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

by J. R. Hamantaschen

She nodded, not pushing her original position. She knew fuzzy details about his meeting the next day: he’d been fretting about it for a week or so. “It’s about 8:30 now. Hopefully, it will be nothing, we can be in and out in a couple of hours.” The closest hospital with a pediatric care facility was about forty-five minutes away.

  >< >< ><

  He drove and she stayed in the backseat, comforting Craig.

  Emergency rooms were surreal, in their way, in how you never imagined them to be as bad and poorly-run as they actually were. But still, how on earth was this reality, this polyglot incubator for disease, a Towel of Babel cast of several languages, all the germy hosts crammed together in one overflowing hall, transmitting their various ailments to one another in close quarters? Several people stood in the hallway because there weren’t enough seats. Half of these people were probably uninsured, he fumed, and he silenced himself, not letting his fear degenerate into cruelty. Everyone here had their problems, no need to make things worse.

  After well over an hour, they met with a young, enthusiastic doctor. He checked little Craig out, gave him an allergy test, checked his stomach and throat, the whole nine yards. The conclusion: a clean bill of health. Babies, you know? Just watch what he eats, monitor him, check for fever, and come back if anything develops.

  They got home around midnight. They stayed up together, relieved, and coaxed little Craig to sleep. It was 1:30 a.m. by the time they’d gotten ready for bed. Fatigue and a powerful headache sunk Miles into bed like a heavy blanket.

  He squeezed Miranda’s hand, and she squeezed back. The chaos of being a parent was beyond platitudinous, a given, the basis of the hackiest small talk. Under that small talk, he always wondered, there must have been despair. Not wondered. Knew. The responsibility to take care of a life, a life you’ve created with a partner you’ve dedicated your life to. He was a drowning man, and he’d fit himself a brand new iron dumbbell.

  He’d joked about that with other new parents and they all laughed and empathetically agreed.

  Tell me about it.

  But no, really.

  It can be tough.

  No, really, I mean it.

  How do you deal with it?

  Back to platitudes.

  >< >< ><

  The meeting the next day wasn’t an explosive disaster, but then again, nothing is usually explosive. This was more like a slow gas leak, a building collapsing into itself, death by a million oversights. He didn’t get enough sleep and looked sloppy. There were dust balls on his suit jacket he hadn’t noticed; his work shirt was more creased and visibly sweat-stained around the collar than appropriate; usually Miranda double-checked him before he went into work for important meetings, but he insisted she should sleep in, he could handle it.

  He showed up a little late, by about ten minutes. He skipped breakfast entirely and felt weak. The usual easy-going jesting of his supervisor, Mark, was nowhere to be found; not surprising, since Mark’s supervisor was also in attendance. Mark’s supervisor told Miles his name but Miles didn’t do a good enough job of remembering it, and he referred to him as a pronoun, signaling to everyone he forgot. Unprofessional. Mark looked disappointed, like he’d been personally let down. Mark transitioned from Mark to Mr. Cunningham.

  >< >< ><

  The curious thing about having a partner-for-life is you end up not talking about upsetting things. You have to maintain an equilibrium. That’s the curious thing. Love is supposed to be passionate, intense, boundary-less. But of course, no one acts like that.

  So when he asked how her day was going, she said it had gone well, that Craig had been healthy and happy all day, but said nothing about how she was feeling, personally. What disappointed her, saddened her, and excited her? Likewise, when she inquired about how his meeting went, he told her it went “not great” and “fine,” but he “didn’t want to talk about it.” That’s a curious turn of phrase, isn’t it? Why do we never want to talk about the most important things with the person we’ve selected to presumably share everything with? No, instead he’d share his insecurities and frustrations at work with Henry, who’d, in turn, relate with his occupational frustrations, but of course it wasn’t the same or helpful.

  Because, the reality is, we go through our experiences essentially alone.

