by Dan Chaon
“Parents?” the cheerful nun said brightly, in a deep, resonant voice, like a radio announcer, and Georgia nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “We’re Mr. and Mrs. Marsh. Erik’s mother and father.” She didn’t look at Rich, though he glanced at her surreptitiously. “Mr. and Mrs. Marsh” was not her usual style—in fact, she had retained her maiden name after they married, for feminist reasons. Any other time, they both might have chuckled at the quaintness of it.
But now, inside this aged building, the formality didn’t seem amusing. Instead, it conveyed a mantle of decorum upon them. They joined a solemn promenade of other couples, grimly observing the rituals of parenthood, in the same way that atheists clasp their hands and bow their heads during a funeral prayer.
The last time they’d visited, Rich had been on Ecstasy. He’d been cheerful, gentle, fatherly—a model parent. No one would have guessed that he was on drugs. The nurses beamed at him, their eyes warm and glistening brown, and he smiled back shyly, feeling that he was good, as good as he would ever be.
Afterwards, as they were driving home, Georgia said the same thing. “You know,” she said. “You’re really good with him. I wish I could be like you.”
He was coming down by that time, and a quiet moodiness had settled over him. “Oh, come on,” he said. “You’re good with him, too. We just have different modes.”
“No, I know,” Georgia said. “That’s not what I’m saying. It’s just that you really turn on for him. In a way that you’re not on for most people.”
“I’m on for you,” he said. He tried to make it into a flirtatious joke. “You turn me on, baby.”
But she just shrugged. “Sometimes, maybe,” she said. And then she was quietly thoughtful.
They walked down the corridor, side by side, and their footsteps ricocheted off the waxed floor. The sound was almost visible, and Rich felt himself flinch again.
Erik was sitting on a chair in his room. He didn’t move. Some of the other children rocked back and forth or moved their hands in some ceaseless, stylized gesture, or banged things. But for the most part, Erik was motionless. He tucked his left index finger behind his left ear and cupped his other hand over his mouth and nose, breathing deeply, like a person wearing an oxygen mask. The doctors believed that he was smelling his own breath. He did this for most of the hours that he was awake.
Generally, Erik was mute. Sometimes he would cluck his tongue, or make a steady sucking sound as he rolled his tongue in his mouth, tasting it. Occasionally, he would move his lips when other people spoke, seeming to mimic them precisely. As far as they knew, Erik had spoken twice in the seven years that he had been alive. Once, when Erik had still been living at home—when he was three years old—he’d said, abruptly and distinctly, “The car. The car. The car.” Rich had been driving Erik to the doctor, and he’d almost run the car off the road at the sound of the boy’s voice; he’d been overcome, for a second, with an amazement that was almost like panic. He pulled into someone’s driveway, turning to stare at Erik, who was sitting in his car seat, with his usual slack, milky expression. “Erik?” he said. “Erik!” And for a moment there was the possibility of something extraordinary. “The car,” Rich had said. “That’s right! We’re in the car! Absolutely!” He didn’t know how long he’d yammered coaxingly at Erik before the sense of the miraculous began to shrink, to vanish, like a piece of snow clutched in the fist. After a time, the old woman whose driveway he was parked in came out of her house. She stood and looked cautiously at him, watching from her porch as he spoke eagerly to the silent child. At last, she approached the car. “Can I help you, sir?” she said sternly. “Are you lost?”
When he’d told the doctor, she did not seem to believe him. Though she listened politely, and wrote things down, he could see that she doubted him. Even Georgia was hesitant to believe, when he told her, and for a while he wasn’t sure himself. It might have been his imagination, he admitted.
And so it was almost three years before Erik spoke again. He was at the school by that time, and the person he spoke to was a professional—a young psychology Ph.D. student who was doing research at the institution. One day she walked into the room, and Erik lifted his head attentively. “I can smell you,” he said distinctly, and she stood there, a bit stunned, as he contemplated her without blinking for many seconds, almost a minute. Then he cupped his hand over his mouth again.
