A Better Angel

by Chris Adrian

  Where the ER doctors poked and prodded and irradiated in search of an answer, the psychiatrist just talked and talked. She wanted to know everything—everything—that had ever happened to us. Though it was only the late afternoon, we got a resident with a middle-of-the-night quality about her—she seemed exhausted and tired and not happy to meet any of us this late in her day. She talked to all of us together, then each of us alone, first me, then my father, and then Carl. When she talked to me her little yellow pencil would flutter madly in her notebook, and she made sympathetic noises when I told her about the divorce and then about my mother’s death, and she kept saying, “You’ve been through a lot lately,” then, “He’s been through a lot lately.” I wasn’t sure if she meant my father or Carl or even me.

  Finally she talked to Carl, kicking my father and me out and shutting the door, waving the policeman down with a practiced gesture when he stood up. We paced outside, trying not to intrude on other people’s emergencies, until Rebecca showed us to a little waiting room down the hall, but it was too far away from Carl, and after five minutes in there we both stood up without discussing it and walked back to stand quietly outside the room. The resident came out crying a few minutes later.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I just need to talk to my attending,” she said and walked off down the hall. In the exam room Carl was lying flat on his stretcher, looking at a picture of Elmo waving benevolently from the ceiling.

  “What did you say to her?” I asked him.

  “What we say to everyone,” the voices answered, though he didn’t look at me. “You will weep, too, at our message, and harder, since we bring it specifically for you. We are here because your faithlessness called us to you, and we will stay until you remedy it with sincerity and sacrifice.” He had pointed at me while he said this, though he still didn’t turn his head, and for the next ten minutes he pointed at me wherever I went in the room, and when my father tried to fold Carl’s arm back over his chest he couldn’t move it. In ten more minutes the resident came back and said cheerfully, “We’re going to keep him!” As if that were the best news in the world.

  It’s macaroni and cheese for lunch. I am making it from scratch, more for my own sake than Carl’s. He prefers it from a box, even in his natural state, but I like the process of grating the cheese and boiling the pasta, and there is something soothing about the circular motion of stirring and stirring. Outside, my father is still chopping, but he’s slowed down considerably, and though I can’t see him from the window I know he’s spending most of the time sitting on an upended log, with the ax head on the ground between his feet, his hands folded on top of the handle and his chin on his hands, staring out at the woods.

  Noontime is always a little pensive for us. I get lost in complicating some very simple dish and my father takes a nap or plays his guitar, and the high sun always has a calming effect on the entity. Carl is quiet in his room now, unrestrained and sitting on the edge of his bed. He’ll stay that way for hours if we let him.

  I am thinking of Carl’s mother, wondering, as always, where she is, and wondering if it would make any difference if she was around and could have been called to her son’s sickbed. He hardly remembered her, and never asked about her, which they said was part of his problem in the hospital. When I think about it I usually decide that she would just make things worse if she were still around, because she had always been a deeply strange woman, and this was just the sort of illness that would have appealed to her. It’s occurred to me more than once that she probably would have been jealous that Carl had gotten it instead of her.

  “This dumb shit has got to stop,” my father says behind me. Still stirring the mac, I turn to look at him, half-expecting him to have the ax with him to enforce his demand, but he’s empty-handed. I turn back.

  “He stays a little longer every time,” I say. “Have you noticed?”

  “You talk like he’s not always there. Like it’s ever anybody but him.”

  I shrug.

  “It’s the worse thing for him, to play along with it. You know it is.”

  “I don’t know anything lately, except what works.”

  “What you’re doing isn’t working,” he says. “It’s not progress. It’s hurting him.”

  “You want to help me bring this up?” When he doesn’t answer I turn around to ask him again but he’s gone. I listen for the sound of the ax again, but the house stays entirely silent. I stand there a little while, stirring aggressively, wondering how he can look at Carl and think that he could contain such a reserve of pathology to pull off this unwitting impersonation, this utter ruination, this scourge. I don’t know what’s worse, or harder, to believe, that a little boy could be fucked-up enough to harbor the sort of sadness and rage that the entity presents us with every day, or that thousands of souls could be fused by a firebomb into a restless collection of spirits that hungers for a justice it can only define in terms of punishment.

  I don’t know how many times I’ve made macaroni and cheese in the same pot, on the same burner, at the same time of day over the past few weeks, but I seem to have noticed for the first time that the side of the pot is immensely hot, and I lay my forearm against it for as long as I can stand, and then as long as I can stand again, before I take the bowl upstairs. Not knowing where my father is in the house, I never make a sound except inside my head, but I don’t even have to show Carl my blistered skin before he is falling back into himself.

