I knew she was right. Even so, I could not be shamed or shaken out of it. I gave up on any of the increasingly rare travel opportunities at work, and I often skipped the bus to the office and wrote at the desk set up in the spare bedroom instead. My wife was pregnant and my house was sick, infected with beetles and wood lice and rejecting all manner of expensive grafts. I felt I should stay at home with my patient. Not that it needed me. I clearly needed it.
And throughout everything, I had neglected to tell my own family we had moved. I have a big family. I am the middle child of five children, which means that we all have to work up an astonishing amount of energy to impart news of any kind to one another. But my brothers and sisters deserved cards, at least, and my mother probably required a phone call.
And what about Dad? I kept thinking of a picture I had of my dad, standing, in the late 1970s, in front of the house we had owned in the redwoods of northern California. A huge timber place set back from a banked mountain road, a house that looms over him in the photo, casting a long shadow through the ageless trees. I could almost hear it creaking, that house, and when I looked at my dad he seemed so small against that massive frame, that encroaching forest.
Here, I told myself, is a man who would understand. Here is a man who would understand the insane, impossible pressures of owning a modest three-bedroom suburban bungalow on the south coast of England.
In terms of impending fatherhood, I at least did not feel the pressure of my lineage. My parents had blazed a trail that, even if it had been appealing to me, would be hard to follow. They are vivid people, my parents, both room-fillers in their own way. My dad was a social worker when we grew up, and, although he never really talked about it, we knew what his job meant: it meant he went to work each day and saved children. A vivid career, and he was often vividly absent because of the hours he worked. I wince at a memory in which he returned home one evening and said he wanted to wash his hands. I led him upstairs, worried that he might not know where the bathroom was in his own house.
And when he was present, he was still vivid: the only American, seemingly, in all of Kent, his voice loud and genial in a world of sour muttering. It was an early indicator that if I was to earn the Americanness my passport bestowed upon me, I would have to work at it. Americans in the 1980s, which in England were still so close to the 1950s, seemed to exude more color than everyone else. My dad was a light source, even before he said anything, and when he did say something he was gentle and caring and somehow out of reach despite the smile. He was Harrison Ford with jowls and sad, watchful eyes, both inherited from his own father, who was a tyrant.
My mum was a different kind of vivid, prone to withering furies and fierce joy, forever in search of a cause, and forever finding one. She has only started to seem small in her sixties, when some of her internal furnaces have dimmed to soot and ember. She was unpredictable and often unfathomable when we were kids, and my sister and I agreed that we couldn’t even be sure where she came from. Her family was French, allegedly: dainty surnames like Tuileries and Solei blunted by hillbilly Kent into Tilly and Solly. She looked like the product of a hundred different backgrounds, however: Romany in her dark-skinned sinew, mad-haired New York folk poet, strident babushka.
Together, Mum and Dad made strange, unintelligible life decisions, lurching back and forth between the United States and the United Kingdom until everyone was dizzy. Like many people of that generation, the 1950s kids let loose in the ’60s and ’70s, they often seemed to conduct their lives as if they were governed by a regular casting of the I Ching. As a result, my early memories remind me of those View-Master machines that stored their 3D wonders on white cardboard discs studded with little slides: a bizarre assortment of places and sights, experience in search of a theme. That redwood forest, Mum spinning the car out on a curving mountain road when she turned a corner too fearlessly and saw a deer standing and chewing on the asphalt; a trip to buy a pumpkin in the countryside, sitting on Dad’s itchy tartan coat in the backseat; the freeway at night, jumbo jets impossibly bright and still in the sky above Los Angeles. And then Kent, Mum’s parents small, prim, and fanatics for a local variety of Christianity, all of us sleeping on the floor because a house of our own was only at the discussion stage.
