Home Game

by Michael Lewis

  I am aware that all these feelings are more or less nuts. But they are also more or less true. I know for a fact that my children are insane. Or, at any rate, I know that if an adult behaved as my children do, he would be institutionalized. Is it possible that they are contagious?

  WHEN I CAME to, the first thing I noticed was that wherever I was, I had never been there before. Flat on my back, an oxygen mask on my face, I looked up and saw a silver wall, some flashing lights, and a man in a dark blue jumpsuit, his back to me. The mask made it hard to call out. I tried to raise my arm but couldn’t. My arms and my legs were strapped down. My head, too. My gaze was directed straight down at my bare chest and the several wires taped to it. My stomach, I could see, was caked with blood. My khakis, too, were a dull dry red. On the left side of my face I felt the warm pleasant drip-drip-drip of even more blood. Apparently, I’d been in some sort of accident: What sort? I had no idea. But I knew what I was meant to do, from TV shows. I wiggled my fingers, then my toes.

  The man in the blue suit turned around and removed my oxygen mask. I now realized, again from TV shows, that I was in the back of an emergency rescue unit.

  “I can feel my toes and fingers,” I reported knowingly.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  I told him. But my voice sounded strange and manufactured, not my natural own.

  “That’s good, Michael,” he said, and smiled with a terrifying condescension. This man knew something I didn’t: What?

  “Do you know what day it is?” he asked.

  “I never know what day it is,” I said.

  “He says he never knows what day it is,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye I now spotted a second man in a dark blue emergency rescue uniform. And I remembered something: Quinn on an ice rink. I remembered skating over to her awkwardly, like a man pumping a Razor scooter up a steep hill, and then skating back to my own beginner’s ice-skating lesson. I also remembered that they had lumped the beginners together with the intermediates. I remembered a short, squat Irishman showing me how to spin. I recalled thinking: If I try to spin I’ll kill myself. But what I couldn’t remember was why I was ice-skating in the first place.

  “Do you know your address?”

  I did, just.

  “Michael, you’ve been a little funny for some time.”

  I now recalled why I was ice-skating. I was ice-skating because Quinn’s mother had conceived that the three of us should do something meaningful together. Just one thing, to remind Quinn that she was still special. We cast about for one meaningful thing and landed upon ice-skating. Tabitha knew how to ice-skate, Quinn and I did not. Quinn and I would learn together, side by side. In that briefly harmonious spirit we had set off, presumably not long before, for the local ice rink. What I couldn’t remember was why we needed to remind Quinn she was special.

  “Where are my wife and daughter?” I asked.

  “They’re outside in your car,” he said. “Do you remember what kind of car you have?”

  I did, a bit more clearly. “How long have I been unconscious?” I asked. He didn’t answer.

  “What year is it?” he asked. A wave of irritation crashed over me. My head pounded. I didn’t care what year it was, or what car I owned, or what I had eaten for dinner. I had bigger problems. Such as: Who was I? Or rather: Was I the same me as I had been before whatever had happened to me happened to me? I needed for the man to sit down and listen to my life story, from the beginning, to see if it all felt familiar. Then I remembered something else: the book! Before I fell on my head, I was writing a book.

  “Can you remember what year it is?” asked the emergency rescue worker.

  I told him what year it was. This time the answer came to me easily.

  “Do you remember falling?”

  “No.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “I remember that if I don’t hand in my book in six weeks, I’m fucked.”

  He looked at me a little strangely. “Okay,” he said. “That’s a start.”

  And so I told him about my literary problems. How thrilling it had been to be handed material so rich that I was limited only by my ability to handle it. How for months I’d been haunted by the sense that something would interfere with my finishing it. How, a few months earlier, with about a third of the book done, the manuscript had been stolen, along with everything I had ever written and not published, including fifteen years of private journals and biographies I had kept of my two daughters. How a fancy truck with darkened windows—it was spotted by a neighbor—had rolled up alongside my office in broad daylight. How its occupants had picked the lock to my office, stolen my computer, all my backup files (from a separate room), and…nothing else. How they’d left no fingerprints, only a mystery.

  Then, by some miracle of brain chemistry, I realized I sounded like a lunatic. “I know this sounds nuts,” I said.

  “This all happened?”

  “This all happened,” I said.

  I explained to the man—who continued to stare calmly at me; how, I do not know—how my wife had understood, or pretended to, that to compensate for the loss of my manuscript I needed to abandon most of my responsibilities as a father. How I had spent several months redefining what is meant by “the bare minimum”—how little a husband and father can do and still not trigger screams of terror when he walks in the front door. How I had a genius for it—and an excuse. A deadline. How Dixie didn’t seem to mind—a father doesn’t add much to the life of a six-month-old child—but that Quinn was different. The moment I put some space between me and her, she set about trying to drive her mother insane. She’d eat nothing but sugar, do nothing but watch cartoons. Denied sugar and cartoons, she took to calling her mother “you stupid lady.” Told not to talk to her mother that way, she’d spit, absurdly, “Jack-n-ass!” Somewhere in there she got her first bad report card: Her teacher said that the normally ebullient Quinn was now, occasionally, “morose.” On my brief visits home I saw more truculence than moroseness, but that was as alarming, in its way. On Christmas morning, the moment she realized that she’d ripped open her last present she looked up and said, “Oh, shit.” Fucking hell, I thought, where did that come from?

