Her guest can’t help but agree.
“His idea of discipline is putting a baby to bed without food.
Now my idea of discipline is having a baby eat everything that’s good for him.”
During the working day, the woman feeds him continuously until he is immobilized with food. In the evening, in accordance with his idea of discipline, the husband puts the baby-in-disguise to bed without any dinner.
Behind the bars of his crib at night, the prisoner overhears the husband and wife argue. They talk of babies and who wanted and who didn’t want the one they had. The woman says that it is tradition to take the one you get, and if you don’t love it right away, you learn to love it. The husband says that’s all right for her to say, but that he’s never been able to love a stranger.
The former baby decides that it is time to move on and tells the woman of his decision when they’re alone together the next morning.
“If that’s the way it has to be, that’s the way it has to be,” she says. “Promise me one favor, one itsy-bitsy favor before you go.”
“One and no more,” says the former baby.
“I want you to promise to stay with me until you grow up.”
The former baby throws off his disguise. “I’ve grown up,” he announces.
The woman shakes her head in astonishment. “They grow up so fast,” she says, blotting a tear with the back of her hand.
The overaged baby is given his unconditional release and is on his way. It is a little disappointing. In the old days, she would have blocked the door or screamed or thrown herself to the floor.
On his return, the true baby finds the usurper in his room, messing around with his toys. “Those are mine,” he says.
“Those are mine,” the usurper says.
“How can they be yours if they’re mine?”
The question seems to baffle the imposter, who mumbles something in reply and hugs the toys to his chest. As a further insistence, he lets out a scream.
In a moment—how fast they are—the mother sticks her head in the room and says, “Please don’t make him cry. How many times do I have to tell you not to make him cry?”
The true baby answers her in his mind after she has gone. He makes an eloquent case against the unplayable lie of appearances.
Wherever the true baby goes, the image of his former self occupies space formerly reserved for him.
The next night, our hero redisguises himself as a baby and leaves the house, pursuing the pleasure of old adventures.
“What a nice baby,” someone says, and he turns to accept the compliment. In the middle of his turn, he stops himself (the remark might have been meant for someone else) to avoid disappointment. Then curiosity gets the better of him and he turns fully around, confronting the landscape behind. If there was anyone there before, there is no one now.
Later that night, he accepts the hospitality of an older couple, who are seeking to add to their scrapbook of memories.
“We’ll give you a little time to settle down,” the old man says, “and then we’d like to see you do some charming baby things.”
The former baby has difficulty remembering what he used to do that old people found charming. He says that he’ll take requests. But his hosts have that faraway look that comes from willful misunderstanding or obliviousness.
“Just enjoy yourself,” each says to him in private as if such advice had to be kept secret from the other.
The former baby has no easy time stimulating pleasure. He sits on the floor and smiles, then stands up and smiles, then jumps up and down and smiles. It is not the most fun he ever had.
“That’s so cute,” one or the other of the older ones says, but then they begin to yawn and fall asleep.
The baby-in-disguise can see that they are trying to please him, and he makes every effort, short of succeeding, to experience pleasure. The stares of these people unnerve him, their unspoken demands. He speeds up his playing, strives for feverish gaiety.
“Are you having fun?” they ask him.
“Fun,” he repeats as he remembers the imposter doing.
After a while, a certain amount of disappointment sets in on both sides. The old couple feel only the barest stirrings of lost youth, the breath of forgotten distaste, and the former baby experiences an incompetence unlike any other failure he has known before. The full and easy gesture of babyhood eludes him. Still, he continues to play, to throw himself around the room as he imagines he had at an earlier, more reckless time.
The old man, peering out of one eye, is the first to give voice to the obvious. “This is not working out,” he says. “It exhausts me just looking at this baby.”
The old lady defends the former baby’s behavior at length and without conviction. A parting of the ways is arranged, under which the stigma of fault is avoided on all sides.
“You’ll visit us, won’t you?” they say for the sake of form as he leaves. “There’ll always be a place for you here.”
The old couple give him a stale fortune cookie as a parting gift.
The message, which he reads at earliest opportunity, is: “Appearances may be deceiving.”
Disguise apparently deceives itself. The former baby works at reestablishing his former sense of babiness, studies the imposter for clues. The imposter uses repetition to extraordinary effect, reciting the same name or word over and over again until it becomes other than itself, until it becomes a flower of sound.
Reciting his name to himself at the dinner table, the true baby discovers that his mother and father are deceptive appearances, expert imitations of the real thing. He confronts them with his recognition.
“You’re not my real mother and father,” he says, then watches them dance their awkward denial. “I want my real parents,” he says.
“Dear,” says the false mother, “we are your real parents. What can we do to prove it to you?”
Several tests are set up for the imposter parents, which they pass but in a way that makes their success seem in itself a deception.
The true baby pretends that the false parents are no different from the real ones; he must be careful not to create dangerous suspicions.
