by Emma Janson
Ignacio rested his elbows on the dresser and waited for his mother’s speech like everyone in the video. He giggled when Carlos tried to help quiet the room and accidently cursed in Spanish. This was followed by a slap to his arm by a family member, which made the camera jerk.
Yet, Juana’s speech wasn’t what her family had been waiting for. Not one of her thankful stories involved family members, as everyone had anticipated. Instead, Juana described cherished memories and lessons learned from the girls who surrounded her. Worry began to take over expressions of Cheyez descendants as she gifted the candles, one after another, to her friends – her gang friends. Carlos panned and zoomed to people getting angry, uncomfortable, and deeply concerned. Elbows nudged and whispers escalated to mumbles coming from scattered sections of the horseshoe.
Ignacio’s eyes stretched with intensity as he backed away from the television, unable to understand the images and words of his mother. Nervous, he glanced to the bedroom door, ensuring it was locked. His heart began to sadden for the younger-looking Grandma in the video, who was gritting her teeth and rubbing her elbow.
The camera panned back to Juana, lighting another candle and telling yet another gang member how they’d influenced her life, a bright and meaningful expression on her face. Her sincerity was the most astounding part of the whole awful experience. Maria stood next to her with pooling tears that teetered on the edge of spilling to the floor. A distant relative shot her a look from the edge of the camera frame, with his hands politely crossed over his crotch, unsure whether or not he should step in out of respect. By the eleventh candle, he was fidgeting in sweat as he mouthed for Maria to do something with wide eyes. She was too frozen with disappointment. Had her husband been alive, he would have stopped the blasphemy, but she could not.
The final four candles were handed to the leaders of the sisterhood, seeming to suggest that Juana had saved the best for last. At the end of her speech, she was in tears as all of her candle-lit friends gathered around her for a group hug which was surrounded by a bunch of offended family members who were ready to lose their composure on an epic level.
Among the crowd was an uncle, recently released after twelve years in the penitentiary. He was seething on the edge of destruction as the teenage girls huddled, almost taunting him. Carlos zoomed out to a wide shot, trying to capture the horde as he giggled unintentionally. When the girls broke from the group hug and spread themselves throughout the family members in the horseshoe, Juana addressed everyone again. Her voice was recognizable, but her attitude was another stake in the hearts of the family that had raised her.
Ignacio leaned in to the dresser, shifted a psychology magazine under his elbows, and turned the volume up.
“My transition to womanhood has begun; I leave behind my childhood.” She pulled out barrettes from her delicately set, cascading hairdo and stretched her hair as tight as she could manage into a ponytail on the top of her head. Doing this exposed fresh tattoos that had been hidden until now, and they ran up and down the sides of the portion of her face and neck that had previously been covered by beautifully flowing curls. Family members inhaled in unison and grabbed at their chests in shock. Maria covered her open mouth as she battled extreme embarrassment and a swelling of explosive anger. Nobody wanted to overstep boundaries with the matriarch of the family by attempting to end the drama without her permission, though, so they all stood on edge, wound tight like soldiers ready for battle. They patiently waited for her to give them a sign.
Ignacio also watched her on the screen and waited for some sign, but it didn’t come.
Carlos giggled and quietly said into the microphone, “Valiendo, Madre! It’s about to get real up in this bitch, yo.” He was blissfully unaware of the truth. He believed the worst that would happen was juvenile detention or time in a group home somewhere, and so he continued to record the drama so that he could laugh about it with his friends…but what he captured wasn’t attitude; it was evidence of a young girl’s deep insanity. It was evidence of a rebellion that was officially transitioning into a malicious act, based from a twisted mind. The act, and this video, would become Exhibit A.
Juana grabbed glasses of alcohol from a preset table and threw them at the archway, causing everyone in the room to instinctively flinch and step away just before she lit the arch on fire. She then rushed to the draperies hanging from the beautiful woodwork along the room’s windows and lit them on fire while screaming, “Long live, mis carnalas!”
