The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  We, it quickly becomes clear, are those someones.

  In order to continue as prospective adopters, she says, we would have to submit to an independent review in which we would need to give a full account of what happened and convince the reviewer that none of it was our fault.

  Even still, she says, the reviewer might find against us, might decide that we are not suitable as prospective adopters. And even if the person found in our favour, we would have a ‘black mark’ on our record and it would be very unlikely that any social worker anywhere would risk matching us with a child for fear that we might, at the last second, decide that the match was not right for us.

  At the time I feel almost relieved by this, because I know that I don’t have it in me to go through a review, although Andrew has been holding open the possibility of trying again.

  Now, with this new information, he no longer is.

  Nonetheless, I also feel a sense of rage that the system should conclude, however implicitly, that we were the ones at fault, when it is clear to me that O— and we were all failed in countless ways by them.

  When people ask us now whether we will try again, I say no, not adoption. My heart is too fragile, the world now too dangerous and too unpredictable. I cannot put myself through it. I cannot face the intrusiveness of new processes of approval. I would never consider trying to adopt in Britain, and to adopt abroad we would have to go through a private company, which might not even find us suitable, and even then our options as a same-sex couple are limited. Few countries want people like us. And who’s to say, in this dark age through which we’re now living, how long even those doors will remain open?

  ORDINARY

  In Blue Nights, Joan Didion writes of her gradual process of realizing how much was wrong, how much went wrong, with her adopted daughter, Quintana, a child she brought home from the hospital two days after she was born. This confession undermines the narrative I have long clung to: if only we could adopt a child in the first days of its life, be certain of taking care of its every need as our mothers took care of ours, bonding with it from its first moments in this world, then everything would be okay, all of us happy and well adjusted and ordinary.

  Whatever ordinary means for anyone.

  Fucked up in a banal way rather than an unpredictable and volatile one.

  Reading Didion, I realize that my idealization of raising children to independence may be deeply old-fashioned. Western society – American society at least, but British, too, and perhaps for much longer – has expanded the purview of parenting deep into the adulthood of the child, so that a duty of care seems practically if not actually a lifelong responsibility. This was not so for my own parents, who supported me financially until I was independent but only up to a point, as their parents supported them, but only up to a point. A net was there if something went catastrophically wrong, but at some juncture in all of our relationships the children became more independent, more stable, than the parents.

  Ultimately, Andrew and I looked at O— and I feared we could never be certain of having time enough to make sure O— would reach independence, make his own way in the world, because those first four and a half years of his life were lost to us, our knowledge of them able to fill a few pages at most, and even that built on the accounts of others, not even his own family, let alone himself. In the end, we did not trust that we were up to the task.

  And although it is not the point of having children, at least not the only one, I could not trust that when I needed him at the end of my own life, he would be there to look after me.

  YOU

  Although I have altered and obscured your name, many other details, the names of everyone around you, numerous details about them as well, perhaps you will still find yourself here, in these pages, some day in the future.

  Nearly a year after the end of the process, I dream about you. These dreams come at least once a month, sometimes more frequently, and then there are days and weeks that I am free of those nightly conjurings. I know it is no longer my right to dream about you. We relinquished the right to dream of what life with you would be like when we decided we could not take you.

  I only hope that in time you may understand how, in making the decision we did, we were doing the best for you because we were not equipped to look after you in the way we believed you needed. Your presence, your person, in all its richness and complexity, all its already existing personhood, was not the right match for two people wounded by our own childhoods and adolescences and adulthoods, by all the difficult experiences we each, in our particular ways, have experienced.

  If we had been different people, we might have been able to give you what you needed, but the old saw that an experience of difficulty makes one able to empathize and respond to the difficult beginnings of another was not, in this case, the truth, or at least only partially the truth: we could empathize, but in the moment you reached us our reserves and capacity to respond were perilously low, and we knew that we could not summon the energies, collectively or individually, to make you a part of our lives, to give you what you needed.

  At some point, I hope that if you remember what happened, if your brain has not erased or repressed the disappointment of our withdrawal, you will understand that we made the choice we did thinking of you, of what your experience might be, as much if not more than our own. The grief of disappointing you, and ourselves, is something from which we have not recovered, may never recover. We hope that you will recover, but we also know that you may not. We feel sorrow about our choice, as well as anger that the system allowed us to reach the point where it was the only choice we felt able to make.

  THE GINGER CHILD

  A few weeks before Christmas, Andrew and I go to Amsterdam where a friend is being awarded a prize. The ceremony at the Royal Palace is followed by an intimate dinner at an historic house on a canal and it feels as though we have slipped out of nightmare and into a fairy tale. In a way that immediately strikes me as self-justifying, I realize that neither of us could have attended this event if we had adopted because one of us on our own would never have managed the boy, and he himself would not have managed the travel to Amsterdam, sitting still through a long ceremony, the flights, the waiting, the negotiation of public transport in a busy foreign city.

