Language Arts

by Stephanie Kallos

  “Excuse me?” Charles said. He glanced at Alison, hunched over in the chair next to him.

  Her bearing—which until very recently had been as reliably erect as a dancer’s—now suggested a case study in severe osteoporosis, her spine the rigid shape of a shepherd’s crook, a recalcitrant question mark. She scrawled on a legal pad that was balanced on her knees; the pad was on top of a rapidly thickening file folder labeled CODY MEDICAL.

  It was 1994. Cody was twenty-seven months old and something was wrong with him. Dr. Indu Gayathri—an MD/ND specializing in the treatment of persons afflicted with fungal-borne neurotoxicity—was the latest in a long line of experts Charles and Alison had consulted in the hope of learning what, exactly, was wrong with him and what, as parents, they could do.

  Surely there was something they could do.

  Something new, that is; their faithful compliance with the behavioral, environmental, pharmaceutical, dietary, chiropractic, craniosacral, homeopathic, Ayurvedic, and acupunctural recommendations put forth by Dr. Gayathri’s predecessors had had no effect on Cody whatsoever.

  If anything, he was getting worse, vacillating between a globally expressed rage and a private, mute dwindling; an inward collapse into capitulation and despair. Charles and Alison looked on, useless, as the affectionate, puckish, inquisitive little person they had been coming to know and cherish began powering down, shutting off, shrinking into the farthest corner of some doorless, windowless inner sanctum to which they could find no access, his small hands clinging to a penlight with a failing battery. All this occurring at the same time that around him, his body (cruelly) continued to be under construction, ever expanding, structurally sound.

  At least he’s not medically fragile, one of the specialists had chirped.

  “I’m so sorry,” Alison said, shaking her head as if rousing herself from a deep sleep. “That last one. Chaetomium … ?”

  “… strumarium.”

  “Yes. Could you please spell that?”

  “Certainly. C-h-a …”

  Charles studied his wife as she transcribed.

  Ali’s postural decline was yet more evidence of trauma, a physical byproduct of what they’d been through over the past months, what they continued to go through, with no foreseeable end. Cody wasn’t the only one who was shrinking.

  Dr. Gayathri finished spelling and then continued. “Please know that Chaetomium would represent a worst-case scenario.” She fixed her eyes on Charles and abruptly flung up her hand: a crossing guard halting the oncoming traffic of an exceptionally negative aura. “Hopefully we’re just dealing with standard, run-of-the-mill black mold. In which case, the protocols are clear and have proven to be very effective.”

  Charles reached over and gently pressed his hand against the flat winged bone of Ali’s sacrum. She continued to scribble with ferocity but registered his touch with a soft intake of breath and by unfurling into an upright posture: a fiddlehead fern in a fast-motion film.

  “I’m going to step out for a moment,” Dr. Gayathri continued, “and assemble some literature for you to look at. In the meantime”—she swiveled around in her desk chair, stood, and opened a pair of doors on the large credenza behind her desk to reveal a television and video player—“I’d like you to watch a short film on neurotoxicology, sick building syndrome, and mold infiltration.”

  Charles opened his mouth to ask if they couldn’t please just talk about Cody specifically (something they had yet to do), but once again Dr. Gayathri’s hand flew up.

  “I know, I know …” She made a halfhearted expulsive sound that Charles assumed was her version of a laugh, although he couldn’t imagine what the joke could be. He glanced over at Alison; she was still focused on note taking, but her expression was now softened by a slight smile. What was it about women and their sense of humor? They could be so enigmatic.

  Dr. Gayathri went on. “Please disregard the fact that this video is a promotional tool for a mold-detection-and-mitigation company. I offer this particular program as a patient resource only because I have found it to provide a clear and compelling explanation of what exactly we are facing here. May I bring you some herbal tea?”

  “Do you have coffee?” Charles asked.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Water would be nice.”

  “Yes, water,” Alison murmured. She had finally stopped writing and was staring down at the legal pad as if it were the entrance to a condemned mineshaft.