“Do you think I’m not your mother?” the woman asks the next day.
“I’m not saying,” he says.
“Well, I am.” she says.
Later, the true baby takes the imposter aside and says, “You’re going to have to help me. This is an emergency.”
“Help me,” the imposter echoes.
“This baby is all right,” he says to no one in particular.
An alliance between them, an arrangement of mutual interest, enters the first stages of negotiation. They play the rest of the day together as if they were both imposters.
The apparent parents are in their bedroom when the baby that is lets himself in the door. The other, the author of the plot, hides himself outside.
“Mommy. Mommy. Mommy,” the baby chants.
The woman raises her head. “Yes, my sweetpie?”
“Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy.”
“What is it, darling?”
“Mommymommymommymommymommymommymommy. “
“What do you think is the matter with him?” the woman says to the man.
“Maybe he wants you to pick him up,” the man says.
When the woman gets out of bed, the baby runs screaming from the room.
“What’s bothering him, do you think?” the woman asks.
At first the man doesn’t say anything. Then he says. “Maybe the baby’s on to you.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that the baby knows you’re not what you pretend to be.”
After that the woman closes the door.
It is hard for the former baby to believe that what he knew to be true is actually so. Still, the evidence is inescapable.
There is nothing for him to do with his information except live with it in swollen silence.
The two of the
m share the secret now, although the presumptive baby has a limited understanding of its implication and that frail awareness will become the shadow of itself in time.
Even the other, the older (the no-longer-baby), will one day forget his discovery and accept the household as it appears to everyone else. Yet in some distant part of him the realization survives and it will return to him at certain moments as a warning against unequivocal trust. At any moment, those closest, those one loves, he knows, can turn out to be enemies in disguise. Once you know that, even if it is something you refuse to countenance, it remains with you like the residue of a dream.
One day he will wake up from a different dream no longer himself, transformed in his sleep as his parents had been, as others will be, into a perfect imitation of the real thing. It is his fortune, he supposes. It is the way things are.
The Penthouse Heist
This is a heist or rehearsal for one. There are six of us in the elevator going to the penthouse floor. The operator is suspicious and calls downstairs for confirmation. “Let half of them go up,” says a mug’s voice over the intercom. “Take the other half to another floor.” I try not to think about what will happen if they catch us. The machine gun has been broken down into three parts, each part hidden under the coat of a different person. If anyone of the three with a fragment of machine gun gets separated from the others, we are without a weapon.
I get off with two of my colleagues, both teenagers, at the penultimate floor, which is the thirty-ninth, while the others continue to the roof. What we will do—it is unspoken but agreed upon—is climb the final flight and rendezvous at the penthouse entrance.
I have this vision of us getting to the top and the roof opening like a flower. Then what? We set up the machine gun and wait. Eventually what we are after will come to us.
There are no stairs or at least no sign of stairs, no door with Exit or Entrance printed across its back. We discuss in whispers what to do. Our first concern is to get the machine gun together and our next is not to be caught.
We take the next elevator down to Lobby—there is no Up elevator on the thirty-ninth floor—and find ourselves confronted by a hostile crowd. To this point, we are innocent, I remind my colleagues.
“Are you a member of the troublemakers’s party?” a plainclothes doorman asks me.
I say we’re here to see a member of the family.
The doorman laughs facetiously. “A blood relation, I’ll bet, I know the man, okay? Against his judgment, he sleeps with a dead horse.”
My cohorts, Gabbo and Pinky, can’t help giggling at the door man’s unpleasant humor. I push the Up button and wait for the elevator’s return.
“What’s the apartment number in which this blood relation resides? I’ll just buzz him first if you don’t mind to let him know you’re on your way.”
“He lives where he sleeps,” I say. “If it’s all the same to you, we’d like to surprise him.”
I can see that the doorman is suspicious of our intent or perhaps doesn’t understand English, merely mouths the few phrases he’s learned by rote.
“No way, no pay,” he says. “Job of doorman is to announce all visitors. The management of this building discourages surprises.”
The elevator arrives and while the doorman is distracted by some other irregularity, we occupy the elevator. The car this time is self-operated and I push P for penthouse and C for close. As the door shuts providentially in the doorman’s red face, his finger is raised to make a point. We will hear from him again, I suppose.
This elevator moves without the urgency of the first, checking into every floor on the way up without opening its doors. Pinky wets his pants, a puddle at his feet. I wonder if we’re in a trap. When we get to the penthouse the daylight is gone and the kids with me have grown up. I’ve never been on an elevator that slow before.
The elevator releases us into the penthouse apartment itself, a surprising place of exit. Our former companions, the other three, are sitting on a thick-napped purple rug, playing cards in a perfunctory manner.
“What took you so long?” the dealer says. “We’ve been bored out of our minds.” His companions yawn, as if on cue, a surly lot.
“Where is the machine gun?” I ask.
