Bedlam and Other Stories

by John Domini

  He was on all fours, in pyjama bottoms. Apparently his first move once he’d got in the room had been to pull over Erin’s vanity table. Now under his chest, his face, his crooked fingers, there lay scattered pieces of the broken vanity mirror. And over the beefy white arc of one shoulder was strung, of course, a camera. Also his mouth still hung open. From our angle his tongue was visible, reflected in a shard of broken mirror the size of a hunting knife.

  “Did you leave the door unlocked?” Erin was asking me. She had the covers pinned up under her armpits already. “Did—did you?”

  But before I could answer—something very strange. Robbie sang a snatch of a song we recognized. “It is time,” he sang roughly, “for you to stop all of your sobbing.” We’d never have thought he paid any attention when we listened to the radio. And then Robbie broke down himself. Suddenly weeping, he let his face sink onto the broken glass. His spine drooped, his big rear poked up sloppily, till he looked like an overstuffed old chair or sofa gone over onto its front. He cried like nothing we’d heard from him before. Till now his tears had come in mere childish squalls, pouts and sniffles and I-banged-my-tootsie: a distraction like his violence, but also in the same way finally of no harm. On this morning, however, Erin and I felt our naked shoulders prickle at the sound of full-grown grief. Great extended sobs, cracked all over, came as if dragged from beneath sediment that had coated the bottoms of his lungs for years. He rolled his forehead over the bits of mirror till one piece left a white scar across the floorboards. His noise made the windows buzz.

  “Robbie,” Erin said in a different voice, “don’t cry.”

  “Quiet,” I said. “I know what he’s thinking.”

  And maybe I did, maybe, because otherwise there’s no good reason for the way that sentence galvanized him. Robbie sat up. He went back on his haunches, showing us an impossible face, where tears mingled with blood from the new cuts on his forehead. Showing us also that beneath his elastic pyjama waistband, against his belly, he’d tucked what appeared to be a sizable pad of stiff construction paper. What? When he yanked the pad out from under his waistband, his eyes were enormous with decision. The paper actually rattled. What was it? Then in another moment he’d picked up one of the larger mirror shards, and clumsily Robbie began to hack apart what he’d smuggled into our bedroom under his belt; the contact sheets of his mad negatives.

  “Stop!” He was weeping but giving orders. “Stop! Your! Sobbing!”

  I realized that, for some time now, Erin had been squeezing my arm. My elbow burned already from the pressure. I shook free by thrusting that arm across her breasts, as if to protect her.

  “Get out of here, Erin. I’ll handle Robbie.”

  In fact by the time I’d finished saying that my feet were on the floor. My solid calm voice, the solid cool floor.

  “Tommy—” Erin’s voice on the other hand was changing at practically every new syllable.

  From the foot of the bed I picked up the robe I’d worn for my faked trip to the bathroom. Seemed like hours ago, and hours ago too I’d peeled off my rubber. It was pleasant to feel the inside of the robe’s sleeves again tickling the insides of my arms.

  “Tommy,” Erin said, “Look, look I know I’ve been teasing you, kind of testing you lately but please, look—”

  I pressed the back of my arm against her breasts again. The mattresses I’d tumbled into so many months ago, tumbled into tricked by paint, were at last giving way. The truer stuff was making itself felt. And so I took my place beside Robbie. I enjoyed the swag of my genitals as I spread my knees against the floor and I felt my sinuses wince at the unwashed smell of his hair. Behind me Erin continued to natter. But I’d mixed it up with Erin before. I got one good deep breath before my chest was dented against Robbie’s shoulder blade. He sat on his heels now, hunched forward again, hunched over his butcherwork. I went for the half nelson. Robbie slammed me onto the floor so quick I didn’t notice when Erin left.

  Perhaps that hadn’t been her talking I’d heard a moment earlier. Perhaps it was only the clock-radio going off at the hour we’d set for waking up.

