But wait. This is just the first cold. Maybe they are overreacting. First child, first-time parents, first cold. He looks back into the boy’s eyes and reattaches. Intends to. He inhales. It feels good. But it’s not like before. It’s not like just a couple of minutes before. Something fundamental and heavy has shifted. Something tectonic. The infant senses it, and it makes him weaker, fills his tiny heart with a lifetime of loneliness and a sense of impermanence. The boy looks at his father. Like he’s accusing him. Like he knows his father was momentarily inhabiting a world without him and now, that imagined world, once imagined, will never quite go away, that even if the boy lived, the two worlds will always coexist side by side for both of them—the world with the boy in it and the world without the boy. And they will have to travel between those two worlds forever. There could be no solid ground anymore. Always half the world is lit by sun and half is night. Something like that. But that can’t be, the father thinks. A baby can’t think like that, can’t see, can’t perceive, can’t know. But what was it Wordsworth said? Trailing “clouds of immortality”? Or was it “glory”? “The child is father to the man”?
The baby coughs. There’s something in his chest. A virus. Like a demon or a devil. The father has not wanted to take the boy to the doctor. He doesn’t want to be one of those parents who rush to the doctor every time his son gets a scrape. He doesn’t want his son to be weak and dependent. To start learning so young that it’s okay not to be self-reliant. A world war just ended, millions of men died without complaint. Death still stalks the earth today, probably bored, unemployed, not working full-time anyway, just doing side projects. Like killing babies. This is fruitless imagining. There is only science.
So the father waited a couple of days with the boy like this, demanding that he beat this thing on his own. It’s just a cold, a first cold, it’s got to be nothing. A test. Odds are it’s nothing. The boy coughs. The demon announcing itself proudly. Death being proud. The boy coughs hard, fighting to bring the darkness forth, but the demon only comes halfway up, and then settles back down deep within him, his devil claws like rappelling hooks digging into and holding to the soft feathery insides of the little lungs. In between coughs the boy is motionless now. The baby hasn’t smiled in a couple of days. The father doesn’t know. He hasn’t read books on it. He figured he would just naturally know, and what he didn’t know, his wife would. Fill in gaps for each other. That’s a marriage. She had the mother knowledge. Don’t they all?
The man involuntarily does that calculus again, molds a hypothetical world minus his son. He curses himself and his avoidance of pain, the need for his mind to forecast the worst in order to save itself the future shock. How selfish, he thinks. But maybe natural, maybe human nature. The instinct for survival, self-preservation trumps all. He has read about animals in books, male lions eating their young. Maybe they do it out of love. They swallow their own pain and the child’s pain with the child, no more suffering. The cub is in a better place, a place without worry and pain. Inside the father. Dad will swallow all. Broad-shouldered Dad. Nature is a bastard.
But maybe not. He is not a lion. He is a man. Maybe he’s unnatural and cold. His wife looks at him, into him. Is she seeing his world without the boy? Is she seeing that he has killed his son? Is she seeing that she is not in that world either? That there is now a world where he has killed her, too? Does she see me, he wonders, inside me, and that I have too many worlds to trust? He detaches from her, too. Is the marriage over just like that? Yes and no. He doesn’t know. What does he know? He’s sorry, sure, but goddamn her. He doesn’t need the accusations. He hasn’t done anything, he’s just thinking, doing his best. The boy coughs, weaker this time. Giving up? He can hear the demon exulting. Sadistic. Its claws well dug in. The mother grabs the infant from her new husband. The child is unresponsive. His head lolls on a slack neck. “Please,” she pleads like she’s asked before. “Please let’s get him to the hospital.”
OCTOBER 15, 1946
Pesky also hesitated and the Boston Red Sox lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games.
12.
Ted hadn’t been to Brooklyn since his mom died. He had never once made the drive from the Bronx to Brooklyn, had never traced backward the flow of his life till now—Brooklyn to the Bronx, the Bronx to Brooklyn. Didn’t matter to the Cololla, he meant Corolla. Bertha didn’t like to go anywhere. Ted slid the Dead into his car stereo. “Friend of the Devil,” the second track off American Beauty, released in 1970. He laughed at the thought that his car was a homebody. An old Japanese guy who had just had enough of this fucking country and wasn’t gonna come out of his small backyard garden.