  “Very good. I’ll be right back.” The doctor loaded the video, pushed the play button, turned off the overhead lights, and left the room.

  Golly, Charles thought, it’s just like health class on sex-ed day.

  Before he could share this insight with Alison (who probably wouldn’t find it funny anyway) a new-agey musical score began playing: marimbas, drums, Peruvian flute.

  Seconds later, brightly lit images of various molds began to float into view; these pictures alternated with a black screen on which the molds were identified and described.

  Chaetomium strumarium turned out to be an especially entrancing-looking organism; columnar in structure, it was composed of stacks of fluffy-looking orbs, cotton-ball kebabs that spun and tilted languidly in a pastel pink-and-blue environment.

  Isn’t that one of the oddest things about dangerous organisms seen in this way, Charles thought, microscopically enlarged and illuminated. Their alien beauty belies their devastation.

  A choir joined the musical score; they sang in a language Charles couldn’t identify, perhaps even an invented language. He had to admit, the musicians were talented; the production values were very good. Perhaps the composition would be credited at the end: Chaetomium Symphonium no. 1 in C Minor. Cladosporium Chorale. Ode to Mold.

  Alison was watching the television screen, slouching again, mesmerized.

  Charles began to question the wisdom of the producers behind this benign, color-saturated, musically lush presentation. The overall tone of the program didn’t exactly inspire dread or prompt one to action; it was a little like watching an episode of Teletubbies.

  Eventually, however, the hypnotic parade of floating fungi, mold, and spores gave way to identifiable and disturbing images alternating with text: a close-up of a severely deformed toenail—it looked more like a talon—and the surrounding blistered skin (intractable nail fungus); a crying toddler (severe asthma … debilitating respiratory ailments … fatal idiopathic pulmonary hemorrhaging); a pained-looking grandmotherly type (hypersensitivity pneumonitis … memory loss); a computer-generated image of the human brain (a high incidence of fatal brain abscesses among long-term intravenous drug users).

  “That’s certainly germane,” Charles said.

  The video continued like this, a succession of pictures along with a litany of life-threatening ailments attributed to mycotoxins, and then, finally, a list of prescriptive actions the afflicted homeowner should take, beginning with HIRE A MOLD-DETECTION-AND-MITIGATION SPECIALIST.

  “This all makes so much sense,” Alison said, her voice flat, her eyes fixed on the screen. “Something invisible. Something in the walls. In the Sheetrock. Or underneath. It can only be this. I can’t believe we didn’t think of this before.”

  Charles stared at her. He wasn’t entirely sure she remembered that he was in the room.

  Dr. Gayathri returned. The overhead halogens oozed back to life.

  “Informative, yes?” she said, reaching between them to set two glasses of water and a collection of pamphlets on the desk. She resumed her place behind the desk, deftly pushing the pause button just as the company name appeared: Emerald City Mycotoxin Assessment and Remediation: Seattle’s #1 Mold Busters!

  “This all makes so much sense!” Alison repeated, her voice now animated, her spine erect. “We’ll get started on the house right away.” She leaned toward the television screen and started writing down the 800 number. “It’s the crawlspace. It has to be. We’re probably all sick—or sickening—and don’t even know it, right
?”

  “That’s quite possible,” Dr. Gayathri replied, nodding, her delivery so deadpan and earnest that it bordered on caricature.

  Charles shifted in his chair; he felt a growing suspicion that he and Alison were being played, a pair of marks in a health-care-industry shell game. Maybe Seattle’s #1 Mold Busters rewarded referring medical professionals with a commission. Maybe the CEO was Dr. Gayathri’s cousin.

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for the two of you to go over the symptoms checklist with your own health in mind,” the doctor continued, “as well as your son’s. But, naturally, a child’s immune system—”

  “—is so much more vulnerable!” Ali chimed in.

  “Precisely. Therefore, any toxic effects—physiologic, behavioral, et cetera—will be both amplified and intensified.”

