This Is Only a Test

by B. J. Hollars

  This is not how you imagined it might go.

  You are a counselor at a summer camp in a midwestern state, and the boy in need of changing is not your son. Years later, when you have a son yourself, you will better understand the intricacies of the process—how half the trick to diaper changing is keeping the kid from squirming.

  But on this day, there will be no squirming. This boy could not squirm if he tried.

  During the flag lowering, a fellow counselor whispers, The boy in the Med Shed requires assistance.

  You nod. You believe you can handle it.

  Already this summer, you have surprised yourself by handling all sorts of things—driving a tractor, a pontoon, a pickup truck. You have kept campers safe as they scaled towers, roasted weenies, and cannonballed into the lake.

  What’s so hard, you wonder, about changing a diaper?

  Once the flag is folded and properly stowed you make your way toward the Med Shed. You enter, open the door to the room on the left, and stare at the fifteen-year-old boy lying limp in his bunk. Only he is not limp. He is the opposite of limp. Rigid. Solid. Statuesque. A narrow rail that twists. His eyes flitter toward you, and you wonder if he wonders if you know why you are here.

  You know why, of course, and since you don’t want to embarrass him, you don’t try to act like this is nothing, like this is something you have done a million times before. You haven’t (this much is obvious to you both), and you want to spare the boy the indignity of your act.

  To your left are the diapers, and you feel your hand reaching toward them. Now one is in your hand.

  Good, you think, halfway there.

  But as soon as you pull your hand toward the boy you realize the logistics are lost on you. Your body stiffens, imitating his own. Surely there is some protocol for this sort of thing, but no one has ever filled you in on the details. There was no mention of this anywhere in your counselor’s training manual, and when you think back to the Red Cross–sponsored babysitting class of your youth, all you remember is that the practice dolls felt as inflexible as this boy.

  You can feel his eyes on you now—doubting you, testing you—so you turn your back to him and scan the diaper bag for directions. There are none. Or at least none you understand. Changing a diaper, it appears, is as simple as folding an origami swan with both hands behind your back.

  (Which is bad news for people like you who can barely fold the flag.)

  From your place inside the Med Shed you hear the voices of children whose bodies were not born rigid. As if to prove it, they burst past the window, a stampede of limber legs kicking up dust. You can hardly blame them for their ignorance. And yet . . .

  Would it kill them, you wonder, to consider the boy who cannot stampede?

  This is not cruelty, you know, just kids being kids. And yet . . .

  Might it seem cruel, you wonder, to the boy on the bunk?

  You consider scolding them—Keep it down! Knock it off with all that racket!—but ultimately you don’t. You don’t even close the window.

  Maybe, you think, he likes racket.

  You will stay with that boy throughout the evening and much of the following day. He and you, you and him, you are inseparable.

  Why you? Because the better counselor got sick and you are the next best thing.

  But also because you’re falling in love with your boss—who happens also to be that sick counselor’s sister—which is why you volunteered in the first place.

  You want desperately to portray yourself as an empathetic caregiver—a suitable spouse—and this boy gives you that chance.

  Fast-forward a few years, and you and that sick counselor’s sister will wed just a hundred yards from that Med Shed, your guests circling the fire pit where you once sang ten thousand campfire songs. Tucked tight in your tux, you’ll stare out at them and see the ghost faces of campers whose names you now forget. And as you take your vows alongside the lake (“in sickness and in health”), not once will that boy cross your mind.

  After showers but before lights out, a smaller stampede of half-busted boys makes its way toward the Med Shed. When they enter—complaining of bites and bruises and poison ivy—the creak of the door makes sleep impossible for that boy who sweats stone-faced in his sheets.

  One after another, the campers come in search of cures for their momentary ailments.

  I was running through the oak grove, one boy tells the nurse, when I was attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes . . .

  I was running, he repeats, which hardly sounds like an ailment to the boy in the bunk who never has.

