The mother of Ajax Breedlove regretted her call to the police just as the receiver picked up, but by that point, she might as well have already pulled the trigger. The floral pattern of a gun wound glows in Miami’s midday sun, and this blossom was one of its brightest. I was there when Ajax broke past the front door of his family’s stucco house and onto the highway merger, right before the passerby merge toward Jackson Memorial, and I watched him rustle over some dilated fence and waist-high hedges – his eyes were bloodshot and he was definitely tweaking – before he collapsed in dehydration by the summer heat beneath his mother’s calving pistol shot. But Ajax had worked himself into a sprint most fearful out of his mother’s fire, only to avoid the pursuit of yet another potbelly pig who stopped by to check in on the boy’s drugged, dilapidated ass. Months of Chancla by the mouthful had run its course, and a mother was left to clean the sheets the only way one could at that age, by breaking them with force.

Ajax may have been a boy, but he was not a clean boy. His mother tried hard to steer the boy, but how many times can you baptize a sinner before you accept that their birth has nothing to do with it? If only his sins were not so material, but Ajax was born to be an addict, and he carried out his role dutifully, the way a tourist to South Beach must burn bright red by nightfall. Each and every morning in our school systems, the delinquents and derelicts of Miami-Dade would trade in substances petty and contraband, but most recent among them was the hyper-hallucinogen known as Chancla, a drug that hits you so hard, you’d have sworn it was your mother’s own shoe that was thrown at the base of your skull. Originally concocted by chemists on a Thai travel forum, Chancla found a consumer base among the Russian émigré of Aventura, who wanted to feel something from the depths of their opioid stupor. It didn’t matter how much you threw up after your first dose, or even with how much fear your heart seized and begged freedom, you were chemically hooked, the withdrawals beginning with hypothermia in the Florida heat and ending with the liquification of your liver within the year. You took the drug in your drink of your choice each morning, noon, and night – Ajax paired his Chancla with the alcoholic energy drink, Four Loko, which our schools sold in their vending machines well into the new decade – and the effect Chancla had on your average student was a pair of bloodshot eyes, a propensity to punch strangers, and an insatiable sexual appetite. Not that Ajax or any local teen hadn’t already exhibited such symptoms. I should know, I sat behind him in four of my classes, rode the same bus as him, and lived across the street from the spot where I murdered a cop before his hoof could clop the mother who had just murdered her only son. We live in a noisy neighborhood.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Yeah, I knew him well, since first grade in fact. Ajax was already predisposed to an audible, oral fixation. When rubber erasers were handed out before our bimonthly standardized tests, Ajax would hog the rubber and chew on whole handfuls, guzzling the fibrous pink just as heartily and just as often as he throated his many suitors in the stairwell beside the band hall. He preferred the boys’ basketball and womens’ soccer teams, whose sweat he inhaled deeply while he maintained eye contact. Not that such a thing was a secret to me or anyone else, because every other week or so, the many lovers of Ajax would simply announce their satisfaction over the intercom. “It was just a prank, you know we wouldn’t do a thing like that,” one would say with the deep laughter of satisfaction reverberating down our hallways. All this to protect Ajax, who was – despite being a mediocre young man, with next to no ambition in life, or his tasting of classmates and pocketing some decent percent of his mother’s monthly earnings each week – a sweet boy. He always opened doors for older women and elderly, and even one summer taught swim lessons to handicapped children (he might have only signed up to get closer to my best friend’s behind, but still). Ajax cared after his appearance, his hair finely faded in the summer and oiled lush in the colder months, his earrings almost unnoticeable, which only made them shine brighter, although they too might have been bought using his mother’s cashed checks.

“Young children could never have done such a thing when I was growing up,” said one neighbor after the event, “well, they might have wanted to, but that changed for sure when those cash loan stores invaded the whole damn state.”

It was no coincidence that across the street from the high school Ajax attended, there stood one such establishment, where you could cash your checks on a loan and with interest. Pure theft, paid for by a state who sponsored that leisure suit larceny, like a rewards system for Florida’s prison systems, as many as the billboards along Sunset Drive. It wasn’t that Ajax wanted to hurt his mother, who worked extra hours to keep her baby happy, it’s just that he was never taught shame. Ajax wasn’t so much a symptom of the failed state of things, so much as its intended result. But don’t poor results deserve sunlight, too? Dutifully chewing his pink cud, failing out of classes and falling into the arms of whichever women would eventually bear him children, just as his mother welcomed a semi-pro athlete into her life, a life chewed over only to bear younger rubber-sucking parents, for the sole purpose of cashing checks until all South Florida was a checking sinkhole. But why did you need to know any of this? You probably know an Ajax already, and may have some passing, touching familiarity with them as if they were the town drunk. It helps to understand who Ajax was and was not to illustrate just how normal this behavior really was in his life, even before the boy fell into an even stranger addiction. Ajax knew how to tell just the perfect jokes to break ice at our afterschool parties. He knew no one deserved to feel lonely.