He had never been able to tell if the Dead were singing “Said, I’m runnin’ but I’m takin’ my time” or “Set out runnin’.” Wasn’t that big a difference, but he rewound the song to that part and listened closely. Still couldn’t tell. Rewound again. Nope. A tiny mystery that shall remain, he thought. He was okay with that. As a writer, he aspired to abide some ambiguity, live in the gray. Keats had famously staked out such negative capability for Shakespeare, and Ted wished to claim a morsel of that generous capacity for himself. But the problem was that while negative capability for an author was genius, for an actual person, it was more often than not the cause of Hamlet-like hesitation, Oblomovian laziness, Bartlebyesque paralysis. Could he make a trade-off? A compromise? Be both? A slate of negative capability at the typewriter leavened with a healthy dose of sprezzatura and derring-do in the field? Both proclivities and talents were still as yet unproven, however. Gray. The color of Ted’s eyes.
He had no idea what he’d do once he got to his father’s house. He knew nothing about medicine, hated needles, didn’t like the sight of blood. What good could he be? What if something went wrong while he was there? He could drive his dad to the hospital. He could call 911. He could call that nurse. He popped in another cassette, Blues for Allah. The Dead sang “Franklin’s Tower”: “If you plant ice, you’re gonna harvest wind / Roll away the dew…”
The old block, on Garfield Place, looked almost exactly the same as back when he was a kid, which just reinforced his own feeling of oddness and stuntedness. He kept his foot poised above the gas pedal to drive off and never come back again. But how far could he really get in the Corolla? He pulled into an open parking spot. On closer inspection, the neighborhood was certainly a bit better than he remembered, having gone through the sporadic “gentrification” process that New York endures in its American cycles of boom and bust. Ted hated this change, he even hated the word gentrification; it offended his Communist leanings and sounded medieval to him. Where the fuck was this “gentry”? He grabbed a couple of plastic bags of clothes and toiletries, and looked around to see if he recognized any indentured servants or serfs walking by.
He got out of the car and headed up to the house. He looked on the sidewalk where once he had scratched his name in the wet cement, but it was no longer there. It was smooth, like when a wave washes away initials in a heart someone drew in the sand. So many waves. Always more waves than words in hearts in the sand, it seemed.
He imagined what he as a boy would make of the man he was now, staring up at the window. As if in a Twilight Zone: “Consider Ted…” The beard, the belly, the aura of homelessness. He probably would’ve scared himself. The young him might’ve made fun of him now. I’m not letting you in, ya fat tie-dye fuck, not till my parents get home. He shook his head—that was a crappy thought. Ted ascended the reddish clay steps of the old brownstone and tried the door. The feeling he had was not quite déjà vu. He had the sensation that he had already done the things he was doing right now, walking the stairs, opening the big door, because he had done them thousands of times as he grew up. So while this day had never happened before, it felt like it had already happened over and over. But he felt no comfort and he felt no hope. He instinctively checked up in the sky to see if planes were falling to earth, worlds exploding. Nope. It all seemed prett
y copacetic up there in the wild blue. He walked in.
The house was messy and didn’t smell right. A bad scent, but not one he could immediately identify; it smelled something like a frightened animal had been slaughtered. An unholy brew of menthol, egg, urine, and smoke. “Marty?” Ted called out for his father.
Marty appeared around a corner in an old, dark purple robe untied in the front, so Ted could see his tighty whities, so old and worn, you’d have to call them loosey grayies. “Teddy, you came,” the old man said, and the genuine surprise and thankfulness of his tone disarmed and moved Ted, gave him an unexpected hitch in his throat. Marty shuffled toward him and hugged him. He smelled terrible. Ted gagged, but held it down and covered it; he felt stuck, felt no agency, like he himself was not at home. His arms hung at his sides.
