My life is insupportable. Injured last night in a fight with two dogs for which I had no heart, merely a savage act to sustain. This morning I can barely walk on all fours. Guilt is the last human vestige to die away.
This will be my last report. “My kiss,” says human lady, “may be the very thing you need to redeem an otherwise blighted existence. “
I howl to frighten her off. () It has no ring. A dying sound. As if my nature has gone out of fashion.
“It’s you who are afraid of me,” she says, getting down on all fours and crawling toward me, howling in a hollow human voice. “Let me love you,” she says with boring persistence.
The wolf laughs.
“Monster,” she screams at him, baring her teeth.
He receives the cutting edge of her kiss. Love changes him (or doesn’t). “I am the killer,” he announces in human voice. The wolf stiffens from the pain, howls a last long heartbreaking cry. Even the hunters, for whom death is only the last step in a familiar mechanical process, are touched in some way by the cry.
“He is in critical though satisfactory condition,” the first hunter says.
“We’ve done what we’ve come to do,” says the second hunter, “and now we can go home to our loved ones.”
“We’ll take his papers back with us,” says the third, suppressing a mild howl, “and let his story be known so that others might avoid his fate.”
I sigh in my sleep, a recorder of silent voices, as the sun begins to rise mercurially in the distance, revising the landscape of the night.
Disguises
The baby that was is not the baby that is. It has come to that. Life, he is aggrieved to report, has gotten out of hand. Everyone seems to have forgotten the way it has been, the way it is supposed to be. The baby that is is an interloper, a baby-come-lately. The true baby, though no longer what he was, is no friend to the new arrangement.
There are characters in this narrative for whom the former baby feels not the slightest responsibility, the imposter baby being a prime example.
“Why do you pretend to be me?” the original says to the imposter when no one is listening. The imposter has no answer to that, seems dumbfounded by the question.
“I’m on to your game, kid,” says the original. “You’re not going to get away with it for long.”
When the father picks up the imposter and says, “How’s my baby?” the original laughs bitterly to himself, amazed by such misperception.
What he needs, he decides, relying as he must on his own counsel, is the restoration of his lost persona, a return to the climate of his faded glories. The idea grows in him, blossoms. Working late at night in his study, he develops a mask that resembles himself as he was.
He will keep the disguise out of sight until a reasonable occasion for its employment arrives. In the meantime, he will pretend to accept the unthinkable terms of the present arrangement. He will even play on occasion with the usurper (anything to divert suspicion) with the kindness and deference he used to reserve for the imaginary.
Sometimes his impatience with pretense, the other’s and his own, gets the better of the baby’s resolve.
“My rabbit, my car, my robot, my G.I. Joe,” says the usurper. “lt’s not yours,” says our story’s hero.
“It’s not yours,” says the usurper, either in echo or in assertion. “I hate liars,” says the former baby, storming off in an unconstrained display of disgust.
The imposter suffers this slight as if it were a painful fall, calling out the other’s name repeatedly in complaint.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” someone big says, picking up the imposter for a whole raft of unearned embraces.
Why can’t he keep his mouth shut? thinks the true baby and he would say it out loud if he weren’t trying to keep a low profile. He wishes one or the other of them — the other his first choice — would disappear.
Indignity follows indignity. The true baby’s own long-forgotten imaginary grandma (reported dead in an early edition of the New York Times) comes to play with the imposter. Perhaps passing away has undone her powers of sight, the true baby thinks, wanting to put the best possible interpretation on unforgivable betrayal. Is there no one left to tell the real from the false?
Some lip service is given by those of the household to his prerogatives, but in fact they have been stripped from him. He is barely allowed to call his old thoughts and feelings his own. While the evening sleeps, he plans his comeback. While his parents are out at a local movie, the true baby puts on the mask of his former self and slips out of the house.
He walks a long distance, six or eight blocks, crossing the streets he has mandate to cross and some others where the area of his authority is undefined, when a tapping on the window catches his attention. A familiar woman he can’t remember having seen before invites him in. If it is soup she has to offer, he has promised himself to refuse.
The question of soup doesn’t come up. In fact, for a while, there is nothing of sustenance offered him except a few heartfelt compliments and a kiss or two on the forehead, “What a big baby,” the woman tends to say in admiration. She offers to put him to bed in the largest crib in the house so that he might be “full of beans” the next morning.
He wouldn’t mind, he says, being full of beans this evening, depending of course on what kind of beans they were.
“I assume,” the woman says, “that when you say beans you’re talking metaphorically.”
She marches him into the kitchen and sets him up in a cramped high chair. She has, she reports, a refrigerator full of leftovers. A metal bib (perhaps only stiff plastic) is tied around his neck, vitiating an otherwise delicate appetite.
The lady serves him a plate of metaphoric beans, which the masked figure picks over disconsolately.
“Would you like me to help you?” she asks.
He nods by mistake, a momentary confusion of signals. Before he can correct his error, a shovelful of leftovers arrives unwanted at lips’ door.
The food refuses to be swallowed and the woman breaks into tears. “What have I done wrong?” she asks. “Why do you hate me?”
The former baby protests that he has been misunderstood, that his feelings about the woman and the food are separate and distinct, to be confused at the peril of the confuser.
“What can I do that will make you happy?” she asks. “Is there anything?”
The baby-in-disguise is escaping the high chair when the husband makes an imposing entrance. “What’s all the noise, for God’s sake?” he asks.
The woman gives him a somewhat biased version of the preceding events.
“You don’t know how to handle him,” says the husband.
“What this baby needs is a little discipline in his life.”
“If you were home more often,” she says, “maybe he’d be getting what he needs.”
They shout a few things back and forth. At some point the husband carries the baby-in-disguise upstairs and puts him to bed. “I’m putting you to bed without your dinner.” he says, “because you were bad and didn’t eat it. That’s the kind of discipline you are going to get in this house.”
The next morning, after the husband is gone, the woman tells the former baby a secret. “My husband hasn’t the slightest interest in babies,” she says. “Now that’s not right, is it?”
Her guest can’t help but agree.
“His idea of discipline is putting a baby to bed without food.
Now my idea of discipline is having a baby eat everything that’s good for him.”
During the working day, the woman feeds him continuously until he is immobilized with food. In the evening, in accordance with his idea of discipline, the husband puts the baby-in-disguise to bed without any dinner.