When they walked into the room, there was always the possibility that something might change. He believed it—believed in a way that he could not speak of, even when they were talking with the doctors. He would listen to them silently, tacitly accepting their diagnosis, while at the same time he held his breath every time they walked into Erik’s room. His skin tingled, and he heard Erik’s deep baby voice in the back of his mind: “The car. The car. The car.” And for a moment, he was sure that it would happen again. This time, it would happen.
A large percentage of autistic children did not remain so forever. They came out of it, to varying degrees—though he wasn’t quite sure what “it” was. A kind of fog or murk, perhaps, a dream wood in which the real child was wandering? Whatever it was, they emerged, many of them. They could not say where they had been.
But this time—despite the way Eric’s body seemed to briefly quiver, despite the way Rich’s heart leapt hopefully, again—Erik was the same. He was sitting up in a chair, with his palm on his mouth, his eyes filmy and distant. It reminded Rich of the look people get right after they do heroin. He had told this to Georgia, and she had nodded after a moment. “Yeah,” she said, and smiled ruefully. “That’s really accurate.” Mary A. used to do some heroin, back when she and Georgia were in their early twenties, and roommates. So she knew what he was talking about. She used to go out and buy jugs and jugs of orange juice for Mary A., and vitamins; afterwards, she would lay on the bed and hold Mary A. in her arms, while Mary A. curled and retched and sweated coldly. She would feed Mary A. teaspoons of sugar water, like a half-drowned kitten she was nursing. “It’s not something I’d do again,” she told him. “You can only live through something like that once.” (This was during the period right after Erik was institutionalized, when Rich was tending to drink too much. “If you become an alcoholic, I’ll leave you,” Georgia said. “I really will.”)
He looked at her as they stood in Erik’s room. Her face had brightened and stiffened; she was trying to smile gently, but her lips were too tight. She ended up looking oddly prim.
“Hello, sweetheart,” she said to him. “Hello, Erik,” she said softly.
It looked like Erik had grown. At seven, the baby softness of his cheeks had begun to solidify, his face and legs were stretching out. Teeth had started to drop out of his head, and new ones were emerging from the pink gum, permanent teeth—a man’s teeth, Rich had thought, and it had amazed him to think that these teeth would still be there when Erik was fifty or sixty and Rich himself was (probably) long dead. “Don’t you think that’s eerie?” Rich had asked Georgia once. “I mean, what if children suddenly grew adult hands and feet and they were still their tiny selves. Wouldn’t that be bizarre?” Georgia had looked at him like he was stoned, which he was, a little. He dipped his head sheepishly.
“Yes,” Georgia said. “That would be strange.”
But he thought of it again, as they stood in the doorway of Erik’s room, and Erik took his hand away from his mouth and showed his teeth at them. It was, Rich thought, a gesture of recognition, perhaps Erik’s version of a smile—though it seemed more like a grimace. Another tooth was missing.
Rich had asked about the teeth before, but the nurses who watched Erik only shrugged. More than likely, Erik had swallowed the teeth when they fell out. The teeth had passed through his body and were excreted. Which, of course, made sense, was basically natural. Rich himself still possessed all his baby teeth. He had exchanged them with the Tooth Fairy for fifty-cent pieces and dollar bills. Later, Rich’s mother had the teeth strung into a bracelet which she nev
er actually wore, but kept in a lower drawer of her jewelry box until she died and Rich found them again. The bracelet was like something a caveman would wear, Georgia had said, and what could be said to that?
Erik showed his teeth for just a moment. It was something special he did for only them, his Mom and Dad—peekaboo!—but then he covered up again, fitting his nose and mouth back into his cupped palm. He looked at them steadily, though. He was aware of them in a way he was seldom aware of people. He recognized them, Rich felt.
But where to begin? That was always the question.
