Just Us

On the subject of Justice, Jordan Neely, and Daniel Penny

When I was fifteen years old, my mother thought it would be a great idea to sleep with my step-father’s brother. It only took her two weeks after meeting him to come to this conclusion, and it followed naturally from her previous research of marrying my father after he had married her cousin. Among the many, many ideas she had over the course of her life that would leave me with a lot of somewhat unbelievable anecdotes this was one of her greatest. When my step-father discovered the affair, he in turn had the earth-shattering thought that it would be a great idea to strangle her to death.

Truly, it was a night for genius.

I woke to the the sound of the glass on the front door shattering, yelling and screaming during a short fight, and I snapped fully awake to the sound of my mom’s skull thumping against the floor above me as my step-father angrily strangled her and demanded to know why she had done it.

I began to have an idea of my own.

Not a great idea, but merely the only idea permissible. Perhaps the only acceptable idea for the circumstances. My idea was that I personally needed to go kill my step-father. I knew from previous altercations I wasn’t strong enough to hold him back and nothing short of lethal force would do the job. I also figured from my mom’s strangled cries that I probably didn’t have a lot of time to decide.

I remember looking at my reflection in a closet mirror as I passed by and thinking, “Are you a killer?” and being surprised to find that the answer was yes.

Yes, I could kill someone.

Yes.

I picked up the shotgun my step-father had bought himself for Christmas since it was so close to my room. We’d all laughed at him for wrapping it up for himself and putting it under the tree but I was happy it was there. I remembered a bit about spray patterns and thought to myself that I should probably get close enough to just put the barrel against his head before I pulled the trigger. Part of me was genuinely happy to know that meant his head would explode.

I remembered to turn the safety off.

My step-father’s brother whose heroic pedigree included thievery, crackheadery, cuckoldry and generally the sort of plaudits with which my mom loved to enrich my childhood experience —and the primary reason she has never and will never meet my son— ran down the stairs in front of me, blood gushing from his arms. He didn’t pause to look at me. He wanted out. His only destination was to be gone. Anything happening upstairs to my mother was none of his concern. I never did learn where he went that night, but his blood smelled like pennies. My whole mouth tasted like it was full of pennies after and I wouldn’t realize until later that it was just what fear tastes like.

If anyone asks you what fear tastes like, now you know. Fear tastes like your whole mouth is full of pennies.

I walked up the steps to the top floor of the house, cradling the shotgun under my arm. My little brother and sister were sleeping up there. I couldn’t hear them crying but I thought about how nervous and scared they must be and how much worse the night was going to get when I killed their father.

I put my hand on the doorknob and started to turn it. The door opened outward, but I pulled the door toward me as I turned the handle so that I wouldn’t make any noise. The door popped otherwise, something to do with the frame being crooked and it made too much noise. Pulling it back kept it quiet.

I felt cold. Not even human. Like a thing from the space in-between stars that had lived for billions of years, witnessed the rise and fall of entire planets, and could not be moved by any emotion. Wrapped up in that feeling there was no doubt that I would walk a few steps to the front room, put the shotgun to the back of my step-father’s head, and send him on his way to eternity.

Then there was a siren.

I heard my step-father run away from my mother, heard her gasp, and then my immediate thought was that it would probably be better if the police didn’t find me with a gun in my hands.

I put the shotgun back, went back into my room and waited for the police to come. Somehow this was the most terrifying part because it took eight minutes and no one had told me that eight minutes is forever. I was relieved when I saw him but for a few moments it was like we didn’t even speak the same language. Who was I? What had happened? Where had my step-father gone?

I answered his questions truthfully. My leg wouldn’t stop twitching but I tried my best to stay calm. My jaw started to chatter halfway through and I felt like a real coward but I was able to keep it under control. Nothing I ever did came up so I didn’t volunteer that information. One question I remember well. Has something like this happened before?

Yes. Of course.

