The neurologist had told them they could start taking Danny out for short walks around the neighborhood. It was time to go back to teaching him how to be more independent. One day she and Jake would be dead and then who would there be to take care of their delicate son? Who would there be to love him?
When Jake got home from his daily stint at Starbucks, she would tell him to take Danny to the bodega on the corner to buy a quart of milk. He would trail behind him and prompt him to pick out the milk himself and then he would prompt him to go to the cash register to pay for it by himself. In a couple of weeks, Danny would be going back to school. Mimi would let him walk there by himself. She would trail behind him to make sure he didn’t wander off. Bit by bit they would teach him. They would teach him how to cross the street by himself. They would teach him not to talk to strangers and not to touch people. They would teach him to be more independent. And they would be gentle. They would always be gentle.
If only Danny could just go on being Danny, she thought to herself as she unlocked the front door of their apartment. If only he could spend the rest of his life being the sweet, guileless person he was, doing all the things he loved doing. But one day she and Jake were going to die, and leave him all alone, with only the state to take care of him.
Mimi reminded herself she was free now, free to go back to taking care of Danny. The District had finally given her back all the money they owed her. It had taken a solid year of fighting to get them to do it—much more than that, counting all the years before. She couldn’t say it had been worth it. Still, she had been right about the money. Teresa Thompson was gone from her at last. The advocate’s face, her voice, her ironic smile were all gone. Gone forever. Gone to haunt some other mother, she supposed. But gone from her forever.
Also, a judge had ordered Teresa to give Mimi back everything she had ever paid her. Due to some glitch in the law that allowed her to bypass the statute of limitations, Mimi had sued the advocate in small claims court, and the judge who had ruled in Mimi’s favor had reprimanded Teresa for her malfeasance.
In preparing her case, Mimi had discovered that one year the advocate had charged her credit card twice.
Tomorrow she would get to work trying to figure out how Danny could have a good life after she and Jake were dead. She would find a way to make sure he would be happy. That he would always be happy.
When Mimi went to check up on Danny, he was still sleeping. He was in bed now, lying upside down the way he always did, his head at the foot board, his quilt wrapped around him like a cocoon, the origami Pegasus he had been working on all morning beside him on the pillow. Danny’s first week home from the hospital, Mimi had tried doing origami with him, but she didn’t have the patience for it. She didn’t want to let him out of her sight, so she would sit on his bed copyediting while he sat on the floor making mythical creatures out of kami paper or paper he took out of the printer and cut into little squares.
Copyediting romance novels usually relaxed Mimi. She would mark off choice passages to show Jake when he got home. But this morning she had been way outside the range of comic relief. She had put down the manuscript and decided to sit on Danny’s bed and do nothing. That was what everyone was always telling her to do: nothing. And it was nice doing nothing, just sitting there, being with Danny in the mysterious zone of silence that surrounded him.
“What is it? What? What? What?” he kept on asking, as he showed her the origami Pegasus he had just made.
“You know what it is, Danny. Tell me.”
“What is it? What? What? What?”
“Remember what we said about asking rhetorical questions.”
“Don’t ask things you know the answer to!”
“So tell me. What is it?”
“It’s Pegasus! Pegasus! Pegasus!”
“And who is Pegasus?”
“Hercules’s flying horse! From Greek mythology. Real horses don’t fly. It’s just imagination.”
“That must be nice to be a flying horse.”
“How many steps did it take?” he asked.
“Tell me.”
“Sixty-nine steps, seventy if you include the last step, which is just showing it.”
That was Danny’s routine when he finished a model—to report, in the form of a series of questions, what he had made and how many steps it had taken. It was impossible to tell if he was proud of his accomplishment or if he showed it to her out of an impulse as obscure as the one that led him to phrase statements as questions. Nothing about Danny’s state of mind was ever obvious. All one could say with certainty about it was that he seemed to like having the same conversation over and over again.
Every now and then he would surprise her with something new, sometimes something so astonishing that it seemed to signal the emergence of a whole new Danny. Like four years ago, when Mimi was in the kitchen making dinner while trying to keep Danny focused on his homework, and out of the blue he had looked up at her and said: “God picked me to be a sample boy,” he said. “God picked me to have my own unique point of view. That’s what’s unique about me—I have my own unique point of view. After I die, God will pick another sample boy to take my place.”
Mimi had decided she wouldn’t say anything about it to Jake. He would spoil the moment for her with his infuriating rationality. He would say that Danny was probably just repeating something he had heard in a video. But he would be wrong. This was important. It could be the moment they had been waiting for, the first sign of Danny’s recovery. She would wait until after everything was okay to tell him about it. Then she would say, See? I knew! But Jake wouldn’t mind. He would be so happy. They would both be out of their minds with happiness.