It could never be said publicly, for fear of immediate and exacting legal retribution, but while everyone knows that divers are the worst people, most remain unaware of the fact that each and every single drug dealer in a South Florida public school is a winning player on that school’s baseball team. While I could not see the transaction from beside the campus swimming pool, I had caught sight of a shadow in the image of Ajax sauntering to and from the pits, wiping his mouth with the opening of each wrist upon his exit. Who knows if Ajax comprehended his fate in that moment, whether he even knew just what toxin had been administered. By the most conservative efforts in South Florida, one estimates that one in three hundred children will overdose as a result of Chancla. By the time I graduated, I knew of seven peers who passed before their eighteenth birthday.

Oh, to know a Ne’er-do-well and watch them descend somehow further. It happened over springtime, just as temperatures rose into a pitch of sweat you couldn’t dry at the base of your neck. What are you supposed to feel when you’ve come to know and understand someone for who they are, with all their flaws as whole to them as the color of their irises, only to watch their behavior fracture like the flowering of a burst blood vessel? He refused to take off his shades from some point before spring break, even when his teachers threatened to fail him on what few grades he had managed previously. Finally, some shame, and for what. What are you supposed to feel for the boy you once knew, in all his arrogance and charm, watch him lose an appetite for all the things that made him smile? Even the many lovers he once swallowed whole avoided him like the coming plague. I watched a young man who once carefully manicured his body in the image of his truest, hungriest self, lose all effort to the tufting of hair in neglect, the pallor of insomnia, the twitch of withdrawal. What was I supposed to do in the face of my peer’s decomposition?

One week before his death, I noticed drops of red on the boy’s desk and saw the mechanical chewing of his cud, typical Ajax. But then, I realized with a start that our school’s erasers had not been passed out yet. What was Ajax chewing on? I asked myself, but I didn’t have to wait long to be answered, because from his mouth Ajax plucked and unrolled a solid, squishy wad of whitened matter, which proceeded to wet his desk further with what couldn’t have been, but what in truth was blood, his blood, and then I sank into the realization that Ajax had begun to chew apart the linings of his own body, to cannibalize on his own mouth, only to discard the necrotic flesh into the trash can as we left class. I was left gagging, stumbling to the nearest bathroom, vomiting on his behalf, and pulling my face up and into the mirror to ask someone other than myself, when is this going to end?

No mother looks forward to their son’s adolescence. Maybe the memories of tucking their sweet, softened boys to bed in toddlerdom helps them break the semen-crusted duvet later on, but who would have the heart to prepare you for that? Ajax’s mother felt like she had lived without a name since he turned ten, but that was neither here nor there when it came to her daily life. She loved to see him smile, and would often remember in the depths of her graveyard shift at Jackson Memorial his tenderness, the many times she felt her own covers being drawn about her neck before the temperature was lowered for her comfort. She barely saw the boy, and he was never that impressive, but that didn’t matter when she compared his sweetness to the whole world, was it? Even if we only shared classrooms all our years, even I could see that, so even if he did not deserve the grandeur for genius, he still deserved something pure at home, didn’t he? Maybe that’s why she didn’t notice his addiction, because he carried on in his doting duties even to the last week of his life. He always took a bit of money, maybe he just needed that much more the past year. She reasoned that he had finally found someone worthy of his companionship. It wasn’t her business what he did with his body, Ajax had been given the talk at the age of twelve, handed a pack of condoms and the entire Prince discography, and sent on his way. Of course things felt different, not like you or I could reasonably measure changes in a teenage boy. But the sad fact is that while his mother wanted to ask these questions just as much as I do now, she had simply been run too tired by the rest of her life to pay attention. She had done the best she could, with what little time and what decreasing funds she had (Chancla had diminishing returns by design, after all). Maybe she had ignored the early signs, stopped drawing comparisons between her son and the young adults whose still-breathing corpses had been dropped at the entrance to her ER. No one deserves to draw a line between two points so clear and as violet as the shade of bruises upon her son and her patients’ chests.

