A Good and Happy Child (41 page)

“This isn’t the answer,” you said, shaking your head. I had called you here, out of bed, in the middle of the night.
Meet
me at Bellevue,
I had said, hysterically, dramatically. You paused in a way that translated to a very New York:
Are you kidding?
But I snapped my cell phone shut. You called back but I did not answer, and because I was a suicide risk, you had to come, drag yourself out of bed, and meet me in the waiting room at the Emergency Room entrance—the
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one with the plastic sheeting due to the endless refurbishments and construction on that block—and argue with me, beginning quietly, but due to my shouting and gesticulations and teeth-grinding and sweeping gestures that threatened even my catatonic fellow madmen slouching in the waiting room—junkies tipping over, filthy men davening and muttering—the burly male nurse had to ask us to quiet down. You flashed him your ID card for NYU Hospital where you’re an attending physician, and you asked him,
at your patient’s request,
to please find voluntary papers, and he showed us into this side examining room. I rocked my body against the examining table, in a need to feel something solid, to knock myself against something, punish myself.

“It’s not over,” I said, tears streaming. I could not even see your face, but felt sure its expression blended patience and disapproval and nerves. “It didn’t finish the job.”

Your voice dropped apprehensively. “What are you referring to?”

I shook my head, refusing to answer. Instead I made sweeping gestures over my arms, my chest, as if scraping off some invisible, clinging muck. “I’ve still got it on me,” I said, “I can feel it.”

“Feel what?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“Tell me,” you challenged.

“The curse,” I wailed, my tears beginning again. “The hatred. The
thing
that made me commit murder.”

“You didn’t commit murder, George.”

“I did. I remember.”

“You remember seeing the body. The man died while he was out looking for you—you feel responsible. You were traumatized. But you didn’t actually kill him,” you said. “The police never suspected you for a reason.”

“What reason?”

“
A little boy cannot kill a grown man,
George—not the way you described it. Not by carrying him up a tree and hanging him,” you said, exasperated. “It’s a physical impossibility.”

“
You’re missing the fucking point!
” I screamed, jabbing my finger in a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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the air. “The police didn’t know what we know—okay? They didn’t know about the demon.”

“George, you’ve got to stop talking that way,” you said. “Keep it up, you
will
be committed.”

The door popped open. Drawn by my shouting, a doctor in a white smock—a stooped woman with stringy brown hair, hooded Slavic eyes, and clogs—barged into the room. “What’s the problem?”

she demanded.

“Nothing.” You drew your hand over your eyes. “It’s okay. Thanks.”

She withdrew, casting a glance of wary annoyance at me.

“This isn’t Betty Ford,” you said, irritated yourself. “This is Bellevue. A public hospital. You’ll be in here with the homeless guys and the criminals.”

“It’s where I belong.”

“No, it’s not,” you snapped. “The criteria, even for voluntary commitment, is being suicidal or homicidal. Far as I can tell, you’re neither.”

“I killed someone. That’s homicidal.”

“You
believe
you killed someone,” you corrected.

“And my son?” I said.

You frowned. “What about him?”

“You said it yourself. I’ve been protecting him,” I said. “I knew what the demons could make me do. I couldn’t hold him because I was protecting him, cutting off the curse—from my father to me, from me to him. Now I’ll finish it. Keep myself where I can’t go near him, or anyone else.”

In an instant, your face turned to stone. You strode quickly across the room and stood so close I could smell your breath—sour from your few hours’ sleep.

“You showed up in my office four months ago so clean and sweet you could have been applying for a loan,” you hissed. “Now you want to commit yourself to an institution because you think
demons
are after your family? We’re moving in the wrong direction here, George. I’m supposed to be pushing you closer to the truth. Not into deeper delusions. Tell me,” you demanded, eyes flashing, “are you serious about this?”

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I merely closed my eyes. Folded my arms. Continued rocking. I wished you would go away. Wished I could melt. I squeezed my eyes, and felt the tears drip over my cheeks.

Demons are after your family.

Suddenly I stopped rocking.

I’m supposed to be pushing you closer to the truth.
I opened my eyes. I cocked my head, listening. You did not notice the change that came over me. Instead, you turned your back and began pacing.