The girls around Juana shouted out her sentiment along with her while Carlos yelled curse words too close to the microphone and took cover behind a metal serving cart. He was screaming at his sister, “What the fuck are you doing, Juana?” The video was wild and uncontrolled as he continued to record the action, huddled into his protective position. The audio picked up frantic running behind more cursing as he finally focused in on the fire that was overwhelming the arch, slowly at first, and yet growing rapidly larger as it burned through the fresh paint and alcohol.
Juana’s friends began lighting tablecloths on fire, as well as the dresses of family members, curtains, dried floral arrangements, and anything else that was flammable. As the smell of burning items became stronger and things were engulfed into flames, family members screamed out the need to protect the children while others tried to put out the smaller fires. The men who could have easily subdued some of the teenagers were more concerned with moving children and elders out of the building. The teens tried to block the exits, but were pushed aside or punched into submission as panic grew among the Cheyez descendants. Carlos captured his great aunt hobbling for safety while embracing two-month-old Ignacio against her frail chest, but the video showed that baby Ignacio never cried as the images became swirls of darkness and faces lost among screams. As people pushed their way out of the building, Carlos could hardly catch his breath. The smoke was thickening, too, as the next minute of tape was nothing but screaming and fire alarms.
Suddenly, a light appeared in the video and silhouettes ran toward it. Carlos did not stop coughing even as he ran to a place where the air by the road was clean, the camera jostling along at his side. When he oriented himself again, he turned the camera back to the building and vomited in response to his sister’s attempt at killing their entire family tree.
Meanwhile, Ignacio kept watching the VHS tape, unsure of how to feel.
After regrouping, Carlos began counting everyone from behind the lens as he tried to breathe in fresh air. He was nearly finished counting when the teens poured out of each exit with charred skin, and scorched hair and dresses. Each one of them looked like a chola version of the possessed main character in the horror movie Carrie as she’d appeared after killing everyone at her prom. They were coughing at first, but regained composure as they walked toward the family with balled fists and demonic eyes. Some of the girls carried broken table legs with sharp, uneven tips and knives from the ballroom kitchen. Carlos zoomed in on the assemblage of teenagers as the smoke poured from the building behind them and faint sounds of firetruck alarms pierced the chaos. Juana stopped with her mob, about 15 feet from the huddled family members, most of whom were sobbing. When the Cheyez men regrouped, they stepped forward to provide a masculine barricade.
Enraged, Juana screamed at the top of her lungs, pink spit flying out of her mouth as she shook her head violently, as if possessed. “Give us our son or we will take him!”
The statement threw some of the gang members off, as they looked a little scared and surprised by what they’d heard. It appeared that the teens hadn’t been acting as a collective, and that Juana was somehow masterminding their intentions. However, some were on board just because of who Juana was to them, and they began edging forward to protect their leader.
Unsuccessfully, seven-year-old Ignacio searched the television screen for the great aunt with a bundle in her arms.
“Pendeja, I’ll go back to prison for you!” The uncle lunged to begin a charge, but the th
ing that stopped him at his first step was Maria’s shout for him to wait, given from her crouched position in the crowd. Neither the teens nor the family members said a word as children cried and sirens blew louder in response to an emergency 911 call. But Maria heroically walked through two layers of family, stepped in front of the uncle, and addressed her daughter.
“Hija del diablo! Devil daughter! Ignacio shall never know your face! I turn my back on you. We all turn our backs on you!” Her fists shook in front of her tensed eyes for emphasis before she turned her back to her daughter who she’d now disowned.
Seven-year-old Ignacio couldn’t believe his ears, let alone his eyes. This was not the grandmother he knew who sang silly songs of dogs with clubbed feet to make him laugh. His grandmother worried about feeding him too much and making sure he was warm. She poked at his dimples and told him that’s how angels got into his face to make him smile. Yet, here she was screaming so hard that he thought the veins in her neck would burst.