  The nurse keeps an endless supply of calamine lotion, Gold Bond, and Popsicles, and somehow these are the only cures those boys ever seem to require.

  Freshly healed (and with purple Popsicles dangling from their lips) the campers begin their long walks back to their cabins.

  Out your room’s window, you and the boy can just make out their small shadows pushing against the dark. Eventually, you hear what appears to be dillydallying (“Dude! Check out this bug!”), so you shout for the boys to double-time it back to their bunks.

  “I’ll time you,” you call out the window. “1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . .”

  The fuse is lit, the campers run, their tennis shoes skimming the earth.

  You turn from the window to watch the boy staring hard at the wooden bunk above him, his twig legs crisscrossed at the ankles.

  “Hey, want me to close this?” you ask, nodding to the window.

  His face is immutable: dark eyes, aquiline nose, slightly sunken cheeks.

  “Maybe we’ll close it this time,” you say, and when you see no reaction—not even the flittering of eyes—you reach your hands toward the pane and press down.

  The following day—your last day together—proves to be a scorcher. It’s so hot, in fact, that not even all the shade from all the oak trees in the grove can adequately protect you. Water is the only relief the camp has to offer, and so all activities are cancelled. All campers are to report directly to the lake with their sunscreen.

  All the campers but one.

  From your place inside the Med Shed, you and the boy hear a bleating “Marco!” followed by “Polo!” You and the boy hear the aftermath of the cannonballs as those campers fold their knees to their chests.

  You offer an apologetic smile, as if to say, Hey, I get it. I’m an empathetic guy.

  But you both know you don’t get it.

  Don’t get what it’s like to be held captive by your body, to be forced to hold a pose indefinitely.

  During rest hour—when the rest of the campers return to their sweltering cabins to write letters home (“The food is great! The lake is great! We love it!”)—you and the boy decide to go for a dip.

  It’s just a lake, you think, what could possibly go wrong?

  You follow one step behind as the boy hums his power chair down the path that leads to the water. He stops his chair just short of the sand, which is when you enter the scene.

  You lift his small frame from his chair and carry him toward the water, cupping one hand beneath his knobby knees and the other beneath his back. Each bead of sweat clings to him, obscuring his face and collecting in his cheeks.

  In that moment, all you want in the world is to give that boy what he wants. Somebody has told you he likes the water, and since you are in a position to give him that, you do.

  From his place at the shaded picnic table, the lifeguard spots you headed his way.

  He asks if he can help and you say sure, then you split the boy’s weight between you.

  As the three of you enter the lake, you convince yourself that a boy like him must like buoyancy. That a boy in his condition must like the way the water turns everything weightless. Removes friction, eases grating, allows a body to rock in the waves.

  Years later, you will all but forget those waves, that water, the whir of the air conditioner in the Med Shed. What you will remember most is the changing. How you struggled to work the angles as yo
u pulled that diaper down. How his knees had proven too sharp, and how each time you spread his legs they snapped back like a bear trap newly sprung.

  Back in those days, you were just some boy and he was just some boy, but when you finally do grow up and have a son yourself, every diaper change will seem easy in comparison.

  At last you learn the protocol—not from any counselor’s manual, or any babysitting class—but from the sick counselor’s sister, your wife of three years, who turns your son’s legs to Play-Doh in her hands. For a thousand diapers you’ll observe the way she squeezes his ankles together with a single hand and wipes, singing a campfire song while she does it.

  You will repeat this because it is the simplest way you know to show love—unmistakable, irrefutable, your pact.

  Death by Refrigerator

  When inventor Oliver Evans first conceived of his “refrigeration machine” in 1805, he never dreamed it could be a killer. He, much like Jacob Perkins and John Gorrie (both of whom would soon improve upon the design), dreamed simply of extending the preservation properties of food. None of them imagined their invention had deadly potential, providing a perfect-sized trap for a curious child who dared step inside.