  “Of course!” Alison nodded with enthusiasm. Charles realized that up until today, they’d been in sync at these confabs, spring-loaded bobble-head twins, their reactions amplified and intensified by stupid hope and blind desperation.

  “And at the same time, because of your son’s age—”

  “Cody,” Charles interrupted. “His name is Cody.”

  The doctor smiled. “He’s between two and three, yes?”

  “Twenty-seven months,” Alison answered. “His birthday’s in May.”

  “So, he’s experiencing as well all the normal limitations of this developmental stage; restricted language, for example—”

  “Cody knows a lot of words,” Charles said. “He can write his name.”

  The doctor smiled again but sped on. “A keen frustration when encountering impediments to his growing sense of independence; an erratic control of physical abilities and functions … Is he toilet-trained?”

  “He was,” Alison answered, “but he’s been a little … inconsistent lately.” She’d begun to dwindle again.

  “That’s not unusual,” the doctor replied, but she frowned and made a note. “Is he tantrumming more than usual?”

  “Yes, you could say that,” Alison replied, smaller still.

  When did tantrum become a verb? Charles wondered.

  “With increased vehemence?” the doctor prompted.

  “Yes …”

  It seemed to Charles that Alison was being pummeled by the sledgehammer of Dr. Gayathri’s relentless queries; she’d shrunk by half and was practically inaudible.

  “We’ve been reading to Cody since he was born,” he said. “Until a few months ago, he could repeat whole stories by heart. He could say the alphabet.”

  “I understand, Mr. Marlow.” Dr. Gayathri’s smile had acquired a petrified quality that Charles found perversely satisfying. “Believe me, I’m not trying in any way to suggest that your child isn’t a marvelous and extremely intelligent little boy.”

  “We’re not here for your corroboration,” Charles countered. “Nobody—certainly not a stranger who’s never even met him and can’t be bothered to remember his name—needs to tell us how marvelous and intelligent Cody is. We’re his parents. We know him better than anyone. We’re here to get some help, for Christ’s sake.”

  Alison shifted in her chair and cleared her throat. “I think what Dr. Gayathri is trying to say”—she spoke softly, her head bowed and tilted submissively, her gaze focused in the vicinity of Charles’s feet—“is that Cody can’t express himself about something this complex, about feeling sick, if what’s happening to him isn’t the usual way he understands what being sick means, like having a tummy ache or feeling feverish, right?”

  “Exactly so,” the doctor replied, her expression steely. “And finally, there’s the heredity factor …” She began babbling on about the effects of mycotoxicity, how whatever genes Cody had inherited from the two of them would determine the nature and severity of his reactions. He might experience some of the same symptoms they were experiencing, or he might manifest the presence of mold in a completely different way.

  All in all, her monologue served to do what all such monologues did: indict and baffle. It was their fault, always. That was what it all came down to. They’d doomed Cody from the beginning by dealing him a bad genetic deck, they’d wrought further damage by not recognizing and protecting him from hazards, and they’d compounded everything by not noticing sooner that something was amiss, not taking immediate action. (As if they didn’t spend every waking moment with Cody noticing and doing, or at least trying. They loved him. They didn’t leave him in a locked car on a ninety-five-degree day while they roamed the aisles of Walmart or smoked crack. And yet, for all the implied condemnation laid upon them at meetings like this, they might as well have.)

  But they had a chance now to make things right, because here was yet another new prescriptive action to take, one that—like all the previous failed prescriptive actions—would not be covered by insurance.

  The doctor paused. She looked down and shuffled some papers around—exactly, Charles thought, like a television news anchor filling that awkward interval before the camera cuts away to the commercial break.

  When she finally spoke, Charles realized that she’d spent the entire office visit delaying the moment in which she’d have to ask one final question:

  “Has anyone suggested that Cody might be … on the spectrum?”

  “Excuse me?” Charles said.

  “The autism spectrum.”

  Charles heard Alison inhale sharply. Her writing hand opened, slack, as if it had gone numb; her pencil dropped to the floor.

  “No,” Charles said.

