With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer

by J. R. Hamantaschen

  “He does have your eyes, Miles, I’ll give you that,” Henry granted him. “You always did have cool eyes. Fortunately, he’s pretty cute overall, so he must have Miranda’s looks.”

  Miles delivered in his unbreaking, monotone delivery: “Unfortunately, the doctor said he also has my heart. It’s pitch black.”

  “Don’t listen to that goofball,” Miranda told Craig, her charmingly chubby giddy mass of baby. She lovingly clutched Craig’s chest. Craig giggled and cooed and enjoyed the touch and sensation of his protective fat being swaddled. “Don’t listen to that goofball,” she repeated again, in that inevitable sing-songy cadence people adopt whenever they speak to babies.

  “He shits like me, too. Explosively. That’s also how we know he’s mine,” Miles added.

  “Well it’s great you have him now. You can finally use all those extra diapers you stockpile.”

  “Stockpile? Do you know how much I shit? All those diapers were put to good use long before Craig was even born.”

  This riffing came effortlessly, yet, ironically, was simultaneously exhausting. Knowing this, Miles offered to go back out with Henry and leave his wife in peace. “I mean, I always thought, practically speaking, having a kid would lead me to drink more, not less, anyway. So it makes sense why we should go out for another,” he stated in his matter-of-fact comic monotone. He received the exhaled snorts of laughter he sought, got Miranda’s “ho ho ho” — which was both criticism and tacit approval — and went back out with Henry. She always wanted to keep up with their back-and-forth but Miles suspected she found it tiring over time.

  “I’ll only be gone like another hour or so. Be home before bedtime.”

  “I know baby,” Miranda said softly, and kissed him tenderly on the lips.

  They decided on a bar to try, on Miles’ recommendation (“I assume no responsibility if you don’t like this bar,” Miles had said. He hated feeling responsible for recommending something someone didn’t like.) Henry assured him it was fine and so they went.

  They sat at the counter in the brightly-lit bar.

  “So, man, a kid. Look at you, got a house, with a garage and everything? And a real live kid. You are, as you always said, a ‘Real Person’ now.”

  A Real Person. Having a child, a family, a mortgage. Being a Real Person. Being literally responsible for the health, well-being and development of an autonomous being that inherited your genes and served as your proxy representative to future generations — that’s … Real Person Shit.

  “I know, I know. Bartender, I’ll need twelve more drinks,” he joked to the guy behind the counter, who he could tell was half-listening in on their conversation.

  “Sounds like you have a young kid? Who knows, you might need it,” the bartender joined in, lips almost invisible behind his mountain man hirsuteness. Like this kid knew anything about that. A line like that may have meant more coming from the archetypical hoary, grizzled bartender who has seen it all. This bartender was a kid. Miles noted this all impassively — it didn’t really bother him too much, except for the knowledge that this kid could make his jokes and go home to his studio apartment, sleep until noon and get high at night with his young, hot artiste friends.

  “So, how is everything going, for real though?” Henry pressed him.

  “Good, pretty good, I guess.”

  There was an unusual silence.

  “So, what is it, you mention Real Person stuff and then it gets all serious? That’s when ‘Shit Gets Real.’”

  Henry snorted his approval of the punctured silence.

  “I guess things are fine, job is still shitty and lame, but at least it’s shitty and lame back in California. Glad they finally transferred me. It’s cool to own a house. Sucks having to drive though. You know, the usual. Or, as we say in California, ‘the yoojzh.’ If you moved out here, you’d pick up all the slang.

  “How do you like your time out here? Sure beats freezing your balls off in Chicago, eh?”

  Henry was just visiting on a work trip.

