“Who else?” my father says as he opens the door.
“I was hoping for satisfaction,” Carl says from the bed. He is restrained there by soft straps that we took from the hospital. They are called posies and bring to mind the image of someone tied down with flowers, but they are not so benign as that. We only tie him down at night, and only because if we didn’t he would wander into high places, the tops of bookshelves or the roof or a tall tree in the yard, to shout out requests for justice and vengeance and satisfaction. Aside from the restraints, it is his same old bed, done up in baseball sheets, and his same old room, covered with pictures of historical personages and dams and bridges and other engineering marvels, except that we have had to take down every picture of an airplane, because these made him cower and cry out in fear.
“Behold!” my father says, after I’ve undone the straps and shifted Carl up into a position he can eat from. My father takes away the silver dome with a flourish. He can manage the flourish even when he is dispirited and tired. “Waffles!”
“We are not satisfied with waffles,” Carl says, his face drawn up in a look of haughty disapproval, but despite that look and his words his mouth snaps at the fork when my father brings it close, and chews and swallows eagerly. Though his words and his expressions seem to have passed into the possession of another, Carl’s appetites remain his own and have become more childish as the weeks have passed. The mouth spews complex obscenities and harsh judgments but is partial to waffles and cheesy mac and vienna sausages. “Waffles are not justice,” he says with his mouth full.
“But justice isn’t delicious,” says my father, though he is always telling me not to talk to “It,” especially when we are trying to get Carl to eat. “And justice will never be the most important meal of the day.”
“We are the dead,” Carl says. “Where is our blood sacrifice? What have you done for us today?”
“Every good boy loves waffles,” my father says, and shovels them in. I dart in with the napkin between bites, and catch the bits and half-chewed pieces that fall out of Carl’s mouth. It’s always easier to keep him clean during a meal than it is to clean him up afterward. He fought like a cat the one time we tried to get him in the tub, and even a sponge bath makes him wriggly and abusive. I keep my eyes down and try to tune out the noise Carl is making, bits of song in a dozen voices, and noises that are not words. But just as we are finishing up I look too long on my son’s face, and his eyes, which have been rolling every which way in his head, following the action in some waking dreamscape, suddenly lock on to mine. It is always very hard to look away when this happens.
“Do you love your son?” the voices ask me.
My father hisses at me in an unnecessary warning. I know I am being baited but can never be silent in the face of that question.
“You know I do,” I say.
“Well, what a way to show it, to abandon him. Abandonment is practiced in degrees, and you have gone beyond the pale, it’s true. He is practically one of us now.”
My father is shaking his head. “Breakfast is over,” he says. He puts the lid on his Jeevesy platter and walks toward the door. “Come on,” he adds, because I am still sitting on the bed.
“I’ll be right there,” I say.
“It’s not going to help,” he says. “It’s not. .” He doesn’t finish, just shakes his head again. He looks terribly sad, and Carl is smiling quite fiendishly.
“I’ll be down in a second,” I say.
“Goddamn it,” my father says, and shuts the door.
“Goddamn it all,” says Carl. “Goddamn your faithlessness and your short memory and your tiny selfish heart and your. . ah!” I interrupt the tirade by slamming my finger in the drawer of his nightstand. I watch his face as I do it: It opens up and becomes a child’s face again, even before it becomes particularly his own face again. There is awe and delight written upon it, and then it falls into an expression of sadness and confusion and Carl starts to cry in the ordinary sobbing of a nine-year-old, without any keening choir overtones or screeching old-lady echoes. Every time this happens he acts the same way, sleepy and confused and sad.
He cries and looks around his room and recognizes me.
“Dad,” he says, “what time is it? What time is it?” which is exactly what he said when he woke up from his operation.
I say, “Nine o’clock, pal. It’s going to be a great day.” And I draw him over into my lap and hold him against me while he cries. From the way my finger is already bruising I figure we have at least an hour.
One night he went to bed as Carl, a not entirely ordinary nine-year-old who read too much and hated sports and had a somewhat morbid imagination; the next morning he awoke as something else: a vengeful spirit, thousands of angry strangers, a changeling. I knocked on his door to wake him like always, and didn’t actually go into his room until he failed to show himself downstairs with only twenty minutes left before the school bus would come. In his room I found him still in bed, a lump under the covers. This usually meant that he had been up reading until only a few hours before. My father and I always checked to make sure his light stayed off, but he kept a dozen little penlights here and there around his room, and we could never manage to take them all away.
“Pal,” I said. “Are you awake?”
“We are awake,” came the reply, and I didn’t really notice the difference in his voice because it was muffled by the sheets and blankets.
“Well, Your Highness, the bus will be here in twenty minutes. So let’s get moving.” Lately he had been reading obsessively about Elizabeth I, and my father had even caught him dressed up in one of his mother’s old nightgowns with a lampshade turned upside down around his neck, issuing decrees to his own reflection. I thought he was just using the royal “we.”
“We do not ride in buses,” he said, and then sat up, flexing straight from the waist, still covered in his blanket. Even before the blanket fell away, and he turned toward me so I could see his face, I was afraid for him. “Or in automobiles or airplanes, but we drift on the original wind that rose up as the towers fell, and we are always restless.”
He stared at me with alien eyes, looking at me, not like he didn’t know me, but like he knew me very well and didn’t like me at all.
“Carl,” I said, “knock it off. This isn’t funny.”
“He’s gone away,” he said. “Don’t worry too much, we’ll keep him perfectly safe.”
I opened my mouth to yell at him, and stepped forward toward the bed to give him a shake, to tell him to snap out of it. Knock it the fuck off, I was about to say, though I hadn’t cursed at him or around him since before his mother left. But somehow I knew he wasn’t trying to be funny, and that, whatever was happening, he wasn’t doing it on purpose. This was something very different from every other time he had pretended to be someone he was not, dead kings and queens, Old Yeller, Miss Piggy. . he had a long history of transient impersonations. Someone in a book or television show caught his fancy and he decided to be them, but no matter how hard he pretended he never before managed to seem so not like himself as he did now. I didn’t yell at him. I didn’t even stay in the room. I went and got my father instead.
Carl sticks around for a while. Eventually he calmed, like he always does, and we had the same conversation about what was happening to him, how he was sick, how he was asleep a lot. And he said, like he always did, that he was sure he had been dreaming, though he couldn’t remember even the briefest scene of the dreams, or recall if they were good dreams or bad dreams. When I had him on these visitations I always wanted to just sit with him and talk about nothing, or listen to him tell me fascinating trivia about some dead president or king, something that had passed for normal in the old days. He always got bored with me, though, and when I wouldn’t let him go to school or go for a bike ride or to a friend’s house or to read by himself he would get angry, and usually I would calm him by reading to him from some dull biography until he was gone again. But today I take him for a walk.