The Bokeh Effect

Crime Fiction by J. Marquez Jr.

On Sunday, May 2, 1993, the stage curtains parted early in the morning. An uninvited Toyota Corolla with two bald heads inside demanded everyone’s attention like a maestro, when it screeched to a halt, blocking several parking stalls on the south side lot of Kellogg Park. The squealing of the tires that rubbed against the asphalt lost several thousandths-of-an-inch of rubber as they played the role of the maestro’s tap. Tap, tap, tap. The barrel of a shotgun made its onstage appearance and prepared the audience for an outstanding performance with a click. Mothers ran for their children who played on the playground clueless of the upcoming concerto. One unfortunate mother of two found herself choosing which child to protect. The rumble of the shotgun shortly initiated the show.

***

Five-year-old Xavier, who went by The X-Man, lived two blocks away from Kellogg Park, which made him a regular. In fact, after the summer, he was prearranged to attend the neighboring Kellogg Elementary School. May 2, 1993, began no different than any other day at the park for The X-Man. After making the usual two-block walk to the park, with his mother’s permission, The X-Man unleashed all his energy and ran toward the playground surrounded by a moat of sand. His wheel o’ feet spun like The Roadrunner’s feet. Yards away from the merry-go-round, The X-Man stopped to an audial freight train of booms connected by clicks. They were suddenly followed by a strong invisible push.

Magneto! The X-Man thought as his body took flight across the park.

“Xavier!” He heard his mother scream from what appeared to be miles away.

The X-Man landed forty feet away, tears formed puddles under his eyes and threatened to spill. His heart raced with The Roadrunner’s wheel o’ feet and an excruciating pain abruptly appeared that taunted his threatening tears. It burned through his shoulder. The X-Man began to lose consciousness to the sound of screaming mothers who ran circles around him. The last thing he consciously observed was how the merry-go-round gently spun to the breeze. The last thing he heard was his mother’s screams. On May 2, 1993, instinct became artwork by creating The Bokeh Effect and placing a horrible memory deep in the background of the X-Man’s next twenty-seven years.

***

The drive-by shooting that took Xavier’s right arm was one of many gang-related drive-by shootings that took place in the small City Of Pomona, California, in 1993. Out of the many shootings, this incident was one of several dozens that took place in a park. And out of the several dozen shootings that took place in a park, Xavier’s disconnection was one of a handful that involved an innocent child getting shot. Fortunately for Xavier, if one is of an optimistic nature, as opposed to the rest of the handful of incidents, all he lost was an arm and approximately forty-eight hours of memory, not his life.

***

On September 13, 2020, in the midst of King Covid’s reign, the tyrant who took thousands of people, including his mother, thirty-two-year-old Xavier finally got back the snippet of memory he lost in 1993. The recovery knocked him figuratively forty feet back like the 12-gauge slug had when he was five years old. The X-man sat in the living room of his mother’s home in Pomona, two blocks away from Kellogg Park. It’d been many years since he’d gone by The X-Man. He was just Xavier to his wife and friends. And to his 4-year old-son, Xavier Junior, he was simply daddy.

Xavier figured that this sudden recovery of memory was somehow connected to the grief of losing his mother. He’d come back to bury his mother and to deal with her finances, not to be punched in the face. But it happened. Xavier got punched in the face by a suppressed memory.

“What’s wrong, honey?” Arlene asked from across the room. She walked a few steps toward him.

“It’s nothing, baby.”

“Don’t give me that. You look like you were suddenly punched in the gut,” she said as she came around the couch he was sitting on and put an arm around him.

It was actually the face not the gut, Xavier thought but didn’t say.

“This has something to do with the incident, doesn’t it?” Arlene continued.

The incident was how he’d labeled the forty-eight hours of memory he’d lost at the park twenty-seven years ago.

“Yes,” Xavier looked down the hallway that led to his childhood bedroom. He heard Junior rumbling around somewhere in the shadow. “The memory hit me like a freight train. After years of silence, my memory decided to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

“It’s fine, baby.” Xavier stretched his remaining arm.

Junior suddenly appeared from out of a shadow. “Psst, psst, psst,” he said, waving a Spiderman action figure in hand from left to right. “Let’s play toys, daddy.”

“Hold your horses, partner,” Arlene turned toward her son. “Daddy and I are talking.”

Junior ran back into the shadow. “Okay, mommy,” he said as he wildly swung the Spiderman around in the air. “Psst, psst…”

Xavier and Arlene took a brief moment of silence. Xavier remembered going by the X-Man when he was Junior’s age in another life time. How he’d loved to play the role of Professor X fighting against Magneto and his band of villainous mutant friends. He remembered going to the park with his mother innumerable times, almost every day. Then the horrific event that took his right arm happened. On top of the grief for losing his mom, he suddenly felt a pang of sadness and guilt for Junior. It wasn’t fair to prevent his son from taking him to parks and other places where children were suppose to be children due to a terrible experience he was destined to live through. Yet, Xavier did. He took away that privilege from Junior, and in turn, robbed him from a large chunk of childhood. So getting back a suppressed memory was kind of like making a step in the right direction.  

“In a way I need this. It’s like finding closure to an incomplete book series. I can further understand certain things.” He said as he looked at the hallway shadows his son had disappeared into. They heard Junior and Spiderman team up against some unknown super villain.

“This specific snippet of my life has been dormant in the background of my memory,” Xavier continued.  “It created a…a…”

“Bokeh Effect.” Arlene cut in.

“Exactly,” Xavier looked at his wife. “Wow. You remember that from Photo Shop?”