  “So,” Henry didn’t take the bait to switch topics from Real Person Shit, “I take it you no longer believe that there is ‘no value in creating human life.’” He said this last part in a bit of a stentorian, didactic tone. It was a playful dig at Miles’ longly-held, freely-espoused views back in college, but it was a bit unfair, too, as Miles had always expressed it matter-of-factly and respectably. He was never some rabid proselytizer, but when the conversation of a higher power or the joys of life-giving or just general plans for the future had come up — usually in so mundane a question as to whether he ever planned on having kids, and if not, why not? — he had always stuck to his guns and explained his position if asked. Most of his friends had agreed but never articulated it and were content just plodding onward, while others just respectfully disagreed out of allegiance to a deeply held faith in a higher-purpose or disagreed but had no articulate reason for doing so.

  “I never sounded like that.”

  “Well, you know what I meant. I always remembered that rather pungent turn of phrase. It’s a good line. ‘No Value in Creating Human Life.’”

  “Hmm, well … of course there is no objective or inherent value in creating human life. I still believe that, I suppose. Except for having Craig, of course. That’s the universe’s only one exception to that general rule.”

  At this Henry scoffed and padded his drink against the coaster for emphasis. “Aww man, you sold out. What would ‘Miles of Years Past’ say to that?”

  To that Miles shrugged in an ‘ain’t I a stinker’ way. “Cognitive dissonance, man. How would any of us be able to survive without cognitive dissonance? Craig is a cool kid, though. He’s great. I love him. He’s a keeper. Even if he has to live with the shame of not having as cool of a name as his father.”

  That was a polite feint, of course: Miles had argued in the past that procreating because you ‘love’ a child is solipsistic and selfish.

  “I don’t know. Why does anyone do anything?” Miles intended that to be the end of it. He had a slight headache.

  “Touché.” And they continued their conversation and their beers, both of them having to drink light, Miles for his family, Henry because he needed to finalize a presentation for a conference later in the week.

  “So, does having a kid make you no longer wish you could fuck other women?” This was a call-back to when they worked in the same office back in Chicago and would talk harmlessly about their desirable female colleagues.

  “No, unfortunately not.”

  “Ahh, figured,” Henry responded knowingly.

  A pause. “It has made me not want to fuck other kids though.”

  That joke was a winner, as it got Henry to spit-take his beer back into his cup.

  Nailed it.

  >< >< ><

  Miles ended up being a little more intoxicated than he wanted to be. He wasn’t drunk, but his head sat swimmingly and he felt the rising cresting of pressure in his forehead as he tucked Craig into bed.

  The mess of shit in Craig’s diaper was a sharp knife through the booze induced fog, and blew away any creeping sentimentalism Miles may have been feeling about fatherhood. Jesus. Craig looked up at him with awe and reverence — and whatever emotions he indicated by his spitting and giddy screeching — while Daddy fumbled around with the diaper. Miles had done this countless times already, but he always had some stop-and-start problems with wrapping the diaper properly.

  Craig said nothing. Miles’ only critic was himself.

  >< >< ><

  It’d been two hours since he did anything that could remotely qualify as work. That must be a record. Not one internal note input into the Bullhorn software, not a candidate contacted, not even an email answered. Not that there were many emails to answer — six unmarked emails by his count — and maybe he could assuage himself by responding to those six
inconsequential emails and feel like he was getting something done. He was supposed to be hustling, being proactive, and bringing in clients and candidates so he’d have MORE emails to respond to. That was the nature of this work. Not having work wasn’t a good thing.

  He was not cut out for sales. It just wasn’t in his blood. He was a reactor — he’d done well in college and even his early entry-level jobs because the teachers and bosses gave him work and, being fairly responsible and detail-oriented, he completed the work fairly well. But sales was a proactive sport. You couldn’t just operate like he wanted to: come to work, watch the clock and wait to go home. No, you needed a certain kind of competitiveness, a passion, a need to close deals and feel validated. He needed to be validated, of course, but by loved ones, not corporate bosses.

  There was just something … what was wrong with him? This was a good job, he’d done well in the past, he deserved this posting, he was sent out to expand the Southern California office for a reason. That’s what his wife said and other people said, too, but of course, they didn’t know.

