“Why do I have to sit in this stupid chair?” he asks me as I strap him into his fancy wheelchair. It was sort of a gift from the hospital. Not that we didn’t pay for it, but one of the puppyish residents wrangled it for him, insisting that there wasn’t any reason that he should have to stay inside all the time when he went home. It was one of the fancy chairs that cerebral palsy kids get. “I look like a retard,” Carl said.
“You might fall asleep,” I told him as I tightened his seatbelt. He never fell asleep outside, but he might chase somebody, shouting “Fire on Babylon!” if he could get out of the chair too easily. “That’s what happens,” I say. “One minute you’re playing tennis and the next you’re sound asleep.”
“That’s narcolepsy,” he says. “Do I have narcolepsy?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “But you sleep a lot. You’re getting better, though.”
“I hate tennis. When was I playing tennis?”
“It’s a figure of speech,” I say, and then my father comes stomping into the room. He usually hides when Carl is back, and when Carl asks after him I say he is out for a drive or buying new teeth or on a date with some lady who is a hundred and five. “Look who’s back,” I say to him.
“You’re a fool,” he says, so quietly and so close to my ear I am probably the only one who can hear him. “It’s not right. It’s not what they told us to do.” I shrug, and turn the chair around, as if presenting him with his grandson. It’s the only answer I can give him, to say, Look, I don’t care what they told us in the hospital. They don’t have a fucking clue what’s happening, but here’s Carl back, for a little while.
“Look at me, Grandpa,” Carl says. “I’m a retard.”
“The retard is standing behind you,” my father says, then bends down and clutches him in a death hug.
“Ouch,” Carl says. “I’m coming back.” My father doesn’t say anything else to either of us, just turns and goes outside behind the house, where he starts chopping wood. It’s still too early in the autumn for a fire, but this is what he does when he’s very upset. We already have enough to last through the whole winter.
“Where do you want to go?” I ask Carl as I maneuver the wheelchair down the jury-rigged ramp that goes from the side door off the kitchen to the driveway.
“Where haven’t I been lately?” he asks cheerily, and I’m struck by how quickly he seems to recover from his time away, and how ordinary he seems. It’s hard to believe that there’s anything wrong.
“Everywhere,” I tell him, which is true, and we make a plan to walk all the way down to the river, but we only get as far as the park before he says he wants to stop and asks if he can go on the slide. “Better not,” I say. “It’s high up. What if you fell asleep?”
“Then I’d just slide down,” he says, and I have a hard time arguing with that, or else I am just being careless, and hoping without any evidence or precedent that he might just stay how he is. I don’t even have him unstrapped from the chair when a plane flies a bit lower than usual overhead and he cowers away from it, trying to throw himself out of his chair. “Get down!” he shouts. “It’s in the sky. . it’s coming!” We don’t live anywhere near an airport, and I shout at the plane as it flies over, because there’s no reason it should be here, or that it should fly so low, except to torture us. The mothers and nannies look away from their toddlers to watch us, and the whole playground seems to go silent as the jet noise fades away. And then Carl straightens up and says, “What was that?” and the regular playground sounds are back again.
“Just a plane,” I say, and strap him back in, then push the chair over to a bench and sit down next to him. He doesn’t mention the slide again. Already there is something accusatory in his eyes, though his voice is still his own. A boy across the playground is bouncing a red ball, and Carl tells me that Mars years are almost three years longer than Earth years before he falls entirely silent. I don’t want to go home yet. I don’t want him trapped again, in his sickroom in our sickhouse, and I don’t want to be trapped there with him. The voices come back but there is nobody around my bench.
“Guilty,” he says, pointing at the moms and the nannies. “Guilty, guilty, guilty.” The boy with the ball kicks it our way and runs after. I kick it back but he runs up to us anyway, ignoring the ball when it shoots past him, and he stands before us, three or four years old, smiling, not saying a thing. “Not guilty,” says the entity. “Yet.”
In the ER they diagnosed Carl with altered mental status, after subjecting him to a gaggle of tests that were all normal. Eventually they let me understand that they didn’t know what was going on, but that something was going on, unless he was faking it all, which they put forth as a distinct possibility. I thought you’d have to be a pretty committed malingerer to submit to a spinal tap. During that procedure Carl lay absolutely still, not even squeezing my hand though they didn’t give him anything but a little local anesthetic around his spine. When, halfway done, the doctor asked him how he was doing, he said, “We are the dead, and what is a needle compared to a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pound airplane? Or two? Poke away, physician. You can’t hurt us like that.”
They called in the psychiatrist, and the nature of our visit seemed to change. A police officer took a permanent seat outside our room, and everyone except a kindly clinical assistant named Rebecca treated us a little differently. I think they were afraid of Carl, of the terribly unusual things he was saying to them, and about them, and of the electric sound of his voice. I was still too afraid for him to be afraid of him.
Where the ER doctors poked and prodded and irradiated in search of an answer, the psychiatrist just talked and talked. She wanted to know everything—everything—that had ever happened to us. Though it was only the late afternoon, we got a resident with a middle-of-the-night quality about her — she seemed exhausted and tired and not happy to meet any of us this late in her day. She talked to all of us together, then each of us alone, first me, then my father, and then Carl. When she talked to me her little yellow pencil would flutter madly in her notebook, and she made sympathetic noises when I told her about the divorce and then about my mother’s death, and she kept saying, “You’ve been through a lot lately,” then, “He’s been through a lot lately.” I wasn’t sure if she meant my father or Carl or even me.
Finally she talked to Carl, kicking my father and me out and shutting the door, waving the policeman down with a practiced gesture when he stood up. We paced outside, trying not to intrude on other people’s emergencies, until Rebecca showed us to a little waiting room down the hall, but it was too far away from Carl, and after five minutes in there we both stood up without discussing it and walked back to stand quietly outside the room. The resident came out crying a few minutes later.
“What happened?” I asked.