  Miranda mentioned how she was excited to get back to work full-time, in that undetermined future when Craig was sufficiently older. The grass is always greener, he supposed.

  If he was serving in the stay-at-home role and not earning money, he’d be eager to get back to traditionally paid work, too. That sentiment usually dissipated, though, at the precise moment he actually started working for another.

  The co-pay for the hospital was $150. He was thankful it had been so low, and that his employer provided his family reasonably comprehensive medical insurance.

  He was feeling deflated from work, from his commute home, from this persistent ambient headache that stayed with him. But he was happy to see Miranda, be in her company, and even happier to be around Craig. There was something about those quizzical, curious eyes, that belly-aching laugh and frantic pace of his that could convince one that life was nothing but a series of new experiences and opportunities. To be that young.

  Even in his late teens, Miles still remembered being excited about sensuality, the joy and pleasure of sex, the unwritten future, all those possibilities. Now that was gifted to this little guy, his son. When would that excitement end for him? Miles wondered. Maybe around sixteen, when Miles remembered it had begun to unravel for him. That indelible quote from his then-girlfriend’s surly stepfather, trotted out whenever he’d come back from a long day at work and the young lovers had made the mistake of being too young and loving.

  “One day, it’ll be your turn to eat that shit sandwich. You just wait,” was her stepfather’s repeated refrain.

  Little Craig carried a plastic guitar toy and ran, hunched over, flapping as he walked like he had flippers for feet. He dropped the toy in his Thomas the Tank Engine bin and ran straight back to Mommy, right into her tummy like he was a fastball and she was the catcher. He was hunched-over the whole time.

  “Look at little Quasimodo over there.”

  She made an exaggerated, playful movement, as if he was a sentient ton of bricks. “Ooh, big boy, built up speed there!”

  Craig curled into her midsection, then stood up on her inner thigh, looking over her shoulder to Daddy.

  Miles rubbed his son’s head, massaging his temples with his thumb.

  He was unabashedly petting his son like a puppy, but Craig seemed to like it. Miles grew up with pet dogs, and that was his longest-standing experience with touch as a sign of love. He even sometimes found himself rubbing Miranda, kneading her inner thigh, cuddling her, a hand on her tummy.

  Craig was still hunched over, Miles noted. Craig made a propeller-like noise and drooled.

  >< >< ><

  The next day at work was a little icy and he kept his head down. No one talked to him — the jury’s still out on whether that was good or not.

  It was when he was cleaning the dishes after Miranda’s dinner the next night that he noticed it again, equivocally. Craig was running around at a funny angle.

  He pointed this out to Miranda, who was reading an old Travel and Leisure magazine on the couch.

  She lifted him up and put him up to her belly.

  “Baby’s never too young to learn about good posture,” and she put her hands to her sides and sat up straight like a wooden British solider.

  She put him back down on the ground in front of her. “Now you try,” and she again assumed the position.

  He giggled.

  Miles moved quietly behind Craig and put a comforting hand on his lower back. He delicately attempted to lift up his shoulders to get him standing straight.

  Craig burst out crying, a high pitched
yipping, as if someone stepped on his toes. He doddered back a few steps, still at that angle.

  “Oh honey, I’m sorry.” Miles lifted Craig up and kissed his head until he stopped crying. Craig was a good boy, in that he rarely was overtaken with those never-ending stereotypical crying jags. He slept easy and was a good sport.

  Miles — oh so delicately — tried to straighten out his son’s back again. He resisted, squiggling out of his grasp.

  He pointed out the posture to Miranda. “Baby’s just being silly, I’ll straighten him out,” but it went no further and soon she took him up to bed.

  He checked some work emails while she was putting him to sleep, ruing about how that presentation had gone. Who are you fooling? he thought. You stayed up late on purpose. You were eager for an excuse to not get enough sleep. You love having a reason to fail.