  We would have missed seeing a friend honoured, and though I know how ridiculous it sounds, I would have missed my five minutes speaking with the King of the Netherlands, a once in a lifetime opportunity for the grandson of an Okie and a farmer’s daughter, a madwoman who lost everything and an embezzling adulterous ne’er-do-well.

  As I am all too painfully aware, it is an opportunity no rarer than the chance – for someone like me – of having a child.

  The following morning, I wake up ill. Sicker than I have been in years. I shuffle to the bathroom and shower and slump against the tiles. However hard I have been trying to hold myself together, I am falling apart.

  But we are in Amsterdam and this is a holiday, a restorative break from the hell of the last year, so we head off to the Stedelijk Museum where we happen upon ‘MANIC/LOVE’, a large exhibition of American artist Jordan Wolfson’s work.

  It seems to have been meant, horribly, for us.

  Much of it I cannot take in. There is too much noise, too much chaos, too much colour and movement in the videos and not enough tenderness or beauty, not for the feverish state that I’m in. There are too many people shouting, Wolfson himself shouting. In a video titled Raspberry poser animated viruses plop and bounce around the streets of New York and Paris alternating with an animated red-haired kid, smiling frenziedly, who stabs himself, comes back to life, strangles himself to death, comes back to life, cuts his chest open so his organs and blood spill out, comes back to life, runs with an unnerving simian gait, is trapped in a cage, ranting, shaking the bars, always returning to life.

  It has become routine to call Wolfson an enfant terrible, but while he is undoubtedly convincing in that role, he also lampoons and subve
rts both the category of bad-boy-artist and the art market that demands such figures. Real violence, a virtual reality film included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017, seemed to depict Wolfson beating a man to death with a baseball bat. His work is never less than dramatically provocative. It embraces an aesthetic of noise and ugliness, mining the possibilities of virtual media and digital technology in ways that are designed both to alienate viewers and to force them to reflect on that alienation. If the artist is interested in formal decisions that make him ‘feel more’, as he has said in interview, then he is just as committed to making his audiences feel more, too, and demanding that we ask ourselves what the excess of feeling produced by his works might mean.39

  In Amsterdam, the piece with which I spend the most time is Colored sculpture, an animatronic polyurethane marionette of a seven-foot red-haired boy with glowing eyes. He is controlled by three heavy chains rigged to a system of gantries controlled by software that takes him through a fifteen-minute cycle of movements. The chains drag and lift and toss him around this confined space, sometimes leaving him hanging in mid-air, watching the gallery visitors in silence, then moving him along and lowering him to the floor, head falling to the side, eyes blinking and flashing, the chains carrying him in an impossible position as if he were a doll being dragged by a child, or, worse, a child being dragged by an unseen adult, a child abused, as susceptible to careless handling as a shiny plastic toy.

  Like the Raspberry poser, just when it seems he might be dead or dying he rises again, eyes bright and maniacal (eyes equipped with facial recognition software so that it often seems as if he is looking right at you), head turning then lowered again, chains dropping him in a terrible metallic rush, or, more ominously, slowly and deliberately, link by sonorous link, only for the one attached to his foot to drag him to the other end of the space before all three chains lift him in the air and lower him once more. Over and over, cycles of motion bleed into one another so the limits of each are difficult to discern.

  Feverish, I stand through several cycles, making notes:

  Hand held aloft, raised, raising the body,

  chain raising the head, whole body off the floor,

  chains cascading to lower the whole body to the floor,

  chain at the foot dragging him across the space,

  other two chains lifting to suspend him in the centre,

  lowered to the floor again,

  chains unravelling in a y-shape across the floor,

  shifting, leg pulled back and to the right,

  suspending him upside down in mid-air,

  lowered gently to the floor,

  chain dragging him by the leg as his other foot, head, arms

  are on the floor,

  now lifted again by the foot,

  suspended upside down,

  pulled forward in space by the hand,

  suspended in mid-air, holding still, no movement, silence,

  silence,

  head upside down, body suspended horizontally,

  lowered again,

  dragged forward by the arm, up,

  turning, head lifted so face and eyes are facing front,

  blinking bright eyes,

  lowered to the floor,

  head held just off the floor,

  dragged by arm and head, slowly, back, lifted again,

  feet on the floor, in mid-air, one arm raised to the side,

  body suspended in mid-air, facing forward,

  lowered again, bright staring eyes,

  pulled backward by the foot, raised half off the ground,

  then flat on the floor,

  chains looping parabolas around him on the floor,

  chains retracting, dragging him by head and hand

  up, to the right,

  then down, lowered to the floor,

  face down,

  eyes bright,

  head chain slowly unspooling,

  arm aloft, only thing off the ground,

  and then, without warning,

  Percy Sledge, song in medias res and the chains spill out,

  cascading,

  body drawn quickly back and to the left,

  lifted by the foot, then

  dropped on the head,

  a slight bounce,

  total collapse, then pulled forward, dragged aloft,

  hanging mid-air as a man loves a woman,

  mid-air dance,

  dropped and dragged to the side,

  fallen on the floor at the right,

  lifted again by the head,

  dropped,

  lifted,

  dropped.