“Okay,” you said. “Go ahead. Voluntarily commit yourself. Pay your outstanding dues to society. While extreme, it’s possible this will make you feel better—clearly, you believe it will. Half an hour ago I would have sworn at gunpoint that there is nothing wrong with you. Now . . .”

I saw the examining room with complete clarity. You were wearing tan slacks, badly wrinkled, I guessed the ones you wore to the office that day and had hastily redonned to meet your problem patient at the emergency room at 3:00 A.M.

You were right. The answer did not lie in here, in psychiatric incarceration. It was laughable—I had nearly imprisoned myself when precisely what I needed to do was slip away.

“Yes,” I declared.

“Yes, what?” you grumbled.

“Yes, I’m serious,” I said, suddenly lucid. “And you’re wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“I’m not deluded.”

You looked up, surprised.

“Good-bye, doctor,” I said, and bolted from the room.

“George!” you shouted.

I pushed my way through the narrow corridor. I ran so fast that I caught the attention of the male nurse. He maneuvered in front of me—great footwork, like a defensive back—gripped my arms, his biceps bulging, shouting,
Whoa, whoa, where are you going,
until I shouted in his face,
I haven’t been committed, I didn’t sign anything yet, I don’t have
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a bracelet,
and you emerged, asking,
Where are you going, George?

Maybe you were right, we can keep you here, just to get a proper examina-
tion,
and the nurse demanded what the heck was going on, was this patient staying or going, all at once, everyone with competing voices, drumming the whole room into an uproar, distracting Nurse Bicep so that with a single wrench and a lunge I reached the plastic door marked EXIT HERE and started sprinting around the corner, past the construction zone and the ambulances and the shuttle bus stop. Gone. After a few blocks I pass through a black-painted iron gate, into a park. There are blossoms on the trees. Midnight blossoms. They hang heavy and fleshy in the rude orange light of the streetlamps. I have left my jacket in the ER, but the cold, even for the coldest hour of a spring night, seems severe. I shiver.

The circular stained-glass window of an Episcopal church looks out onto the park, its panes dark and blank—dead eyes.
Most merciful
God,
I recite to myself,
we confess that we have sinned against thee in
thought, word, and deed.
Then, to my surprise, I hear a response. I spin around. The park is deserted. Even the homeless are sleeping elsewhere tonight. I search the bushes with my eyes, expecting to see some horny couple emerging from the ivy, red-faced and stinking of alcohol, a wad of cash changing hands . . . but the shadowy corners remain still. I open my mouth to speak aloud, to call out. Then I realize what I have heard. Just a whisper. The labial smacking of a murmur in my ear, so close as to be on my shoulder, tingling the hairs on my neck; inside my head.

“I know you’re there,” I say aloud. “I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

I’m a man now, after all,
I say to myself.
I’m the one who stands up
to you.

Am I?

My mother and I never spoke of it again. Nothing between that first
collapse in the shower, and the policeman’s visit, existed for us. We never
mentioned Kurt—and when we met or heard of others with that name, the
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barest blink did not pass between us. My mother packed the story away, the
way she packed our belongings—in garment bags and labeled boxes—into
the Toyota for the long drive north the day after I killed Kurt. She left her
job, left our house in the hands of a realtor, left all the friends we knew with-
out a phone number or address.

I walk, head bent, following a tight O, the circular path in the center of the park. I pass benches, the same benches, around and around. If I cannot enter the asylum, then at least I can find a place to pace, to clear my mind.

I’m not afraid,
I say to myself.
The man is the one who stands up on
the fortifications, braves the bullets, lays the strategy, and takes the conse-
quences. The man is the one who fights.

You can’t.

I spin again. I know it is a voice. But suddenly it is not so much a matter of a voice, but which voice. They argue and hiss around me—

somewhere at knee level, it seems—like a sea of tickling grass, each teasing, each vying for attention, nipping puppies wanting to be chased. I strain to hear them. Then stop myself.
No.
I press my hands against my ears and I groan.

