by Ben Marcus
“You left him with a stranger,” Maureen hisses into the phone. “I can’t go away for one minute. I can’t leave him with you for a single second. A stranger who knows nothing about children.”
Mather sees the full hatred in her body, how she’d like to crawl into her phone and kill him as she stalks around the parking lot.
“I’m right here,” Mather says. “Look up,” and he watches her uncoil.
Maureen sees Mather and takes the boy from Robert. They’ve got him wrapped up in his snowsuit, and he’s wearing one of those white stocking caps they give to babies at the hospital. Somehow it still fits him.
“We’re leaving,” she announces, and Robert falls into step behind her.
Mather approaches and the sitter rushes at him, frantic.
“I don’t give them Allah. They take Allah. It’s okay they take Allah?”
Mather tells Maureen to wait, to hold on, there’s a lot to talk about. She can’t just barge over and take Alan like that. She has a lot to account for.
“Really?” Maureen says, and she looks almost excited, as if she can’t wait to tear into Mather over this.
Mather wants to see the boy, and, when he approaches, Alan looks at him with his pink-rimmed eyes, crusty and dry in the corners, and his skin not so much pale as yellow. Mather goes to touch the boy gently—this is his little son, he would like to give him a kiss—and the boy cringes, nestling further into his mother.
Mather backs away.
“It’s okay, Mr. Mather?” the sitter says. “It’s okay they take him?” She’s acting like Mather’s only friend.
“You’re asking the wrong person, you bitch,” Maureen says. But Mather calms the sitter down and says, “Yes, it’s okay, don’t worry.”
“Leave my friends alone,” Maureen spits. “Don’t call my work. Don’t call us.”
Robert looks at Mather, and there’s not even malice in his eyes. Just boredom.
Mather watches them drive away and he goes upstairs, alone, to his apartment. It’s not even noon. He’ll start by doing laundry, all the boy’s clothes. He takes everything down to the machines in the basement, then upstairs he vacuums, opens the windows for air.
From the boy’s crib he removes the humidifier. What Mather will do is take off the tubes and soak them in a good, hot solution. The plastic water tank has to be soaked, too. The mask pulls easily from the hose and it still smells a little bit of the boy, his sleeping breath. When Mather puts it back together it will be as clean as new.
Later, Mather will go shopping and he’ll buy the boy’s favorite foods. He’ll stock up on distilled water for the tank. He’ll even lay in some candy, for those times when nothing else works. If it’s not too late after that and he has the energy, Mather will take the bus down to Rollingwood to the toy store he loved when he was young, if it’s even still there, and he will pick up something fun for the boy. There has to be something that Alan will love to play with, maybe a train table, which he’s too young for at the moment, though not really for long. He’s growing up. It’s not a bad idea to start thinking about getting the right train table built up in the living room.
At home tonight, Mather will lay the pieces out on the floor, and he’ll start building, because it could take a few days to get it done, and this way he’ll have a head start. He wants to be ready for next time. He wants to bring the boy in and present it to him and see the look in the boy’s eyes when he lowers him into place and pushes that very first train into view.
PART 2
On Not Growing Up
—How long have you been a child?
—Seventy-one years.
—Who did you work with?
—Meyerowits for the first phase: colic, teething, walking, talking. He taught me how to produce false prodigy markers and developmental reversals, to test the power in the room without speaking. I was encouraged to look beyond the tantrum and drastic mood migrations that depended on the environment, and if you know my work you have an idea what resulted. The rest is a hodgepodge, but I don’t advocate linear apprenticeships. A stint in the Bonn Residency. Fellowships at the Cleveland Place, then later a stage at Quebec Center. I entered that Appalachian Trail retreat in 1974, before Krenov revised it, but had to get helicoptered out. Probably my first infant crisis, before I knew to deliberately court interference. The debt to Meyerowits is huge, obviously, if just for the innocence training. Probably I should have laid off after that, because now it’s all about unlearning.
—Unlearning as Kugler practices it? That radical?
—I skip the hostility to animals. I skip the forced submersion and the chelation flush. That’s proven to be a dead end. But Kugler is a walking contradiction in that respect, isn’t he? He keeps a horse barn. He does twilight childishness, and now he’s suddenly opposing the Phoenix baby-talk crowd, who I think are not as threatening as he makes out.
—They’re not registered.
—True, but they’re pro-family, and I still believe, when I’m out in the field, in a pro-parent regimen, in supporting those with maturity fixations.
—Which is contradictory, isn’t it, given how many adult families you’ve worked with, and how many of them have ultimately disbanded?
—The term adult is problematic, I think, and it’s too easy to say that my childwork is directly divisive to Matures, particularly Rigid or Bolted Matures. I may help accelerate a latent behavior, I may enable conflict vectors along the lines of the Michiganders, who fasted as a form of warfare, and I feign indifference to familial tension, but I think that success itself has been fetishized, and a certain nostalgia for growth has spoiled our thinking. I can be pro-family without coddling actual families. I can support familial fear-based clustering even if it involves admitting that we are most likely members of the wrong family. There is that famous German phrase, which I can’t remember exactly, that describes a certain way to hold a gun to someone’s head. The literal meaning of the phrase is that you love that person deeply, just not at the moment. I argue for a love that functions perfectly in theory.
