Radio Belly

by Buffy Cram

  HER SON IS a spectacle—no more getting around that fact. If a spectacle kayaks off the map, is he still a spectacle? she wonders and then realizes he’s paddling so hard she can barely keep up. She calls out for a break, feeling like a child and an old lady at the same time. He senses what she’s thinking, she reasons, and he’s trying to get away from her. She thinks of that game they used to play when he was young, “What am I?” where one of them would think of something to be—a flower, a rock, an ocean—act it out and then get the other to guess. But after a while they were too quick for it to be any fun. “Dog!” Mary would shout before Stefan could get down on all fours, “sun” before his arms were halfway above his head. It became a kind of party trick, everyone convinced they’d rehearsed it.

  Dr. Wong calls it their “capacity for sympathetic transfer.” The people in her parent group call it codependency. The neighbours call it unhealthy. Everyone tries to frame it as his illness or her weakness, but Stefan and Mary have always lived this way, with their antennae out. She had tried to explain this to the doctors at intake but they weren’t interested.

  She had brought Stefan in because he was hiding in the basement for days at a time, because his life was more of a struggle than it needed to be, because the neighbours had found him standing in their gardens, listening to the flowers at odd hours of the night. Still, she had the feeling she could just as easily have decided not to bring him in. In those days she could still lure him upstairs with a grilled cheese sandwich. He would sit across from her, answering her questions, acting his old self for a time. It was on one of these days that he first tried to explain his moustache conspiracy to her—he was trying to warn her about the “new ironic moustache,” that it was not at all what it seemed. He was panicked and ranting. She heard him out, but kept waiting for him to say he was just joking, it was all an act.

  It was at intake that she met Dr. Wong. First came his questions—an interrogation that went on all night. She had the feeling she was betraying Stefan, helping the doctor catalogue his every oddity as the first signs of illness:

  How he could suddenly be overcome with empathy for inanimate objects. That, on more than one occasion, he had run away with the ball in the middle of a soccer game because he couldn’t bear to watch it be kicked any- more. Same with chess—he would get teary and start to pro-tect the other pawns. She’d find them tucked into his bed days later.

  His strange requests for Halloween costumes. A jellyfish one year. Forty-something rolls of Saran wrap. Another year, a doll’s leg. Not the whole doll, just the leg. That, for several years, he slept with Band-Aids over his belly button, afraid his skin would come undone and slip off in his sleep.

  That when his teachers wrote “So bright!” and “Imaginative!” on his report cards; they meant “bright” as in too much light, like a mirror stealing it from all around. They meant a Van Gogh imagination—the dangerous kind.

  After hours of questioning, Dr. Wong finally made his judgment. “Schizophrenia,” he announced. He was as grim as he was sure of himself. Schizophrenia: the too-tight sweater Stefan would have to wear the rest of his life. “Sorry,” he whispered, and then he handed Mary a brochure for one of the parent support groups downstairs.

  “THE DISEASE OF too much imagination,” one of the parents said at group the next evening.

  “Too much plot,” said another, and all the other parents nodded. Too many beautiful plots, that was exactly it. Trying to apply plot to a plotless world.

  She made an appointment with Dr. Wong for the following morning to try that theory out on him. She wanted to confess how, during that golden stretch after she had gotten sober and before he hit puberty, she had probably spoiled Stefan a little, allowing him to sleep in her bed way past an appropriate age, reading as many stories as he wanted late into the night, even if it meant skipping school the next day.

  “Is it possible he caught a bad case of the Grimms?” she asked. “You know, too many fairy tales too early? A set-up for failure?”

  “Schizophrenia,” he said. “Not your fault.”

  But all those magic beans and golden geese. The rest of the world such a disappointment. No wonder Stefan felt the need to story the gaps.

