by Chase Novak
Alexander Twisden emerges from the small elevator and looks up and down the hallway, his nostrils flared in disdain. He sees Michael standing in front of the door to his apartment and walks toward him with the long, princely strides of a man who knows that everything he says, wears, and does is important, a man who knows how to project his personal power so well that only a complete fool would fail to note it.
“What are you doing, Mr. Medoff?” Twisden says as he brushes past Michael and enters the apartment. “I have to tell you, I am stunned by your lack of judgment.”
“Adam told me you were out of the country.”
“Oh, Adam told you.” He expels air, as if no words could adequately describe the idiocy of Michael’s remark. He surveys the apartment, and Michael feels a slow, cold twist of dread, wondering what this place looks like through those icy eyes. “So?” Twisden says. “Where is he?”
Michael clears his throat. A strong coppery scent emanates from Twisden, and as Michael backs away from the odor, he notices that there is something red caked beneath a few of Twisden’s fingernails.
“He’s asleep,” Michael says. Somewhere in the back of his mind, banging distantly like a shutter in a window too far away to be seen, is the thought that somehow Twisden has gotten this information from Xavier…
“Adam!” Twisden says loudly. “Please come out here.”
“Okay, okay, hold on,” Michael says, pushing back a little as a way of regaining his confidence and his self-respect. “You can’t come in here and start shouting. I’ve got neighbors on all sides.”
“And I’m sure they’d be thrilled to know you are keeping one of your little boy students tucked away in this shit box of an apartment.”
Alex Twisden’s bluster may often have had a disarming and even disabling effect on his adversaries, but when the bluster is used on Michael, it has a nearly directly opposite effect. He feels himself tremble at the volume of Twisden’s voice and the rancor of his words, but the effrontery of it, and the implied assumption that Michael is some poor weakling who will quake and tremble when faced with the bluster of a Real Man, brings out the innate stubbornness at the core of Michael’s personality. Gay men from intolerant small towns are among the toughest people in America.
“Hey, back off, all right?” Michael says. He sees Twisden’s eyes widen. “He showed up here in the middle of the night. He said you were out of the country. I mean, come on, what is going on?”
“What’s going on? You would presume to question the way my wife and I are raising our children. There is no one who cares more about their children than we do. No one. But I think the question here, Mr. Medoff, is what kind of teacher turns his little apartment into a clubhouse for ten-year-old boys.”
The two men are silent for a moment, and in the silence Michael hears a soft click. Adam has locked the door to the bedroom.
“I find your tone offensive,” Michael says. “And I find—”
But he doesn’t have a chance to list the things he objects to because Twisden has grabbed him by the shirt and now runs him into the wall, where he hits with a bone-bruising thud.
“Adam?” Twisden calls, in a surprisingly tranquil voice, considering that he is pinning Michael to the wall at the same time.
Both men’s eyes turn toward the bedroom door, but Adam is silent.
“I’m going to have you fired,” Twisden whispers to Michael.
“I’m going to have you arrested,” Michael says.
Twisden gives Michael a last shove and goes to the bedroom door. He tries the handle, but it barely turns. “Adam, please, come out. Now. I need you to come out now.” He waits, listening, tries the handle again, and finally steps back and runs his shoulder into the edge of the door. The effort of it barely shows on Twisden’s face, but the result is a splintering of the door’s frame. Casually, as if this were a perfectly acceptable and normal way of entering a room, he reaches through the jagged opening and undoes the lock on the inside. He brushes the splinters and dust from the shoulder and sleeve of his jacket and walks into the bedroom.
The bedroom is filled with shadows going this way and that at mad angles. A bedside lamp has fallen to the floor, turning shoes into hills and chairs into watchtowers. The white cotton curtains dart and dance away from the open window. In the midst of the commotion, Adam has fled.
“I am dialing nine-one-one right now,” Michael says as Alex goes to the window. He flings it open to its widest and looks up and down. The rusted, pigeon-spattered fire escape is flush with the outside of the window.
“Oh God,” Alex says, running his hand through his thick head of hair. “Oh please. My little boy! My son!”
With amazing agility he slips out of the window and stands on the fire escape, looking up, down, and side to side, but Adam is nowhere to be seen. He dips back into the bedroom, shaking his head.
“It’s ringing,” Michael says. He holds the phone toward Twisden.
“Why would I be afraid of you?” Twisden says. “With all that I’ve got going on in my life, how would I ever be able to find the time or the energy to be afraid of you?” And with that, he brushes past Michael, making sure to jostle him, almost, in fact, knocking him over.
“Asshole,” Michael says, somewhat quietly, secure in the knowledge that Twisden is already halfway out of the apartment building. He hurries to double-lock the door behind Twisden and then turns to survey the damage done to the bedroom door.
When he goes back into the bedroom itself, Adam is sitting on the edge of the bed, shaking with fear.
“Why did you lie to me, Adam?”
The boy looks up at him, helpless and afraid. He shakes his head.
“I think I just made a huge mistake, Adam. I should have—”
“No,” Adam says. “You can’t.”
