The Punisher
Mike Smith
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It is a testament to the power of words that terrifying true-life events can be made wondrous or manageable or even humorous, simply by converting those events into phonetic units of language—into lines and blocks of black on white symbols.
Truman Capote took the horrifying murders of a Kansas farm family, and wrote them into In Cold Blood, a book of undeniable beauty. Carl Sagan took the universe in all its unfathomable complexity and wrote Cosmos, a book that helps readers begin to comprehend and celebrate the vastness of what is. And John Kennedy Toole took his intense feelings of depression and alienation and somehow wrote A Confederacy of Dunces, a comic masterpiece.
Words are amazing like that. They transform the way we perceive events, people, and places. See the West, then read a Cormac McCarthy description of what you just saw, and then see it again, anew. Words can be transformative, and yet with that power come limitations.
Words change things. Merely by describing something, that something is in a way reduced, contained, simplified, altered. A good writer can make the experience of reading about something feel very close to the experience of living it—for instance, read James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men for a vivid idea of life as a poor white tenant farmer in the 1930s—but something also almost inevitably gets lost in the process. In certain hands, or for certain effects, dramatic facts and events put into words can come out sounding mundane. Expressions of heartfelt love written down can seem maudlin or sappy. And situations brimful of absolutely terror can, once reduced to lines on a page, seem laughable.
Take for example, an incident from the police report of the July 3, 2008 issue of Espanola’s Rio Grande Sun. It reads:
Thursday, June 19
• 12:34 a.m. — Dispatchers received multiple calls from Las Lomas Apartments residents who said a man was yelling "the punisher" and kicking a woman's door. He was gone when police arrived.
It’s funny.
But a large part of this item’s humor is due to words. Here it is, a single paragraph, a couple of sentences, a collection of morphemes and phonemes strung together in a language we can understand, in a way that allows us to assemble a mental picture of this unusual occurrence. But without that reduction, without that diminishing and that packaging, without taking that actual event and paring it down to something so manageable as the formal anecdote above, that really must have been one hellaciously frightening experience. Like: terrifying. Like: the freakiest thing ever.
There you are, a woman alone in your Española apartment, in a town that, judging by its police blotters, is already no stranger to crime. You’re alone, when suddenly, someone begins bashing away at your door, kicking at it, violently shaking it in its frame, on its hinges, rattling the doorknob. The stranger is relentless, and he wants to come inside, bad. He attacks the door, and he attacks the door, and as he attacks, he yells.
“The punisher! The punisher, the punisher! The punisher!”
He is deranged and ridiculous, and he is going to bash at your door until it breaks, until he comes stumbling across your doorstep in a blur of splintering wood and lunacy and his own fists, until he comes reeling across the linoleum toward you. His shouts are nonsensical, but all the more terrifying for their idiocy.
“The punisher, the punisher! The punisher, the punisher!”
When the police sirens finally sound in the distance, and the kicking and the crazed shouting finally turn into silence, the man slips away. Perhaps he’ll be back later. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a month. Maybe in a year. You will always have to worry about it. Or you’ll have to move.
To the woman in the story, to the one person who has endured this event as a reality, the police account of the event no doubt lacks almost all humor. To her, this event is no doubt an experience she is grateful to have survived, a terrifying and unpleasant ordeal that will forever make her heart race when she recalls it.
Only the rest of us, distanced as we are from the event by its encapsulation into words, will ever be able to just read about it, to imagine the crazy man at the door, and to laugh and laugh and laugh.
“The punisher, the punisher! The punisher, the punisher!”
And to laugh and laugh and laugh some more.
And laugh.
—Mike Smith
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