Amazingly, these people had five children together. I was wedged between two older brothers and two younger sisters. I sensed that we had all been brought up without a great deal of forethought or planning, and I assumed that this cheery chaos was something I would bring to my own family, that it was in the genes on both sides. But I was not correct about this. My mum and dad had led a crazy life together when we were young, but the thrilling instability of their existence was a result of their relationship with each other. They were like two chemicals that erupted in combination but were quiet and safe when stored by themselves. When my parents separated, their individual personalities were suddenly visible. Dad, who eventually settled in Wiltshire, became shrewd and prudent, a planner and scholar of past experience. Mum, who stayed in Kent even though she hated it, continued to live like a house cat, somewhat tame, somewhat wild.
Which way did I lean? After a childhood with so little structure, the house I’d bought had kindled a new kind of panic inside me: responsibility.
And so I brought it with me, panic, to the twelve-week scan in February 2013, ready to argue that, this time, surely, it was at least an appropriate response. It struck me, at the time, as being surprisingly medical, this scan—short on the dreaminess and idle speculation I had been hoping for, nothing like my unhurried moments watching the gentle flutter of the neural tube.
The tube was gone now, replaced with a mass of early baby. Folds were measured, features were checked off and limbs counted. No time to stare into the screen and ponder what was taking shape; instead we were lurched from one thing to the next, Sarah and I somehow separated in that room by the force of our shared anxiety. We both experienced that scan by ourselves, and I alone remember a brief nightmarish cross-section in which the ribcage of my daughter suddenly loomed up through the gray bubble of her torso, looking like the mad splayed teeth of an anglerfish.
I sensed the mystery of the unborn child at that point. They are fragile, but they are terrifyingly powerful.
As we headed toward the twenty-week scan at the end of March, something started to change within me. Something that is apparent only in retrospect, in the same way that, when you find yourself lost on a journey, you must try to pace backward to discover the moment you first started to drift.
The change was this: with no warning, and no obvious cause, my panic started to leave me. The house and its problems could not jolt me back to sparking life anymore. I was serene, but it felt forced, like something that had been inflicted on me, as if a drum had been placed over my head to shield me from the world—and to shield the world from me. Was this the first sign of neurological problems? I am still not certain. It was remarkable, though. People remarked upon it. Sarah would say “You must be feeling better” when a setback or a surprise failed to trigger a meltdown. I would nod politely and think: I’m not sure I exactly feel better.
There were still moments of lurid shock. My daughter was, at this point, a roving lump—an elbow, a knee, a fist—racing around under the surface of my wife’s belly. At times, that lump seemed angry, but maybe it was just impatient.
And there was giddiness too. She loved buses, according to her excited wriggling, and she loved sugar and cold drinks and a TV advert that featured the song “Moon River.” We told ourselves that we understood this girl who had yet to be born. We told ourselves that we would recognize her when she emerged.
By the twenty-week scan I was calmer than I had been for some time, and I assumed that this was a good thing. This final scan was serenity itself: a mild March day, a cheery sonographer, a wakeful baby who was gulping away with a mouth that looked just like my sister’s. We moved in close and I saw the face of the full moon on the screen. Actually, I saw it twice: th
e left hemisphere of her brain, and then the right, creamy light riddled with pits of rich shadow.
And I was delighted by that illicit glimpse of such intimate territory, a vision of something that should generally go unseen. It was nice to feel calm, to feel no panic.
Throughout all of this, of course, there was one thing that should have caused me genuine panic. I missed it completely.
Illness is a perverse adventure. In its early stages, it runs you backward, from experience to a clumsy sort of innocence. You unlearn things. You discover that old truths no longer hold. To put it more directly, one day you can open a door without incident. The next day you cannot. And yet you might not notice this change. Not for quite a while.
There must have been a first time, but I can’t remember it. Without knowing it, I developed a full-blown problem with door handles. I started reaching for them and missing. One door and then another, a clawed swipe through empty air. Always a modest revelation, and this is because I never watched my hand as I reached for a door handle. I just assumed I would hit the target blind. After all, I always had. And then I would have to look and see that I had not hit the target.