“I can and I must. He’s your father. I’m going to call him, and I’m going to take you home. This is nuts.” He reaches for Adam to get him off the bed.
But the boy takes Michael’s hand in both of his and presses it to the side of his face, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth twisted.
“Adam?”
“They’re going to kill us.”
This is what children say when they are worried about being sent to their rooms, or being grounded, or having their iPods taken away for a week. But Michael knows that in some cases—not so few as we would like to imagine—this is what children say when they are genuinely and legitimately afraid of suffering harm at the hands of the people pledged by nature and the law to protect them.
“What do you mean, Adam?” Michael says in a soft, calm voice.
Adam shakes his head.
“Does your father hit you?” Michael asks.
“No.”
“Do either of them?”
“No.”
“Spank you really hard? Shake you? Twist your arm?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Then what? Threaten you?”
The boy shakes his head and shrugs, looks away.
“Then what are we talking about here, Adam?”
“What I know.”
“And what’s that? What do you know?”
“That late at night something happens to them. They get different.”
“Adults have their own time, they have adult time. And they are different then than they are when they’re with their children.”
“It’s not that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Michael sighs. “I don’t know, Adam. It sounds like things are basically okay at your house.”
“They’re going to kill us,” Adam says, his face reddening, his voice rising. “I don’t think they can help it. But at night something happens. I’m not lying. This is true, I swear to God. They want to…”
His voice breaks, and he looks down, his body trembling.
“They want to eat us,” he says, in barely a whisper.
Bernard’s mother comes home after her shift plus overtime at the
hospital to find the boy in his bed, fully clothed and sobbing. The sight of this is more wearying to her than upsetting—she has seen him like this countless times. In fact, lately, as he grows up, more often than not she finds him in various states of despair, from loneliness because of his isolation; frustration because his physical limitations are so severe; or shame and revulsion, if he has disobeyed her stern warning to keep away from the mirror, all mirrors, any mirrors, and anything else with a reflecting surface, be it a toaster or a spoon.
The mother, Amelie Gauthier, sits on the edge of his bed and pats his back. She is tired, so tired, more tired than a human is meant to be. She is feeling the exhaustion driving through her like a steady rain. She glances at the boy’s motorized chair; the seat is thick with crumbs, the detritus of the cakes and cookies he munches day in and day out. His ever-present laptop is open; his screen saver is the face of Jesus. Faith in Jesus is the one thing she has been able to give him.… Her open hand travels up and down his curved, bumpy spine, feeling the practically prehistoric rise and fall of it. She knows this boy’s body as well as her own.
“Bernard?” she whispers.
“Oh, Mama, Mama,” the boy whimpers. “Sick, I’m sick.”
“Shhh. Mama knows. Mama’s here.”
Their tiny apartment on West One Hundredth Street is dark; its few small windows look out onto the darkness of the building’s air shaft, at the bottom of which, fourteen stories down, is a mysterious pile of broken bottles, soup cans, discarded lamps. The thick gloomy shadows of the apartment itself, depressing on the face of it, is actually a kind of blessing to Amelie and Bernard, muting the visual impact of Bernard’s countless deformities and hiding, as well, the chaos of their quarters.
There is no proof of Bernard having been born. The closest thing to any record of him is the hospital’s report of him emerging dead from his mother’s womb. Amelie has raised him in complete secrecy, allowing him contact with only the wild children who inhabit the city’s parks and the virtual world he inhabits on his computer. Because of this, all of his numerous and often pressing medical needs have been taken care of by her, and if their apartment were ever to be fully lit, it would look like a medical-supply locker, full of gauze, syringes, ointments, bath chairs, transfer benches, intermittent catheters, every conceivable type of pillow, and pills of all kinds: antibiotics, mineral supplements, vitamins, sedatives, painkillers, antispasmodics, laxatives, various antipsychotics, and sleeping aids, all of them pocketed by Amelie and brought home in her never-ending quest to make Bernard 1 percent more comfortable and functional.
“What did you do today, Bernard? Park?”
“Yes.”
He rolls over, showing himself to her, as if he has already thought this through and wants her to experience the full impact of what he will say.
“They run so fast.”
“I know, I know.”
“And I sit.”
“You’re here.”
He shakes his head, at first slowly, sadly, and then with increasing vehemence, until it looks as if he is having a seizure.
It’s unbearable to Amelie. Her heart is breaking and her eyes are closing—how can she feel simultaneously this sad and this sleepy? A million times over she has relived the moment she took the gnarled, doomed newborn that this child once was, swaddled him in a sheet, and made him her own. They were going to kill him! They were going to throw him away as if he had never happened! As if he did not have a heart, a brain, feelings, a soul.
Bernard holds up his hand for his mother to see. “Saw another,” he says.
There was a time when she could easily decode his communication, but it takes more energy than she has now, and as her own powers steadily decrease, buried beneath a weight of accumulated years and exhaustion and isolation and discouragement, she finds that she and the boy, rather than growing increasingly close to each other, are actually drifting apart. Saw another? Saw another what? Another hand?
