While the City Slept (12 page)

Another assessment was ordered by the court. While the deadline for the report approached, Isaiah moved in and out of several more schools. He ultimately graduated from Auburn Adventist Academy and began looking at colleges, including one well on the other side of the Cascade Mountain Range from his parents, an Adventist university in Walla Walla, Washington. That’s where Kayla Manteghi ended up going to college, and she remembers one day running into Isaiah on campus. It was a quick conversation. But, she said, “he seemed the same to me.” Isaiah attended only two quarters at Walla Walla University, the fall of 2003 and the winter of 2004.

—

In September 2003, the second report on Isaiah’s family was completed. As it was being prepared by the social worker, on an “expedited” basis, his father’s progress in domestic violence treatment and the respectful parenting class was evaluated. That progress was found wanting. Almost
a year after being ordered into these programs, Isaiah’s father had failed to do much more than complete one intake form, though he “did admit to pushing and grabbing the mother,” according to his domestic violence caseworker and therapist. Interviews with all the “minor children” in Isaiah’s family were also conducted for this second report from the social worker, but by now the “minor children” designation excluded Isaiah. He was eighteen, considered independent from the family that raised him, ready to exercise his free will in society at large.

Consequently, only Isaiah’s younger sister and brother were called in to Family Court for a session with the social worker. Isaiah’s younger brother, then nine years old, was interviewed first. He was noted to be relaxed, friendly, and dressed appropriately. He made good eye contact as he spoke about beginning a new school year, movies, and playing basketball. “When asked about his relationship with his mother,” the report states, “he told the evaluator, ‘She always listens to me and doesn’t get mad,’” although he did note she was making him do some chores, like folding clothes and doing the dishes. When asked about his relationship with his father, he said, “I wish he wouldn’t take things so seriously.” When asked what he meant, he said, “I don’t know, I just think he gets mad a lot and we always have to explain things to him.” He spoke of his parents’ fighting often before their separation, said his father had not been nice to his mother. When asked what three wishes he would like to have granted, he said, “To live in a house, for my parents to get along, and for me to have a happy life.” He also spoke of his older brother, Isaiah, and how Isaiah had just started college, which meant Isaiah was getting to live away from home in a dorm.

Isaiah’s younger sister, then eleven years old, was interviewed next. She, too, seemed relaxed and made good eye contact, though she spoke more softly than her younger brother. When asked what her parents’ separation had been like for her, she looked on the positive side. “It’s okay,” she said, “because before this my dad used to hit us sometimes.” When asked
for her three wishes, she said she wanted to continue living with her mother but also wanted to spend some time with her father and that she wished for her parents to stop fighting.

Seven years later, after much else had happened, and as another school year was beginning, Isaiah would have a chance to field a question about three wishes. By then, however, the context would be quite different. Isaiah’s first wish, he told a psychiatrist who was examining him at the request of his public defenders: “Not being in jail.” His second: “Perfect health.” His third wish: To become “smart enough to know what the best thing to wish for would be.”

I
n the fall of 2003, Isaiah was simply trying to make it through college. It proved difficult. It was not long after the social worker completed her assessment of his family back in Seattle that Isaiah dropped out of Walla Walla University. By the fall of 2004, he was attending Pierce College at Fort Steilacoom, a community college not far from the Tacoma home of his aunt, Rachel Kalebu. He didn’t get any further than two semesters.

That same year, a judge ordered Isaiah’s father, who was still working a well-compensated job as an engineer, to pay $1,000 a month support to his mother and to pay off Isaiah’s private high school tuition bills, one of which totaled $5,000. In the meantime, Isaiah’s mother was to apply for Social Security disability benefits. By the end of that year, Isaiah’s father had sent a letter, through his lawyer, telling Isaiah’s mother that he understood she’d been denied disability benefits. The letter told her to start looking for a job and keep him apprised.

In early 2005, Isaiah, now nineteen, was arrested, charged with misdemeanor theft, and then released after shoplifting two CDs from a Kmart that was a ten-minute drive from his aunt Rachel’s house. A couple months later, Isaiah’s parents were back in court arguing over money, including the tuition still owed to Isaiah’s private Adventist high schools. Isaiah’s father filed invoices from the schools that had notes at the top saying, “MUST BE PAID TO GET TRANSCRIPTS.” He told the court he couldn’t afford to pay until the financial support to Isaiah’s mother was
either decreased or ended. The court continued the requirement that Isaiah’s father pay support to Isaiah’s mother, in order to give her more time to appeal her disability denial. As a result, Isaiah’s transcripts were effectively held hostage to their continued disagreement.