Inside I thought that I should have been quicker. That bothered me for a long time. Next time, I promised myself I would race up the stairs.

We went upstairs. My brother joined us at some point. Not the youngest brother who could barely walk and still took bottles, but my older younger brother. The front door was completely broken and covered in blood. There was blood everywhere. The carpet, the walls, the furniture. It all stank like blood.

My step-father’s brother smoked a cigarette as a paramedic bandaged his arms. He’d come back when he saw there was help. Even as the bruises were forming on her neck, my mother laughed at the idea that my step-father had been physically abusive with her that night. It was all a tragic misunderstanding. She had no idea what had set him off. It was a total mystery. Nothing like it had ever happened before. She giggled when the police asked if there was anything going on between her and my step-father’s brother. No. Of course not.

I excused myself to call my grandparents to come get my brother and sister because they didn’t need to be there for the clean up. It was too much. Too much to see and know.

My formerly tranquil and dismissive mother screamed at me for embarrassing her. There hadn’t been any need to get her parents involved in her business. What was I thinking? Was I stupid? She laughed at me in front of the police about how hysterical I was being. How hysterical of me to think the children shouldn’t see a little bit of blood! There was hardly any blood at all! Nothing had happened! I was waking up two elderly people in the middle of the night for no reason. And if anything had happened, it was over. There was no reason to involve them. None at all.

My brother and I spent the few hours after the police left cleaning up blood. We told my mother to rest. She’d been strangled. She needed to recover. Bleach and water like the police told us. Cleaning up all the blood seemed like something that someone else is supposed to do for you in movies. Or like something you’re not supposed to do because of crime scenes. But it happened to be the case there wasn’t anybody else to do the cleaning and nobody was going to turn the house into a crime scene. Nobody else. Just us. It was a school night so we tried to be quick about it and when my grandparents came we handed off the children —among whose number we did not count ourselves— then we went back to bed.

I don’t think I knew to say to the police that my step-father had tried to murder my mother but they only charged him with an assault charge. He spent a few months in jail. My mom dated his brother on and off for years. Except it wasn’t really dating. He stole most of the nice things we owned after my grandfather died. I assume for drug money and I think he was homeless during that period. After a while, he started hitting her too. She never called the police or pressed charges. If we said anything she told us we were lying.

Eventually, as it always must, love conquered all and she and my step-father had their best idea yet to get back together even after she miscarried his brother’s child.

Of course, this wasn’t the only time something like that ever happened.

Of course not. Don’t be stupid.

When I came home from a camping trip in the sixth grade he punched me in the neck. He was just joking around of course! All a mistake. No, no don’t get the wrong idea. He laughed about it with my mother. About how I looked when he hit me the neck, like such a dork. Also, what does it even mean to get punched in the neck? Do you even know? His hand was open at the end so he only hit me with the web between his thumb and the rest of his fingers. That’s not even being punched. I was probably standing wrong and that’s why it had become so hard to breathe afterward. I was standing there all wrong, standing totally like a complete moron, and if I had been standing better than him hitting me unexpectedly in the neck wouldn’t have hurt so bad. My mom made me show her how he used his hand so that she could explain how I hadn’t actually been punched in the neck at all and needed to be more precise in how I used language. There was no reason for me to tell anyone he had punched me in the neck because that would be a lie. And also it took me a little bit to even understand what she was asking so how sure could I even be about anything that had happened?

Too many times to count and more would just be painful without a point. I promise there is a point.

When I was twenty-five, on my birthday to be exact, my step-father finally broke the last and only rule I had ever set on him. He was not, under any circumstances, to threaten my little brother and sister. Not for a moment. Not as a joke. Not for any reason. I no longer cared when he hit my mother so long as he was quiet about it. All offers of help had been refused. Police intervention had been refused. My older sister had tried to get the police involved and my mother had told the police she was the real abuser and insisted they arrest her instead. I lost all sympathy for a woman who so easily betrayed her own children.