Watching Danny sleep comforted Mimi. During all those years, when at the end of each long day she would be exhausted yet still unable to sleep, she would go into Danny’s room and stand in the doorway and look at him. Sometimes she would climb into bed with her son and hug him and he would hug her back. Hugging was something that autistic children were not supposed to do. In all the breaking news reports about the latest cure that friends and relatives would call to tell them to watch, the ultimate proof of a cure, the heartrending affirmation of a life restored, was often the image of a child, previously averse to human touch, hugging his mother for the first time. Before the diagnosis, Mimi had also assumed that autistic children did not like to be touched. But Danny had always craved physical contact, more so than other children, it seemed to her. During those last months before the diagnosis, when her fears about her son had begun to multiply, hugging Danny had been her only comfort.
Mimi wanted to climb into bed with her son now. She knew it was wrong: Danny was thirteen, and technically speaking, practically a man. But what harm could it do? She unraveled the quilt and lay down next to Danny, wrapping her arms around him tightly. Soon she was asleep and dreaming. She dreamt they were flying into the sky on the back of the paper Pegasus. She was sitting behind Danny, who was steering the horse into the clouds, past the sun, past the moon and past the stars. All the while, Danny was talking to her in a foreign language she had never heard before. She couldn’t understand any of the words, yet everything he said made perfect sense to her. Soon they were flying to the edge of the universe, where all the planets had gathered together in a circle, as if to greet them, or as if to say good-bye. Mimi held on to her son and rested her head on his shoulder as he steered them out beyond the edge of the universe to where there was nothing, nothing at all.
The Red Cart
Jake and I started our morning, as we had every morning for the past three days, working together at Starbucks on writing a letter to my doctor at the pain clinic. The purpose of the letter was to refute charges that I was doing something suspicious with the narcotics she had prescribed for my bladder condition. The letter had a subtext (the most important part for me), which was to make the doctor feel ashamed.
&nbs
p; Although Jake was helping me, he also despised me, for we were in the middle of a fight that had been going on for weeks. As was so often the case, by now neither of us could remember what the fight was about, but that didn’t stop us from hating each other. It was a powerful force, this hatred of ours; it led us by an invisible leash wound tightly around our respective necks and we did whatever it told us to do.
“Why can’t you ever learn to keep your big fat mouth shut?” Jake was asking me.
We had come up to the part of the letter where we were explaining that I had not exactly “threatened” to take my mother’s methadone (discovered when I was cleaning out her medicine chest in the aftermath of her recent death), as the duplicitous Dr. Ruttman (always so kind and cordial when we met face-to-face) had put in bold capital letters in her report, but that, in fact, the reason I had told her I was holding on to my mother’s methadone was because I wanted to try to convey just how desperate my bladder (that infuriating weight at the center of my body that had tormented me for most of my life) could make me feel. The stash of methadone, combined with the fact that I had tested negative for Percocet, had turned me from a patient with a maddening medical condition into a second-generation drug addict and/or criminal who was scamming the Benjamin Baruch Center for Pain and Palliative Care for narcotics. It hadn’t occurred to me to explain that my eighty-year-old mother had been prescribed methadone for back pain—not to wean her off cocaine, which was what the doctor must have assumed.
“Well, I’m keeping it shut now!” I responded. “I’m not saying a word. I won’t say a word ever again. Not to you! That’s for sure! Not a word! Not a single word!” Jake and I, when we weren’t busy rolling around in the mud of our terrible hate, had been trying to figure out what exactly it was I could be suspected of doing, because Dr. Ruttman’s charges appeared to contradict each other: On page 4 of her report, which I had read in astonishment on the subway ride back from the clinic the previous week, was written, “intentional dilution of urine suspected,” and a few pages after that was written, “diversion possible,” which Jake and I learned from the Internet meant that I was suspected of selling the Percocet, instead of taking it.
“If I was diluting my urine, wouldn’t that mean I wouldn’t want them to know I was taking the Percocet?” I was asking him.
“And if you were selling it on the street, then why would you dilute your urine?”
“Yeah, wouldn’t I want it to show up in my urine? I mean I would, theoretically speaking, save at least one pill for myself, you know, for the test.” The image of myself standing on a street corner somewhere, whispering to passersby, Percocet! Want Percocet? Got Percocet! appeared to me and I chuckled to myself.
“What’s so funny?” Jake asked me.
“I just realized what a respectable person I am.”
“Why? Because you’re not a drug dealer?”
“Yes. Yet I feel that I am.”
“I know what you mean, because I, too, know that you are not a drug dealer and yet somehow I feel that you are,” Jake said. “Let’s finish this thing.”
I wished I could tell the drug addict I had made friends with at the clinic last week what had happened. No doubt he would be able to shed some light on my situation. He had been sitting next to me, at the end of his sad and broken life, with his faded tattoos and his cane and his hacking cough, mumbling to himself as he filled out the questionnaire attached to the clipboard that was handed to all us patients by the surly receptionist upon our arrival at the clinic. I had taught him how to spell “bowel movement.”
This is someone who doesn’t care about anything, I said to myself as I transcribed his words onto the back of a flyer for eight-dollar shoes that a dejected-looking clown on stilts had handed to me on the corner of 14th Street and Fourth Avenue. “Normal routine: don’t have none.” “Sleep? Two hours a night—maybe two hours. Tops two hours.” “Enjoyment of life: what the fuck does that mean?” He had a nonchalance I admired. What a concept. To have absolutely no expectations. That would be a kind of freedom, wouldn’t it?