Not too long after this, Isaiah was living with his mother and went with her to the grocery store. While shopping, Dr. Lymberis wrote, “he had a spontaneous, out-of-control episode of sobbing. His mother noted that ‘he was a mess.’” It is the first account of any outward expression of vulnerability that Dr. Lymberis could find. In that grocery store, Isaiah complained that his aunt and his father “were on him all the time” and that the lack of transcripts was hindering his attempts to return to college. “His mother knew Isaiah could not get his transcripts because his father had not paid the high school the past-due tuition of $5,000, but Isaiah was not saying that to her,” Dr. Lymberis wrote. “She also noted that Isaiah had applied to pilot school because no transcripts were needed for entrance to that school.” While he was crying, Isaiah’s mother told me, she noticed him “stammering, stuttering—and he never had a stuttering problem before.”

It’s unclear when, exactly, pilot school became a goal of Isaiah’s. Perhaps he’d remembered the pilot training program at Auburn Adventist, or maybe the roar from the airport runways near his mother’s latest apartment. Whatever the immediate motivation, he’d applied to learn to fly at a technical college, his childhood fascination with planes now an adult pursuit. Isaiah did well in his pilot training program, earning As and Bs, feeling hopeful. “That was his dream,” said his older sister, Deborah. “He loved it. He felt free. He just wanted to travel. Eventually, his goal was to make lots of money so he can build him a house on a island somewhere, and just live peaceful and free. That’s what he always used to tell me. That’s all he wanted. He loved the sky. And he would work. And I know that flight lessons are very expensive, and he would spend all of his money for those flight lessons, until he found out he was color-blind. And that destroyed everything.”

The flight school, at some point, had required Isaiah to take a vision test as part of his physical. Until then, not one person in Isaiah’s life had noticed his color blindness, including Isaiah. Now, in his early twenties, he learned that he would never be a pilot.

He had tried, by what will he had, to escape the fetters of his experience, only to find them still clinging, too tight for his resources. For Isaiah, this was a cataclysmic disappointment. “That’s where everything went downhill,” Deborah said. “That’s where it
starts.”

T
here is a fault that runs directly beneath this city. People ignore it and go on with their days, though it is widely known that if it were to slip, years of pressure cracking loose in an instant, much of the fill beneath Seattle’s industrial south could liquefy and revert toward its primeval disposition, muck washed around by tides. This same fault runs near the mouth of the Duwamish, perpendicular to the river’s flow. The last time it moved, land on one side of the fault jumped twenty feet, disrupting the river for a time, until its northward tendency—the tendency helpful to humans casting things out to sea, and to salmon seeking wider waters—carved out a new path. This fault will jump again, interrupting commerce, relationships, migrations. For all the modern science, for all the scans that have begun to show the hidden movements beneath observable events, this is all that is certain.

Much of Isaiah’s youth was spent on a hill above this crack in the earth. The home in which his parents fought was above it, and after the police came to the house on Elmgrove Street for his parents’ last brawl as husband and wife, after the home was foreclosed on by the bank amid divorce proceedings, after the Family Court social worker recommended counseling for Isaiah that never materialized, after Isaiah dropped out of two colleges and learned he was too color-blind to become a pilot, something was observed to be rising within the young man. It might well have been rising for some time.

All that is known for sure is that Isaiah remained bereft of helpful intervention, even as it became increasingly apparent that the part of him now surfacing needed assistance. He was an adult, not only in the eyes of his family, but also in the eyes of the law, and he was expected to contribute to society or face consequences. He was having trouble with both expectations. In 2006, he was pulled over for a broken taillight on a road not far from his aunt’s house. When the officer smelled pot, Isaiah was arrested, based on the law at the time, for illegal possession of marijuana. He was found to have a glass pipe and a few grams with him in the car, and he told his mother and sister he was using pot to quiet negative voices in his head. He bounced between their apartments and his aunt’s house and between something like twenty different jobs over two years, getting fired from places like Bel-R Greenhouse and Interstate Plastics. In court filings connected to his theft arrest, he’d listed his employer as “Abercrombie.”

During this period, Isaiah was sometimes described as a smart and dedicated worker. Other times he was described as disorganized, slow, sad, chronically tardy. Sometimes he was responsible and straightforward, and sometimes he was dishonest, manipulative, willing to take surprising risks. At Interstate Plastics, where one employee remembered him talking about his dream of flight school, Isaiah claimed to be able to drive a forklift. He appeared to have no experience with one, though, driving a forklift around, a co-worker said, like “a wild man.” When he was fired from that job for being late one too many times, he called his boss to thank him for being “the best of all the bosses” he’d had. “I thought that was strange,” the boss later told Dr. Lymberis.

