from my Hephaistos dissertation journal, 2003 

“There’s a guy following us,” says Kenton. I don’t look back. We’re already walking fast along the boulevard. It’s about midnight, and no one else is around. Who knows why this guy is here, but there’s only one of him and two of us. And anyone can tell we’re in good shape from the way our feet connect solidly with the ground.

Kenton has not conveyed urgency. But we speed up. We’re getting close to the corner of the street that leads into our friends’ “transitional” Atlanta neighborhood. There are no shops here, just a closed-up auto mechanic’s garage fronted by cracked asphalt pavement with a few weeds poking up, making an open space at the street corner. On the corner across from that is the school property, fenced in, and deeply surrounded by tall trees, the buildings well back from the street, invisible. Across the street is a continuous chain-link fence and a blank concrete berm rising up to the elevated light rail MARTA tracks that run parallel. There are no lights and no cars.

We turn the corner, leaving the cement sidewalk for the street. As we turn, I can finally see out of the corner of my eye the figure of the man who has been following us. He’s running, and as he telescopes toward us he yells that he’s got a knife.

We have both swiveled like a gate on a hinge to face him. I notice that he has full cheeks, he’s stocky, maybe Kenton’s six-foot height. He wears dark clothes, and he’s black. Part of the night is gaining form and rushing at us. There is one thought in my mind, forming in slow motion: “This is it.”

Now things occur in rapid motion, a blur. The rushing man grabs me, by my daypack strap or my arm, I have no idea which, and we rotate centrifugally. His knife arm raised, he threatens Kenton that he is going to hurt me. I don’t know if I say it out loud, but I’m filled up with NO, like a donkey straining against a bridle. I back up and twist and, breaking free, I have the sense that I have forced him to let go out of sheer force of will.

In dreams, I’ve tried to scream and couldn’t make a sound. Not so now. I’m screaming with intent, and I can hear Kenton screaming too, trying to raise attention, from someone, somewhere in the houses nearby. Straining, I’m trying to push out all the sound I can, alternating the loudest scream I can make with “Help!” Scream-Help! Scream-Help! Scream-Help! The best thing to do is run, to get out of the way. I know it will be best for Kenton, who is somewhere behind me, with the man between us, not to have to worry about where I am now. For a moment it’s back to slow motion as I struggle to run—it shouldn’t feel this slow. Fifty yards down the street, I look back, and see Kenton, his back on the pavement, knees and arms raised, to protect himself, the dark man leaning over him. I have the fleeting thought that that could be the last time I see him alive. I stop thinking, turn my head and keep running, screaming for help.

The school property on my left is endless. The first house on the right has lights on but I know from passing it this morning that it has a lock-box on it—for sale, empty. It’s only now that I start to feel something like panic. The next house is dark, but with a porch light on. I consciously register this light only as I bang on the door, still screaming, and I begin to see that I am bloodying the glass with blossoms of vermilion. I did not know I was cut.

In graduate school I was attracted to write my disseration on the Greek blacksmith god, Hephaistos. The wounded god of fire chose me, I felt, rather than the other way around. I didn’t even know his name before I came to study myth and depth psychology. Kenton said, “Be careful who you invite home!” Hephaistos and all blacksmith gods image a profoundly ambivalent archetype. They are gods of both hot chaos and cool order, intimate with the white-hot flow of molten iron as well as its rigidity when cold.  Poets of Ogun, Hephaistos’s African brother god, who is still actively worshipped in the African diaspora orisa religions, priase the god with both affection and healthy fear. In Yoruba-land, Ogun is the god of metal, accidents, technology, cutting, circumcision, medicine scars and tribal marks. Ogun’s marks make humans know who we are. We and others can read our landmarks of scars, identify our corpses as belonging to this tribe or that.

After what seems like an eternity, lights go on in the house as I continue to hammer the bloody door. A young man opens it, two women peering around from behind him to see who is there. They take me into the house and after I croak out what is happening, the young man calls the police. One of the women produces a towel for me to wrap my hand in, and wants me to sit down. I do, on the hardwood floor, trying to avoid bleeding on the carpet in the center of the room. I try to explain more, and am now feeling intense anxiety about Kenton. The young man goes out onto the porch to see, a neighbor is arriving from across the street, and Kenton lopes into the yard. The people pull both of us back into the house and we sink against the wall and onto the floor side by side. The neighbor, seeing that Kenton’s hand is badly gashed, takes off his shirt and crouches to stanch the blood until the ambulance arrives. These people are angels. Kenton seems barely aware of the tremendous gash in his face. The sliced skin pouches open. I don’t want to him to see what this looks like. My hand is not as bad. I can simply hold it up, wrapped in a towel, to control the bleeding. I don’t want to look at it. We are both artists, both right-handed, and we have both been slashed in the right hand.

Kenton thinks the man was wielding a box cutter. That would explain the cleanness of the slash on his face, which curves upward from his jaw to where his glasses stopped it entering his eye. Although the cut in his hand was so long and deep that the plastic surgeon put his entire finger into it up to the first joint to probe for anything that would injure him once it was sewed, no tendons were involved, and very little nerve damage. One of my finger tendons was cut, and I had to have surgery to reattach it. I wore a cast for twelve weeks and underwent physical therapy. My finger is crooked now, but works, and it’s strong. Kenton’s scar looks like a duelling scar, that ladies from two-centuries ago Vienna might have swooned over, deliciously. Some people think it’s rather elegant.

We both have scars, the visible traces of wounds from the event. I brought home the fiery gods of blades and fateful injury. We are marked, and have a different feeling about the archetype of the wounded maker gods. The most important thing has been that the story is ours. Sometime during the night that we waited in the emergency hospital room for the hot-shit surgeon to show up and do his magic with more metal implements, Kenton reminded me that we had to decide how we would re-myth ourselves—as victims or as something else. From that moment, neither of us has ever looked back to the victim option. We realize too that our story is powerful. Many friends expressed anger and hatred for the man who attacked us, and there are lots of explanations for why he might have done it. We could not identify him, and the police couldn’t find him, at least not that time. They all expressed real regret and sorrow that something like this should happen to visitors to their city. But we know that the story is ours. The man who attacked us has his own. We don’t know what it is, and we don’t need to.

And in more recent events, the archetype has made its presence felt. Lest we forget: we have not come to the end of this story, yet.