and shout as a pulse that I swear is drawing closer each day. I may have left Miami, left the country, left the continent, but the chimp was released that next day, challenged to the death, his eyes heavy rings of blue circling a black hole from which the sun cannot escape. He is coming now. I don’t know by what method he runs towards me, but I have felt that great white blue approach, and the travel will transform him. Each border crossed will elongate his limbs, each ocean he cargoes will gray his body, until he resembles Apple Jacks, the Weimaraner with sharp teeth and soulless eyes. That day will come very soon. That day came, the great ape Apple Jacks found me. I see him, I saw him only in the moment before my eyes are torn out of me, in the gleam of my reflection in his vacant hunger. He is tearing my eyes from my face and eating them as my head is thrown against the pavement, my nose is plucked and chewed as my throat is crushed. He is eating my face underneath the awesome light of Miami’s sun, and I feel my life ebb out from me to the sound of glee, a grunt of flesh and bones snapping so finally cathartic, as for once the migraine of Miami’s summer light finally leaves my body. I fade now into a dark so consuming that not even the bluish light of my self may claim me, how beautiful.
Zachary Issenberg is a writer from South Florida. He lives with his wife and cat and is currently writing a novel or two about Miami. You can find his writing in Bookforum, LARB, The Millions, 3AM, and The Shoutflower.