The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  CHAPTER 16

  The Horror, the Horror

  So, we had a baby.

  In many ways, it felt like having malaria. Meaning, you don’t think much about either babies or malaria until they happen to you. I knew that having a family was, prima facie, good, like peace treaties between warring tribes on distant continents were good or innovations in trash-bag durability were good.

  My spouse was different. She had a gift. Her knowledge of babies and how they work was vast and frightening, even before she made one of her own. She preferred babies to college. Babies were her college, she their professor. Women with broken babies would bring them to her to fix, asking her questions about how to make them sleep or eat or generally behave in a way as to not be filled with devils or vomit locusts, and she answered these questions with alacrity and compassion.

  “Are your nipples cracked yet?” she’d say, on the phone. And then she’d say, “Oh, you’re just engorged,” as if being engorged, which sounded like an adjective that happens to you maybe right before your brain explodes, was no big deal. “It’s probably just mastitis in your milk ducts.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked, while she rolled her eyes and walked away. She was an expert, and I could not fathom the abyss of her baby knowledge. For my thoughts were not her thoughts, neither were her ways my ways.

  When we got a child of our own, I was excited that my wife could finally experiment on her own baby. I was proud, how she powered through an epic birth like some kind of Icelandic sea monster in the World’s Strongest Pregnant Sea Monster competition. She had earned the right to do whatever she wanted with our baby. Which was how I wanted it. In that first year, I mostly just shadowed my wife, following her lead, doing whatever she did after I watched her do it, which was a great way to make sure she did everything.

  I had some role in this drama, I knew, though it was unclear what. I would have to learn. And one thing I learned is, when you have babies, people will ask you about them.

  “How’s the baby?” they would say, during that first year.

  “Fine,” I would say, lying.

  I had become one of the lying liars of the world.

  Because sometimes, it’s not fine. Sometimes, it’s like riding a Greyhound bus across the country with tiny people from the state hospital who have the same last name as you and are very likable but also want to bite you and pee on your suitcase. And you can’t get off the bus until it stops, eighteen to twenty years from now. But you can’t say that. You have to keep lying. Because you have to keep making babies, so society’s adults can have something to take pictures of besides the ocean.

  Sometimes, my childless friends would want to know.

  “I mean, what’s it like, anyway?” they’d ask, with a cadaverous smile, the way you ask somebody what it’s like to date a girl with no ears. It was a sick question, designed to make themselves feel better about their life choices. “Do you like it?” they asked. “Is it fun?”

  Ours may be one of the first generations in the history of human breeding to ask such a silly question. I could think of a hundred good reasons to make a baby, but liking it was not one. I didn’t like having children any more than I liked having cartilage. A blessing? Sure. But so is cartilage. One helps me ride my bicycle, the other one poops on my floor. Is that what they wanted to hear?

  We started potty training our first daughter when she was still a year old. I cannot explain why we started so young; my wife led me to believe that our child’s learning to use a toilet before age two would be something along the lines of memorizing the periodic table or the Chinese alphabet. It would be a real accomplishment, she said, and she wanted to try. She was an ambitious young mother.

  “But she seems so young,” I said.

  “She’s very advanced,” my wife said, remarking on the child’s other talents, which were largely focused on distinguishing between the sounds of ducks and nonducks.

  “What does the duck say?” I’d ask.

  “Quack-quack!” she’d say.

  “What does the sheep say?” I’d ask.

  “Quack-quack!” she’d say.

  “She’s so smart,” people would say, as a courtesy.

  Some friends said go for it. Force the toilet issue. Incentivize it. These friends came from the school of parenting who strongly inveigh against the commodification of youth and believe that any capitulation to the needs of the young will end Western civilization and reduce our nation to something resembling an early Charlton Heston film. Others told us to let the child decide when she wants to use the toilet.

  “Just let it happen,” they said, which seemed the very opposite of what you want to do with feces.

  The most normal friends suggested we buy a small, colorful, cartoonish children’s potty. “The ones with the pictures of princesses on them,” they said.

  “Ariel!” our daughter said, when we brought the pink bedpan home.

  “Yes!” I said. “Now you can poop on her!”

  I laughed about this, but not my wife. No. She would not laugh for many years. Because she knew that potty training was going to be an endless campaign against the inevitability of the rectum and the deep Freudian fears of the young, a war fought with love, and prayer, and sullied brown hands, and Skittles, which my wife poured into a mason jar.