They’ve tried coaxing baby talk, bright observations about the trees outside or the stuffed animals they’d brought, described in Crayola colors and basic shapes. They’ve tried edging closer, covering him with small, furtive kisses, touches and whispers. But what Erik liked best was to hear them singing, and so, once they were seated in chairs, Rich started in. He came up with a song he’d been thinking of, which of course Georgia had never heard of, and so he switched to “Octopus’s Garden,” and she joined in, her careful, formal alto joining his mellower, nasal tenor.
“I’d like to be—under the sea,” they sang, slowly, as if it were a lullaby.
After a time, Erik would begin to relax and loosen. An old memory would come to him, and after a time they took turns coming close to him—both at once was too much—and he allowed them to pet his hair, and to hold him in their laps while they hummed softly. He would press his ear against their chests, enjoying the vibration the humming made.
Rich had asked Georgia once, “Do you think that there’s some kind of key?” And she’d cocked her head, not understanding.
“I mean,” he said. “Like that time he spoke to me. Do you think it was something internal, or was it some kind of outside stimulus? I mean,” he said, “Was it a song on the radio, or a certain type of way the sunlight hit his eyes, or a smell maybe? Maybe something he saw? A key of some kind. And he got out, for a second.”
Georgia considered this, looking off somewhere—the wallpaper, a tiny snag of cobweb hanging from a corner. She shook her head. “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t think it works like that.” And then she waited, thinking for a moment, letting it turn a few times in her mind. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe there was some—factor at work. I don’t know. But it’s not like he’s—imprisoned in a tower or something, and we can just find the magic key to make everything better.” She looked at him, the thin line of her lips tightening, and a tear suddenly slid out of the corner of her eye. “Shit,” she said. “Rich, don’t do this to me. Don’t be whimsical about this.” Her chin had trembled for a moment, and she caught it with her hand, pressing it still, composing herself.
“Georgia,” he said, and touched her hand. “Honey,” he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t—” But what could he say? It hurt her, he thought, because this kind of hope, this kind of musing, made her feel alone. He couldn’t help her, but he swallowed back other such imaginings, seeing them through her eyes: Futile. Frivolous. Cruel, even. He thought of how she had said, “Magic key,” turning the words in her mouth in a way that made him seem blindly, stupidly childish—the silly, ghost-seeing husband of her letter.
But later, Mary A. had agreed with him. “Oh, of course there’s a key,” she said. She’d called one night while Georgia was out at a movie, and Rich had talked to her for quite some time. Once a conversation with Mary A. began, it was hard to end it.
“A key,” Mary A. said. “But it’s more like a psychic moment. We all have them. But it’s not something we can control, of course, not most of us. It’s just that, suddenly, he’s in our world—snap, like that—in the same way that when you get a déjà vu, you’re in another world for a minute. That’s what I think, at least.”
“Yes,” he said. He paused, holding the phone against his cheek, looking out the window to the bare driveway, where Georgia would pull up when her movie was finished. Their argument had been going for quite some time by then, a week or more, and he was aware of the silence that she was telegraphing, even as she sat in the darkened theater and watched a film—he imagined it was some French or subtitled thing, something he wouldn’t have wanted to see, and he imagined her solemnly reading the translations as actors emoted in a foreign tongue. “How was the movie?” he would say, and she would say, “Fine.”
“Listen,” he said to Mary A., rubbing his face. “You can take this for what it’s worth. I mean, you don’t have to answer or anything, but what do you think is going to happen with Georgia and me?”
“Oh, sweetie,” she said lightly, very Southern. “I don’t know that!”
“You don’t?”
“Well,” she said.
“I just want to know if it’s over. I mean, if there’s nothing I can do.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s nothing like that. It’s much more complicated than that.”
“Yes,” he said. She was silent for a time, both of them listening to some version of the rest of the conversation in their heads. He let out a long breath, which fluttered against the mouthpiece.
