“I just need to talk to my attending,” she said and walked off down the hall. In the exam room Carl was lying flat on his stretcher, looking at a picture of Elmo waving benevolently from the ceiling.
“What did you say to her?” I asked him.
“What we say to everyone,” the voices answered, though he didn’t look at me. “You will weep, too, at our message, and harder, since we bring it specifically for you. We are here because your faithlessness called us to you, and we will stay until you remedy it with sincerity and sacrifice.” He had pointed at me while he said this, though he still didn’t turn his head, and for the next ten minutes he pointed at me wherever I went in the room, and when my father tried to fold Carl’s arm back over his chest he couldn’t move it. In ten more minutes the resident came back and said cheerfully, “We’re going to keep him!” As if that were the best news in the world.
It’s macaroni and cheese for lunch. I am making it from scratch, more for my own sake than Carl’s. He prefers it from a box, even in his natural state, but I like the process of grating the cheese and boiling the pasta, and there is something soothing about the circular motion of stirring and stirring. Outside, my father is still chopping, but he’s slowed down considerably, and though I can’t see him from the window I know he’s spending most of the time sitting on an upended log, with the ax head on the ground between his feet, his hands folded on top of the handle and his chin on his hands, staring out at the woods.
Noontime is always a little pensive for us. I get lost in complicating some very simple dish and my father takes a nap or plays his guitar, and the high sun always has a calming effect on the entity. Carl is quiet in his room now, unrestrained and sitting on the edge of his bed. He’ll stay that way for hours if we let him.
I am thinking of Carl’s mother, wondering, as always, where she is, and wondering if it would make any difference if she was around and could have been called to her son’s sickbed. He hardly remembered her, and never asked about her, which they said was part of his problem in the hospital. When I think about it I usually decide that she would just make things worse if she were still around, because she had always been a deeply strange woman, and this was just the sort of illness that would have appealed to her. It’s occurred to me more than once that she probably would have been jealous that Carl had gotten it instead of her.
“This dumb shit has got to stop,” my father says behind me. Still stirring the mac, I turn to look at him, half-expecting him to have the ax with him to enforce his demand, but he’s empty-handed. I turn back.
“He stays a little longer every time,” I say. “Have you noticed?”
“You talk like he’s not always there. Like it’s ever anybody but him.”
I shrug.
“It’s the worse thing for him, to play along with it. You know it is.”
“I don’t know anything lately, except what works.”
“What you’re doing isn’t working,” he says. “It’s not progress. It’s hurting him.”
“You want to help me bring this up?” When he doesn’t answer I turn around to ask him again but he’s gone. I listen for the sound of the ax again, but the house stays entirely silent. I stand there a little while, stirring aggressively, wondering how he can look at Carl and think that he could contain such a reserve of pathology to pull off this unwitting impersonation, this utter ruination, this scourge. I don’t know what’s worse, or harder, to believe, that a little boy could be fucked-up enough to harbor the sort of sadness and rage that the entity presents us with every day, or that thousands of souls could be fused by a firebomb into a restless collection of spirits that hungers for a justice it can only define in terms of punishment.
I don’t know how many times I’ve made macaroni and cheese in the same pot, on the same burner, at the same time of day over the past few weeks, but I seem to have noticed for the first time that the side of the pot is immensely hot, and I lay my forearm against it for as long as I can stand, and then as long as I can stand again, before I take the bowl upstairs. Not knowing where my father is in the house, I never make a sound except inside my head, but I don’t even have to show Carl my blistered skin before he is falling back into himself.
“Let’s talk about that day again,” Dr. Sandman said to Carl. I was watching them from behind a piece of one-way glass, along with the rest of the “team,” two residents and a nurse practitioner and a social worker and a ridiculous medical student who only looked a couple months older than Carl. We had been there for a week and a half already, and I had gotten to know their secret-spy room quite intimately. They asked a lot of questions, and they watched Carl sitting by himself, refusing to play with the variety of toys they put in front of him, watched him reduce another resident to tears, watched him sitting there doing nothing at all. They watched me talking to him, and listened as the thing I was coming to know as the entity listed my sins, personal and paternal and civic, all the ways I had disappointed these thousands of strangers. I kept saying, “Carl, Carl, come out from in there,” though I wasn’t supposed to say that, I wasn’t supposed to do anything that would make Carl feel uncomfortable, or like he had to do something. They were always telling me what not to do with him, and always in the friendliest way: You might not want to raise your voice at him. You might not want to tell him that he’s making you angry. You might not want to tell him he is making you sad.
“Our birthday,” Carl said, smiling.
“Is that what it was?” Dr. Sandman asked. He was a large man, three inches taller than me, with at least fifty pounds on me, and not fat. He looked more suited to hunting down bail-skipping criminals than ferreting out the secret pain of children.
“Of course. We were born in the fire even as we died from it.”
“Yes, you’ve told me that. But what were you doing? What was happening in the house when you heard about the planes. It was a long time ago, but do you remember?” He had asked me the same question, in the same room, before I was brought to the other side of the glass. He asked if we let Carl watch the television footage of the planes crashing into the buildings and I said not we, but somebody did. His mother wanted him to see it. She thought that it was important.
“Other people forget,” Carl said to Sandman. “We never will. We were doing. . everything. You could never understand. You have always been just one, we are thousands.”
“Help me understand.” So his mother went away after the. . disaster? he had asked me, and I said yes, for the first time. And he sat there tapping his pencil against his teeth for something like a full minute.
“Help you? Help you? We are dead, you are alive. There is an arithmetic of obligation. Why don’t you help us?”
“I’m trying to help you. By talking with you.” Does he ever ask about his mother now, Sandman had asked me. Does he ever ask where she is? I said that we didn’t really talk about her much.
“Words are not sufficient. Words are not justice. You promised that everything would be different, that everything would be better, but everything is the same, or worse. Now we require satisfaction, and words do not satisfy us.”
“Talking is the best way to feel better,” Dr. Sandman said. “You’ve got to trust me on that one, Carl.”
Then Carl wouldn’t say any more, but only glared furiously around the room, and every time Sandman spoke he only mocked him by raising his hand and moving it like a gibbering mouth. You may not want to tell him to trust you, I thought. You may not want to call him Carl.