3 Abbott and the Good News First
At the end of the day, after helping his wife get their daughter to bed, Abbott lies facedown on the carpet of the family room. He is unclean and unshaven. He knows not the date. His joints ache from what the Internet has diagnosed as either hepatitis or Lyme Disease. There is something (is it Yellow Turtle?) jutting into his ribs. Still, that old-time languor does not descend. He rolls over onto his back, regards the pattern of paint and texture on the ceiling. The pattern of paint and texture he finds uninteresting. Abbott recalls the hours spent lying on floors, staring at ceilings, awaiting a feeling, any feeling at all. (The music from a band that tuned its guitars irregularly.) He remembers the moves — high chin, slow blink, heavy arms out in Savior or up in Surrender — but the moves don’t feel natural. Abbott is — tonight it’s evident — no longer listless. He’s bored, angry, exasperated, worried, gloomy, tired, sad, hot, afraid, and content, but not listless. Moreover, he’s hungry. He gets off the floor, puts a doll where she goes, and walks to the kitchen.
4 Abbott at the Edge of His Seat
“I just pray this one is a good sleeper,” Abbott’s wife says, pointing to her abdomen. “Well,” Abbott says, “the big sister was not too bad.” This morning they are up before their daughter, and it is amazing. Abbott is happy and optimistic, though lurking at the far edge of his contentment is the knowledge that the coffeepot is almost empty. There might be enough for another half cup. “Are you kidding?” his wife says. “She was terrible. Completely terrible.” “I mean, she wasn’t great,” Abbott says. “You don’t remember?” his wife says. Abbott smiles in the manner of someone whose personality has been drastically altered by head injury. Abbott’s wife always wants to know why there are long drips of coffee on the outside of Abbott’s mug. He says the mug rims are too thick, but the real answer, he suspects, is that he is gulping the coffee. “She was a monster,” Abbott’s wife says. “There was that stretch where you had to take her out in the car to get her to sleep.” Abbott’s memory is stirred very lightly. “Oh, yeah,” he says, “I remember doing that a few times.” Abbott’s wife says, “A few times? You did it every night for five weeks.” Abbott envisions himself driving through the foothills of the Rockies with a sleeping infant in the backseat. It’s not quite a memory, but it’s a nice image. Still, he understands that you couldn’t see Pikes Peak or Mt. Cheyenne because it would be dark outside. And also, there’s NORAD. “Did I like doing that?” Abbott asks. “You mean driving around with her?” “Yeah.” “I don’t think so,” she says. “And that one time you were gone for nearly an hour, and I was almost puking I was so worried. My breasts hurt, and my incision still hurt. Remember that? I was still having that feeling like my guts were shifting around. I was supposed to be getting some sleep while you were out, but I was pacing around the house, wondering what I would do if both of you were dead.” Abbott pauses at this fork in the story. He can choose. He says, “What happened to us?” His wife laughs. Abbott says, “No, I mean where were we that night? Why were we so late?” “You honestly don’t remember?” his wife says. Abbott shakes his head. He remembers now, but he wants to hear it from her. “First you got stuck at a train crossing. It was a long train, and then something happened to it.” “Oh, yeah,” Abbott says. “It just stopped.” “And of course when the car stopped moving she woke up and started screaming.” Abbott says, “Oh, man.” “It was a long time,” Abbott’s wife says, “and when it finally moved, you were trying to rush home and you got pulled over by that cop.” “You’ve got to be kidding,” Abbott says. “He pulled you over because our front headlight was out.” “I do remember that headlight,” Abbott says. “And remember, you bought a headlight, and you kept saying you were going to put it in yourself because you weren’t going to pay someone else to replace a stupid headlight, which is what we ended up doing.” “But I don’t think I got a ticket,” Abbott says. “No, because the officer said he had a little one at home about the same age. You two had a little moment. You shook hands and agreed that there wasn’t any sound worse than that.” “And then what happened?” Abbott says. “And then you finally came home,” his wife says. “When I heard the car pull up outside — I had actually been praying. Like actually saying a prayer.” Abbott says, “Was she asleep?” His wife says, “She was going insane. And she was hoarse by then. And you — I’ve never seen you look like that. You were like some kind of POW.” Abbott drops his head, rubs his palms on his knees. “I can only imagine,” he says.
5 Abbott’s Set Point
Right there on the brick wall of a Pioneer Valley bakery: HERE. WE. COME. DEVILS. The spray-painted letters are eerily neat and uniform, and the punctuation is terrifying. Had the vandal chosen a comma for direct address, the effect would have been lost. And then that ominous first-person plural … Everything about these words is calculated to inspire dread. All day long Abbott has been rattled by the bakery graffiti. This is no time for procreation, no time to make something that can get hurt. Late tonight, on a whim, Abbott types “here we come devils” into a dog-themed search engine and then clicks FETCH! The search turns up twenty-three thousand hits. Abbott learns that the phrase is featured loudly in a video game based on the career of General George Armstrong Custer (1839–1876), infamous American cavalry commander and Indian fighter who lost his life at Little Big Horn. Custer in Internet photographs has the kind of droopy, creeping mustache that obscures the mouth. Abbott is nearly giddy with the information. He feels emancipated. He wants to go look at his sleeping daughter and put his hand on her head again, but his wife has asked him to stop doing that because it disrupts the child’s sleep. He stays in his chair for quite some time, considering whether to assemble the crib, the pieces of which are stacked against the bookcase. A scrap of paper on the desk by the laptop is blank except for the word rash. Gradually, Abbott becomes less sanguine. Gradually, he returns to his prior state of agitation, what researchers might call his set point. The problem, Abbott realizes, is that the bakery graffiti signifies exactly what he thought it signifies.
6 Abbott near the Doorway
Abbott’s unborn child’s head is still facing the wrong direction, and his wife is quiet the entire ride home from the obstetrician’s office. “Maybe it will still flip,” Abbott says as his family lingers in the car in the driveway. “Or it won’t,” she says. Later, he finds her sitting in a chair she never sits in, her hair over her eyes. Nobody ever sits in this chair. “I’m sorry,” he says. He offers to turn on a light, not because it is dark in the room but because it would give him something to do. “Are you crying?” Abbott says. He stands near the doorway, ten feet from his wife. His impulse to leave the room prevents him from approaching his wife’s chair. His impulse to approach his wife’s chair prevents him from leaving the room. The countervailing desires create in him a radical stillness. He is near the doorway but not in it. Both his feet are on the rug. His arms hang loose at his sides. “I’m sorry,” he says again. Abbott’s wife says, “I was just thinking of a story about this guy I once knew. He told me that one time when he was eight or nine he had a horrible earache during a sleepover at a friend’s house, and he didn’t want to wake anyone up, so he just lay there and suffered all night. He said it was excruciating. He said he just gripped the side of his head and rolled around in bed, whispering for help, hoping his friend would wake up, but he didn’t. It turned out to be a bad infection.” The phone rings once and then stops. Abbott looks down at his wife, who is looking through the window at whatever can be seen from the chair. The wind has picked up. “Who knows what made me think of that,” she says. “Isn’t it awful, though?”