“I don’t know what goes on in her head,” Mary A. said finally. “If I did, we’d probably still be together.” She paused again for a moment, then let out a small laugh that was meant to be airy, that was meant to say, “Just kidding!”
But she wasn’t. He was aware, then, that Georgia and Mary A. had been lovers—he had perhaps really known all along, or should have—but at that moment he gathered the facts in a sudden, easy intuition, the way the lyrics of a song would suddenly line up word for word in his brain. It wasn’t a shocking revelation or even something that made him jealous. “Yes,” he said, but he wasn’t sure what he was answering. “Yes, I know.”
“You know what Georgia said to me once?” Mary A. said, quiet now, musing. “She was like, ‘I can’t stay with someone who isn’t afraid to die.’ And I thought it was pretty funny at the time. You know, I was indulging in certain . . . behaviors then, but now I think back, and she was probably right. She falls in love with fools, I think. I don’t mean that in a cruel way, either, but if you want to know about Georgia, that’s the real secret.”
“Yes,” he said. “Well.” He thought again of the letter, on Georgia’s desk, unsent. He had seen it still there, earlier that day, and had considered before dropping it in the wastebasket.
“It would be really terrible for her if you self-destructed, you know,” Mary A. continued in a bright voice. She listened, as if to hear something on the line—to be sure he was still there, still breathing, still pressing his ear against her voice. He exhaled softly.
“But you won’t,” Mary A. said.
“No,” he said.
“You’ll forge onward, despite everything.”
“Yes,” he said.
He looked at Georgia as he held Erik in his arms. She was thinking something, knowing something, and he could not guess what. Erik nuzzled against Rich’s shoulder, breathing him in, and Rich ran his finger lightly over the peachlike hairs on Erik’s ears.
What could he do? There was a numb ache in his chest, a dull hopefulness, a kind of shadow that Rich recognized as a symptom of love. How ridiculous, he sometimes thought. My God! He loved this boy, his son, this vacant little person, with an intensity that had never made much sense to him. He knew that there was not, and perhaps would never be, any reciprocation, but it didn’t matter. He had no choice, and it often occurred to him that all the things people said about love were wrong. He ought to tell Georgia, he thought. Love didn’t have anything to do with the outside world: it just happened. Some mysterious brain chemistry set in, and you couldn’t avoid it. Human beings could fall in love with an idiot, with a drug, with a rock; they could fall in love with the smell of their own breath. It was a biological function, Rich thought, some long-forgotten instinct that could kick in at any moment. He could actually feel it activating, the way a drug might, tracing through his body from the center to the extremities, and he could feel it in the pads
of his fingertips as he sat there.
“Can I hold him for a while, please?” Georgia said politely.
And now afterwards: What would it be? They were driving in silence again, another visit without a miracle, without any change. In the quiet, his eyes resting on the road, he could imagine them growing old with each trip, their faces sagging as Erik’s legs grew long and coltish, their hands becoming dry and shrinking as their child grew hairs and an Adam’s apple. How long, how many years could they stand it?
He didn’t know. It had stopped raining, and the late afternoon sun, low in the sky, caught Georgia’s profile, caught the strands of hair around her head and made them clear and delicate as a spider’s web, but her expression was shadowed. The dark stumps of telephone poles slid by, orange-lit, beyond her silhouette—and the horizon, the dull yellow-gray prairie that rose up just beyond Denver’s city limits. Up ahead, a sugar-beet factory was sending a long, white plume of steam across the interstate, a solid-looking cloud of murk. He could imagine a figure emerging out of it, lurching steadily and almost gracefully, like a knight on a horse out of the fog, but there was nothing. They passed under it, and the road didn’t even grow misty. It just darkened, and they felt the shadow of the steam fly over them.
What? he thought.
FITTING ENDS
There is a story about my brother Del that appears in a book called More True Tales of the Weird and Supernatural. The piece on Del is about three pages long, full of exclamation points and supposedly eerie descriptions. It is based on what the writer calls “true facts.”