It is a mildly amusing thing, to find yourself standing, hand extended and closed around nothing while the door you’re trying to open just hangs there and remains shut. I doubt I gave it much more thought than that the first time it happened. Once I got the door open on my second attempt, I must have quickly filed the memory away alongside all other mildly amusing things, which is to say I forgot about it completely.
I also forgot to look for patterns, for waves rippling outwards from that first missed door handle, cresting gently over the other doors, the light switches, the kitchen cabinets and ATM keypads. For at least a year, or so it seems in retrospect, I failed to spot a silent disaster unfolding, a fundamental shift as the entire world and everything in it moved two or three centimeters away from me—but only if I wasn’t looking.
It was hard to notice this when a baby was on the way, of course. As the due date approached, I fumbled through one day and the next, dropping things, spilling things, spiking myself on pen points and cutlery. I probably thought it was the anxiety of parenthood if I thought about it at all, and I didn’t reflect on the fact that, actually, my anxiety had mysteriously vanished by this point.
So although I had told myself that I would recognize my daughter when she was born, that I would know her instantly and innately, this was probably unlikely. I did not know myself even. My hands had gone missing and I hadn’t really recognized that. Sure, they seemed to be right there, snugly attached to the ends of my wrists. But when I used them for anything, they were often not quite where they told me they were. For the first time ever I began to have to look carefully at the distinct pieces of the world around me if I wanted to do anything. Pieces like keys and locks. I’d really look at them, I’d stare, because they had ceased to be objects of second nature to me. They had stubbornly made themselves visible through my growing clumsiness.
And still I couldn’t take any of this seriously enough to wonder what it might mean.
You lose touch with yourself. Of course you do. The marriage. The house. The baby. Steadily, I found myself drawn back to my dad, often phoning him in the evening when Sarah had gone to bed, just to ask for reassurance: the Californian voice on the end of the line, the American talking to his English son. I remember listening to the phone ring, staring into the darkened window of our box room while I waited for him to pick up. I did this every other night. I even remember what I was generally thinking at these moments, the questions that prompted the call but would remain unanswered because unasked. Can we do this? Are we allowed to do this? I imagine that’s what everyone asks themselves, and besides, I was surrounded by packing boxes, still unopened, of board games and video games and ancient copies of the books I had read and reread as a child and had never been able to throw out, all of which seemed to speak eloquently and rather damningly of my ability to transition into the role of a parent.
What I don’t remember is what I saw in that darkened window on those nights. I was so used to my own reflection—like I had previously been so used to door handles—that I never really looked anymore. My reflection was just an idiotic ghost that followed me around in mockery, wild hair and wild beard colluding with old brown clothes and a permanently distracted look to create the kind of person you might see in a Depression-era photograph, huddled next to a dustbin that someone, in a burst of community spirit, had set on fire.
Permanently distracted. But distracted by what? By my midthirties, the things I paid attention to were seismic, the sorts of big-life things I would phone my dad about. My reflection? Unlikely. And my door-handle problem? No chance.
A delivery room is no place for a baby: the submarine instrumentation, the echoing screams, the experts hovering with the resuscitation trolley. Luckily, on a sweltering night in late August, it’s a monster who shows up: a sweet, scarlet Godzilla, skin flushed and glossy and distinctly amphibian, eyes bright and black, a fleshy beak for a mouth. Her head is lengthened by the suction that has been applied to pull her out and as I lunge for her while she’s laid on Sarah’s sweating belly, my first thought is: I do not know this person, but she is a marvel.
“How is she?” cries Sarah. I stare in awe at my daughter’s head. Her black eyes stare back at me, perhaps trying to focus for the first time. I try to connect the thin red face in front of me with the baby who likes buses, sugar, and “Moon River.” Her eyebrows are two faint lines, as if drawn on with pencil. She seems to be pondering something difficult. She seems to be very old. She waves me aside.
“How is she?” cries Sarah again, and I realize I didn’t answer her the first time. I realize that some foolish part of me has been waiting for my daughter to speak.