  The work emails were just background on his computer, skimmed over in between .gifs of sexually compliant young women, adoring eyes, bouncing flesh. He wasn’t even getting hard, but appreciated the calming, narcotizing effects of the pornography.

  He had to shake out all the dandruff when he took off his work shirt to go to bed. He’d been scratching at his head all day and all night.

  Eventually they both found themselves in bed, after Craig had drifted off to sleep.

  In between snuggling and sensitivities, he asked her whether she ever got Craig to straighten up. She deflected a bit — she hating talking about anything remotely substantive before bed, but admitted he’d been a stubborn silly little boy, you know how he gets.

  No, I don’t.

  >< >< ><

  This was an easy assignment and he was fucking it up. He was just as smart as everybody else, and there was no reason for what should be a basic assignment to throw him off course so much. He just overthought it. He was instructed to use some discretion, collate the analyses of sales reports and identify the recurrent trends. A relatively simple summary job. But he hadn’t been provided some of the documents and findings cited in the reports. His internet was slow. He started the assignment by adding too much detail, but had to keep the tone and level of detail consistent throughout. Some sections had too much, some too little. He had excuses — he always had excuses, and some were legitimate. He didn’t control the internet; he didn’t control what his boss could or couldn’t provide him. Of course, the credibility of excuses never mattered in the Winner Culture, did it? Just the Results, right?

  He responded with lightning speed to any email the boss sent out, to sustain the fiction that he was a competent employee, while continuing to underperform on the analysis itself.

  He scratched the back of his head for long enough for a head in a nearby cubicle to turn. “Shit,” he said as he blew off the hair debris and scabs that covered the documents. He looked down at his crotch area, which ran amok with strands of hairs and ugly dandruff.

  He petered out at work and came home late, so when he complained about failing at work, his wife could point to his staying late as proof that he was a good employee and he could internally satisfy his contrarian impulse by knowing the truth — that he hadn’t even been working late at all, just dawdling in his car.

  Craig was walking in a crouched position again, something that he’d been doing all day, according to Miranda, although he’d been sleepy and slept most of the day. She’d touched and inspected him all over but didn’t see any bruises or injuries. They dangled a cookie over his head, just out of reach, to see if he’d straighten himself up. He cooed and reached for it, eager and happy as ever, but his back refused to straighten out properly. Miranda tried again to physically encourage it. Craig screamed like an alarm with malfunctioning batteries, a scream sharp enough to stop them in their tracks.

  They should take him to a doctor tomorrow. Doctors, doctors, doctors. Kids get sick, but poor baby.

  He held Miranda at night and kissed the back of her neck. Frenzied butterflies occupied his gut. He kissed the back of her neck again and held her tightly from behind, in the spoon position she liked. He pressed himself against her until his stomach was flat against her back, as if he could connect his body to another he’d stop feeling that anxious buzzing.

  “I’m scared, to be honest, baby.”

  She didn’t respond. He held her tight again for emphasis, and she meekly squeezed his hand, a sop to his anxieties.

  “I’m sorry, I just am. I want him to be ok.”

  “I know. We will find out tomorrow. I’ll take him first thing to Dr. Glickman. I need you to be strong though, you know. If he’s not well, I need you there with me.”

  “I know,” he said in a sullen whisper. He declared his love for her over and over again over the years, his utter devotion and he meant it, and she meant it in kind. He told her a million different ways that he was weak, ineffectual. “You’re too good for me,” he’d always say to her, his cry for help and understanding that she’d misinterpret as loving modesty. “You’re the good one!” she’d say, because he cleaned the dishes or hugged her tenderly or let her indulge whatever hobbies she wanted, as if it required any competence as a provider or husband to be a decent human being.

  But when it came to the big things, he’d fail; he’d always fail.