My one rule, as I paid their bills, and helped the kids with their homework, was that my step-father was not ever, under any circumstances, to threaten them.

One day he did. Of course. I was stupid. He finally did.

And my little sister, the youngest sister who I had held in my arms when she was a baby and I was thirteen but knowing somehow that it had made me become a man early, left the house for school sobbing and broken because her model of a world where her father would never do that kind of thing to her had finally shattered. That meant the universe was a lot worse than she thought it was. The whole world was a lot more wicked than she had known. I walked her out the door, told her it wasn’t her fault, and when that door closed…

It was almost sexual.

No. Better than sex. Nothing else like it. Sin. Something known to God but forbidden to man. Wrath.

I think it might be like what the Vikings felt when they went berserk.

I wasn’t a teenager anymore and he was getting old. The dynamics between us had changed. I had always been big but now I had muscle. I walked toward him and he could tell it was different now, too. I loved it. Loved that he was afraid. The greatest love I had ever known in my life to that point, that fearful look in his eye.

I grabbed him and threw him around like a rag doll. It was pathetic how easy it was. I barely had to try. He gurgled and told me to get off him so I shoved him down to the ground and pounded on his head. I broke three punching bags in high school. Pure frustration. I’m not a pro boxer but I’ve got practice in. He turned so that my fist connected with the back of his skull. I used to get so mad at him I’d punch concrete walls over and over and over again. My wrists still click and my knuckles still crunch when I make a fist. His skull was practically soft in comparison. So I just kept hitting it as hard as I could.

And he kept trying to talk like it was okay for him to talk, like I’d given him permission, and I figured hey why not? Why not grab his fucking neck and squeeze? I could feel the veins and cartilage and all the other stuff in there under my fingers and it was awesome. He was so scared and I was drunk on it. His little hands slapped me and I knew that he knew he was going to die. And it was fucking awesome.

“Stop! You’re killing my husband!”

And when my mom said that somehow she wasn’t the same woman who had betrayed her children year after year. I didn’t hear the voice of a parasite that sucked the life out of everyone else to keep her chaotic fires burning. A woman I had honestly come to despise. I heard the voice of my mom, who had given birth to me and nursed me and maybe she hadn’t done a lot of other good things but she’d done those things. Maybe she had been selfish, and egotistical, and lied all the time because appearances were always more important than reality but she was my mom.

It felt deeply rude to kill your mom’s husband in front of her. That was the only feeling I had, a sense of rudeness.

I let go of my step-father’s neck. He fell onto his back and did his best to catch his breath. His eyes were red. I’d turned his eyes red from hitting him in the back of the head. All I felt was tired.

I know violence isn’t supposed to solve problems, but he never tried to hit anyone after that. Hardly ever raised his voice. They were divorced a few months later. He gave up. I don’t think he could handle even one person not being afraid of him anymore.

Now, to the point.

The entire reason that civilization exists, the reason we build institutions, elect officials, and vest them with power… the reason you pay your taxes and educate your children is so that a normal person trying to live a normal life doesn’t have to encounter situations like this. These sorts of events are supposed to be shockingly rare and when they are not, the whole point of government has failed.

Do you know whose fault it was that Jordan Neely died on that subway? It was all of our fault. You, me, the strangers you pass on the street. Oh, I blame our political parties the most. Our duly elected leaders can’t seem to be responsible for anything bad that has happened. But that’s our fault, too. We voted for them. We are a society of free men and women and for all of our denial about responsibility we get to make the decisions about our own laws, so when those laws fail it is our fault.

I never went and lobbied to bring back involuntary institutionalization of the mentally ill. I never demanded the mentally ill people wandering the street be housed even if it was against their will. I let people talk about freedom and compassion for hypothetical people who don’t exist and certainly don’t match the description of America’s homeless population because it was easier than having to argue that maybe if your compassion doesn’t cause you to materially improve another person’s life it’s actually fake? Maybe letting someone die in the middle of the street when they’re mentally ill is actually a really shitty, selfish thing to do? I walked on by and didn’t make eye contact, the same as you. That is a really fucked up thing to do to your countrymen. Even little children know that it doesn’t make sense to let somebody die of despair, let alone in a goddamn alley. Love isn’t love unless you love someone so much it’s okay for them to hate you for a little bit while you force them to get their shit together. If I had lobbied, even then I would not be blameless because I should have found it within myself to win.