He sees the combination of confusion and indifference in her face, and he holds his birthmarked hand up higher by way of explanation.
“Girl, my age. Nice too.”
“Really?” Amelie’s attentiveness rises. “Last night?”
“Yes.” The poor scrambled and twisted child’s good eye fills with tears, which he brushes away with his hand—the red squiggle is moist for a moment.
“Was she with the others?”
“They took.”
“Took?”
“Her.”
“I see.” She hears the gurgle of the boy’s bladder emptying. As usual, he seems completely unaware. He has that look of his—a kind of frightened stare, as if he has seen something dangerous that he is powerless to prevent. Without warning, he coughs deeply, and a bubble of saliva emerges trembling from his tiny mouth. If he were a comic-strip character, this would be the dialogue balloon, and it would say: Why was I ever born?
This question, unthinkable once to Amelie and never ever spoken, has come to haunt her. In that way, the child has eroded her once-impregnable faith. When she spirited him out of that hospital while those two rich fools were cooing and sighing over their twins, seemingly unaware that triplets had been born, there was no question in her mind whether she was doing the right thing. She was saving a life just as surely as a fireman who carries someone out of a burning building or a cop who takes the gun out of a lunatic’s hand. He was not going to be handsome or fleet, that infant she was saving, but Amelie did not care about beauty or the usual paths to success—in fact, they filled her with a kind of contempt, their very easefulness suggesting something sneaky, morally lax, unfair, and vile. But what she had not taken into account was that by rescuing this child from the oblivion to which the doctor was all too eager to consign him, she was condemning him to something that might be worse. With the sudden horror that is the emotional equivalent of an avalanche of ice, she thinks: I have done more harm than good.
Bernard tries to sit up, fails, and mewls with frustration, his hand clawing at the air as if the very invisibility of oxygen was part of the prison that held him fast.
“I know it’s sad for you, my darling,” Amelie says.
“Yes.”
“So hard.”
“Alone,” he says. “Alone.”
“The girl,” Amelie says.
“Mmm. Nice to me.”
“With the birthmark.”
“Nice.”
“Did she tell you her name?” She knows the answer; she has often thought of the two with whom this poor thing was born. She even knows where they live—several times she has succumbed to temptation and walked past their house, and once she has even seen them, being walked to school by their mother.
“So did you talk to your new friend?”
“Have no friends. Just you, Mommy.”
“I know, baby, Mommy knows.”
“Mommy.”
“It’s so hard, isn’t it?”
“So hard.”
“Every day,” Amelie says.
“Hard.”
“And getting harder too, isn’t it, baby?”
“Scared.”
“So hard, life is so hard.”
“Scared, Mommy.”
“Shhh.” Amelie puts her hand into the pocket of her nurse’s smock, touches the little bottle she has been carrying around for days: Dilaudid. Slowly, her fingers close around the cool glass. She has been thinking about this all day, all week. Her original plan was to shake thirty drops onto Bernard’s tongue and drink the rest of it herself. Now, however, her mind is going in a different direction.
“I have something for you,” she says. “It tastes a little icky, but it will make you feel better.”
He looks at her hopefully. “Nommy.”
“Stick out your tongue.” She takes out the bottle of synthetic morphine, shows it to him.
Trustingly, Bernard sticks his tongue out of his abbreviated dash of a mouth. His tongue is short, almost square.
“Mommy loves yo
u.”
“Mmm,” he says.
“You know that, don’t you?”
It would be easier to die, for both of them. But she must not; she will not. Life must be protected above all else.
“This is going to make you feel a lot better. Okay? No pain. Just beautiful sleep.”
“ ’kay.”
Patting his perspiration-soaked forehead with one hand, she deftly unscrews the cap of the little bottle with her thumb and forefinger. The cap hits the floor, rolls beneath Bernard’s bed.
“Can you open wider for me?”
“Mmm.”
She shakes the bottle over his tongue.
“Icky icky,” he whines.
Alex has done what he can to chase Adam down, but he has failed to locate him, and now, dejected, he returns home, where he sees Leslie, who has had no more luck finding Alice than he had finding Adam.
She is on the sofa in their sitting room. A valuable—very valuable!—cherrywood-and-horsehair settee used to be in the spot where she now lounges; it has been replaced by a very, very informal piece they recently picked up at the Housing Works thrift shop, a butterscotch-and-vanilla-colored sofa still smelling faintly of the patchouli incense its former owners burned. The upholstery is already beginning to unravel. Indeed, this has been the case in a lot of their furniture, and inasmuch as they are aware of how rough they are with their belongings, it is always a battle between selling the things off quickly for the money needed and holding on to the old things and maintaining the connection they give them to their former life. Not so very long ago, it fell to Alex to be the cold, realistic one when it came to their once-beautiful possessions, and it was Leslie who balked and often bargained like a child, promising to be more careful and weepily saying the antiques were precious to her, even though she had in the past often complained that the furniture was uncomfortable, the paintings were oppressive, and the various decorative items made her think of a stage set for The Mousetrap.