  I first learned of refrigerator deaths while serving as a camp counselor in a small country town in Indiana. The victim was a boy named Bobby Watson, who in the summer of 1968—while lost in the throes of a game of hide-and-seek—wedged himself into an abandoned fridge left to rust on the edge of the dock. A maintenance man wandered past moments later, tied the fridge to the dock, and heaved it into the water, wholly unaware of the child hiding within.

  The fridge, we informed our campers during weekly retellings, was meant to serve as an anchor for the docks, though for Bobby it served as a coffin instead.

  I dedicated several summers to this place and can verify the story. That is, I can verify that it is a story, one employed by counselors as a cautionary tale to scare campers into steering clear of the waterfront after dark. Yet no matter how well we told it (and most of us told it quite well), the campers always seemed far less afraid of drowning than the other half of the horror: being trapped inside that fridge.

  If a boy named Bobby Watson did actually die inside a refrigerator in 1968, he was hardly the first. From the 1930s through the 1960s, America’s refrigerator deaths occurred with surprising regularity. Although there’s no verifiable truth to Bobby Watson’s tale—no newspaper reports or camp records confirm his existence—the story was likely inspired by the multitude of other deaths that occurred in similar fashion.

  By the 1950s the death-by-refrigerator epidemic became a public health concern—albeit a strange one—and in response to the crisis, in August of 1956 Congress passed the Refrigerator Safety Act. The legislation required that refrigerators be designed to open from the inside, and made it illegal for shippers to transport any unit that failed to meet this standard. The act—while an important first step—did not immediately solve the problem. There were still far too many unsafe refrigerators in operation, and the government could do little to force citizens to replace their perfectly functional fridges. In the years to come—as compressors and fans overheated—thousands of refrigerators were disposed of, though not always responsibly.

  “At least 163 [refrigerator] deaths were reported nationwide between 1956 and 1964,” reports writer Cecil Adams, adding that the number climbed even higher in the mid-1960s before eventually leveling off and falling as the newer, safer models replaced the old. Nevertheless, the tragedies continued, prompting the press (and camp counselors) to maintain focus on the problem by immortalizing this peculiar fraternity of children whose curiosity ultimately cost them their lives.

  Children like three-year-old Larry Murphy and his four-year-old cousin Paul, who in June of 1954 were discovered by a junkman as he prepared to break up an abandoned refrigerator in New London, Connecticut.

  They say Bobby’s mouth was full of fishes.

  Or children like four-year-old Cynthia Ann Hartman and older brothers Joseph (five) and Martin (six), all of whom managed to squeeze themselves inside an empty fridge in Chicago in August of ’64.

  No one knows how long Bobby lasted until the air ran out.

  Three years later, in July of ’67, Roger L. Brown—who, according to the newspaper, had previously “been warned by his parents about playing in or around the abandoned refrigerator behind their house”—failed to heed that warning. He was found suffocated inside a fridge in Sarasota, Florida.

  Fully aware of the threat refrigerators posed, in July of 1976 the Herrig & Herrig Insurance Company placed an ad in a Dubuque newspaper in which they—much like we camp counselors—employed fear as a deterrent for death. “It doesn’t take long for these tightly insulated refrigeration units to snuff out a life,” the ad began. “A child becomes unconscious in ten minutes and dies within twenty-five minutes.” In its haunting conclusion, the ad also notes, “And don’t assume that magnetic doors are childproof. Many children will just curl up and go to sleep once inside.”

  The image of children peacefully curled up inside refrigerators seemed in stark contrast to the death Bobby Watson endured. His experience—fictional as it was—was nothing short of a fingernail-clawing horror story, an account that likely shared many details with the real-life tales. However, more shocking than either the vividness of the insurance ad or the Watson story was the realization that these tragedies could have been easily prevented had the public followed proper disposal protocol. To ensure the mistake was never repeated (again), the media issued a call for action, with one newspaper deeming refrigerators “child traps,” while another described them as a “menace.”

