“So you see, to get to the point, when I handed him Weird Willy I had the toy figured at less than a minute. What does any of it matter, his crying, so long as he sweats enough to fill the fucking testing device, I should’ve thought. I should’ve thought, I’m lucky that my son is just crying and not spazzing out, or giving me a much harder time. I’m lucky that he’s only being tested for this disease and hasn’t been handed a diagnosis: terminally ill, with only a few weeks, or a day, or even less, to live, for sure, and that this is still a wide-open thing,” he would tell Dr. Brackett, at his office in White Plains.
Outside, down in the street, the traffic signals would be cheeping, making a sound meant to guide the blind, if there were any. In the four years that he’d been going over the bridge to visit Dr. Brackett, he had never seen a single blind soul using the audible signals to cross the street. The streets in White Plains were always dusty and forlorn, and somehow reminded him of a Western town just before a shootout; folks were hidden away, peeking out in anticipation of violence. Even up in the office he’d feel this — while hearing the cheeping sounds — and it would form a backdrop as Dr. Brackett, a small, lean, sharpchinned man, placed his palms on his knees and leaned forward to say something like:
“It is perfectly possible that you didn’t loosen the collecting device when you grappled with your son. After all, the nurse came in and adjusted it, didn’t she? You can’t be blamed for that. I’m sure it happens all the time. In any case, let’s focus on the wider theatrics of your parenting actions: Do you think you’re the first father to cup his son around the mouth? You’re a good man with a clean heart, not perfectly clean but clear (yes, a clear heart), and you had good intentions, and you were just at the end of your rope, and so you naturally felt frustrated and fearful — above all fearful, because what the test meant, most certainly, one way or another, was the central element/key/crux in the parental drama (let’s call it a drama, not a play). You were fending off, or, rather, delaying for as long as possible, the end result of the test, perhaps subconsciously. You were biding your time with Gunner, trying to fend off, if I may use that phrase again, his anxiety, or what you imagined was his anxiety, by inducing play, a certain level of play, presumably, not just using up time or trying to keep him calm, as you claim, but trying to keep the scene itself stable and quiet on some level, maybe thinking, as you tried, that in doing so you’d also somehow, and perhaps this is a long shot”—he would admit, because Dr. Brackett, as a shrink, liked to counter and undercut his own statements as a way of enlivening them, making them seem like organic, natural formations in order to assure his patient that he was just as human as the next guy and didn’t subscribe to the old formalities of Freudian methodology—“but perhaps you were also under the belief that, somehow, if you kept Gunner quiet and calm, the outcome of the test might be positively affected. Because you believed, I believe, that there were, and are, deeper factors at play — quantum/God/mystical, take your pick — and that if the test went smoothly the results were more likely to be negative. You felt, at that moment, in the sweat chamber, after the toys gave out, a sense that in the heat of the room, and in the sweat that was being exuded from Gunner’s body, fate was at hand, so to speak.” (Here Brackett would draw a couple of deep breaths.) “Now that you know that the results of that particular test were inconclusive because the collection device came loose and, in the end, not enough sweat was collected, you blame yourself for the fact that you’ve got to go back next week and again reopen that door to the question of his health, and that in doing so you must once again face the possibility that he has cystic fibrosis, and that your life will change again,” Brackett would say.
“Now let’s backtrack a little. The nurse, who presumably has been through many of these moments with many other patients, most likely came into the so-called sweat chamber to offer assistance, to help you in one way or another, or to remove the electrodes, and in seeing your hand over Gunner’s mouth she understood your predicament and sympathized with it and with the boy’s predicament, too — perhaps your own more so than the boy’s — and at that moment she did not judge you as harshly as you’d like to think, but was actually waiting for you to speak, and in hearing your anger, when you did speak, and within it your deep, almost Jobian fear, felt her own helplessness before all the illness she has faced, as you were saying. Bald cancer heads, forlorn eyes, tears, kids suffering at the deepest level. Kids cheery and chipper against the saddest odds. Kids with that disjointed misunderstanding of their own place and status, not only healthwise but otherwise, too. Kids bucking themselves up heroically. Clearly, just going by the fact that you continue to mention what her Mona Lisa face seemed to be saying, almost obsessively, it seems to me, it becomes evident that you were turning to her as a soothsayer, and maybe that might mean, and here I propose this only as a theory, a useful one — perhaps, perhaps not — that she, too, felt herself to be unwillingly put into a shamanic position; no, let’s correct that and say an oracular mode. Let’s say she felt that her face might — from your point of view — be seen as an oracle, and let’s say that that might explain the strange expressions she presented, if they really were strange.”
Cavanaugh imagined all of the above as he drove back over the Hudson while Gunner slept in the backseat with his head lolling to one side and his tiny mouth open around his own breath, and, down below, the river fretted with bits of white chop as the first hard wind of the fall drove down from the north and cut past Hook Mountain on its way to the city. As he drove, he began to cry, openly and with stifled guffaws, the way a man must cry when he is faced with the future, any future, a good one or a bad one, and after he has sat alone in a room with his child, waiting for sweat to collect so that he may know something about what is to come, some exactitude in the form of a diagnosis; he cried the way a man must cry when he’s driving, keeping both hands on the wheel and his eyes wide open through the blur, and he cried the way a man must cry when he is exhausted from being up deep into the night while his boy coughs up almost unbelievable quantities of phlegm, clearly succumbing to a disease process — as his doctor called it — that at that point was indeterminate; he cried for himself as much as for his son, and for the world that was unfolding to his left, an open vista, the gaping mouth of the river, which at that moment was flowing down to the sea, hurrying itself into the heart of New York Harbor. He was crying like a man on a bridge — suspended between two sides of life, trapped in the blunt symbolism of the spans, and atop the floating pylons that sustained the decks of reinforced concrete — while his son slept soundly, unburdened now, it seemed, when Cavanaugh looked back at him in the mirror, and afloat on his own slumber. Not at all sick, or diseased, and free from whatever torment the future might offer up. By the time (three minutes later) that Cavanaugh was exiting off the thruway and driving down Main Street (six minutes later), past the stately trees unfurling their fall brilliance, he had collected himself and was clear-eyed and in a new state. He wasn’t a man reborn at all. Not even close. That would come much later, after the second test, and when the results were in, conclusive and hard, no nonsense in the statement they made. That would come (he imagined) when he gave himself over to the fact that salt moved chaotically in and out of certain cells, and that Gunner’s body would forever confront certain facts: mucous blockages in his lungs and pancreas, and frequent infections. But for now, as he entered the town on a beautiful fall day, the diagnosis was somewhere off in the remote future, and he was alive and dealing with the moment at hand, which included his own actions in the sweat room, and the failure of his set design for the convention scene, and he felt himself growing calm before the sweet presence in the backseat, which came to him in the form of a soft snore, a little clicking sound that accompanied each exhalation, and then, finally, a small groan as the car settled over the curb of the driveway (eight minutes later) and came to a stop, and then another slight sniff as his boy awoke (one minute later), roused by the silence, the lack of road noise, and opened his eyes and blinked, and then said, “Are we home? Are we home now, Dad?”