  “Let’s talk about that day again,” Dr. Sandman said to Carl. I was watching them from behind a piece of one-way glass, along with the rest of the “team,” two residents and a nurse practitioner and a social worker and a ridiculous medical student who only looked a couple months older than Carl. We had been there for a week and a half already, and I had gotten to know their secret-spy room quite intimately. They asked a lot of questions, and they watched Carl sitting by himself, refusing to play with the variety of toys they put in front of him, watched him reduce another resident to tears, watched him sitting there doing nothing at all. They watched me talking to him, and listened as the thing I was coming to know as the entity listed my sins, personal and paternal and civic, all the ways I had disappointed these thousands of strangers. I kept saying, “Carl, Carl, come out from in there,” though I wasn’t supposed to say that, I wasn’t supposed to do anything that would make Carl feel uncomfortable, or like he had to do something. They were always telling me what not to do with him, and always in the friendliest way: You might not want to raise your voice at him. You might not want to tell him that he’s making you angry. You might not want to tell him he is making you sad.

  “Our birthday,” Carl said, smiling.

  “Is that what it was?” Dr. Sandman asked. He was a large man, three inches taller than me, with at least fifty pounds on me, and not fat. He looked more suited to hunting down bail-skipping criminals than ferreting out the secret pain of children.

  “Of course. We were born in the fire even as we died from it.”

  “Yes, you’ve told me that. But what were you doing? What was happening in the house when you heard about the planes. It was a long time ago, but do you remember?” He had asked me the same question, in the same room, before I was brought to the other side of the glass. He asked if we let Carl watch the television footage of the planes crashing into the buildings and I said not we, but somebody did. His mother wanted him to see it. She thought that it was important.

  “Other people forget,” Carl said to Sandman. “We never will. We were doing . . . everything. You could never understand. You have always been just one, we are thousands.”

  “Help me understand.” So his mother went away after the . . . disaster? he had asked me, and I said yes, for the first time. And he sat there tapping his pencil against his teeth for something like a full minute.

  “Help you? Help you? We are dead, you are alive. There is an arithmetic of obligation. Why don’t you help us?”

  “I’m
trying to help you. By talking with you.” Does he ever ask about his mother now, Sandman had asked me. Does he ever ask where she is? I said that we didn’t really talk about her much.

  “Words are not sufficient. Words are not justice. You promised that everything would be different, that everything would be better, but everything is the same, or worse. Now we require satisfaction, and words do not satisfy us.”

  “Talking is the best way to feel better,” Dr. Sandman said. “You’ve got to trust me on that one, Carl.”

  Then Carl wouldn’t say any more, but only glared furiously around the room, and every time Sandman spoke he only mocked him by raising his hand and moving it like a gibbering mouth. You may not want to tell him to trust you, I thought. You may not want to call him Carl.

  Back in his room I sat with him, waiting for my father to come and take over. We split the days, and Carl was never alone, but it was harder than having him at home is, because we were always with him. He had a roommate, a bald six-year-old who seemed more peculiar than psychotic. A loose-lipped nurse told me that he pulled out all his hair and ate it. He always called my father and me “sir,” and otherwise did not speak much to us.

  I fell asleep that afternoon in the chair next to Carl’s bed, because he was so quiet, probably still angry from Sandman’s questioning. It wasn’t for long. Carl woke me again, talking, and before I was fully awake I realized there was something different about his voice. It still had that electric, many-voiced quality, but it was kind, or at least not accusatory, and not angry.

  “Every promise is broken,” he was saying, “but we must take up the broken promises and bind them whole again with blood.”

  “I like blood,” said a voice behind me, and I understood that Carl was talking to the weird bald kid. “It makes me happy when I drink it.”

  “We are never happy,” Carl said. “For those who can get happiness from drinking blood, we say let them do it, but my blood bindings are not red. Blood is sacrifice. Everything else is irrelevant, or a worse mistake.”

  “You are sad spirits,” said the boy. “I think you must be missing your brother, like me.”

  “We miss everyone. We are a host but we are utterly alone. Yet it is the faithlessness of brothers that pains us, too.”

  “Sad spirits! I knew so many, when I was younger. Do you speak the language of grief, then?” And the kid started to make barking, sobbing noises at Carl.

  “We speak every language,” said Carl, and he started to bark and sob back at the bald kid. My father came through the door, thinking, I knew, that things could not possibly get any more fucked-up than this.

  “Time for me to go, pal,” I said and stood up too quickly. I knocked my head hard against a heavy lamp suspended over Carl’s bed, and it hurt like hell. I shouted, “Fuck!” Carl’s eyes went wide, at the curse, I thought, and then his sobbing barks turned to ordinary sobbing, and for the first time in a week and a half he sounded like himself. In his own voice he asked me what time it was.

  My father has a lifelong habit of never staying angry at me for long, even when he’s on the right side of the argument. We make spaghetti for dinner, because Carl is still back, despite the risk of a mess if he should go away again. “What did you do?” my father asked me, looking at my bruised face and hands for new marks, but my burn is covered by my sleeve.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all. He’s just . . . back.” And then I say, though I know I shouldn’t, “Maybe it’s over. Maybe it’s just over.”

  It’s harder getting the medication into Carl when he’s back, but he’s supposed to take it at dinnertime. There are tears before he’ll take it, but that doesn’t make the slightest difference to my good mood, or my father’s, and we rub off on him.

  “It tastes like feet!” he says, but he’s smiling. We eat downstairs, for once, and my father sets the table as if for a holiday, with fancy plates and candles. Carl twirls his pasta expertly and pretends that he’s been in a coma for ten years.

