Back in his room I sat with him, waiting for my father to come and take over. We split the days, and Carl was never alone, but it was harder than having him at home is, because we were always with him. He had a roommate, a bald six-year-old who seemed more peculiar than psychotic. A loose-lipped nurse told me that he pulled out all his hair and ate it. He always called my father and me “sir,” and otherwise did not speak much to us.
I fell asleep that afternoon in the chair next to Carl’s bed, because he was so quiet, probably still angry from Sandman’s questioning. It wasn’t for long. Carl woke me again, talking, and before I was fully awake I realized there was something different about his voice. It still had that electric, many-voiced quality, but it was kind, or at least not accusatory, and not angry.
“Every promise is broken,” he was saying, “but we must take up the broken promises and bind them whole again with blood.”
“I like blood,” said a voice behind me, and I understood that Carl was talking to the weird bald kid. “It makes me happy when I drink it.”
“We are never happy,” Carl said. “For those who can get happiness from drinking blood, we say let them do it, but my blood bindings are not red. Blood is sacrifice. Everything else is irrelevant, or a worse mistake.”
“You are sad spirits,” said the boy. “I think you must be missing your brother, like me.”
“We miss everyone. We are a host but we are utterly alone. Yet it is the faithlessness of brothers that pains us, too.”
“Sad spirits! I knew so many, when I was younger. Do you speak the language of grief, then?” And the kid started to make barking, sobbing noises at Carl.
“We speak every language,” said Carl, and he started to bark and sob back at the bald kid. My father came through the door, thinking, I knew, that things could not possibly get any more fucked-up than this.
“Time for me to go, pal,” I said and stood up too quickly. I knocked my head hard against a heavy lamp suspended over Carl’s bed, and it hurt like hell. I shouted, “Fuck!” Carl’s eyes went wide, at the curse, I thought, and then his sobbing barks turned to ordinary sobbing, and for the first time in a week and a half he sounded like himself. In his own voice he asked me what time it was.
My father has a lifelong habit of never staying angry at me for long, even when he’s on the right side of the argument. We make spaghetti for dinner, because Carl is still back, despite the risk of a mess if he should go away again. “What did you do?” my father asked me, looking at my bruised face and hands for new marks, but my burn is covered by my sleeve.
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all. He’s just. . back.” And then I say, though I know I shouldn’t, “Maybe it’s over. Maybe it’s just over.”
It’s harder getting the medication into Carl when he’s back, but he’s supposed to take it at dinnertime. There are tears before he’ll take it, but that doesn’t make the slightest difference to my good mood, or my father’s, and we rub off on him.
“It tastes like feet!” he says, but he’s smiling. We eat downstairs, for once, and my father sets the table as if for a holiday, with fancy plates and candles. Carl twirls his pasta expertly and pretends that he’s been in a coma for ten years.
“Do we have a lady president yet?” he asks.
“Yes,” says my father. “A black lady.”
“All right! Are people living on the moon?”
“And Mars,” I say. “Terraforming is under way.”
“Cool,” he says. “Cancer?”
“Defeated,” my father says.
“Finally,” Carl says. “But who’s at war?”
“Nobody,” I say.
“Peace everywhere,” my father says.
“And nobody is starving except the teenagers who kind of want to,” I say.
“A perfect world,” my father says, leaning back and laughing as he raises his wineglass to us, and I smile, too, but uneasily, because I realize all of a sudden that we are all pretending, and maybe that’s not the best thing for us to be doing as a family. And as if on cue Carl’s smile vanishes, and he sneers, and in the electric voice he shouts, “Liar!”
It’s just a spasm, but the rest of dinner is somber. We don’t play any more games, and limit our conversation. Carl tells us about the way a dynamo works.
I use up the last minutes of his presence with a quick bath; by the time he’s back in bed, he’s gone. “What did you do for us today?” he asks me as we strap him into his restraints for the night. “Have you made the change I asked you for?”
“Nighty night,” my father says, and kisses Carl on the head. Carl turns his head and spits, not much volume but he makes a loud noise, “Ptui.” My father goes to the door and waits for me, glaring, waiting for me to hurt myself again. I lean down close to Carl.
“You are breaking my heart,” I say.
“Yes,” say the voices. “Into two thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-eight pieces.”
I wasn’t the only one to leave work. Dozens of us disappeared, going home to be with our families as the world ended. I came home early that day. Carl’s mother had already picked him up. His teacher had called in a panic, as if the preschools were going to be the next target.
I expected to find them doing something ordinary — making cookies, playing a board game, reading a story in the yard. I don’t know why I expected his mother to manufacture a sense of peace around him, or to prepare one for me. As I said, she was a strange woman even before she became intolerably strange and selfishly crazy, before she went off on the journey that Carl and I were not allowed to accompany her on. This was the sort of thing she had been waiting for all her life, confirmation that the world outside was just as fucked-up as the one inside her.
I walked in the door and saw them standing hand in hand in front of the television, watching the replay footage of the towers falling.
“Do you see?” she said to him. “This is just what I mean. It’s kairos, breaking through time to make history. Do you feel it?” she asked him, and she shivered all over.
“Dad!” Carl said, when he saw me. “There’s people in there!”
He was three years old.
The house is old but not very big. My father will sleep through anything short of screams of bloody murder, and I have earplugs, but I’m afraid to put them in because I want to hear if Carl should happen to become himself in the middle of the night. I am thinking as I lie there, listening to him mutter, that that will never happen. I press on the burn on my wrist and regret the lie I told my father, that Carl had just gotten better, that whatever was in him had just tired of us and gone away, without anyone having paid some departure price. I wonder if things would be different if we had spent that day making cookies and playing games and pretending that the world had not changed, or if it would be different if his mother had never left, if the chaos she radiated would have been better for him than the dull peace that my father and I have provided. I wonder if it would have helped to have asked him every day if he missed his mother, if he thought I drove her away, if he worried that she was dead.
The answer to those questions is always that I don’t know, and usually I drift off to sleep to the mumbling voices in an agony of not-knowing, not knowing what I did wrong or what I am currently doing wrong or what I am going to do wrong tomorrow to perpetuate my son’s suffering and my own.
But tonight I just lie there, in unrelieved paralysis, until very suddenly the not-knowing breaks apart into a very clear certainty, and it’s like I always just fell asleep too soon for certainty, and a certain comfort, to come settling on me in my bed. I get up and go back to Carl’s room, undo his restraints, and sit him up.