  Look one way, there was the blunt camera he’d brought in with him; look the other, there was his outsize slice of mirror. I lay on my back on broken glass. But even as my awareness flooded with dread about getting cut where I couldn’t see, I felt also how I was trapped. The front of my robe had opened and he’d straddled me. His weight on my intestines cut my breath to shreds while something loose inside his pyjamas tickled my diaphragm awfully. My left arm was helpless against one corner of the vanity table and my right, he ground into the floorboards beneath his knee. Smothered. Truly roped in for the first time. Even my face was covered, spattered with his blood and sniffling. I had to blink and I saw him go crazy in strobes, my view drawn up closer and closer in a flickering pus-colored montage. The red hood of his open mouth, the dented metal walls of his back teeth, the spit-sheen from the tunnel that led in still farther. And now Robbie moved. With another of those weeping groans, that noise which seemed kicked from under his deepest sediments, he brought nearer the length of glass in his hand. He brought it between our two faces and turned it slowly. My breath made the mirror darken.

  “Robbie—” But what could I ever say to him?

  I actually hit on a plan, then. I started to think I could buck up my middle hard enough to get him off me. And I was willing to believe the mirror wouldn’t hit anything vital, I’d gotten that desperate, when over the unending grind of his sobs I heard the noise on the stairs. Erin banged into the room. I could see enough to tell her arms were full. And her robe too had opened; catching a glimpse of one thigh, I suffered an absurd pang of want. But the thigh moved, my wife moved, I couldn’t see much besides the blur of a shape like a dump-bucket, and then with an explosion of water Robbie’s weight was off me, his reflecting weapon was out of my face. I sat up wet and uncertain.

  My deep breaths still tasted of his sickness. The renewed circulation of blood froze my elbows and the palms of my hands. Erin wasn’t allowing anyone time to calm down.

  Of course time itself was a different shape by now, every available fraction of a second cram-packed.

  I discovered her behind me. I felt a knee or a touch at my back—or was it blood? Had my back got cut? In any case I whipped my head round—she was holding the living-room flower vase at waist level. Around it her body appeared drawn, nervy, and her robe was a single hard red. Even as I understood she’d used the vase to drench Robbie and me, she turned away from us and set the thing on the bed. She started to tug the covers straight around it. I’d just had my life saved, but here my perspective still felt unsettled, unrelieved, and my neck hurt from turning so fast to look at her. Now the sound of the bedclothes stretching—so pointlessly, with that mammoth urn in the way—was as bad as anything I’d heard since I’d left the door open.

  “Robbie,” Erin began, “I know you’re really just sitting back in your easy chair.” She was moving more than necessary; her robe bent back my arm-hairs. “I know we’re supposed to get all upset over you, and you, you just go right on sitting back in your easy chair.”

  I blinked vase-water off my eyelashes. Again the strobe effect. But now it was Erin who flickered, Erin’s looks coming round in montage as she turned to confront Robbie. Her breath was short as if she’d been in here wrestling with us.

  “You could still jump up right now, you could jump up and get us both.” I touched her thigh, but she wouldn’t stop. “But you can’t be bothered. You can’t make up your mind.”

  The way Erin pulled together her robe—with one neat hand to her throat, a womanly gesture—was so at odds with the shakes that got into every syllable she spoke.

  “I’m sick of worrying about you. I know you can’t ever hurt us.”

  No time to calm down. No choice except to see again about Robbie. But there, God, the shock of my relief. Robbie looked finished for the day. He lounged, with knees crookedly splayed, against one edge of the
fallen table. In those speckled pyjamas he might have been a caterpillar drowned in the rains (plus possibly even then I was responding in part to some hint of the change in him, some newly calm line in his forehead or in the drooping oval of his chin). But Robbie also was holding another piece of mirror. Smaller than his last, yes, and that one detail alone couldn’t change his battered general appearance. Nonetheless, however, he was frowning into the glass. His knuckles were trembling around it. And Erin, worst of all…to hear my wife’s exasperation changed my thinking finally…Erin, you kept going after him. When you stamped your foot I could feel it right up my spine. That familiar stubborn rant cleared out whole seconds in the otherwise bumper-to-bumper cram of my fright. But Erin, no. No, there’s nothing there. I admit I’d been the one to let him in—I mean I can see what you had in mind exactly. Because why else would I leave the bedroom door open? I too couldn’t live any longer with these blind household cycles, sex and damages and do-it-again. I too couldn’t stand it. And Erin—I’d mixed it up with you before—your promise of last things had proved no good. We’d merely gone limping from one blind alley to another. Therefore earlier this morning I’d arrived at the same conclusion you had now, namely, that Robbie and no one else could strip away our life’s elastic wraps of pain. The bone in my heel knocking flatly against the base of the bedroom door had been the gavel banging down on my decision. But look where it had got me. Instead of breaking any syndromes, I’d been laid out, useless as the rubber mat beneath my shower-stall tears. I’d practically gone blinking up into Robbie’s sick mouth. Now at least the poor wrecked child sat away from me—Erin, away from you and me both—we had him away from us at least, at last.