A day later, we wrap her in blankets, cardigans, and scarves, even though it is late summer, and lock her into her car seat to take her home. My dad drives us away from the hospital. We are still wordless with emotion. I probably fumble with the door when getting her out of Dad’s car. I probably reach for the handle and miss. I am still waiting for the moment of recognition with my daughter.
And then it’s there. The next morning I wake up with my hand up against my eye, and my daughter, lying just beyond me, looks truly tiny in comparison. This is not a trick of perspective, I discover: she really is that small. And when I pick her up, she is so implausibly light. She is pleasantly rigid, but as insubstantial as an egg carton. She wakes and stares at me, dark eyes canny and curious. Her mouth starts to work: she is gulping. I pass her, reluctantly, to Sarah, who has just emerged from a very thin sleep. My daughter keeps those dark, wet eyes on me for a second, or at least she seems to. It’s enough. Something has passed between us. It feels like we have had our first moment together.
We spent the next few weeks staring into my daughter’s face. I wasn’t searching, I don’t think, but I was still waiting for something, even if I didn’t understand exactly what it was.
Maybe I was waiting for her to settle. She changed every day. Her eyes started to lighten to a marbly blue. Her cheeks grew dimples. She learned to smile, her first attempts followed immediately by a frown as she studied our reactions.
Between her transformations, Sarah and I assumed certain roles. Sarah was food and I was sleep. (Sarah was frequently sleep too; I was never food.) Leon woke very occasionally and, blearily examining us, either smiled or burst into tears. When there were tears I drove myself mad trying to stop them. Mix tapes were created of songs she had wriggled to in the womb, articles in progress were read to her in a slow, narcotic voice: she was soothed by game reviews and developer interviews, by list features and picture captions. Everything worked at least once, but nothing worked forever. We were always searching for ways to please her.
I remember a few things particularly fondly from this period. The first time I attempted a diaper change was a bit of a sitcom, if anybody ever made sitcoms about bomb disposal. “
I’m going in,” I said to Sarah, and then shut the door to the nursery behind me. Seconds later Sarah opened it, largely out of curiosity, and in those seconds Leon had managed to pee all over herself and me. Her hair was wet with it, which was quite a trick, and I appeared to be going into some kind of traumatic shock in the corner. Sarah moved me gently out of the way and became an ER nurse again. “Don’t worry,” she said as she worked. “This is not the first time I’ve been pissed on.” As my senses returned, I marveled at what a fascinating person I had married.
Defeat like this was generally amusing with Leon. Days later, though, I had a crucial victory in the same nursery. I was changing her for bed and she started to sob. I watched her face contorting with sadness, little eyes reduced to pooling slits, little chin wobbling. I thought I was going to freeze again, but instead I realized that I knew exactly what to do. Nobody had ever told me, I just knew. I reached forward very gently and placed my hand, suddenly huge, on her tiny chest. It took a second to calm her completely, and then we stared at each other for several minutes, lost in sheer fascination.
The three of us went out together once during this period. Our mission was to get her registered at the local council, to announce to the world the name that we had spent weeks piecing together: Leontine Maple Donlan. I can’t remember the trip at all. All I can remember is the preparation, the first time we needed to put Leon in anything more complex than a vest that buttoned up at the bottom. We had great ambitions for that day: a shirt, trousers, a jaunty bonnet. It was our first experience of clothing anyone other than ourselves, and it felt like the moment in a Tintin book where the flustered kidnapper has to bundle a chloroformed victim into street clothes before they can be propped up in the passenger seat of a car.
Better to stay at home. Over the months that followed, even after I returned to work, I chose to work from the spare room. In the mornings, Leon would awake next to us, still impossibly small and yawning. In the evening she would lie on me and I would stroke her tiny spine, running a finger up and down its ridges to soothe her while we watched documentaries about Nazi megastructures and all the trouble that polar bears were suddenly in.
The Inward Empire Page 4