  When I spoke that last line the ambulance man laughed. “He’s okay,” he shouted out to his colleague. They changed their plan to drive me to the trauma center to determine if I’d suffered brain damage. Instead, they would drive me to the emergency room to have my head sewn up. Before they did, they invited Tabitha into the truck to tell me that she and Quinn would be right behind me, in the aforementioned car. My wife is at her best in such moments; she’s as good in a crisis as ice on a burn. After making it clear to me that I was a wimp to be concerned about the state of my brain, she said that I didn’t need to worry about Quinn: She had hustled her off the ice before she could see her father lying in a lake of blood. It’s astonishing how much trouble we take to prevent our children from seeing the world as it is. It’s even more astonishing how, even when we might think we have earned a right to forget about our children for a moment, we haven’t.

  The ambulance started, the siren wailed. I remembered another thing: Quinn needed to feel special because I had spent too much time working on my book. I was learning how to ice-skate because someone had broken into my office and stolen my book. The theft of my computer memory had led to this assault on my own.

  The emergency rescue worker was back to fiddling with one of the machines hooked up to me. He seemed to think we were done talking. We weren’t. My mind wasn’t right, and I knew it wasn’t right. I thought: When you hit your head and you are never again the same, how do you know? If you have that thought does that mean you are the same? I didn’t know; and I was certain the only way I would know was to talk and talk and talk. “I’ve got to finish this book soon,” I said, a little desperately.

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I still have a problem.”

  “Yeah?”


  “I can’t remember what the book’s about.”

  “Give me a moment,” he said. He didn’t even try to hide it: I was boring him. I was boring the emergency rescue worker! I must have fallen asleep, as the next thing I knew I was looking up not at an emergency rescue worker but a lady doctor. “I hear you’re a writer,” she said, making conversation. “What do you write about?”

  She was soon sorry she had asked. For it was then I remembered: Baseball! I was writing a book about baseball. As she stitched me back together I offered her, free of charge, my literary autobiography. Every last detail, including the occasional journal I’d been keeping of my family life. I told her, for instance, I’d written about the birth of my child, which had occurred in this very hospital. I told her I’d lived in Paris, and published some accounts of the experience. It was then that she perked up.

  “I read those!” she said.

  Inexplicably, I felt better.

  “I loved those descriptions of you with your son in the Luxembourg Gardens.”

  “That was Adam Gopnik,” I said. For the first time I felt something I knew I had always felt. The surge of irritation, the choking back of indignation—oh, the horror, oh, the smallness of existence—was so breathtakingly familiar that I couldn’t deny it: I was still me.

  PART 3

  WALKER

  TWO HAD SEEMED like the right number to both of us until we had two, and even then it seemed sort of like the right number to me. Two was always the plan; five years ago, at fantastic expense, with the view to maximizing our living space while giving each child her own room, we’d torn up a four-bedroom house and made it into a three-bedroom house. Then one day Tabitha began to shoot me long, soulful looks at night and say things like, “I just feel like someone’s missing.” She thought we should at least discuss the idea of having a third child, but of course all that meant was that she’d already made up her mind. It was up to me to prevent it, which is to say that it was only a matter of time before it happened. And that was that. Tabitha called the architect who had torn out the fourth bedroom, and told him we’d be building an addition.

  Beep! Beep! Beep!

  To the shriek of an alarm I awaken but don’t move. What with the extra pillow and the warm blanket, the delivery room couch had proved surprisingly comfortable.

  Beep! Beep! Beep!

  Having witnessed childbirth twice before, I have acquired this expertise: I know that alarms on delivery room machines are nothing to fear. Along with smoke detectors and airport security machines, they belong on the long list of devices in American life designed to cry wolf. Apart from that, here is the sum total of what I’ve learned waiting for my children to be born: (1) arrive sober; (2) do not attempt to be interesting, as it makes the nurses uneasy; (3) never underestimate your own insignificance; and (4) try to get some sleep, as no one else can. Of course, it is important to be present and conscious for the birth of your child. To miss it would be to invite scorn and derision and lead others to speak ill of you behind your back. But up until the moment the child is born, the husband in the delivery room is in an odd predicament. He’s been admitted to the scene of the crisis but given no serious purpose. He’s the Frenchman after the war resolution has passed.

  I had just pressed a second pillow hard over my head to mute the alarm—it sounded as if it might be coming from the painkiller pump—and was very nearly asleep, when I heard a new voice. “You’re ten centimeters,” it said.