  I reached again for my wife.

  “Erin,” I said, “we’re wrong about him. Please—”

  “Erin,” Robbie said then, “please. Please don’t be so hard on me. If you just go down and start breakfast, I promise I’ll be there in a couple minutes. I just have to clear away some of this mess here.”

  Recovery is a word I distrust. A word like a feather, like ragweed, it blows in unreliable patterns over too much ground. Because the sanity Robbie has come to enjoy lately must be understood as taking place within strict limits. He’s sane enough to live in a guest house on his father’s property, with a maid next door and a doctor in town. Though these days the songs he sings come from off the radio, on the other hand that’s not such an accomplishment, bringing a thirty-year-old man to the point of singing hit tunes as he noodles around in his darkroom or shovels snow outside. Robbie is a trusty, nothing more. He’s the inmate you can rely on for a job like shoveling snow. And if Robbie does shave most mornings, if generally his hips are lined up under his belt as he walks, if he can now process most of his own shots and use an enlarger correctly, nonetheless I have yet to see him buy any of those razors or clothes or chemicals for himself. He can’t so much as go into town without someone else doing the driving. He visits that doctor four times a week. In fact, the softness of his awareness, the shrugging innocence with which he gives up on harder questions, sometimes can only be understood as his new form of violence. Robbie uses helplessness now the way he used destructiveness then, as a means of stealing our attention from whatever’s upsetting him without at the same time revealing the full ugliness of his case. He hits us with his pillow in part so we’ll play with him, and in part so we won’t see the jissum staining the other side. Thus recovery, no. Recovery will never convey the full sense of what’s gone on during Christmastime this year. For my wife and myself, the better word is remorse.

  In the narrow hallways of a school like ours, a person learns fast enough about cruelty. The smirks at the table where you aren’t hip enough to sit, the lies told so evenly it’s as if the heart itself was wrapped up in a winter coat. A person learns fast enough, and we spent all the years we remember best learning. Then why is it Erin and I could never recognize how cruel we were to this boy? Entire landscapes of viciousness, we’d traveled, but why only after the fact could we comprehend the rough proof of the snaps and slides? Late in December hardly a meal went by when there didn’t come to mind, say, some time I’d yanked Robbie to his knees and then laughed at him. Or some freaky valentine we’d ignored, some furniture or silverware in the shape of his own splintered nerves. Or a cold afternoon when, nothing to it, he’d looked our way and we’d turned our backs. Yes, Erin and I couldn’t analyze, couldn’t classify. None of our experience around the quad had prepared us for the raw simplicity of shame. Though of course we’ve tried to rationalize. When we couldn’t manage to forgive ourselves, of course we could smart-talk someone else into doing it for us. “You two must have seemed like the blessed angels to the boy,” the maid told us, or we got the maid to tell us. “Like the blessed angels of the Lord, after the hardship he’d known.”

  Ration out the reassurance. Any idiot can get that degree. It’s useless paper before the agony, useless agony after the fact. Every forgiveness lately seems no more to Erin and me than the creaky and overworked string of sanity itself. With each new claim that we helped Robbie, we hear the fastenings shriek that much worse against the rusty cleat of the truth about what we did, and in the glasses of the crowd below us the reflected glare seems that much more dizzying. We understand now that, for the madman, there must also be some numb commitment to the air itself. There must also be the decision to drop. Yet by the New Year, Erin and I had to wonder if our whole life hereafter wouldn’t be this same pinch-footed balance, this softening rope over deeps of remorse, two teenage hoods tottering along forever on boots that have just enough padding for us to pass as cool.