Isaiah tried to use his mind to escape the troubles in which he found himself. It didn’t always work. He’d told the officer who arrested him for marijuana possession that he didn’t know anything about an outstanding warrant for his arrest, but he did know and a few minutes later admitted as much. The warrant was for the misdemeanor theft charges that had
been filed against Isaiah a year earlier, for shoplifting those CDs from the Kmart. His aunt, Rachel Kalebu, had posted bail to get him released on those theft charges, and Isaiah had never resolved them, triggering the warrant. When he was arrested for marijuana possession, he was arrested for the outstanding theft warrant, too. Again, Rachel Kalebu posted bail for him.

“She loved like God loves,” Deborah said. “No matter what you’d do, she’d kinda forgive you.” This was her role in the family, the reason she was referred to as Mama Ray by the wider Kalebu clan. “Mama Ray takes in strays,” Isaiah’s mother told Dr. Lymberis. “Discarded people. The broken ones.” She had played this role for Isaiah’s mother and father when they needed it. She had played it for her elderly mother and aunt when they were dying and needed home care. She played it for J. J. Jones. She played it for Isaiah in his childhood, and now, with Isaiah’s parents still caught up in their divorce proceedings, she continued to play it for him in his adulthood.

After the marijuana arrest, Isaiah attended some court dates, completed Alcohol and Drug Information School, as required by the court, and began to pay down hundreds of dollars in fines in small chunks: $20.38 one month, $28.88 the next. Sometimes he was helpful around the homes he inhabited, buying his mother groceries or babysitting Deborah’s kids, and sometimes he was emotionless, zombielike, impossible to communicate with, and speaking of wrongs done to him, of hidden codes and plots. Sometimes he had money, and sometimes he didn’t. He took out a $400 payday loan from a Tacoma business called Advance Til Payday, failed to pay it back, and ended up with another court proceeding, this one in small-claims court.

—

Isaiah later described this period to Dr. Lymberis as “the worst time of my life,” worse than anything that happened before or after. A number of
his older relatives died during these years, including his paternal grandmother, known as Je-Jah, whom he’d been close with and whom Aunt Rachel had been caring for at her home. He developed the first significant relationship of his life with a woman Deborah said he met riding the bus, but then the woman got pregnant. Isaiah strongly wanted children and a family of his own, spoke of hoping to become a father. But the woman did not feel Isaiah could financially support her, so she aborted the pregnancy. After that, Dr. Lymberis wrote, “he was sleeping 10–12 hours a day, felt depressed, lost and demoralized.”

He had been taught to disintegrate, to become a man by keeping this separate from that, to be successful by not engaging, or displaying, the effects of his traumatic childhood, to push back on anything that felt like a challenge to his self-perception. “When I’m pushed, I push,” he later told Dr. Lymberis. “It is always me against the world, and I’m not going to lose.” No one ever successfully intervened to suggest a different path. No one with expertise ever spoke to him about the pressure building, the way, unaddressed, unintegrated, it would continue to build, push against him, and leak out when it couldn’t be contained. “It was a constant,” Dr. Lymberis said. “It was leaking out, and destroyed his capacity for adaptation, even when he was given a chance.” Unable to attend college, keep a job, or start a family, and tangled up in the effects of this disintegration, Isaiah now adhered to a new feeling, a feeling that, to outsiders, had no connection to his present reality. “He started thinking he was God,” his mother said. He also began talking about himself as the king, the creator, the president of the United States. He felt omnipotent, “in the zone.” He went to his room in his mother’s apartment and paced back and forth for hours. Words burst out of him as if under incredible pressure, following a logic those around him couldn’t trace.

There were still periods of engagement with the world others saw, with forces Isaiah admitted were more powerful than himself. These periods came in and out, an intermittent signal amid the noise. One day in 2007, Isaiah called a court and paid $28.57 toward an old speeding fine that had
grown, with late fees, to about $185. In these moments of relative clarity, Deborah would ask him what was going on. “He’d be like, ‘I have a problem with authority. I’ll get another job. I’m just looking for the right job. I want to fly.’”

He was flying, regularly. Into delusions. Into extended periods of sleeplessness. Into rages over things like his car getting towed from a spot in front of Deborah’s home. “He went up to the place,” Deborah said, “and instead of handling it professionally, all I know is that my mom called me and said, ‘Deborah, Isaiah just said that he’s about to go kill everybody up in the tow yard.’” Isaiah’s mother called to warn the tow yard, and nothing ended up happening, except that when Isaiah’s mother eventually paid to get the car out, Isaiah told her he didn’t want the car anymore. Deborah found that odd.