—But you have destroyed an unprecedented number of families.
—I don’t destroy anything. I do question the term limits of parents, and I’m not the first to promote child-driven power reversals. We have to remember how much thought Benner-Louis put into this subject, and how resonant her geological metaphors were. If prodding an object for flaws causes a momentarily resolved family to unravel, then what you’re saying is that we should stay silent and paralyzed, the classic demand placed upon children. It is not my problem that families are hurt when we notice how they have hardened into stone, how they stoke each other’s failure instinct, and if Matures are not powerful enough to admit a stagnation, they are welcome to blame me, but that’s merely evasive. I give choices to children, and I supply functional tunnels to those who have yet to become children. This is mapping as Parsons envisioned it: you don’t map a route that has been spoiled by the progress of others. Adulthood looks like an exhaustion farm. Who would knowingly purchase a ticket to that? In my work, I re-child certain people who have presumed a premature adulthood, and, most importantly, I question adulthood as a retreat from the power of infancy. I’m a supplier.
—Which brings us to Maryland.
—My tantrum work is still being fine-tuned, but you could reference an entire series of Chesapeake catastrophes that might seem now like open wounds, even as our daily perspective, as time passes and fewer of us can recall the perished, will refresh itself to show how essential, for instance, something like the Lake Maneuver was. Assertive Submersion may not be pleasant, in the lived sense, but if the values of a social group are being collectively ignored, forcing Matures, through panic, to relocate their child-state, it is an adequate way to broadcast a set of perspectives and beliefs that have been conveniently forgotten. Behaviors are advertised and promoted all the time. Why should we be penalized for making our case so powerfully that people nearly die from the overwhelming logic of it?
—But can you sketch for me a picture of your ethics?
—I think that fixed moral boundaries are harmful, even if they provide momentary comfort and save lives. I think our ethical duty is to eliminate the behavioral corsets that are cinched over children just as their explosive energy is at its most threatening. Is a tantrum disruptive, or does it point to an emotional tunnel we’re afraid of entering? The doctrines of the tantras involve meditation, mantras, ritual, and explosive behavior. We’re talking about ancient ideas that are elementary and obvious to high schoolers. My ethics? I’d like to shed the strictures of adulthood and make maturity an optional result of a freely lived human life, not the necessary path to power and success, lorded over by depressed, overweight, unimaginative corpses. The twenty most central mantras have their roots in baby talk. No one disputes this anymore. A syntax comprised of these mantras, which should not be confused with NASA’s failed language, can marshal the force of an entire infant society, but—and this is key—this syntax is not capable of instructional phrasings, so nothing can be taught, which keeps maturity and its death mask perfectly at bay.
—Has it been necessary to denounce such important figures in child development as Dr. Spock? Where has that adversarial approach benefited your child program?
—Dr. Spock reviewed existing children, but he didn’t promote new ones. His art was to survey the past and ensure a predictable persona outcome. He devised solutions for the escape of childhood, very good ones, I might add. I think that some of his approaches are worth modifying, if only in service of a kind of dark science. We can bottle that kind of curatorial approach to behavior, but it won’t save anyone. These were tonics for escape, and they should have been marketed that way from the start. I’ve simply asked for honesty. Spock’s entire approach presents infancy as a problem to be managed, to be grown out of, and I’m not alone in finding this condescending. Physical growth is (mostly) a necessity (although we’ll soon see about that), but emotional growth is something Matures crave strictly for others. Rarely is it satisfying to the person who accomplishes it. There’s a missionary zeal around this dirty word, development, and it’s exerted on otherwise defenseless people. A spell has been cast on us, and it leads to a spectacularly depressing failure we have come to call “adulthood.” The artwork of children is so often discarded because Matures cannot accept, let alone decipher, the chaos and disorder children depict after only briefly gazing at the crushed and gargantuan figures that supposedly parent them. Children’s art perfectly captures the sloppy, disordered, ugly world that awaits them if they choose the path of maturity.
—Many people would disagree with that.
—And I bet they’re old and “adult” and reasonable, accumulating comprehension as if it were food. It’s a laughable mistake, this certainty compulsion. Your entire line of questioning revolves around the notion that if not everyone agrees with me, there must be something wrong with my ideas. This is a classic rhetorical tactic—I think it’s called the Consensus Chalice—for a Mature. The Fear of the Infant wasn’t merely a successful film; it depicted a real aversion to the kinds of discoveries that might be possible if Matures didn’t operate with such staggering fear. Baby talk has tremendous potential, despite its obvious dangers and its near-total incomprehensibility. The only reason you don’t embrace it is your abject terror.
—What’s next for you?
—Meyerowits, for all of his accomplishments, died as an adult, and it has shamed his entire family. His legacy, in the end, means nothing, because he left this world knowing and thinking too much, headed down the wrong road, with a body that weighed as much as six children. He attacked his own theories, in fear of the complexities and richness of innocence, and now he’s dead. I want to die as I am, looking out at a world that I can admit is too complex to know and far too terrible to join. I want to die as a child: barely able to walk, careening through the fog of objects and people I can never know, wearing nothing but the tattered onesie my first mother bought me. This is my goal.