  Dr. Gayathri seemed, for once, to be bankrupt of speech.

  “No,” Charles repeated. “No one has mentioned autism.”

  “Well,” Dr. Gayathri said, “there is a great deal of evidence that mycotoxicity can be a significant triggering factor in the disease …”

  Autism, Charles was thinking, and it was as if he’d spoken the word into an electronic device that caused it to reverberate—not receding, like an echo, but exactly the opposite, gaining in volume and intensity, like the ringing of an unheeded alarum: autism, Autism, AUTISM, AUTISM! He was vaguely aware of Alison reaching down to retrieve her fallen pencil.

  “This company … ,” Ali began, her voice barely audible over the crescendo of the repeating word in Charles’s head. “Emerald City.” Nodding toward the video screen, she wet her lips and swallowed with effort. “They could refer us to a house excavation contractor, couldn’t they?”

  Auto-, from the Greek autos, “self,” Charles thought. How does that fit with -ism?

  “Yes, absolutely!” the doctor answered. “There’s a full list of resources related to mold mitigation right there in the informational materials I’ve provided.”

  Alison snatched up the pamphlets and began studying them.

  Dr. Gayathri went on. “I would like to schedule another appointment very soon. It’s extremely important that we start finding ways to support and strengthen your child’s immune system during this transition; that is, while you decide what to do about the environmental issue. Supplements, dietary changes … these can all have a very positive effect in the interim.”

  “Oh God!” Alison cried out. “Is Cody safe, do you think? Do we need to move him somewhere else until the problem is fixed? Maybe we should send him to my parents …”

  “Alison,” Charles said, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary if we take immediate precautions and implement a dietary program right away. But it would be appropriate for the two of you to have a discussion as soon as possible about how you’d like to proceed in terms of your house. In this case, I do believe we’re dealing with SBS as caused by biological contaminants.”

  Alison began to cry.

  “SBS?” Charles asked.

  “Sick building syndrome.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “I don’t think we can move,” Alison managed to say. “It’s the only home Cody has ever known; he loves the house, the garden … We live
on a corner lot, you know, and there’s this big stand of old trees. Cody calls it his forest …” She took off her eyeglasses, swiped at her nose, her eyes, her forehead. “And his room, he just loves it, all his things, the colors … We’ve tried so hard to make it … his.” She gripped her hands together in front of her face, a gesture of entreaty. “I think uprooting him would do more damage than good.”

  “That is of course your decision,” the doctor said, and—to her credit—she looked at both of them.

  Alison nodded sharply and put her glasses back on. “We’ll need to replace the windows right away,” she said, “all of them, probably, but certainly those 1950s aluminum ones in the kitchen and bathroom. They’re always sweating, I’m sure they’re a factor in the mold …” She turned over a fresh page on her legal pad and resumed writing; it was a to-do list, Charles noted, beginning with ASK DAD ABOUT CONTRACTOR RECOMMENDATIONS and GET CASH OUT OF 401(K). Her eyes were too big, too bright, her pupils too dilated, her breathing too rapid: a wild creature in flight mode.

  “Alison,” Charles began again, reaching for her hand, but she gestured him away.

  “We’ll make this work,” she muttered, pressing down hard with her pencil, adding item after item to her list, all emphatically capitalized in block print. “We’ll do whatever it takes. I know what you’re thinking, Charles, I know, but we can’t be proud about asking for help, not anymore. It’s all for Cody. From now on. It all has to be for him.”

  Ephemera

  Charles pulled the crawlspace door closed behind him, turned on the overhead fluorescents, and surveyed the room. It looked far less like the father-daughter playhouse he’d remembered with such fondness and more like a hopelessly jumbled catchall: a scattering of tools, paint cans, odd bits of leftover construction supplies, Alison’s abandoned sports equipment, and dozens of unlabeled cardboard boxes.

  How could he have let this happen?

  Charles despaired. Organizing clutter was not his strong suit.

  If he and Alison were still married, she could have directed him instantly to the boxes he’d come down here to find. There were three.