  Since she’d been on Wellbutrin for the past year, she’d become less anxious, more determined, less victim to mood swings. There was no anti-depression or anti-anxiety medicines left for him to try: his frequent prescriber card was thoroughly stamped. He was retrogressing in medical advancements, so desperate he was trying Prozac. He assured her he’d stay strong and swallowed up his emotions, as if it were a switch to be turned on and off, like anyone could reveal themselves in a moment of weakness, resolve to do better, and instantly be back on the right track.

  He waited until she fell asleep, and masturbated joylessly into the sheets, imagining a sexually voracious, younger Miranda reverse-cowgirling her former coworker who always made eyes at her. He emptied himself into the sheets and was too depleted to detach the stickiness from his inner thigh or change his damp boxers.

  >< >< ><

  The assignment was barely passable but he sent it in anyway, doing nothing else but distracting himself with listicles and clickbait, dreading the reply from his supervisor.

  Craig wouldn’t straighten out, but the doctor was at a loss as to what could be wrong with him. En route to the orthopedic surgeon referral, Craig threw up all over himself in the baby seat. The baby seat was a horror show, a miasma of porridge-like fluids.

  The surgeon was at a loss, too. In the X-Rays everything looked fine, the surgeon assured them. Craig was only a year and a half old, his musculature was still adjusting, don’t worry too much, he’d seen this before. Be glad it’s not something serious.

  >< >< ><

  Late at night, a couple days later. His boss had had a serious talk with him earlier: his performance needed to improve, significantly. They would talk about a regiment, structure to his day. More input, more calls, more results: simply a numbers game. Ok, he agreed. What else could he do?

  He surfed the Internet late at night while Miranda put Craig to bed. Miles surfed the webcam sites and made small talk with the regular coterie of models he spoke to. He tipped them to hear their affections and see them smile; he asked them to be bouncy and happy, and they did it. He didn’t even request nudity or care to see it. He just wanted their affection, these pretty ladies who listened to him, or pretended to listen to him, who provided what he wanted when he asked for it and seemed perpetually grateful for what he provided in return. He never did hard drugs but imagined the reason people did them was because the sensation was superior to the real world; it was the same with this. This was calming, aesthetic and anesthetic, rewarding and gratifying and pleasurable.

  >< >< ><

  He called his mother the next day. She moved down to Florida with her boyfriend and talked about what she’d been u
p to, arts festivals she’d been to, restaurants they had gone to. She asked about “little Craig” and he told her about his posture and recent-flare up, and she told him to expect that, little kids get sick, just keep an eye on him, and she regaled him with a colorful anecdote about a stomach problem he’d had as a little boy and how it went away.

  He called his father, who expressed more concern and told him to keep him updated about how Craig was doing. If he didn’t call his father, he’d never hear from him; his mother at least called on her own accord to have someone to tell her stories to. His father was overworked, as always, could never find good help to assist him with his business. He, too, mentioned how nervous he’d been as a new father, but not to worry, things work out in the end, which was a curious thing to say in a world of colon cancer, schizophrenia and disabling freak accidents. Miles’ father hadn’t even been a good father, really, treated his son like a burden rather than a blessing, so what good was his advice?

  He called Henry.

  “Hey man, good to hear from you,” Henry started. Miles’ flinty telephone timbre and his unfocused demeanor clued Henry in to his psychological state.

  “Hey man, how is everything going? How is … how is the depression doing?” Henry probed.

  “The depression is doing great. I mean, as in separate from me. I’m doing terribly, but the depression itself, man, it’s going great. Never been stronger!” There was Miles, always with the joking, and the conversation proceeded apace, verbal feints and deflections and other coping mechanisms. The conversation was substantive but of no great lasting effect, because that’s how things were when you were a yawning chasm.

  >< >< ><

  Miles was at a bar after work, by himself. He was supposed to meet a friend, but the friend cancelled after Miles had arrived. Miles wasn’t going home yet. He had chalked out a couple of hours for socialization. Miranda had always talked about the need to wrest away some “fun time” for yourself after work, to keep a healthy separation between work and life. He was going to indulge that, with a friend or not.