  He just assumed the paterfamilias instinct would have taken over. Miles had so many people riding on him now — a family — but still he kept this distance, of being above the fray, as if he were too good and special to debase himself hustling HR representatives for menial work orders to fill. He’d gotten some early scores on the board through dint of luck — met some “walking invoices,” as his boss back in Chicago had called them, highly qualified candidates that just reached out to him, just happened to be perfect for the jobs they had on the job board. Even though everyone knows the essential ingredient in the recruiting game is luck, he got a good reputation for being nothing but the conduit between qualified candidates and their jobs.

  Then the luck started running out, the job board slowed down, his boss’ patience was wearing a little thin with his lack of hustle, but then, boom! Pregnancy, a transfer request to head out to the fledgling California office. His boss, he suspected, had been sorry to get rid of him on a personal level but not-so-sorry otherwise. And now here he was, in his little office with only two job orders to work on — a lowly secretarial fill and a part-time library assistant fill — job orders that every other agency in California had in their databases. He had those jobs, had a sea of untapped and untouched HR representatives.

  Representatives that, at this pace, would remain untapped. What was wrong with him? He just … couldn’t do it. He wanted nothing more than to do it. He wanted orders to fill, candidates to interview and place, backslaps and high-fives. He wanted it, and he could imagine it, but yet here he was, not doing it. Did he feel above it? Was he afraid of failing? Was the fantasy of success enough, did the fantasy conjure up the same chemical cocktail as the actual accomplishment? These were all interesting questions, but the reality of the situation was the Reality: he ate lunch, checked and re-checked his email and the effluvia of the Internet with the dedication of someone trying to decipher a pattern.

  His printer had been non-functional for the last three days. They had an assistant who was supposed to help with those technical issues. He resolved to fix it himself to make himself feel good, only to punish himself later for spending his time on something someone else was responsible for, that had no relation to his bottom line. He knew this, yet still, he did it, sliding open the printer and examining it (he may as well have been looking inside the human brain), looking serious as if the illusion of competence needed stoic resolve to sustain.

  But of course, he couldn’t fix it — it kept saying there was a fucking typeface load error; isn’t typeface what gets printed OUT, not something inside the printer? — and doing something successfully was an optimistic pipe dream to the ever-frustrating reality of knowingly spending his time on a distraction and managing to fuck that up, too. Better call the college dropout with the generic tribal tattoos to fix the problem.

  >< >< ><

  He sat around the dinner table with Miranda and his son. His family unit. Craig was eating iron-fortified grain soup sweetened with honey, which seemed a bit intense for a baby, but what did he know: this was a new day and age. They’d found the recipe on a Young Parents blog in the comments section: he was amazed, here was a recipe left by an absolute stranger, upvoted and approved of by other absolute strangers, and here they were feeding it to their child. Maybe the blog poster was an absolute sadist? But Craig seemed to like it, edging his pudgy little face closer and closer to sip out the slurry. “New textures and tastes,” indeed.

  There was an agreed-upon moratorium on asking about work. He didn’t ask her about her reduced work schedule, and she didn’t ask him about his job. She was curious and, maybe she didn’t want to admit it, a bit nervous, as any time she asked about his work he got sullen and a little evasive, as if he needed a night of respite to regrow his protective armor. No one likes talking about their jobs, but there was a pained desperation in his eyes when she used to ask about how it was going, almost like an internal straining of his heart.

  So she focused on other things.

  She was talking about some show on Netflix she’d gotten into as he sat, mesmerized by the enthusiasm of little Craig. Whatever world of discovery and adventure little Craig inhabited, Miles wanted to be a part of it. Craig sipped again and smiled wildly, a sense of unfettered joy that’d be meretricious on anyone old enough to be self-conscious. Even Miranda’s chatter about the nuances of the show, its themes and plots and intrigues, complemented the atmosphere. Miles wished time would stop and his world could subsist solely of Miranda and Craig, solely of their love and affections, where the only thing that mattered was the cultivation of childhood glee and entertaining his fluency for popular culture.