  Then during the last week of January, Mr. Challait asked Erin and me to stay on indefinitely.

  He asked, and this surprised us both, with Robbie there to hear. The two men sat side by side on the sofa. Robbie sat back, fingers nervously playing over his tie-clip, while his father leaned forward with elbows on knees and thrust that attractive Headmaster’s face at us. Radiators clonged soggily in other rooms. As always since the new windows have been put in, the house felt stuffy. Mr. Challait began by mentioning the possibility of relapses or other secondary disorders. He explained next that, beginning February first, he would become semi-retired. His older son, he said, had taken over most of the traveling since Thanksgiving anyway. Finally the man leaned still closer. He made his offer.

  “I can’t pretend I understand the chemistry,” he finished. I’ll never understand, with any precision, that is, how you three worked this out. But frankly—” and his voice broke, his head dropped.

  We’d seen Mr. Challait crying before, these past weeks. When he and Robbie fixed the broken rocker, the tears had started to show the first time the son demonstrated he knew where the glue went. Erin and I had learned to go on as if the high emotions weren’t happening.

  It was Robbie who spoke next.

  “It’s so hard,” he said. “For years and years, for the longest time, all I could think about was my own problem.” His voice was timid, and as he spoke he looked down at himself in his tie-clip, but there was obvious thought behind the words. “That took all my energy. The decision that anyone else matters—” suddenly he looked up—“it’s just so hard.”

  Remorse. Remorse seems our only recovery.

  “So.” Mr. Challait was folding his handkerchief. “So, ah, everything here would go on the same. But don’t, ah, don’t get me wrong. I’d allow you kids full privileges. Nights off, weekends away, whatever.”

  Pretending to think it over, I looked at Erin. Though I could tell already she agreed with me. Yes, sadness may slip my attention way off the mark—I might be distracted by the briefest hint of a remembered bad time—but I can catch my Erin’s sly indicators out of the corner of one eye alone. The way she causes the shadows to change shape in that hair the color of a yellow crayon. The shifting dangle of her blouse’s fold between the peak of her shoulder and the tip of her breast. And she has wonderful hips, my wife, muscular and full of surprise
s. Especially after she’s set you up with those strict lines in her face.

  “Frankly—” Mr. Challait began.

  “No thank you,” I said, a little louder than necessary. “No. You can’t expect so much.”

  Later that day Erin and I sat at the kitchen table. This was after dinner actually, and we put together our vita sheet line by line. We’d done a lot of writing at this table recently anyway. We’d answered all those letters from friends, the ones about how tough their first semester at college had been. And we may try some of that university life ourselves. I mean a job in a college town doesn’t seem too unlikely at least, since Mr. Challait promised us a “glittering” reference. So we wrote. Robbie bustled in and out, taking our photograph, humming tunes we recognized. The kitchen’s heat too had its familiar light touches, the odors of bourbon and oregano. And after listing what foreign languages she spoke, Erin told me a secret.

  “What I always loved about you,” she said, “was that you never took for granted anything the teachers told you. You never took for granted anything they told you. I remember one day Old Witch Winslow told us not to put our hands up behind the radiators in class because there were spiderwebs there. The very next day you had to sit next to the radiator and find out. You were so cool about it, but I saw you. I saw you at your desk with a handful of spiderwebs.”

  I realized then that, remorse or otherwise, these nine months at Mr. Challait’s had left me at that moment very calm. Erin of course was laughing, her face full of buttery wrinkles, and I understood also by now that whatever we’d learned in this job wasn’t going to be of much practical use in the next. But I sat feeling calm nonetheless. Calm like when my mother and father used to dance in the kitchen, humming uncertain tunes of their own, calm as, for example, the resume on the table between my wife and myself. In fact, reaching across it to touch Erin, I was overcome by calmness, except my heart, which was down there somewhere going insane.