  The last time they’d brought the chains out onto the field, they’d measured her at a mere four centimeters. Ten was clearly forward progress, but it had been nearly five years, and I couldn’t recall how many centimeters there were in a first down. I rose on the couch, and in the unnaturally bright tone of a man pretending he hasn’t just been asleep, asked, “So…how many more centimeters we got to go?” That’s when I noticed we had a new doctor. She looked at me strangely. “Ten centimeters means the baby’s coming,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  She’d been in the room only a couple of minutes, as it turned out. Before that, Tabitha had never seen or heard of her and—as the doctor now mentions—she’s about to quit delivering babies and move to Detroit, so this is likely to be the extent of our relationship. “I’m Dr. Vay,” she says, and grabs a stool and a mask. It’s 4:23 in the morning and the mood in the air, as far as I’m concerned, is giddy exhaustion. “Oy vey!” I holler as Dr. Vay moves into the catching position. Only somehow it comes out, “Ai vay!”

  “It’s oy vey, honey,” Tabitha says calmly. “Can you get the mirror?”

  I find the mirror. In Berkeley, no birth is complete without a mirror. The belief here is that the mother, as she grunts and groans, should have all five senses fully engaged and pumping meaning into the experience. The ideal Berkeley birth has probably never actually happened, but if it has, it happened far from civilization, in the woods, without painkillers or doctors or any intervention whatsoever by modern medicine. Along one side of the birthing mother was a wall of doulas wailing a folk song; along the other, all the people she had ever known; at her feet, a full-length mirror, in which she watched her baby emerging; at her head, a mother wolf, licking and suckling. Incense-filled urns released meaningful, carbon-free odors. The placenta was saved and, if not grilled, recycled.

  Tabitha never wanted the full Berkeley. But back when we started, seven and a half years ago, she gave a passing thought to employing a midwife instead of a doctor, and thought that it might make the experience more meaningful if she skipped the painkillers. She picked out music and found scented oils with which to be rubbed. To the immense irritation first of her obstetrician and then of herself, she hired a doula, who was meant to use said oils to massage her feet during the delivery, but instead went out for turkey sandwiches and never came back.

  That was seven and a half long years ago. With her slender build and narrow hips and near-total intolerance of physical discomfort, my wife was ill-designed for childbirth. The first time around, in this very hospital, she began to hemorrhage. The doctors saved her life, and with so little drama that we didn’t realize what they’d done until well after. The second time around, again in this hospital, they saved not only her but our second daughter, who had entered the birth canal at a historically tragic angle. Entering her third pregnancy, my wife lost interest in doulas and incense. She longs only for painless, antiseptic, impersonal modern medicine. Numb is good. If they ran tubes underground from hospitals to homes so that painkillers could be delivered in advance of labor, she might well have been their first paying customer. Of the original Berkeley Dream, the mirror’s all she’s got left.

  “Can you feel the contractions happening?” the doctor asks.

  “Slightly.” She’s lying, thank God. If she felt a thing she’d be hollering.

  Beep! Beep! Beep! The painkiller pump, again. Another nurse appears—another stranger we’re almost surely never again to lay eyes upon. “Angie needs a break,” she says. Angie’s the nurse who still hasn’t worked out what’s going wrong with the painkiller. Angie exits. Dr. Vay prods and pushes and massages and waits. Behind her on the wall is a small sign, bearing the first words my child will see: We Strive to Give Five Star Service.

  “I think you’re having one now. Push.”

  Tabitha pushes, turns beet-red, and goes all bug-eyed.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t hold your breath,” I say helpfully. No one notices. A single thirty-minute nap and I’ve lost what little right I had to be heard.

  “Can you feel anything at all?” the doctor asks.

  “Not really.”

  “Imagine you’re trying to poop,” says the doctor.

  Worried that imagining might make it so, I retreat up and away from ground zero, and stroke the tippy-top of my wife’s head. But this just further isolates me as the character in search of a role—the carrot in the school play. Out of nothing more than a desire to seem busy, I grab hold of one of Tabitha’s legs and pull it backward. Then, like
the master on a slave ship counting the strokes, I begin to chant. “One, two, three…” I half expect the doctor and nurses to fall about laughing and tell me to stop, but they don’t. I seem, in fact, to have written myself a speaking part. “One! Two! Three! One! Two! Three!” Tabitha pushes harder. Her eyes look as if they are about to pop out of her head and ricochet off the ceiling.

  “Here it is.”

  There comes a moment when I cease to be able to watch the birth of what is presumably my child with anything but horror. This is that moment. It’s meant to be a beautiful sight—a thing to be videotaped or at least remembered, and played over and again in the mind—but it feels more like a hideous secret to be kept. But the damn mirror makes it hard to avoid. Ten minutes ago there was no place to hide; now there is no place to look.

  Boy or girl? We didn’t know. But girls were all we’d ever done, and we’d spent a lot less time arguing over boys’ names than girls’. She’d gone from Clementine to Penelope to Phoebe to Scout and then back to Penelope. At midnight when the water broke all over the living room floor, we were just starting what I assumed would be a long creep back to Clementine. I liked the sound of Penny Lewis, but Clementine made you want to sing.

  “That’s the best push yet!” says the doctor. “One more time.”

  “One, two, three…” I feel like Richard Simmons in one of his videos. You can do it!