  “Juice!” Craig yelled, as he grabbed his sippy cup. He often extended his arm when he did that and pointed at the closet, where Miranda kept the extra juice boxes when they weren’t in the fridge. Clever kid, that Craig. Craig’s pointing at the closet, coupled with his yelled “Juice” sounding like “Jews!” was ripe for a future Anne Frank joke, assuming the proper sardonic audience.

  This was not that audience.

  Little Craig bounded up off his chair and headed closer to Miles, sashaying his hips as he ran like a take-no-prisoners Diva, a fair part of the juice he was drinking already missing his mouth. Funny, Miles thought, why Craig was walking like that? His legs seemed off their joints, pumping awkwardly like the emaciated sticks of a runty gazelle. In another circumstance, it would be funny to watch.

  Craig tripped, and hard. His soft forehead landed squarely — smack-dab — on his juice cup and his knee overarched onto the ground at a weird angle.

  Crying filled the room. Not the usual I’m-hungry-but-I-know-what-hunger-is-so-I-know-this-will-be-taken-care-of type of crying, but rather the dreaded I-don’t-know-what-happened-and-I-don’t know-how-to-calibrate-my-response sort of crying. The crying of smashed glass and midnight screams.

  “Honey!” Miranda yelled, as she swooped up Craig. “You take charge of him for one second!”

  Wait, what? Since when was he taking charge, and when was that responsibility given over to him? How was the fall his fault?

  “I-” he started. “I’m sorry, I, he just fell,” Miles stammered.

  “You ok, Little Guy? You took a fall there, huh? Eager Beaver took a fall, huh?” Miranda consoled him.

  Miles looked at Craig, distraught and crying, and even at that virgin age maybe Craig could detect some of Daddy’s guilt. Somewhere in Daddy’s look of empathy and humaneness there was understanding, of what it feels like to be overwhelmed and distraught and crying, and maybe Craig knew that Daddy understood him. Maybe, for it is difficult to detect the tonal and attitudinal shifts in a baby’s fits, but his crying shifted from pain and fear to the desire to be loved, to be enveloped by that sad but understanding creature that was his father.

  Craig produced a muffled, inward hacking cough, like there was an o
ld man somewhere in his throat, handkerchief-up, struggling to breathe. It could have been funny, in another circumstance. Craig, 18 months-old, going on 108 years-old.

  Craig’s body shook a little bit, a shaking that started down from the bottom and made its way up, like a too-small elevator shaft dealing with an ascending cargo carriage. And — ding — final stop, top floor, doors open and the tired workers spilled out the contents — chunky, dewy vomit, thick, squat and squamous like a runny brick. The rice particles looked like half-maggots, but that was fine, expected. What’s worse was the unexplained: the intense, burgundy-like tubules threaded through the vomit like asbestos fiber.

  “Oh, god, honey!”

  After he was done, Craig vacantly mulled and chewed his mouth, like how a dog smacks its lips after being sick. Craig stared up at his father, silent and droopy-eyed.

  “I’ll get a towel,” Miles declared.

  “Baby, what did you eat?” his wife asked, gently patting him and rubbing the poor baby.

  No one said a word. Miles quietly cleaned up the little puddle, which was still practically steaming. It looked like too-thick oatmeal with raspberry-flavored syrup.

  “He seems better, but I want to take him to the emergency room.” She said it patiently, without any sense of panic in her voice.

  “I agree. I’m sure he is fine, babies get sick sometimes, but I think that’s best. Let’s go.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine, I can just do it. I know you have a big day tomorrow. I’m sure it’s nothing.” They spoke formally, almost diplomatically, in measured tones. Of course, babies get sick — diarrhea, fever, stomach aches — nothing to get too worked over. Running to the emergency room for one upset stomach is probably overkill; why, I bet if her grandfather were still alive, he’d say something supportive and endearing in that old-timey way, about how when her father was sick he’d give him nothing but ginger ale and a little whisky. Something like that.

  “I want to come, too. It’s important.”