  “What are those for?” I said.

  “One Skittle for teetee and two for a stinky,” she said.

  I explained to my wife that I would join PETA before allowing the word stinky to occupy my brain’s language centers.

  “Stinky!” our daughter said, holding her nose. At twenty months, she was roughly the size of garden gnome, with a Magellanic Cloud of curly brown hair spiraling out from her head in every available direction, which made her look not unlike a walking toilet brush.

  “Stinky! That’s right!” my wife said, handing her a Skittle.

  The training started on a Monday and consisted of these ten simple steps:

  1.Remove diaper from child.

  2.Walk child to toilet.

  3.Point to toilet. Smile.

  4.Point to child. Smile.

  5.Point to floor. Frown.

  6.Point to the places on child where the urine and the feces come from.

  7.Say, “Woo woo.”

  8.Make the child repeat, “Woo woo.”

  9.Point to toilet again. Smile. Show teeth. Seem crazy.

  10.Wait.

  I received calls and updates throughout day one. The first came in at 11 a.m., when my wife reported that the child had urinated in every room of the house and was now hiding underneath one of the beds. She’d been wearing, for the first time ever, what are called “big-girl panties,” which is, I believe, the technical term for “underwear soaked in urine.”

  By the end of day two, most of the house was covered in sheets, towels, and other textiles in various yellows and browns. But it worked. I came home and—wonder of wonders!—heard the sound of tinkling. It was the child, on the adult toilet, in the act of voluntary micturition. Day two! It was such a glorious moment, everybody had a Skittle.

  That night, I dreamt that every poop that had ever been pooped in the world was represented by its very own Skittle, and the jar reached up to heaven. It was big and wide and pretty, a jar of joy. My wife had done it. No wonder all those moms had called her, and still did. She was some kind of baby wizard.

  “What about number two?” I asked the next morning.

  “Oh, that’ll happen soon,” she said.

  And she said it with such confidence, such hope.

  Over the next few months, what happened was, the child pooped in all the closets. She pooped in her room, our room, the guest room, the living room, but not the bathroom. She did all her urinating during the day, in the toilet, Curious George panties pushed carelessly around her dangling ankles; but her poo, like the nine-banded armadillo and certain species of wombat, was nocturnal. Only when her rectum was cocooned in the palliative barrier of absorbe
nt garments would her gastrointestinal tract release its malodorous bounty.

  She would find a dark place somewhere in the house. We would hear her talking through walls and could often smell her pooping through them.

  “Who’s she talking to?” my wife said.

  “The dark lord she serves,” I said.

  She would poo and then just keep talking, possibly to the poo, because she loved it and was not ready to say goodbye. Sometimes, she loved it so much that she wanted to keep it inside her, compelling my wife to feed the child various accelerants designed to loosen the bowels. Every morning and night, the woman stood in the kitchen and mixed liquids and powders like a medieval apothecary, shaking and stirring and going mad. She poured these tonics into our child, whose bottom opened like the Grand Coulee Dam. Around suppertime, the baby would begin to hold herself in unusual ways, grasping the front of her crotch with one hand and the back of it with the other, apparently trying to lift her entire body off the ground and throw herself out the window.

  “LET’S GO POTTY!” my harried wife would say a bit too loudly, smiling a bit too brightly, the way crazy people do.

  “No,” the child would say. “No! No! No! NOOO!”

  It was not an angry kind of NO. It was the kind of NO you hear when you ask someone if they want to throw themselves from the top of El Capitan. My wife fetched her tools, most notably an enema the size of a large handgun, while I chased the child, picked her up, carried her to the toilet.

  “NOOO!” the baby said.

  “Listen, we don’t want to throw you in the toilet,” I said. “Unless it will help you poop.”

  “Stop scaring her!” my wife said.

  Please note that I was not the one holding a turkey baster full of nitroglycerin.

  My parents had taught me so many things. My mother taught me to read and write and paint, and to love the act of learning, and my father taught me to skin a buck deer and even nonbuck deer and even nondeer deer, and also how to run a trotline, as well as how to run dogs and bases and people off your property with axes and mauls. Those had been relatively complicated things to learn, involving much nuance and tenacity, and yet I had learned them. How could we not teach our child this most basic task?

