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It takes 4,893 newtons of force to break a man’s head: an object weighing 55 kilograms falling from a height of more than 100 meters with an impact velocity of nearly 44 meters per second. Sometimes it can weigh even less than that at a greater height, at a faster speed. Physical, violent.
For New, it takes two graves dug for the lack of one. It’s mourning twice in one day, grief doubled in the span of seconds, minutes, hours, days; spiraling into years. It’s accumulated regret that gets molded into purpose, flattened with grief, sprinkled with a taste of all his decisions leading up to a funeral for two.
From a bird’s eye perspective, the object falling might seem to take a while before it hits the person below but for the person struck by the object, the impact is half a second and instantaneously followed by death.
New’s world ends like this, with graduality built from the cracks and fissures caused by childhood’s sentiment of escapism, in a slow crescendo of negligence, a continuous half-hearted attempt at reconciliation, an accumulation of debt, resentment in a low simmer until it boiled over into grief and guilt, a shiny collection of well-told lies, mother’s pills, father’s braided rope, little brother’s ghost.
The irony is this, when you have less to lose more is taken from you in bits and pieces, like a leaking pipe, steadily draining, siphoning until you have nothing to your name that even the label of poorness becomes a privilege. Meanwhile, loss is felt in one fell swoop the more you have to lose.
They say anger is brief madness, but there is no brief in three years of amassing sorrow, regret, anger, and sharpening it to something purposeful. For madness to be brief, it must be a state of mind and New has lost his for the sake of honing his grief into methodical madness and violence. When you start losing your marbles, you learn to keep count of the ways society has failed you.
New balances out the scale between him and society with calculated violence and a gun. The common answer of the impoverished. Those who say violence is not the answer must not have culminated oppression stored in their bodies, weighing their choices, wracking havoc in their future. Violence is the only way the poor can mete out punishment.
But brutality is oftentimes frowned upon, murder most especially, and yet at the hands of someone with power and influence there is conviction of why it must be done. The poor cannot have justice only retribution and justice can only equate to violence to those who can afford to escape its consequences.
New wields his blade, never mind the reason he holds it in the first place, and it will be called a lot of things except justice. Self-serving revenge, yes. Violent retribution, yes. Karmic justice in the form of Tan, no—when New is done with this house and its occupants no cosmic being would be able to dictate his karmic bonds. No, the real karma is this, they will gun each other down in a fit of guilt, hysteria, and paranoia and New will watch all of this with a self-satisfied smile.
Here’s what they don’t tell you in the aftermath of breaking a man’s head, is that you make sure he stays down lest you invite malevolence into your home.