It took what soul persisted in the shell of Ajax to finally ask for help. Some people from around the block said Ajax only asked when he did, simply because he could never hope to afford Chancla again, and the convenience of assisted-suicide was a far better alternative to the continual and graying rot of his body from the inside out. Others who knew Ajax better, including his many former athletic partners or even the cop-killers like me, liked to say that it was the child trapped in the prison of such mortifying decomposition, like a child submerged in a sand castle of their own flesh, that Ajax found consciousness in his last moments of life the same way that we all will and do each death we face, and it was in those noble seconds of clarity that he reached down from his bed and texted, with the effort of moving the two still-functioning fingers he had, just three simple words: kill me, mommy.

And that’s as much as anyone could gather from the facts available in the seventeen or so hours between that message sent and the subsequent sprint of Ajax from his house and onto the street where he was shot in the head. His mother had been at work for thirteen of those hours, had she seen the message at any point before the end of her shift? Her supervisor, a nurse practitioner some several decades younger, noted that she had never seen the woman wield such compassion in the emergency room that day. There are some who wondered aloud what kind of mother could see such a message and continue on with their job. Why not leave early, if the reason you worked yourself to exhaustion each day was dying at home? But most people have never had to detach themselves the way a healthcare provider must to relieve your pains. A body is a body, and you must treat the patients in the order they arrive. Either she hadn’t seen the message until just four hours prior to the death of Ajax, or she had simply known what to do from the start, and spent the day with the hermeneutic values befitting our most capacious saints. Fine, call it denial, but let’s see you face the end of your life with any better decision. The patient was in pain after all, what else had she sworn her oath for, if not to ease his suffering?

In another life, his mother could afford the rehab afforded to his classmates. For many of the south Floridian children of bankers and bureaucrats, addiction was the tropical malady, one of many purging mechanisms in a young adult’s life to turn a future, feverish revolutionary into a comfortable and content suburbanite, cured from the deep-seated empathy of their childhood. In another world, the rehabilitation centers of Miami would open their doors to a childlike Ajax, whose only sin was bearing the new mark of Cain, poor credit. But the children never learn their lesson before the freefall into a security net. Never in a world like ours, that net wearing thinner and wider with each generation. Maybe there is some stable care we could provide someone struck by Chancla, but a recent city commission voted against using public funds, because the urban planners who populate our local governments can afford survival. Should you want to change the world, all you can do is view the body like a failing engine, pouring in chemicals and taping on adhesives in the hope something will fix. You think about this daily when you work in patientcare.

There were no records of either Ajax or his mother purchasing a gun at any point in their lives, but that’s par the course for any gunshot in South Florida, so let’s not focus on the logistics at this point. What matters is that Ajax was simply the last patient in a long line of patients in his mother’s career, someone she chose to see clearly for what he was, a person with a body that would not stop failing them, succumbing faster to its eventual death than modern science could hope to treat. There’s only so much another human being can do to prevent the natural decline of life. To care for someone’s health is to sustain that life, but to care for the patient is to keep their spiritual health intact, even as the body depletes itself. That’s what triage and hospice care are meant for, aren’t they? Someone has to look at our bodies at their most frail, at their most incapable, and understand whether the world has enough resources to sustain this body long enough that it can be led, step by unstable step, towards some form of recovery. And what if we find ourselves just like Ajax, who probably saw his own form in the refracted light of his broken mirror, and could not cohere from those fragments any image he could call his own? It takes a certain kind of healthcare to recognize the human right to self-destruct. If only we can all be so fortunate, to recognize our bodies fading before us, and to happily accept our end. Imagine the sudden ease of it all, to prop ourselves like Ajax against the wall of our final arena, and to send a message to someone outside yourself that they, too, must accept your life for what it is, finished. Maybe that’s all Ajax wanted to send, as naïve and scared as he must have been.