  THE NEXT TIME Mary showed up for group, she wandered past her designated room. She couldn’t see the benefit of sitting across from people just as stricken as her, and in all the same ways. Down the hall and around the corner she found another group about to start. It was for the parents of boys who’d become girls, girls who’d become boys, or those caught somewhere in the middle, a red-haired woman named Patty explained. Mary was informed that the ones caught in the middle wanted to be called “ze” instead of he or she, that it was the new pronoun of choice. “We have a joke,” Patty said, “Jack and Jill went up the hill and came back Ze and Ze.” Then she laughed too loud and for too long. Now this, Mary thought, is where she belonged. This was a celebration of parenthood, of imperfection, of children who had gone up the hill—over the hill—and come back changed.

  Toward the end of the meeting, a man at the back rose to speak. He was wearing dirty pants, construction boots, an angry moustache. He was a newcomer, he said, and it was clear from the look on his face he wanted nothing to do with this brave new world of gender. He said his daughter had started with the hormone pills, that she now had tits and a beard, but he said it like, “Isn’t it sick?”

  “Tell you what, you take my boy to a game and I’ll take your girl shoe shopping,” Patty snapped. How she said it: “At least you still have a girl.”

  But the newcomer kept on about the “hormonal rains,” about the fucked-up food chain. He was a monster, mad at the world. Still, some of what he said crept into Mary and stayed.

  “JUST ONE MORE thing, Dr. Wong,” Mary said at their third and final “outtake” appointment. “What about mercury poisoning?” He had the thinnest of moustaches, she noticed, barely there. Hard to trust a man like that. “What about the water, all those transsexual fishes and frogs?”

  She told him about the strange dentist who’d done Stefan’s fillings, how he’d flirted with her and then wouldn’t take her money, about their neighbourhood, an estuary downhill from the city, a sponge for toxic runoff, all the other boys from their street queer or criminal or mentally ill, not one boy right, although the girls came out okay, got scholarships, moved away.

  “No specific cause,” Dr. Wong reassured her. He said something about predisposition, something else about this not being an appropriate venue for airing guilt.

  But she wasn’t done confessing. She was a mother onion rolling downhill, peeling herself as she went.

  She told him about the time she’d found Stefan face down and bluing in the neighbour’s pool; how, when her only job in the world was to count to five and blow, count to five and blow, her mind had spun out, unable to catch on the moment even as she felt him grow heavy against her lips. One whole minute before help arrived. How desperately she had loved him in that long minute. “What if I’d always been able to love him that much, Dr. Wong?” she asked. “What if I loved him that much now? Do you think it would bring him back?”

  But Dr. Wong wasn’t interested in love. He had made his diagnosis. Not even a drowning could throw him off course now. He wrote out a three-month prescription for Stefan, a psychiatric referral for Mary, and sent them both home. It wouldn’t be the last time they saw each other though. It wouldn’t be so easy.

  THEY’VE BEEN PADDLING for hours. The fog is lifting, brightening all around, but they are still heading toward a place they cannot see. She is dizzy—more than dizzy. She leans over the side of her boat to be sick but what comes up instead is an old prayer—Take us, please. Another heave, another prayer—Take me instead—and then she follows that thought down. Something else forming in the murky depths of her mind. A plea: And if not me, then all of him, all at once. She pictures him blue-lipped benea
th her, remembers pushing the breath into his little body, like trying to force air into clay. Finally a kick deep inside his chest, a sudden opening through which he took everything—all the breath her body offered and then some. For the second time since his birth, she turned herself inside out, pushing life into him. For the second time, the great emptiness that followed. How easy it would be to knock him over now, she thinks, to hold him under with her paddle. How much better to move through grief, not to live there. And then, just as soon as she’s formulated the thought, the fog slips past and the island they’ve been paddling toward hovers ahead like a mirage.

  BACK ON LAND they slip into their usual roles. She sets up camp, and he sits in the sand, rocking back and forth, doing some sort of mental accounting.

  “Firewood,” she says, clapping her hands to startle him. As a boy, he’d spend entire days playing Can’t Touch the Ground. He’d jump from rock to log, log to rock, collecting driftwood the whole length of the beach. Now he stands reluctantly and lumbers toward the treeline. He is as heavy-footed, as off-balance as a tourist.