When she turned around, away from Juana, the shimmering lights of the oncoming emergency crews twinkled in her tears, and yet she held her head high. Several family members slowly turned, to signify their denial of young Juana’s existence as they followed the matriarch’s lead. Eventually, everyone shunned her; even the hardened criminal, her uncle, turned his muscle-bound back in proof that he had become a better man. Carlos focused the camera on Juana, who watched them all turn one by one as her last remaining sensible side – that which had sought a return of her own son – was shunned for the atrocities she’d tried to bestow. The gang members looked to one another, waiting for Juana’s next command, which she never gave. When the fire crews and trucks stopped up the street to connect to the water main, though, a young and unexpected hero emerged from the back of the Cheyez family’s formation.
Ernesto was 14 years old, with Downs Syndrome, and the youngest sibling of Maria’s deceased husband. Not only had he been born challenged, but Ernesto was morbidly obese and insanely strong. No one wanted to see what he was capable of in terms of strength, but this incident had pushed everyone to their limits…and he was no different. He was unable to compute the events surrounding him, and it only made an uncontrollable rage well inside of him. He turned opposite the statuesque group of family members to the teens, and then ran at full speed, charging through everyone. Some moved out of his way in surprise and some were knocked out of his way like bowling pins as three hundred pounds of angry Ernesto screamed out an obsessed focus on Juana.
Juana watched him charge her as he approached faster than anyone would have thought possible. Ernesto’s arms were outstretched, his fingers spread like he had seen fingers displayed so many times on crucifixes nailed to his momma’s living room walls. His scream was worse than any scream heard in the past, as there was screeching that permeated the sound, his voice cracking from his impending puberty.
Carlos spun the camera away from the motion of the firetrucks to capture Ernesto’s break away and zoomed into the action as the girls stood frozen, waiting for the train wreck to hit. In broken English, he screeched, “Don’t. You. Make. Her. Cry!” Ernesto’s arms and hands clothes-lined two of the gang members on either side of Juana before he wrapped her in a bear hug, plummeting all of them to the ground. He landed on top of Juana’s tiny frame and seared dress. Her feet kicked as she tried to scream for help, but she was unable to catch her first breath. Half of the gang immediately attempted to push and pry him off, the others analyzing their moral compasses as they considered shanking a fat handicapped child.
In the video, things between the main actors in the scene seemed to pause with everyone in a standstill as emergency crews began to show up to deal with the fire, working in the background of the video to address what looked like the most pressing concerns.
Luckily, the fire was extinguished quickly, but it took some convincing before Ernesto walked away from Juana. Family members scattered everywhere, crying and holding hands, all of them incredibly lost. When most girls would have been beginning their self-discovery at her age, Juana was handcuffed to a stretcher in the back of an emergency vehicle. She then watched as her great aunt relinquished her bundled zenith to emergency crews.
As squad cars escorted the emergency vehicles out of the area, one of the field officers made a radio call to ask how to process a fifteen-year-old for arson and attempted mass murder. With this, Carlos faded the video to black in an attempt to put a dramatic closing on the already intense evening. This creative ending was what finally pacified the sounds of firetrucks, police sirens, and family members who were crying next to Ignacio. And the recording stopped.
FALLING APART
The severity of the Cheyez incident caused unified deflections every time Ignacio brought up the subject of his mother with his family. They couldn’t be tricked into giving him information on Juana. Once, he asked Ernesto for his version of the story, but Ernesto just hunkered down and insisted that she was dead, refusing to look him in the eye for weeks afterward. Ignacio apologized several times, and felt wicked for asking. He never gave up wondering, though; rather, he pretended that his curiosity faded with age. Secretly, he kept notes in a diary and then, in eighth grade, escalated to collecting undisclosed audio clips of his family members talking. In high school, he spent countless hours in the library – looking through news articles and psychology books.