“Of course, honey,” she said from behind him, her arm gently wrapped around him and over his shoulders. “The Bokeh Effect is a photographer’s trick that blurs out the background in the picture he or she is taking, in order to accentuate the focal object or person—not quite erasing the background because it’s still there, just camouflaging it. It’s quite a neat trick and a useful tool in the photo world.”

Arlene and Xavier had met in Photoshop class on their sophomore year in Cal Poly Pomona many years ago. Although neither pursued a career in photography, they both held a soft spot for it. If it wasn’t for their special interest in photography back then, they would have probably never met. 

Arlene continued, “you see, I ‘member.”

Xavier also remembered. In fact, he’d been forced to experience The Bokeh Effect at the early age of five without his consent. And for years, he’d lived in a picture restrained by a blur in the background. It took twenty-seven years of dormancy for The Bokeh Effect to finally wake, rise and say, what’s up, X-man? I’ve been in the back of your mind for over two decades. I’m not going anywhere. What you gonna do? If that wasn’t a challenge, then what was? After twenty-seven years of being pushed around by a terrible event, the time had come for Xavier to push back. It’d been years since he’d set foot in a park. But enough was enough. If not for his sake, then for his son’s. So when the Bokeh Effect came out swinging out of a darkness thickened by years of seclusion and asked, what you gonna do, Xavier swung back with fury in response.

“Baby, I’m going to the park,” he announced with new confidence. “I believe it’s time for me to face whatever I need to face.”

He turned to Arlene. His wife pressed her lips tight and formed the crease on her chin that always appeared when she was reserving her thoughts. But Xavier knew what she was thinking. 

“Baby, I need this. You need this. And so does Junior,” he explained. “It’s not fair. Junior does not know what a swing is. A slide. The fair. The beach. Disneyland. How long will it be?”

“But, honey…”

“We can’t go on like this forever. The opportunity has presented itself. I need to take it.”

Afraid of what her husband was about to do, Arlene walked around the couch and knelt before him.

“I get it, honey, but must it be here? In Pomona? And does it have to be today? I know the whole state is on mandatory lockdown but do you think that stops the neighborhood gangs from their mischief? They don’t care.”

“It’ll be fine, baby, trust me. After the governor initiated the war on gangs with zero-tolerance laws against gang-related crimes and distributed heavier penalties on gang members, the City Of Pomona has been clean. How long has it been since the last drive-by? Two years?”

Xavier held her chin and locked eyes with her.

“Look, today we take our first step toward a thousand-mile journey.”

She held on to the connection between their eyes. The crease on her chin frowned briefly, then disappeared.

“Well, okay, but I’m going with you.You have no say-so on this one” she said. “Deal?”

He kissed her forehead and said, “deal.”

On that note, Xavier stood up with a newborn view of the crazy world he’d lived in. The morning sun peaked a look from behind his heart and lit up the past twenty-seven years of his life that hadn’t seen a ray of daylight.

He called his son who ran out of that shadow he kept disappearing into. Seconds later, Xavier, Arlene and Junior made their first step toward a thousand-mile journey that began with two short blocks to Kellogg Park.

On September 13, 2020, in the shadow of his mom’s death and the company of his beloved wife and son, Xavier made the same two-block walk to Kellogg Park he’d made with his mother once. The background images in the picture his life photographed and blurred twenty-seven years ago were an array of iridescent clarity. Xavier was well on his journey to a world where all doubts, fears and insecurities would be kept blurred in the background. And somewhere deep in that background is where he’d keep them. From that point on, Xavier would be in total control.

The streets were empty due to California’s state-mandated lockdown, a weak attempt against the war on King Covid. When they arrived, Junior saw the island of playground equipment for the first time in his life. He looked up at his mom and dad with a crescent for a mouth. He detached himself from them with their nod of approval, and ran, exponentially picking up speed by the second. His little feet soon became a blur like The Roadrunner’s wheel o’ feet. A slide awaited him. A dangling bridge. The monkey-bars. A set of swings. And by the looks of it, they were all for him alone. Kellogg Park was a ghost town.

From two feet…ten feet…forty feet…no, one-hundred feet behind, Xavier and Arlene watched their son experience the friendship a child makes with a park’s playground equipment. Xavier was about to say something to his wife but the screeching tires of a nearby vehicle interrupted him. An uninvited Toyota Corolla made an appearance and cut the sharp turn from Lancer Avenue to Medina Street at a higher speed than the one suggested by the City Of Pomona. Two bald heads peaked from inside. One held a small handgun. Xavier screamed his son’s name and abruptly took flight. Arlene stared at her husband in terror. Xavier had not yet made it to his son when he realized that the popping of the handgun never pierced the silence of the morning. Arlene looked up, her pounding heart restrained by the clutches of her windpipe. The Toyota Corolla was actually a Ford Taurus and the two bald heads where a couple—both with full sets of hair. The handgun was actually a phone the passenger held as she presumably yelled instructions to the driver. The couple never slowed down. Instead, they kept driving to their unknown destination, clueless of the commotion they had caused. Xavier and Arlene simultaneously looked at each other and exploded with laughter. They never heard the popping sound of a handgun nor the booming sound of a shotgun because nothing other than a pleasant time at Kellogg Park happened that day.

The X-Man had finally defeated The Bokeh Effect.

---

Bio: J. Marquez Jr. was born and raised in the jungles of Los Angeles. He is a true enthusiast of rock music and 80’s-era graffiti art. His poems and short stories have thorns, which The Literary Hatchet and The Yard: Crime Blog handle with extreme caution on occasion. To learn more about him—it is unclear why anybody would want to—one can read the biographical and illustrated stories tattooed up and down his arms and across his chest.

Read more Hard Life Fiction on The Yard: Crime Blog

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