  “Do we have a lady president yet?” he asks.

  “Yes,” says my father. “A black lady.”

  “All right! Are people living on the moon?”

  “And Mars,” I say. “Terraforming is under way.”

  “Cool,” he says. “Cancer?”

  “Defeated,” my father says.

  “Finally,” Carl says. “But who’s at war?”

  “Nobody,” I say.

  “Peace everywhere,” my father says.

  “And nobody is starving except the teenagers who kind of want to,” I say.

  “A perfect world,” my father says, leaning back and laughing as he raises his wineglass to us, and I smile, too, but uneasily, because I realize all of a sudden that we are all pretending, and maybe that’s not the best thing for us to be doing as a family. And as if on cue Carl’s smile vanishes, and he sneers, and in the electric voice he shouts, “Liar!”

  It’s just a spasm, but the rest of dinner is somber. We don’t play any more games, and limit our conversation. Carl tells us about the way a dynamo works.

  I use up the last minutes of his presence with a quick bath; by the time he’s back in bed, he’s gone. “What did you do for us today?” he asks me as we strap him into his restraints for the night. “Have you made the change I asked you for?”

  “Nighty night,” my father says, and kisses Carl on the head. Carl turns his head and spits, not much volume but he makes a loud noise, “Ptui.” My father goes to the door and waits for me, glaring, waiting for me to hurt myself again. I lean down close to Carl.

  “You are breaking my heart,” I say.

  “Yes,” say the voices. “Into two thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-eight pieces.”

  I wasn’t the only one to leave work. Dozens of us disappeared, going home to be with our families as the world ended. I came home early that day. Carl’s mother had already picked him up. His teacher had called in a panic, as if the preschools were going to be the next target.

  I expected to find them doing something ordinary—making cookies, playing a board game, reading a story in the yard. I don’t know why I expected his mother to manufacture a sense of peace around him, or to prepare one for me. As I said, she was a strange woman even before she became intolerably strange and selfishly crazy, before she went off on the journey that Carl and I were not allowed to accompany her on. This was the sort of thing she had been waiting for all her life, confirmation that the world outside was just as fucked-up as the one inside her.

  I walked in the door and saw them standing hand in hand in front of the television, watching the replay footage of the towers falling.

  “Do you see?” she said to him. “This is just what I mean. It’s kairos, breaking through time to make history. Do you feel it?” she asked him, and she shivered all over.

  “Dad!” Carl said, when he saw me. “There’s people in there!”

  He was three years old.

  The house is old but not very big. My father will sleep through anything short of screams of bloody murder, and I have earplugs, but I’m afraid to put them in because I want to hear if Carl should happen to become himself in the middle of the night. I am thinking as I lie there, listening to him mutter, that that will never happen. I press on the burn on my wrist and regret the lie I told my father, that Carl had just gotten better, that whatever was in him had just tired of us and gone away, without anyone having paid some departure price. I wonder if things would be different if we had spent that day making cookies and playing games and pretending that the world had not changed, or if it would be different if his mother had never left, if the chaos she radiated would have been better for him than the dull peace that my father and I have provided. I wonder if it would have helped to have asked him every day if he missed his mother, if he thought I drove her away, if he worried that she was dead.

  The answer to those questions is always that I don’t know, and usually I drift off to sleep to the mumbling voices in an agony of not-knowing,
not knowing what I did wrong or what I am currently doing wrong or what I am going to do wrong tomorrow to perpetuate my son’s suffering and my own.

  But tonight I just lie there, in unrelieved paralysis, until very suddenly the not-knowing breaks apart into a very clear certainty, and it’s like I always just fell asleep too soon for certainty, and a certain comfort, to come settling on me in my bed. I get up and go back to Carl’s room, undo his restraints, and sit him up.

  “What do you want?” I ask him.

  “You know it,” the voices say. “Every day we tell you. Justice. Satisfaction. Vengeance.”

  “What do you want?” I ask again, and this time I poke him in the chest.

  “You know!”

  “Tell me!”

  “You said it would be different, but everything is the same. You were supposed to become your better self, and where is he now? Pay us our blood price. Bring him back!”

  “Him? My son?”

  “Fool! Your self!”

  “I just want my son back,” I say. “Just give me back my son.” I push him again, harder, so he falls back against the headboard we’ve padded with blankets, and the voices laugh.

  “Prove to us that you deserve him. Prove to us that you will be different.” They laugh and laugh and laugh at me. I grab Carl by the front of his pajamas and haul him out of bed, and drag him with me, still laughing, downstairs to the kitchen, and I hold him dangling next to me while I look around frantically at the butcher knives, the oven, the microwave, the vacuum cleaner, trying to think . . . what can I do that will be enough, a final proof, enough to get him back forever. I take him through the door and down the steps, around to the back of the house.

  It’s a little rainy but warm. Low clouds reflect the streetlights back at us and the whole yard is bathed in a soft orange light. I push Carl down too roughly against the neat wall of wood my father has made, enough for two long winters. I kneel down beside him and take up my father’s ax. Carl has stopped laughing and smiling. His gaze is fixed on me.