But if all that were true, then it would seem to run completely against the verifiable fact that Ajax fled his house with all the strength his remaining adrenaline reserves could provide. We know that Ajax sent his mother a cry for help, that his mother answered as soon as her work allowed (she was a nurse during the plague years, after all). We know from non-consensual surveillance footage that in just under ten minutes, his mother arrived from work and Ajax leapt from home, with the momentum of what started as a sprint soon becoming a childlike crawl. This discrepancy raised many questions, popular among them the dimwitted suspicion of conspiracy. The answer is actually simple to understand, you just have to see the world with Ajax’s face worn above yours, closer than a mask. He might have felt the bravery to end his suffering in one moment, but what about when his mother arrived home? It doesn’t take much effort to ask yourself how you would feel if you heard your mother arrive home, the sound of her bags settled by the door, the creak of your door slightly ajar –  just like she used to peer inside when you were but an infant in your own room for the first time – and finally the sight of her as you struggle to look upon her face, and for her to turn her face away as she places before you the barrel of a gun. It doesn’t matter if she promises that she always loved you or that there will be no more pain, that mommy’s here, or even the dutiful promise that no one will see you like this, something you want more than to live one day longer, and all these things can make sense in your soul, but the body you exist in displays one final, primal will to live. Like a wolf might chew through the leg caught in a trap, Ajax slammed his head against the outer grating of his porch door on his way out, the impact sloshing his brain with the sound you might hear throwing a bag of compost. Having reached its final, ripened act, the drug melted him in the afternoon heat.

There were cries for help, certainly, but they were hushed by locals who knew better than to summon some infernal sow who could only carry out the devil’s work. People in pain rarely react toward the cause of their suffering, choosing instead with all their blind terror to languish in the dark. What matters is what I saw and understood, the look of a mother upon her child’s crumpled face, the seconds of her palm against the underside of his blubbering jaw which stretched for all the lifetimes they both deserved, before she pressed the muzzle against the one portion of his skull that no one could survive. I don’t want to think about what she must have seen, although a quick visit to your local Miami morgue can give you plenty of imagery to draw from. I refuse to say the name of his mother, because in those final moments of his life, all I know for sure is that Ajax had been loved, and maybe just a little spoiled, by a mother who had chosen each day to work harder to nourish an even bigger child. No one wants to imagine how a coffin could hold their baby. That’s why I like to think that when Ajax melted beneath the ivory sun of May, his mother did not see the brain matter as it leaked from his milky skull, or how his bonemeal had been reduced to a blubbery mucus the texture of frying bacon. You can learn a lot about a peaceful death by the injuries we sustain every day. I know that his mother did not see what South Florida had done to her child, she just saw her baby in the bathtub, in need of careful rinsing. That’s not a sickly body, just a soul in need of cleaning – come here, she says, let me rinse all the dirt from your pretty face, massage your scalp with these suds, you can even blow your nose in the water to make bubbles, just like that, now let me douse your face just a little longer, hold your breath, my baby. I didn’t hear the gunshot so much as I saw the world react to it. Such noise for such a quiet mercy.

But a cop born three blocks from the epicenter of crime still could not comprehend what they had seen, because they are given a gun to solve problems that you simply cannot undo with more bloodshed. Look at how the mother holds her son’s head in the nook of her arm, like a deflated football, or any other object to distract you from what she actually held, honestly. What the cop saw was a murderer, because the cop can only see the world in terms of what they are paid to achieve by their handlers. In our migraine of a Miami, violence is paid in kind with violence of an even more disquieting intent. It was only a matter of time before another gunshot rang through the halls of our swamp, but who was it going to come from? I caught the officer in the middle of his effort to dress properly, as he adjusted his badge, turned on his camera, and lifted the barrel just a few paces behind the grieving mother. She must have known there would be nothing left for her but needless retribution – she had killed her only son after all. Where was the logic in murdering a woman clearly in the throes of the deepest, truest love one human can give another? The downcast of afternoon was fast approaching from the intercoastal, the subtle quiet of rainfall just minutes away from our neighborhood, but all I could feel was the sunburn on my neck as I wondered what could be done. I withdrew my own pistol, the same pistol I store in my backpack each day before class, and aimed without a second thought.

There are many ways you can describe the sun in South Florida. If you’re not from here, you talk about its blinding heat, while the locals prefer to express their days by the constant sense of heat stroke pervading our people. Have you ever felt the cold chill of heat stroke, which erupts from the base of your brain and travels towards the tips of each limb? If you have, you may understand the impossibility of giving any moment in South Florida the sense of right or wrong. At what point between the birth and death of Ajax was there a right decision, when every instance we spend alive feels wrong from the start? And if nothing can make sense in these lives born out of such wrongness, then what’s just one more bullet, if only to let a mother smile just one second more? I don’t know where his mother went after Ajax dissolved into the street, but I still place flowers on the spot to this day. It’s only so much for children to consider.

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Zachary Issenberg is a writer from Miami. You can find his writing at 3:AM, Propagule, Bookforum, and LARB.