My Views on the Darkness
—People are pursuing different strategies during the hardship, and yours would seem among the most severe. How long have you advocated the cave?
—Advocate is the wrong word. If I occupy a life raft out on the ocean, and people are drowning, I don’t “advocate” the raft to them. I enjoy the raft and my relative security. If the people in the water choose to survive, they will swim to me and petition the raft, and of course I’ll give fair consideration to their request, weighing the relevant factors. In such a case, advocacy of the raft is hardly necessary, and the same is true for what you call the cave.
—So you don’t need to promote what people cannot live without?
—Right. But even if I hold a deep conviction about survival, particularly during the hardship, our species is too complex for me to assume that everyone wants or needs to survive. There will be people, to follow this life raft example, who must stay in the water and perish, for reasons peculiar to them, and it’s not my business to probe their motives. Oceans require people to drown in them. That’s not only a line from a popular song. To me it’s beautiful that our survival strategies are wonderfully diverse and not all of us can succeed.
—In other words, you feel that people who do not agree with you about the cave have a death wish?
—My feeling about other people and their wishes is not important. What I think doesn’t interest me, just as survival is not a theoretical project, at least as I practice it. When you outlast everyone addicted to unprotected space—Americans, as we call them—you don’t much care to hear the ravings of the newly dead. Every species is defined by death and every creature has a role to play, even if some of those roles appear negating or doomed, or beguilingly marginal. If I was assigned a death role, if I was meant to die tonight, for example, which I’d be prepared to do if such an event could lift the shadow, you might still hear me disputing the reigning survival narratives, perhaps even arguing that death is the most radical form of survival. It is a necessary imperfection of the species that we each believe we are in the right.
—So the cave is a survival narrative?
—It’s not a cave any more than a house is a cave.
—It’s underground.
—A relative distinction, and a sloppy one. Caves have entrances, in any case, so your terminology is moot. Let’s try to think outside of our disease. It’s enormously difficult to penetrate a true underground space, and I’m hardly an absolutist when it comes to subterranean levels.
—Explain.
—Most of what you call the underground was once cold, blue space that is now simply clotted with matter. It’s the old adage we learned in grade school: solids attract, space is a punishment. Are there ideal clottages of matter that feature high survival ratios? Perhaps, but it’s not so simple. I look for below-grade cavities that are aperture free, but I’m not interested in fixating on pure coordinates because I don’t believe in compassing. These foolish tools are just treasure maps to one hell or another. Areas of high solidity, which often occur at extremely low altitudes, are simply safer. The sea-levelers have lost access to light and power and laid themselves bare to every sort of attack, yet still we have to listen to their sentimental justifications and old-fashioned cries for the good pastures and prairies which are graveyards now. I don’t believe in some absolute mineral intelligence, but you’d have to be a moron not to notice what is surviving and to wonder very seriously how to model it.
—To the outsider, this looks like you’re burying yourself alive.
—I would agree with the word alive here. I put a premium on life, even while others wring their hands and object to the “idea” of the low home, or other safe zones, all the while groping in cold darkness with no food, at an altitude—where our buildings used to be—with a remarkably grim survival rate. Drs. Moskin and Ruefle have repeatedly refuted the idea of an absolute sea level. Why are we even having this conversation? We key your
dangerous coordinates into a GPS and find ourselves headlong over a cliff. What good will it do me to grab on to you if we’re both falling to our deaths?
—But we’re not falling.
—Said the remarkably uninformed man. The whole idea of a boundary between the earth and the air is problematic. It is one of those intellectual wrong turns that has marked us with a terrible shadow. The scar around our necks is where sea level used to be.
—What scar?
—It’s an expression. Altitude itself has been fanatically idealized since early mythology. We’ve been banning the wrong books. The beauty of flight, the freedom of space, the supposed poetry of birds: glories or cautions? To me it’s strikingly obvious that we should seek to be supported by matter on all sides, a suit of earth, as Frehlan put it, whether in person-sized cavities or elsewhere. Altitude, even as a concept, has failed. Evolution teaches in the negative, but we are terrible students of the future.
—Is it the Anchorites you side with?
—Who said that if you want to watch someone die, befriend an Anchorite? There’s a narcissism to people who flee to the mountains, and I’m not just singling out my father. The flight of the Anchorites is self-centered and historically minded—in the worst way—and to me they are like characters auditioning for a novel. Pick me, pick me! They are begging to be noticed and they cry when wounded. The preening quality of their isolation has no appeal to me. They have a fondness for exposure, and we might as well watch them decay before our eyes. But my opinion on this is merely personal. I care about results. In terms of efficacy, which is what matters, Anchorites die. Six of them will die during this conversation.
—Is that your final measurement for people, whether or not they die?
—That measurement predates me, and it will outlast me, too. I’d be curious to learn of a more revealing criterion.