“Hug me, ya faggot,” Marty whispered mock-lovingly in Ted’s ear. Ted put his arms around his father, who was so thin, it was like hugging a child or a suit on a hanger. “You smell. Like the pot.”
“You smell like the shit.”
“Don’t squeeze so hard,” Marty said. “You tryin’ to hug me, fuck me, or kill me?”
“Ah yes, this is just how I pictured our reunion.”
Marty pulled away. “I think you broke a fucking bone. Let me help you with your bags,” he said. “Your plastic bags.”
Ted said, “I’m into recycling.”
They walked up to the second floor, Marty stopping several times to catch his breath. He put his hands on his knees and his head down after only a few steps. Ted got the image that the old man’s ruined lungs had the capacity of two empty envelopes to hold paper-thin volumes of air. That collapsible and sticky. “I gotta get one of those elevator seats for old fucks. By the way, if I ever talk about getting one of those elevators for old fucks seriously, shoot me in the head.” Slowly they made their way to Ted’s old room, the room he’d had as a child. Ted didn’t want to walk faster than his father. Their progress was so halting, he wasn’t sure if he was walking or standing still. He let Marty open the door to his old room. “The honeymoon suite,” he said, and held out his hand as if for a tip.
“Yes. Yes. This is where the magic never happened,” Ted said, and he walked into the small rectangle that was the world he had grown up in.
13.
The cliché of the unchanged childhood bedroom in movies and TV is usually shorthand for a parent who does not want to let the child grow up, or the child who refuses to grow up, or the parent in mourning for the dead child. A Miss Havisham thing without the sexual politics. If Ted had wanted to be extra hard on himself, he might’ve said that his room was pretty much as he had left it for Columbia because his father was mourning the death of what he thought Ted could have been. But that might be ascribing too much sentimentality to Marty; it was more like Marty was lazy as shit and a bad housekeeper. Seemed all four floors of the house were basically unchanged over the last ten or fifteen years, as the life that Marty had been living was collapsing in upon itself geographically, and the space he actually inhabited had shrunken more and more, until he really existed only in the living room downstairs, and in the kitchen and the bathroom. If the universe was constantly expanding, Marty’s universe was constantly contracting, its central sun losing touch with its outer planets and outer rooms, on its way to collapsing into one room, a small dot, a black hole, death.
“You should go take a shower or something, Marty, you reek.”
“Thanks for the tip, son. I’ll leave you to commune with memories of your salad days,” Marty said. “Ah, if these walls could talk.”
“I’d tell them to shut the fuck up.”
Marty shuffled off, leaving Ted alone. Ted stood frozen, looking at his single bed and its New York Yankee sheets, pillowcases, and blanket. Vinyl albums lining the walls—LPs and 45s. He picked up a 45—“(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.” Elvis. Elvis, America’s uncrowned king, had died just last summer. His death had felt like the end of something, but Ted didn’t know what. He wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Elvis these days, but he understood his presence in the room. There were a couple of Pat Boone albums. “Love Letters in the Sand.” Holy shit, that was embarrassing. Perry Como. Johnny Mathis. Gogi Grant? What’s a Gogi Grant? There was a Sam Cooke album. That was acceptable. On the wall above his bed was a Technicolor poster from the 1955 sci-fi nonclassic This Island Earth. He couldn’t remember if he’d put that up there ironically or if he really dug the kitsch of its tagline: “TWO MORTALS TRAPPED IN OUTER SPACE … CHALLENGING THE UNEARTHLY FURIES OF AN OUTLAW PLANET GONE MAD!” Two mortals trapped in an outer borough. Looking around his room at these artifacts, Ted had the feeling he was trying to decipher hieroglyphics. He grew up in the ’50s, which were really the ’40s, he’d have to give himself a break.
Ted hated memory lane, so he walked to the dresser, tossed in some of his clothes from the plastic bags, and dumped his toiletries in the bathroom. He ran the water from the tap until it flowed from dark brown to light brown to New York City clear. He put his head down to swallow some and laughed as he remembered he’d read that Kosher Jews had to get special permission from the rabbi to drink tap water in the city because it contained microscopic crustaceans, undercover shrimpy shrimp, treif on tap.