The word gaslighting gets thrown around a lot these days, but we are all being gaslit right now. Daniel Penny killing Jordan Neely on that subway car was the very last in a long chain of dominoes. Daniel Penny made the only real choice that was left by the time those dominoes fell on him. I’ve watched the video and it’s clear to me that what happened was a pure accident. He held the chokehold for three minutes not fifteen. He let Jordan Neely go shortly after he went limp. No one in real life is Chuck Norris from the movies. No one can take into account that maybe a guy who is on drugs and has come to hate his society doesn’t have the normal pain response that would cause him to stop fighting when he’s on death’s door. Three men were holding him down right up until the end. If it matters, it was a mixed ethnic group.

You have a right to defend your life. It is good to defend the lives of others. But in a functional society, it’s never even supposed to get to that point. There are other societies that don’t let schizophrenic people die in the middle of the street from suicidal ideation. They don’t pretend for the sake of delusional trust fund kids who want to jerk off to a fake image of what a great person they are that if they put a few thousand dollars on the chest of a person who has no idea what reality is that they’ll suddenly become a normal functioning member of society.

Always, there is the appeal to some other magical person. The police. Doctors. Whatever. Like when my brother and I cleaned up blood that night, it felt as if there was some magical person who ought to be doing it instead, who could clean up blood and not find it traumatic. For whom cleaning up all that blood wouldn’t even be difficult. If Jordan Neely died, well it was because no one had found the right magical person who could cure his mental illness or restrain him perfectly without the risk of killing him. If you are in a dangerous situation where you have seconds to make a decision, your only moral recourse is for the magical person to be right here with you already and for you to not take any responsibility for what’s happening.

Bullshit.

You are the magical person.

Whatever your limits are, they’re probably close to the limits of whoever else is going to be put into the situation. If it’s hard for you it’s also going to be hard for the next guy. Cops aren’t Chuck Norris either. Maybe they’ll have some more training but who cares if they aren’t right there with you and the decision has to be made immediately? It’s why we have the reasonable man standard. If you can’t do it, why imagine it’s so easy for someone else? Cleaning up blood fucking sucks. Having to restrain someone who has abandoned all belief in society is difficult. For everyone.

The reason I worked quietly for so many years on the Forum and the Index is because I don’t believe in magic people. I don’t believe that even if I spent my life trying to solve one problem it would remain solved in the world as it exists today. Something is deteriorating. I call it Extelligence and the answer to shoring it up is as I’ve described elsewhere. Aliens aren’t going to descend from above and teach us how to fix things. I didn’t rely on a magical person to appear because I remembered being fifteen years old and having to make a choice because the awful truth of the universe is that sometimes no one is coming. I believe in God but not one who doesn’t ask that you even try or take any responsibility.

In a perfect world, Jordan Neely’s mother was never murdered. He never went over the edge. Never went too crazy to care for himself. We don’t live in that world. But we could live in a better world where when a fellow citizen starts to lose his marbles we take care of him even if he’s too sick to know he’s ill. You know why Jordan Neely deserved a warm room with a soft bed and three square meals a day? Because he was an American. He was part of our tribe. When someone in your tribe’s mom gets murdered and stuffed into a suitcase and thrown off the side of a freeway and he loses his mind, you don’t just fucking shrug and let rich kids talk about how in theory everyone can be helped and no one belongs in an institution it’s all Elon Musk’s fault for not building them while he goes insane on the subway for the next fifteen years.

If your institutions are broken, you’re supposed to fix them. No one else is going to do it. There’s just us.