  Music stops as the lift,

  the drop,

  the lift,

  the drop,

  the lift,

  the drop

  the lift the drop the lift the drop the lift the drop

  pulls him into the middle of the front of the space,

  an abrupt dragging back and to the right, to the left,

  dropped on the head over and

  over and over and over and over,

  dragged by the foot, dropped and

  dropped and

  dropped

  on the head until

  falling to a total collapse.

  Silence. Stillness.

  Chains start to move again,

  dragging him forward by head and hand

  across the floor,

  top chains twisted together then untwisting as he comes to the front,

  bright-eyed, staring, looking forward, slowly rising,

  demonic,

  suspended just off the floor, moving to the right,

  and the voiceover starts, a young man’s voice,

  voice of the artist,

  and flashing animations in the eyes.

  When the voiceover stops, he falls to the ground,

  dropped again,

  dropped on the head,

  a burst of music,

  dropped on the head,

  dropped again

  dropped

  dropped,

  pulled to the front,

  pulled up in mid-air,

  dangling, watching us watching,

  abuse and recovery,

  child as symptom of man loving woman,

  child the abused monster of love.

  It is a ghastly, visceral dance of manipulation and control. Much of each fifteen-minute cycle occurs in a silence so pregnant with the expectation of violence and noise that I find it excruciating to watch, but also impossible to avert my gaze.

  Wolfson has said the figure is derived from Huckleberry Finn, mid-century American television marionette Howdy Doody, and Alfred E. Neuman, the cartoon mascot of MAD magazine. To me he also suggests the murderous doll Chucky from the Child’s Play movies. As I am writing this, Nikolas Cruz, a boy who looks like a demonic mash-up of Finn and Doody and Neuman, but also like one of American-born, South Africa-resident photographer Roger Ballen’s subjects, kills seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Florida, on Valentine’s Day, 2018. Like the Colored sculpture, Cruz’s eyes seem to register an audience, a viewer, but without any indication he actually sees the people who might be watching, or being able to understand them as anything other than faces, an assortment of features that might themselves be as constructed, and artificial, as Wolfson’s sculpture’s own precursors.

  What is Wolfson doing with all these citations of boyhood – and specifically of white, American boyhood? Might the answer lie in this particular work’s implicit reference to earlier polychrome sculpture, from classical Greek and Roman to medieval Catholic traditions, works that were, in their own ways, puppets for various ideologies and belief systems? In this case, the ideology could perhaps be white nationalist American masculinity itself. Earlier versions of the Colored sculpture character have appeared elsewhere in Wolfson’s work – as a two-dimensional cartoon boy aiming a gun into his abdomen, or poised over a bucket defecating while gazing at himself in a mirror und
er tabloid-style headlines that read, variously, ‘AMERICANO SEX RED SEX… SLAVE… Racist… AMERICAN BLACK’. White America, the figure seems to be saying, take a good long look at yourself and all the shit you’re producing.

  If Colored sculpture is the puppet of an ugly, racist American ideology, then it seems also to insist we acknowledge the trauma inflicted by that culture on white boys, and the ways in which such trauma produces violence in its victims. It would not be outrageous to conclude that Colored sculpture stands for any number of young American men who resort to horrific acts of violence but who are also often survivors of abuse: boys who keep getting up off the floor in preparation for the next cycle of beatings, their actions programmed by the culture that has produced and continues to control them, boys for whom it is nonetheless difficult or impossible to feel sympathy even as we acknowledge the complexity and violence of the forces that have determined who they are and what they do.

  Colored sculpture’s voiceover, read by Wolfson himself, conflates the energies of sex and death, as if the puppet were at once sex-worker, victim, and murderer for hire:

  Two to kill you

  Three to hold you

  Four to bleed you

  Five to touch you

  Six to move you

  Seven to ice you

  Eight to put my teeth in you

  Nine to put my hand on you

  Ten to hand inside your hair [sic]

  Eleven your leg over my shoulder…

  Thirteen I killed you

  Fourteen you’re blind

  Fifteen you’re spoiled

  Sixteen to lift you

  Seventeen to show you

  Eighteen to weigh you…

  Do the numerical headings imply payment or digital programming or even a sequence of dance positions in a mechanical ballet? Or can they be read as a monstrous riff on a counting nursery rhyme, ‘One for Sorrow’ for a post-human age? It seems no accident that the sequence ends at eighteen, the age of legal adulthood. What is indisputable is that the voiceover text is all about the interplay of eroticism and sadism, particularly in the first few lines, oscillating between violence and tenderness, until the syntax breaks down in the ninth line: ‘Ten to hand inside your hair’.