Not long after that, Deborah went over to her mom’s place on the way to return a shirt at the Southcenter Mall. She saw her mom. She saw Isaiah. “Mind you, everything is fine,” Deborah said. It was early in the morning, and after she returned the shirt at the mall, she brought them all breakfast from Burger King. “Me, Mom, and Isaiah are the only ones there,” she said. “We eat breakfast, the Burger King I brought, and I was like, ‘Okay, I gotta go, you guys.’

“So, I give him a hug. ‘Love you, see you guys later. You coming to the house later?’ You know, small talk. He’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ll come through.’ You know, talking. ‘Bye, Mom, love you.’ Out the door, right? The very next morning, I get a call. I’m getting ready for work. He calls me, he’s like, ‘You’re a terrible mother. I’ma take your kids, and I’m gonna get custody of them, I’ma ship ’em off to Africa. Matter fact, I’ma call CPS and get those kids taken away from you. You don’t deserve to be a mother.’ Like, I don’t even know who this is, though, on my phone at this point. I’m like, ‘Who is this? Isaiah?’ So I’m looking at the number. I’m like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, something’s wrong with me, huh? You’re the crazy bitch.’ He’s cussing me out, telling me he’s gonna take my kids. I don’t know where it comes from. Just out the blue, right?”

—

She had been out of the house during her parents’ most explosive fights, during the beginning of their divorce and custody battle, during the father’s complaints about the mother’s “bitching,” during the father’s talk about how the kids should be taken away from the mother, during the court order that the father surrender his children’s passports over concerns he would take the kids to Africa. She hadn’t heard what Isaiah heard in those years.

Deborah called her mother to ask what was going on. Her mother didn’t know, told her Isaiah had just left. So Deborah went to work. Her job was running a cash register at a Dollar Tree store not far from her mom’s place, which was at present an apartment in a city just south of the airport but still along the same high drumlin field that holds West Seattle. The city is called Burien, and much of it is a sprawl of gas stations, car dealers, and fast-food restaurants. The apartment is near a public high school and the Burien Transit Center, a four-story concrete park-and-ride where the parking stalls on the rooftop level are watched by cameras, and the view is of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport being watched by its air traffic control tower. Watching over this entire vista, from the public buses coming and going at the transit center to the airplanes landing and taking off at the airport, is the dormant volcano. Lest it be missed on cloudy days, it is also depicted, in painted relief, on the transit center’s sides.

Through the front windows of the Dollar Tree store, Deborah spotted Isaiah walking through the parking lot. She called her mom, said, “Mom, I see this fool right here.” This was how she referred to Isaiah when he was being thickheaded. “I’m on my register, but I could see him,” Deborah said. “I’m like, ‘I’m getting off work anyways, it’s time for me to go.’ So I’m like, ‘Mom, come get me right now at the job. Come pick me up, because Isaiah’s up here and he’s walking like he’s RoboCop, the Terminator.’ Like, he’s got this blank look, and he’s just marching. Blank stare. Like he’s on a mission, but I don’t know what for.”

—

Their mother drove to the Dollar Tree. Deborah got in the van. They drove into Isaiah’s line of sight, shouted to him, “Isaiah, get in the car! Isaiah! Isaiah!” He kept on walking, toward the transit center, as if he were about to get on a bus. “Lord and behold, if he did not—if he could walk through that car, he would have. Mom literally backed up her car because that’s how blank stare he was.” Deborah was mad at this point, still upset about Isaiah’s threatening to call CPS on her that morning and still wondering what was wrong with him, so she jumped out to confront her brother. “So he’s walking, and I’m like, ‘You got a knife in your hand? Isaiah!’” She jumped back in the van and with her mother drove to the Burien police station. The police looked for Isaiah but didn’t find him. “They did nothing,” Deborah said.

—

It was around this time that Isaiah’s family became well acquainted with the phrase “Danger to self or others.” Something was clearly wrong with Isaiah. “I kept trying to get him into mental hospitals, but he wouldn’t go,” his mother said. “And he was bigger than me. I couldn’t very well drag him to the hospital.” That, and he was now over eighteen, which meant that legally, except under specific threatening circumstances that were not yet present, Isaiah would have to drag himself.

His mother, who thought he was a danger to both himself and others, became frustrated by the standoff. “I told them, I said, ‘Do you want him to hurt someone before you help him?’ And that’s exactly what
happened.”