He walked over to the closet to hang up his jacket, a dark blue Yankee Windbreaker he had gotten free at work, and he saw some old T-shirts and sneakers, Chuck Taylor Cons, and in the back, some winter and beach stuff—ski boots, scuba gear. He bent down to check it out and saw a stack of black-and-white composition books. Ted had initially preferred to write in these before he moved on to the yellow legal pads that sprang up in his own apartment like daffodils. He grabbed a few of these composition books and sat on the edge of the bed. The distinctive Pollock-like splatter of black and white, the white square in the middle for identification, the black spine. As familiar an appearance and shape as something in nature. He could tell by the lettering on the covers that these belonged to a young person. “KEEP OUT!!!!!!!” was scrawled across the front of many of them, “UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH OR WORSE!!!!!” “IF YOU ARE READING THIS AND YOU ARE NOT THORDORE” (misspelled, Ted noted—Thor-dore—with a sudden, almost overwhelming tenderness for his young self: Thor, the god of thunder!) “LF FULLILOVE YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE IN DEEP SH#T THAT MEANS YOUUUUU!!!!!” warned another. It’s all right, Ted thought, I’m THOR-DORE LEFT FIELD FULLILOVE, I should be okay.
The handwriting was the blocky, slightly too large penmanship of an eleven-year-old boy. The calligraphic equivalent of pretestosterone bluster. A blowfish blowing up. Ted had used to catch these blowfish, or cowfish, when they visited relatives in East Islip. He would fish with a bamboo pole in Great South Bay using frozen minnow as bait for snapper, and a plastic bobber on the surface. Too often the blowfish, not snapper, would take the bait. The animal’s only defense when threatened was to inflate itself to two or three times its size in order to appear a more formidable foe to a predator. The fish had no defense but inflation of self, Ted thought, like so many people, blowhard blowfish. Ted would unhook the fish and stroke its belly, which would initiate this hilarious response. They weren’t good eating; allegedly only the tail was not poisonous to humans. Being poisonous is a better defense than becoming a balloon, Ted thought. In a few seconds, Ted would have a living fish balloon in his hand, like something out of an LSD dream. Only the buck teeth and horned brownish head, which did make it look like a little cow, hence its name, would not swell to epic proportions. And he would roll the living ball from hand to hand, like a pitcher looking for a grip, the smooth skin now stretched to bursting, with the prickly consistency and feel of his father’s three-day beard on a Sunday. It was like holding his father’s cheek.
Some friends of his might take their little knives and pop the fish exactly like a balloon, something that struck certain young boys as hysterical, leaving the fish to a slow, leaking, protracted death. But Ted wouldn’t do that. He would wind up and throw it as far back out over the water as h
e could. The fish would land and float on the waves for sometimes a minute, staying inflated, not yet sure that the threat had passed. There was something in this so human and sad to the young Ted, the laughable yet desperate bluster even after the fact, though he would not have been able to verbalize it like that. Threat gone, but still this operatic display, this inflated softball of a being, bobbing on the waves, belly up, head submerged. And then, when the poor thing had somehow determined it was safe, by recognizing a favorable change in conditions known only to itself, it would deflate comically and sink underwater, swimming away to inflate again and make pint-sized sadistic humans laugh another day.
Ted looked at the date on the front page: 1957. Yup, eleven. He began to skim through the pages. Nothing jumped out at him. These were journal entries Ted had kept as a boy. His father had made him write every day. “It’s a muscle,” Marty would say. “Use it or lose it.”
“Well, why don’t you write every day?” young Ted would respond, because he’d much rather play a dice baseball game when alone in his room, rather do almost anything other than write.
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up?” was his father’s usual retort.
Ted was intrigued. These journals could hold a key of sorts for him, a clear, unadulterated glimpse into the past that might help unlock a future. If he could know what he was, it might help him become something other than what he is. He stopped on a random page and read what was apparently a book review.
Bucky F*cking Dent Page 5