  She starts a small fire with what wood is lying around and then follows after him. The sun is setting now, everything sepia and shimmering as if she’s moving through the memory of a forest. Every step sends up a fine golden dust. The smell of sweet, burnt vegetation, things crackling, coming apart underfoot. Then she sees him, standing off the trail in the thickest part of the forest. He is a statue of panic—a man realizing he has forgotten something—his wallet or passport—only what Stefan has forgotten is more essential: identity or purpose. He stands with his head tilted, listening to the air. She gets close enough to see he is trembling, muttering, and then he looks at her with eyes like emptied rooms. No sign of him there.

  “Like he’s possessed,” neighbours used to say when they called to report he was standing in their back garden again. But by the time she could walk up the block to collect him, he’d always snapped out of it. This is the first time she’s seen it for herself.

  She steps closer and every part of him tenses. His arms lift ever so slightly as if he might swipe. His lip twitches into a sneer. Not her boy. Stefan has flown apart and in his place this animal, capable of anything.

  “Okay, okay,” she says and backs off, hands up, as if from an armed man. When she is finally out of sight she turns and runs. It is then, while running from Stefan—from her own boy—that she trips. She hits the ground nose-first, teeth-to-mud, like a human plow. Like a fool. The damage: fat lip, bruised chin, scraped knees and, above all else, blindness. Her glasses have flown off. She feels around in the blurry shadows, in wider and wider circles, trying not to cry. But the forest is cruel here. Trees crowd and whisper. Everything is menacing, is shuffling in the dark just out of sight. She can’t make out the edges of things, keeps coming up on shapes sooner than she thinks, bumping into trees, roots, rocks, and then she can’t find her way back to where she fell. Her glasses could be anywhere, in any direction. It is late, those long purple moments before full dark. She’ll be lucky if she can find her way back to the beach.

  No sign of Stefan when she comes crawling into camp. Just the embers of a fire left. She makes her way to where they dumped the camping gear and gropes around for food, the tarp, the knife. Boys, she thinks, they grow like weeds until the day they split open, the man in them pushing through. How sudden the change and how out of time—the urges of a man arriving before the intellect or morals of a man. The violence of a man. She grabs the sleeping bags but doesn’t bother with the tent—they will sleep in the open air tonight.

  AFTER DR. WONG sent Stefan home, the calls started. From the grocery store—he was burying notes in the bulk bins, kidney beans spilling out across the aisle. From the hardware store—he was tampering with the merchandise, writing messages on the backs of boxes. Soon he was banned from all the shops on the strip. She had to drive to faraway neighbourhoods to do her shopping. Her daily dilemmas narrowed to this: bring him along and risk embarrassment or leave him behind and risk his getting into trouble.

  The medicine wasn’t working, she told Dr. Wong. Where before his turmoil had been private, now it was worn on the outside, for all to see. “Isn’t that worse?” she asked. “Aren’t we aiming for better here?”

  What Stefan most likely needed was more, Dr. Wong said and increased the dosage.

  Stefan became jittery and stopped sleeping. He was on alert, hyper aware of whatever was coming next. He would jump just before the doorbell or the phone. He developed a new maniacal laugh, then a fear of blinking, then a habit of standing bug-eyed in the corners of rooms, watching everything. He became non-verbal but not for lack of things to say. She could still see movement, the tail-flick of intelligence, in the darks of his eyes.

  Dr. Wong increased the dosage again. It seemed he was rooting for the medicine more than for Stefan. Then the business with the moustaches escalated. He started pacing the sidewalks, yelling at every moustache that passed by. He would follow some moustaches halfway across town, others he would duck into bushes to avoid. He started breaking into people’s houses, drawing moustache hieroglyphs on the walls. There were teams as far as Mary could tell—good versus evil—and he was some sort of spy. He was ze, caught in the middle.

  Then one day the unthinkable.

  She unrolls their sleeping bags on opposite sides of the fire. The terrible things that happen by the sides of highways, in basements, under bridges. That farmer who killed all those hookers and fed their bodies to his pigs. That student who dismembered and barbecued his ex-girlfriend. All those men who were boys once. All their mothers, with no idea. She zips herself in, relieved he’s not back yet, and then afraid of what he might do, and then asleep, with the knife clutched to her side.

