"That youngest boy of yours. How is he?"
"Fine, fine," I respond. "Much better than we would have hoped."
By now, my wife and I have had our fill — are sick and glutted to the teeth — of psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, speech therapists, psychiatric social workers, and any of all the others we've been to that I may have left out, with their inability to help and their lofty, patronizing platitudes that we are not to blame, ought not to let ourselves feel guilty, and have nothing to be ashamed of. All young doctors, I'm convinced, strive to be beetle-browed, and all older ones have succeeded.
"Prick!" I have wanted to scream at them like an animal. "Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick!" I have wanted to shriek at all of them like a screech owl (whatever that is, including the two I went to see briefly in secret about myself). Why can't the simpleminded fools understand that we want to feel guilty, must feel guilty if we're to do the things we have to?
Unperturbed, they would answer equably that my screaming at them was a way of trying to relieve myself of blame and call the repetition perseveration.
And they would be right. And they would be wrong.
I could tell stories. An outsider wouldn't believe the number of conflicting opinions the different doctors gave us and the backbiting judgments they made of each other, but we did. We believed them all, the good and the bad. And disbelieved as well (we had no choice) and had no choice but to search for others, like wandering supplicants.
"It's organic."
"It's functional."
"It's largely organic with functional complications now."
"He isn't deaf but may not be able to hear."
"At least he's alive."
"The prognosis is good."
"For what?"
"The prognosis is bad."
"It would not be possible to offer a prognosis at this time."
Not one of them ever had the candor, the courage, the common sense, the character to say:
"Jesus — I really don't know."
It began with:
"You're making too much of it."
And moved to:
"He will never speak."
"He probably will not surpass a mental age of five, if he attains that. His coordination and muscular control will never be good. It will require tremendous patience."
We hate them all, the ones who were wrong and the ones who were right. After awhile, that made no difference. The cause didn't matter. The prognosis was absolute. The cause did matter. It was organic (ceramic. The transistors are there). It just doesn't work the way others do. (A radio will not work like a television set.) There was no malfunction. It worked the way it was built to (worked perfectly, if looked at their way). The architecture's finished. The circuits can't be changed. Nothing is broken; there's nothing they can find to be fixed.
"Why can't they do it with surgery?" my wife's asked me.
"They wouldn't know where to cut and stitch."
He's a simulacrum.
"If only we hadn't had him," my wife used to lament. "He'd be so much better off if he'd never been born."
"Let's kill the kid," I used to joke jauntily when I thought he was just innately fractious (I used to carry color snapshots of all three of my children in my wallet. Now I carry none), before I began to guess there might be something drastically wrong.
I don't say that anymore.
(Poor damaged little tyke. No one's on your side.)
He is a product of my imagination. I swear to Christ I imagined him into existence.
We do feel guilty. We do blame ourselves. We're sorry we have him. We're sorry people know we do. We feel we have plenty to be ashamed of. We have him.
My head is a cauldron.
My mind is an independent metropolis teeming with flashes, shadows, and figures, with tiny playlets and dapper gnomes, day and night. My days are more lucid. I never think of Derek in danger; I only think of my boy or myself.
I have melodrama in my noodle, soap operas, recurring legends of lost little children trying wretchedly to catch up with themselves, or someone else, the day before. They stare. They are too sad to move. They are too motionless to cry. There are blurred histories of myself inside requiring translation and legibility. There is pain — there is so much liquid pain. It never grows less. It stores itself up. Unlike heat or energy, it does not dissipate. It all always remains. There's always more than before. There's always enough near the surface to fuel a tantrum or saturate a recollection. Tiny, barely noted things — a sound, a smell, a taste, a crumpled candy wrapper — can mysteriously set off thrumming vibrations deep within. It's mine. I have more than enough to share with everyone I know. I have enough for a lifetime, and someday soon when I am fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety, I will overhear someone speak the word birthday, brother, father, mother, sister, son, little boy, doggie, frankfurter, or lollipop and my eyes will dissolve into tears and I will throb inside with evocations of ancient, unresolved tragedies in which I took part replayed in darkness behind curtains that have come down. That will happen. It happens to me now. Frankfurter. A poignant nostalgia befalls me. Merry-go-round. I want to cry. Cotton candy. My heart breaks. I feel I can't go on.
