Khalil Rafati - I Forgot to Die

Y oure going to die if you dont get help.

Im fading in and out of consciousness, trying to focus my eyes on the figure standing above me.

If you dont get help, youre going to die!

Oh shit, I remember this voice. I thought I had simply ODd again and some overzealous paramedic was trying to hit me with some tough love. No such luck. The voice belongs to my girlfriends father.

Godammit, why did she let him in?

The voice continues to rant about how irresponsible we are. How could we let this happen again?

Over and over. Hes stuck on repeat.

Now my eyes are open but I tune the voice out. I need to assess the situation.

Jennifers father is here, which means the whole family knows. I slowly make my way toward the bathroom.

Fuck, it looks like a bomb went off in here. Needles and blood everywhere. I fall into the wall twice. No one seems to notice or care. I rub my shoulder and notice a patch.

Shit, no wonder Im not sick yet. 150mg Duragesic 72-Hour Timed Release.

Thank God. This will tide me over until Jennifer can get rid of her father and little sister.

I stumble through a cloud of flies toward the toilet. Gatorade bottles are brimming with dark yellow urine. I lift the toilet lid.

Ah, that explains the flies. The landlord must have turned the water off again.

I piss in the sink. The edge is crowded with cuticle clippers, scissors, needle-nose pliers, two bottles of hydrogen peroxide, and one can of paint thinner.

Slowly and carefully I raise my head toward the mirror.

Chunks of flesh are missing from my left cheek and between my eyebrows.

The top part of my right nostril and two patches of my scalp are gone.

On the wall, written in my blood with my hand, are the words:

GOD HELP ME

I was born in Toledo , Ohio in 1969, the Year of the Cockthe rooster, the bringer of light. I was born premature because, as my mother put it, my father got excited, which was code for he beat her. My dad was a Palestinian, but the kids at school all called him a sand nigger, and my mom was a Polackboth of them straight off the boat.

There was a sad old Indian man who always sat on the street corner. Everybody in my neighborhood was white and they had pretty eyesblue and green. Everybody was white except my dad and that old Indian man. My dad was brown, but it was an angry brown. The old Indian man was very brown, but it was a sad brown that almost seemed more like a red. I was always happy when the rain came because he was so dirty and it made him clean. Everybody else ran but he just sat. Next time it rains, Im not gonna run. Im gonna sit still like the old Indian man and get clean.

I dont know much about my fathers past other than he was born in Jerusalem to a poor Muslim family. I overheard him tell a story once about skipping school as a kid and playing at his cousins house. When his father found him, he beat the cousins entire family then made my father run the 12 miles back home while my grandfather rode a bicycle behind him. Every time my dad fell down, my grandfather would get off the bike and beat him.

A relative of mine told me another story in broken English about my dad leaving his first wife and their kids behind in Palestine. He went to Germany to make money and they didnt think he was coming back. When he returned five years later, he found that his brother had married his wife and theyd had a child together.

If my father ever had love in him, by the time I was born it was gone. Life had hardened him. The world, as he knew it, was a bad place.

My mother had it even worse. She was a small child in Poland when World War II broke out. Her father died at sea, fighting the Nazis. Her mother tried to escape to Hungary, but it was very difficult to get through the border and having a child made it nearly impossible, so she left my mom on a strangers doorstep and the two sisters who lived there took her in. My mother and the sisters were shipped off to Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and eventually to Siberia to a labor camp for women and children. My mother never spoke of these times, and when I asked her about it she would always say, The past is the past and best left alone. But sometimes (rarely) she would mention some details, like being forced to wear a sack around her neck and pick wheat with her bare hands or how 15 or 20 of them lived in one tiny shack with a stove for heat and one bucket that they all had to use to go to the bathroom. Sometimes the bucket would freeze from the cold. Most of them starved to death.

When she was in her thirties, long after the war had ended, my mother and her husband made their way to the United States. They had a son, but soon after, her husband abandoned them and returned to Poland. She managed to track down her biological mothermy grandmotherwho was working for a wealthy family as a maid in Toledo, Ohio.

My mom called her.

Im coming to see you, she said.

A few days before my mom got to Toledo, her mother closed the garage door and kept the car running. There was never any tearful reunion, answers, or closure. My mom had been abandoned once again. She ended up a single mother working as a maid for the same wealthy family as my grandmother and taking classes at the University of Toledo, where she met my father. They fell in love and quickly marriedan angry, violent, yet charming man and a broken, beautiful woman who thought she could change him.

Even the honeymoon didnt last long. The first thing my father did after they got married was make my mother give up her son from her previous relationship because he didnt want to raise another mans child. He made her send him to an orphanage. On countless occasions, she begged my father to let her son come home, but he refused, and eventually she got pregnant with me.

My earliest memories, from before I could even talk, are of recurring nightmares I had. One was of a small, shadowy, demonic figure that chased me relentlessly, wanting to kill me. I inherently knew it was evil, before I had heard anything about good and bad, God and the devil, heaven and hell. The other nightmare was of a giant white ghost that would drag me into my parents closet, pin me to the floor, and tickle me until I couldnt breathe. I would feel an immense pressure on top of me and I couldnt get up. Id like to say my memories got better after that, happier, but Id be lying.

When I was five years old, my mother started pleading incessantly again to bring her other son home. Finally my father relented. I dont know what happened to my brother while he was at that orphanage, but I am certain it was horrible. The first time he touched me was very confusing because I was so desperate for attention, but I knew immediately that something was wrong. Over time, the incidents became more and more aggressive. He was eight years older than I was, a young man going though puberty and confused about his sexuality, and I was just something to experiment on.