  SHE WAKES AND for a long moment can’t remember who she is. Then she can remember who but not where. Then she can’t remember how to operate her mouth. She sits up, choking. A faint glow in the distance—Stefan’s night light? She must be in the upstairs hallway, except the light is jittering. She must be drunk. Then water sounds, wind, and memory starts to trickle back. She remembers kayaking, Stefan standing in the woods, losing her glasses. She remembers that there is no house anymore, that this is their new start, their last chance, their beautiful end. She looks around but the night is an indecipherable smudge. She gets on her hands and knees and feels her way to the other side of the fire.

  “Stefan?” She reaches for the edge of his sleeping bag but he’s not there. “Stefan?”

  Nothing.

  Water sounds and that strange light growing larger in the distance as if it’s bearing down on her.

  “Stefan!” She can’t hear herself over the waves.

  Still nothing.

  Her heart flutters, triple beats, then a long desperate syllable, “Maaaa,” from behind. She crawls back toward him. He must’ve moved his sleeping bag next to hers in the night. His hand finds hers in the dark and the world rearranges itself again, everything in its place. Water ahead, sky above. And that light across the water must be the resort, lit up like a dancer in bright skirts.

  “The house is burning down,” he says.

  The size of the fire has quickly doubled—a chorus line of dancers now, the whole resort surrendering upwards.

  She wonders for a moment if it was her, if she forgot to turn something on or off, but before she can rule herself out Stefan looks at her, fully present for the first time in months, and says, “I did it.” There are two small fires in his eyes. He is wide open, terrified. It’s a look she’s seen before—that day she pulled into the driveway to find a crowd of hissing neighbours, an angry father, a ruined mother.

  The neighbours were ferocious, pounding at her windows. When she stepped out of the car, they swarmed, yelling on top of one another: Stefan’s got our girl!—Jumped out of a bush and ran off with her!—Holding her hostage in the basement, fucking pervert maniac, doin
g who knows what!—Police on their way!—Open the fucking door!

  She didn’t open the door. She hurried around back and locked herself in.

  She may never understand what she found that day. Chelsea, tipped over on the ground, babbling softly, her wheelchair upended. Mary’s first thought: Of course it’s the disabled girl, something familiar about this scenario. Her second thought: At least she won’t tell. Chelsea with a thick black moustache drawn on her upper lip, sucking her fingers, seemingly content except she was sitting in her own puddle. Her pants undone, a clean towel folded on the ground next to her. Had he tried to change her, or was this something much worse? On the other side of her a plastic bowl of water, duct tape, a pen and flashlight. Was this violence? Stefan came rushing into the room then, a roll of toilet paper in his hands. Without even acknowledging Mary, he unspooled it to sop up the mess. Wet piles everywhere. Was this kindness?

  They moved quickly then—accomplices. “We’re okay,” Mary kept saying. She found sweatpants—We’re okay—changed Chelsea, sat her back in her chair—We’re okay, we’re okay—fixed her ponytail, even gave her a juice box before they heard the sirens. Then she gave Stefan all the money she had in her wallet and helped him sneak out the bathroom window. What had she envisioned for him? A glorious getaway? A life on the lam? Monthly postcards from deepest Mexico?

  He made it halfway down the block before they caught up. It took eight men to bring him down. A dog pile of cops and neighbours. Stefan at the bottom, shrieking and laughing in sock feet, his blue-black moustache smudged.

  He was committed. Not exactly schizophrenia, the doctors said this time, although closely related. Not quite a mood disorder, although Stefan’s moods were certainly disordered. Not quite autism, but not unlike it in presentation. Not quite psychosis, although he would need to take antipsychotics for the rest of his life. Not brain injury per se, although areas of the brain were affected. They ran tests and tinkered with his medicine for weeks—medicine chasing the side effects of medicine in a great loop. By the time she was finally allowed to visit, what he resembled most was a zoo animal, caged and asleep in the back corner of himself.