I was due at the clinic at one thirty, when I was scheduled to pee into a little jar, have the remainder of the pills that Dr. Ruttman had prescribed for me the previous week counted out, and get a prescription for another week’s supply of the new drug they had given me—a form of morphine, with many more side effects than the drug I had been previously taking, but presumably with less street value.
I pursed my lips and kissed Jake symbolically on the cheek (for despite everything, I knew that one day we would make up and find our way back to love, and I thought a kiss, premature and insincere though it may be, might give the process a nudge in the right direction) and off I went to go home to print out the letter.
I ran into the exterminator in the elevator. He was a big man with a big red face and a big bald head, every inch of which was covered with beads of sweat—some of them so large they could be more accurately described as bubbles. I told him how happy I was to have run into him. “My apartment is infested with mice!” I said. “I see them crawling out of the stove! It’s disgusting!”
“No time,” he told me. “Been fumigating for forty-five minutes.”
“That’s very alliterative of you but you can’t do this to me,” I told him. “Please. I’m infested with mice! I’m going to call your office.” I proceeded to dial the number, which I had stored in my cell phone. “You might as well come with me now. Your office is just going to tell you to go back anyway.”
Ignoring me, he escaped with his gigantic canister of poison through the door of the basement apartment, and when he found me waiting there for him eight minutes later, he said, “You win.”
“My apartment is on the sixth floor,” I told him as I pressed the elevator button. Something told me that one of my neighbors was holding the elevator door open (after years of New York City living, one develops a sixth sense about such things) and I started banging on the door. I prayed that I wasn’t going to have to wait forever until someone on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth floor finished up one of those brotherhood-of-man conversations (Isn’t this weather brutal? You look great! Did you lose weight? At least twenty pounds, I bet!) that transpire in the elevators and on the sidewalks of the city.
“How can you go around dressed like that on a day like today?” I asked the exterminator, hoping to divert him with the kind of small talk in which I have always excelled. He was wearing long navy blue pants and a long-sleeved navy blue shirt with mike’s exterminating: just say no to pests written above the shirt pocket. “I couldn’t bear to wear any kind of sleeves on a day like today, much less long sleeves. And that fabric,” I said, grabbing hold of the end of one the shirt tails that had been liberated from the confines of his long, hot pants. “That’s a heavy polyester blend. At least they could give you something lighter.”
“This is what they give us.”
“That’s so heartless. Mailmen get to wear those cute little shorts. And so do policemen, don’t they? Or is it the UPS guys? I forget. Yeah, it’s the UPS guys. Why not exterminators?”
He shrugged, which involved some effort, considering all the stuff he was carrying.
“Finally.” As the elevator arrived, I asked him, “Don’t you have any water? You should carry around a bottle of water with you. Put it in the freezer at night and it will stay cold all day long. That’s what I used to do when my son was little.”
I felt the familiar sadness creeping up on me. I was thinking about the summers Jake and I used to spend at the beach with Danny when he was little, before his diagnosis. We would bury him up to his neck in sand, and Jake, who had always been so good at finding ways to delight Danny, would mold octopus arms out of wet sand. My job was to give him sips of water from the bottle I had put in the freezer the night before and to scratch the occasional itch that would appear on his beautiful face. We hadn’t started worrying about
him yet; we were still going through the phase of thinking, So what if he isn’t like the other children? Why should he be? We’re weird. He’s weird. What else should we expect?
“I did that, but it’s all gone,” the exterminator told me.
We were friends now. I could relax.
“What’s your name?” I asked him. “I’m Mimi.”
“Lou. My name is Lou.”
I opened the door of my apartment and went off to fetch a glass of ice water while Lou went off to drop pellets of poison behind my stove.
“Here,” I said, handing the glass to him. “And I’ll give you a bottle to bring with you.” I scrambled around in the havoc of my kitchen cabinets looking for a plastic bottle. When I found one, I filled another glass with ice and water and poured it into a funnel, which I held scientifically over the mouth of the water bottle. It felt good to be performing this simple act of kindness.
“Do you have roaches, too?” Lou asked me.
“Not really. The gel controls them. Do you have any gel? Please use the gel. I hate the spray. I hate the smell, and besides it doesn’t work.”
“That’s because they don’t mix it right. The spray works much better than the gel. You just gotta mix it right. Most people don’t mix it right. I do. That’s what I use in my apartment.”
“I prefer the gel.”
“I don’t have any gel. Besides, like I told you, the spray works better.”
“Okay, I believe you. Spray away. And you might as well give me some glue traps. Though they don’t work. The little fuckers walk right past them. I used to worry about them being inhumane. The glue traps. But now I don’t care. Let them die a slow, wriggly death.”
“It’s us against them,” he said.
“That’s life in a nutshell,” I responded.
“You can say that again.” And with that he was off. This might be the best part of my day, I thought to myself.
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