  Forget Evans’s, Perkins’s, and Gorrie’s great strides in the advancement of food preservation; for the moment, refrigerators were little more than chambers of death for the innocent.

  A coffin-sized home for Bobby Watson.

  In 1985, UCLA epidemiologist Dr. Jeff Kraus released a study, “Effectiveness of Measures to Prevent Unintentional Deaths of Infants and Children from Suffocation and Strangulation,” that provided an in-depth look at the 471 lethal cases reported in California between 1960 and 1981. When Kraus broke the number down further, it revealed that plastic garment bags were the primary suffocative child killer (responsible for 109 deaths), while refrigerators came in second with 84. As a result of both federal and state legislative efforts, Kraus reported a sharp decline in suffocation and strangulation deaths, though many were left to wonder how such a seemingly innocuous kitchen appliance—one used several times a day—had become such a safety hazard.

  Some might argue that our discomfort with refrigerator deaths centered not on the deaths themselves, but on the complexity of our new relationship with the machine. In the early twentieth century, refrigerators quickly became America’s most necessary appliance—our protector of sustenance—though they soon revealed their ability to take life away as well. It must have felt like a betrayal of sorts; after all our years of feeding from it, it appeared to be feeding on us.

  Though, of course, we can’t overlook the terror the grief-stricken parents felt upon imagining their child’s death, a trauma that was better preserved in their heads than the food inside their fridges. Parents couldn’t help but wonder what it might be like for their child to struggle from the inside, pounding hard at a door that simply would not give. The problem with the old refrigerators, Cecil Adams explained, was that their design “prevented air from getting in and the kids’ screams from getting out.”

  What could possibly be more terrifying than that?

  People fear any number of things, only some of which make logical sense. Nevertheless, we have a name for all of them. If you fear bellybuttons, then you suffer from omphalophobia. If you fear kitchen appliances (including the fridge), then you are an oikophobic. We have even given a name to those who fear nothing but the possibility of procuring a fear: they are phobophobics.

  According to psychologist Nandor Fodor, cla
ustrophobia—a fear from which Bobby Watson apparently did not suffer until his fatal moments—is defined as the “widespread morbid dread of confined spaces, small rooms, caves, tunnels, elevators, or pressing crowds.” Dr. Robert Campbell later revised the definition to include additional claustrophobia-inducing locales (“theaters, classrooms, boats, or narrow streets”).

  Neither definition makes mention of refrigerators.

  If you were to ask a sufferer of claustrophobia to name additional omissions, he might mention cellars, airplanes, cars, churches, roller coasters, or the daily fear of wearing a necktie.

  Imagine being buried alive in a hole. It’s like that.

  While the majority of mid-twentieth-century psychologists could easily diagnose the phobia, they struggled to gauge the degree to which a patient suffered. As a result, in 1979 psychologists developed the claustrophobia scale, a twenty-question assessment that deduced the acuteness of one’s fear. Participants were asked to rate their anxiety or avoidance on a number of uncomfortable scenarios, including “entering a windowless lavatory and locking the door,” “riding a small elevator by yourself,” and “being outdoors in a fog when you can only see a few yards in front of you.”

  Once more, refrigerators were left off the scale.

  When tracing claustrophobia’s roots, Nandor Fodor looked first to one’s true beginning: birth. In his 1949 book, The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning, Fodor provides an in-depth description of the brief yet horrifying moment all newborns share; the moment in which the child must take his or her first breath independent of the mother. “If this interval is too prolonged, the baby will turn blue and suffocate,” Fodor explains. “If the baby lives to breathe, it has tasted death by suffocation.”

  While few claim to remember this post-birth near-death experience, Fodor argues that the psychological stress of the moment is forever encoded in the subconscious, that “evidence of it can be found in morbid suffocation fears.” For Fodor, our fear of confined spaces (and the possibility of suffocating within them) is simply an unavoidable side effect of being born, one that points toward an inarguable truth: before we can breathe, we can’t.