They don’t seem to know, look inside one another’s coats, empty out pockets.
“There are three parts,” I remind them. “You have two of them and I have one.”
In the lost time, this bunch seems to have forgotten the arrangements, and though I am only peripherally involved in the heist, a man with a sociological interest in crime, I am obliged to recount the plot to the rest of them. When I finish they stand up and applaud.
“That’s it!” their spokesman says. “How could we forget? When you sit around for years, waiting, sometimes your mind wanders. If you ask me, I think we’ve let opportunity slip through our fingers.”
I take charge in the absence of official command. “Put everything of value in laundry bags and let’s get out of here before we’re discovered.”
I wonder what has happened to the occupant of the penthouse, my nominal relative, but think it’s best not to ask. I hope they had more sense than to kill him, though they seem capable, this crew, of almost any extreme.
What they are not capable of is distinguishing valuables from trash and they manage in their collective fever of greed to loot the house of almost all its portables, filling fifteen laundry bags before they’re through.
I suggest a compromise measure—two bags apiece—and the crew (I stay out of the discussion) argue about what to take and what to leave behind.
“I myself go for stuff with sentimental value,” Pinky says.
“Who’s to decide what stays and what goes?”
“That’s my view too,” says the spokesman for the other three. “The value of an object depends on what it means to who wants it.”
I try to work out a principle that will satisfy all of us. “You blindfold me,” I say. “The three bags I touch will be the three we leave behind. How does that sound?”
My suggestion is rejected, though they decide to blindfold me anyway.
The explanation comes when they are about to leave. “Five goes into fifteen three times,” says the group’s leader. “It is easier to leave a blind leader behind than three valued sacks.” It has come to that.
I apologize for my unfelicitous advice, plead with my former colleagues to reconsider my situation. My abjectness is cement to their hearts. “You’re just lucky we don’t make you really sorry,” their youthful spokesman says.
I am thrust into a closet in which a man and woman, also bound and blindfolded, seem to have prior tenancy.
The reason I can see them is that the jostling and bumping I received has moved my blindfold down over one eye.
“Don’t hurt us,” the woman says. “You are welcome to our valuables. Anything your heart desires is yours.”
“It’s too late for that,” I say.
“You’re not a hardened criminal,” she says, “are you? You have a kind voice, a kind of kind voice, not sticky or false like some. If you untied me, you’d find undying gratitude behind these bonds.”
When I untie the woman, she threatens to call the police, becomes noisy and belligerent. The woman wrestles with me while the husband, his hands tied in front of him, rushes to the phone. I push the woman away, but she comes back, leeching on to my shirt, accusing me of unspeakable crimes. I drag her to the door with me and pull us both out of the apartment.
The woman is still holding on to me, shredding my shirt with her long nails, as I get into the elevator.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I say.
“I’m persistent to a fault,” says my companion.
Halfway down she whispers, “I’ve been planning to leave him for years. I just needed the right occasion.”
“What happens when your husband calls the police?”
“Trust me,” she says, putting a finger to my lips.
“There’s more than one way to skin a goose.”
The door opens at the fifth floor and a tall blond man with a Doberman pinscher gets in.
On the third floor a gaggle of women of a certain age present themselves. The penthouse lady and I are pressed to the back of the elevator, the cold nose of the black dog between us.
The crowd ought to make it easier for me to slip away unnoticed, an anonymous figure leaving the building.
When the door opens into the lobby, we are faced by a spotlight, the kind used at old-fashioned Hollywood premieres. The crowd claps politely at our emergence. We are apparently not what they are waiting for. But if not us, who?
“What’s going on?” I ask my companion.
“If anyone asks, you’re with me,” she whispers, walking into the center of the crowd, pretending to be blind or distracted. I follow behind, carrying a briefcase someone in the elevator handed me.
A reporter with a microphone stops us and asks if we would mind answering a few questions. The woman says, “We are just good friends,” and moves on through the crowd past a policeman, who is flanked by two of my former colleagues.
“What’s your part in the heist?” the reporter asks me. “It was my job to drive the elevator,” I say.
“The getaway elevator? Is that what we’re talking about?” He holds me by the thumb as I try to slip away, insists on an answer to his questions. “Was it or was it nor your job to drive the getaway elevator?” he asks.
“No comment.”
“But you don’t deny it, is that right?”
Two lost children pass between us, giving me the occasion to move off. The interviewer, who is perhaps working for the police, follows me through the crowd, challenging me with questions. I prefer not to know him.
The briefcase I carry clangs as if silver is inside, or jewels. Do I hold after all the fruits of the heist? Is it circumstance or calculation? Perhaps, I think, the briefcase was passed on to me as an attempt to frame me for the crime.
I slip the case into another man’s hand, free myself of its burden. I am not in this caper to get caught. There are police at the main door, some uniformed, some in plain clothes. I tremble to go by them, have always been frightened by the law.
The Return of Service Page 12