On an overcast afternoon soon after we left Preston, a minister parked
his canary yellow Honda in the gravel drive of my maternal grandmother’s
house in Killingworth, Connecticut. He wore casual clothes. We had the
impression he did not wish to be seen in clerical collar making this particular
house call. Over the objections of my Presbyterian grandmother—former
member of the Women’s Temperance Union, and for whom, I’m sure, this
seemed scandalously Catholic—the minister, tall and gaunt in his flannel
shirt and pleated blue jeans, gave me a “special blessing.” No stole, no cruci-
fix, no mentions of the serpent. Only stony February sunlight on three drawn
Anglo-Saxon faces in a nervous circle. Fifteen minutes of mumbling from a
Good News version New Testament. A cool damp hand on my forehead.
Some stern staring into my face afterward—maybe to see if it “took.” Then,
after grave and respectful thank-yous from my mother, a parting line at the
door:
It’s in God’s hands now.
And no good-bye. I suffered no more visita-
tions from my Friend, from Other George. The minister—a proper minister
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of God—had been able to do what my father’s friends, in their enthusiasm
and maybe their folly, could not do. Or perhaps it was just that the demon
had no more use for me.

For me,
I repeat to myself. Then it strikes me.
But what about him?

I begin to run. Down the long block, past the glass office building, past the off-Broadway theater and the W Hotel and the Disc-O-Rama and into Union Square Park, where rats bumble across the pavement like little furry footballs. I sprint through the park’s dim and leafy center, and just as I do, the streetlamps extinguish, click off—their light detectors have sensed the sunrise. I rush around the corner past the medical clinic and into our building, our lobby with the vinyl sofas and the dentist’s office, and I wave to the slow-witted doorman, who nods—clearly not aware that I haven’t lived here in months—and I punch the elevator button, but it’s slow, so I round the corner to the stairs, force my tired legs to climb two at a time, until I stand, heaving, in front of our door. I hear noises inside. They are awake. Rising early with a hungry baby. My heart pounds in my ears, and with every downstroke, the voices rise, rumbling and scratching, so brutally loud they are like a pick jabbed between my eyes. The throb of a headache begins. Trembling, I take out my key. I open the door. Maggie never changed the locks. The apartment is lit brightly. Music murmurs from the stereo. I stand in the doorway and steady myself. The thrum in my head is relentless. But I hear something else. A swooshing noise, and an irregular rattle. I close the door softly behind me. The swooshing noise is the shower—through the open bathroom door, I hear Maggie singing to herself. The rattle is my son. He is standing in a baby saucer outside the bathroom door—where Maggie has placed him to keep an eye on him—spinning a plastic tub full of beads.

A few minutes later, the shower stops. “Paul, you okay?” Maggie calls for the baby. “How you doing there?”

There is a silence.

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“Paul?”

Maggie steps from the shower, toweling herself off.

“Paul, Paulie-cracker, where did you go?”

She opens the bathroom door wide and finds the saucer gone. Footsteps as she checks the bedroom. Then walks into the living room.

“OH GOD!” she screams, grabs her chest, draws up. “Oh God, you gave me a heart attack. How did you get in here?”

I am standing over the baby—still in the saucer that I have dragged to the far end of the room. He is now six months old, fat and round-headed, a whisper of hair across his pate, sucking on a bottle.

“Visitation,” I whisper. “It’s Sunday.”

I reach down and grab him by the armpits. I lift him into the air, wrenching his fat, sectioned legs free from the saucer-seat. I hold him above me.
George
—
what are you doing?
exclaims Maggie. She runs toward me wrapped in her white towel, leaving wet footprints on the carpet. I swivel away from her, to be alone with him, to have him to myself. I smell his scent that mingles fresh laundry with a hint of pee. I stare into his eyes: they are a brownish black, a blackish green, as dark and alive as ocean swells. Maggie pulls at my shirt.
Give him to me,
she is shouting,
don’t touch him.
I fend her off with an extended arm. She does not hear the voice, a single voice, now distinct and vivid, calling me. I raise my eyes to see the figure in the window: the urchin with its straw-yellow hair. It has pressed its chewed fingertips against the glass. Its gaze is unblinking. Its eyes are dull. Its mouth hangs open, wet with the desire to consume us. Dawn casts rays of sunlight into the room, but in its presence, even the morning sun is moribund, shot through with decay. I wrap the baby in my arms. I swear to him that I will never leave him, that I will stay, that I will protect him.
That’s how we will break the
curse,
I whisper. Then the figure in the window opens the void of its mouth and screams.