I want to keep my dreams.
Ball-bearing roller skates. I melt.
I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
I miss my father, they told me. As if I didn't know. (I miss my boy now too. He is pulling away from me. He does his homework in his room without my help and doesn't talk to me anymore about what is happening to him at school. I don't know if he's more unhappy or less.) They didn't tell me anything I didn't know. They couldn't help. They said I was perfectly normal — which was the most deplorable thing I have ever been told! With time and much treatment, that condition might be remedied. They envied my sex life. (So do I.) The pity, we agreed, is that I don't enjoy it more.
(The company takes a strong view against psychotherapy for executives because it denotes unhappiness, and unhappiness is a disgraceful social disease for which there is no excuse or forgiveness. Cancer, pernicious anemia, and diabetes are just fine, and even people with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease may continue to go far in the company until they are no longer allowed to go on at all. But unhappiness is fatal. If my daughter or son were to commit suicide, that would be overlooked, because children do things like that, and that's the way kids are. But if my wife were to jump to her death without a prior record of psychiatric disturbance, did it only because she was unhappy, my chances for further advancement would be over. I'd be ruined.)
I have acrimony, they told me (which is also normal. I have more pain than acrimony. My mind is a storehouse of pain, a vast, invisible reservoir of sorrows as deep as I am old, waiting always to be tapped and set flowing by memory. I can discharge acrimony. I can only experience pain).
There are times when I am attacked from within by such acrimonious enmity toward people I like who have suffered serious personal tragedies or business failure that if something (or someone else) inside me were to give voice to the infamous words that leap to mind, I would be put away and reviled, with no possibility ever of absolution or apology. (The tragedies of people who are not close to me move me distantly, if at all.)
"Good for you! It serves you right!" I want to sneer.
(I want to spit.)
I'm afraid sometimes I might. (I have sat at tables with men I've known a long time and have wanted to touch their hand.)
It's not I who wants to kick Kagle in the leg. New people are hatching inside my head always, whether I want them to or not, and become permanent residents the moment I take note of them. We are often at cross purposes. They have time. They have time to work without interruption at whatever it is they came there to do, and they saunter away with great self-possession into darknesses I've not been able to penetrate. They weave back and forth in droves through a labyrinth whose tunnels I've never seen. I have a small cemetery there lying on a diagonal with orderly rows of identical headstones, an image left by a photograph, perhaps, or the reduction of one actually seen long ago. People may be buried there. Every once in a while startled three-dimensional thoughts, fancies, or series of new old recollections go flying across my mind like flocks of sparrows and disappear in unlit underground holes. I can summon them back when I want to if I can remember to make the effort, but only one at a time. The man who wants to make me kick Kagle in the leg is a worldly, relaxed fellow with black silk socks and a gray pinstripe suit. He's a man about my own age with neatly trimmed white hair. He is little, of course; he has to be to fit inside. (Even all those sinister and gigantic ogres who've been menacing me in my nightmares all my life have been small; it's just that I am so much smaller.) He seems to know his way about the stone passageways of my brain much better than I do, for he reappears in different settings, often reading a newspaper with one ankle crossed comfortably over his knee, biding his time. He thinks he's got more time than I have. (He hasn't.) I think there's a sauna, for many of the more affluent, better-bred occupants of my thoughts seem the type that likes to scorch itself leisurely after playing squash. I suspect there's a homosexual haunt located somewhere secret. Tiny shops are all about at which wicked contraband is exchanged by grimy, unshaven men who know how. Grimy, unshaven men expose themselves to me and to children of both sexes and go unpunished. All crimes go unpunished.