After graduating high school, his research into his mother’s story became more intense. He managed to open sealed documents by using lots of manipulation. The patrolmen and women who’d been on the scene nearly eighteen years prior to his search had been promoted through the system. Most of them were higher ranking officers, if not retired. The remaining personnel refused to give information to him, though, for fear that it would ruin their future careers within the system.
One such detective with a thick accent tried offering his opinion without offering information. “Son, your motha tried to torch your whole frikkin’ family! What do you care where she’s at and what she’s doin'? If I were you, kid, I would neva’ look back. She’s probably locked up – where she should be.” To emphasize his insensitive suggestions, he circled his index finger around his temple. And although his answer was less than professional, he was the politest out of all the people Ignacio questioned. Others referred to her as “the Firestarter” and did their best to quickly get him off the phone or shoo him out of their offices.
But lack of closure makes trauma a looped horror that attacks a person in different ways. Years of open-ended questions and images from the VHS tape manifested into an uncontrollable force of destruction during Ignacio’s freshman year of college. Between classes and football games, the things that occupied his mind were not always his studies or his girlfriends. At first, it was only nagging questions that bothered him, but then these questions progressed into lapses in time. Eventually, he experienced grand feelings such as those his mother might have had during her youth – like those that had resulted in an evidence tape. There were many nights when he felt Juana’s pain as she pulled fake fingernails from her cheek. Countless nightmares included burning, crescent moons. Ignacio tried to self-medicate with marijuana, but there was a painful heat in his ribcage when he smoked, and he didn’t know if it was from smoke inhalation or from his great aunt’s overprotective arms as she’d run for safety with his infant body in her grip.
His obsession with his mother’s story began skewing his perception of reality at the moment when an image of her tattoos seemed to appear on his neck. Sometimes he believed that his dimples hid the scarring of moons and that he was, in fact, the zenith. However, the so-called tattoos he saw were random scratches from his digging at his skin while he slept. His dimples were just dimples, and other than his unique circumstances, he was your average eighteen-year-old Hispanic male.
He tried ignoring his strange thoughts with the intensity of his family, who dismissed his questions, but the effort still left him within his mind to develop conspira
cy theories. He felt as if his family had never really loved him – otherwise, he imagined they would have just told him where his mother was institutionalized. Ignacio’s grades fell because constant thoughts of his mother’s unknowns plagued him. Every morning, he wrote “Where is she?” in the steam of his bathroom mirror. He saw her fifteen-year-old face in every Hispanic girl on campus, and sometimes thought the buildings he was in would burst into flames. Finally, his theories and research took over his world; it was as if he was trapping himself within it.
Ignacio was unaware of his own decline, of course. He felt it was a simple curiosity that needed to be wrangled by a well thought out plan. On scratch paper in his film studies class, he repeatedly scribbled the word plan. He felt this was what he needed to get answers and to relieve his mind of his maternal obsession. Even as the professor yelled at him to pay attention, he flipped the sheet of paper over in embarrassment, but when he looked down again he saw his backward writing through the thin sheet.
Ignacio realized that he could not devise a plan for answers while thinking outside of the box, as he’d previously assumed was the only choice. He had to be inside of the box, somehow.
This was where the line of sanity twisted. Eleven years after watching the tape labeled ‘Exhibit A’, it was clear that Ignacio Cheyez needed professional help. Ironically, he thought he was controlling his obsession by immersing himself within it, thus setting in motion his calculated efforts to get inside of the mental health care system. Not for the sake of his own rabbit hole, but to discover his mother’s. He wanted to be crazy so that he could see and understand her crazy – and he thought of his new efforts as Operation NALP. It made sense to him.
Getting “fake” treatment began with countless self-admissions for mental health care, and the resulting interviews with his college counselors. He discussed his VHS discovery and how it had ruined his world thereafter. Nightmares. Smoke. Blackouts. Burning moons. He expressed his one-word question that needed to be answered, no matter the cost, and he did it over and over again.