  I wanted to help, or at least sufficiently get in my wife’s way in a way that angered her. But she wouldn’t let me, her logic being that the woman who’d pushed the baby out could teach the baby to push other things out, and so she held the child over the toilet and the child wailed and looked down into the hole for baby alligators.

  “Go away,” my wife would say, through the closed door.

  Then the door would fly open and the incontinent child would escape and run around the house frantically, looking under things, as though she had lost a precious jewel or her mind. It seems so natural: you eat, you form waste, your body and gravity have a meeting, come up with a simple plan: a location, perhaps some light reading material, and a candle for illumination and mood. Nature runs the meeting. You are merely attending, participating. After all, your attendance is required. You could call in sick, and the meeting would be rescheduled. You cannot get out of the meeting.

  “We really need to have this meeting,” Nature says.

  “I’ll be here all day,” Gravity says.

  “She can’t keep putting this off,” Nature says.

  And that was the problem. The child became so distressed at the sight of the toilet bowl that she lost the ability to go anywhere: the toilet, her Pull-Up, the closet. She kept rescheduling the meeting, until it was no longer going to just be a meeting. Human resources would have to be there. Security would be called.

  To prepare for this explosive day, my wife became an ethnographer of the body’s lower functions, studying the child, making field notes.

  “She’s got to go,” she would say, marking the calendar.

  “How can you tell?”

  The child would be walking very slowly and sort of leaning back, the way some people approach limbo poles or hurricanes. “It’s been five days since she went.”

  “The toilet will not eat you,” my wife said to the child.

  “But if you don’t give it your stinky,” I said, “it will come into your room at night and take it from your bottom with a fork.”

  The child cried, ran away.

  I didn’t understand. She was three now, could read chapter books and run effectively from cats and recite creeds dating to the late Roman era.

  Sometimes, if we were lucky, nature blindsided the child with a surprise emergency meeting that she could not postpone. We’d be in the front yard playing, and she would grow quiet and sidle under one of the tall camellias by the front porch and squat down and do it right there like a war vet.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “A stinky,” she said. “In the garden.”

  The neighbors stared from their porch, concerned.

  “She’s very advanced!” I yelled, a bit too loudly.

  How did you potty train me?” I asked my parents on the speakerphone, while my wife and child wrestled just beyond earshot.

  “Actually, I never did,” Mom said.

  “You done it yourself,” Pop said. “You was smart like that.”

  “THAT’S NOT TRUE,” my wife said from the toilet. “THEY’RE LYING.”

  Were they? I followed the odor of memory, and it sent me back to 1978, a time for Grease and inflation and a new trend known as airplane hijacking. There was a party at our house, I remember. We had guests. The Bee Gees were there, on the stereo, wafting through the air, wanting to know how deep our love was. Also wafting through the air: an odor. The Brothers Gibb sang about feeling something and not wanting that feeling to go. I was only three and didn’t understand who the Bee Gees were singing this to, but found that it was a fine expression of the love I felt for my feces, because I did not want them to go, either.

  “And it’s me you need to show,” they sang. “How deep is your love?”

  To whom were they singing this song? Even at the age of three, I felt confident that they were not singing to their feces, as one should probably not address one’s own excrement in any form, except to flush it, which was a problem, because while the song had distracted me, my feces had decided to make an illegal border crossing.

  Something bad had happened. I locked the door. I was not sure what I could do, there in my room, with a locked door. My only real option was to bury myself in the toy box and hope that my family moved to a new house. Mom knocked.

  “What are you doing in there?” she said, rattling the knob.

  “I’m in here, pooping on myself,” was not an option. So I did what anybody does when a frantic person is trying to knock down a locked door while you’re emptying your bowels: I climbed out the window.

  Throughout the house and pouring out the windows, I could hear the Bee Gees asking again, how deep was our love? They really wanted to know, they said. They were living in a world of fools, they said. Breaking them down, they said.

  I hit the hot grass and looked both ways. Should I run away? Should I dig a hole to China, as I’d heard was possible? Should I dig a hole for my stool, which jangled in my shorts like a smuggled gem?

  I knew what to do. I would check the mail.

  “What have you done?” they’d say.

  “Look!” I could say. “The new Sears catalog!”

  After walking in the midsummer heat, I knew it was going to take more than toilet paper to clean me. It might take a garden hose, perhaps some sort of heated cauldron, perhaps all three of the Brothers Gibb working in harmony. I walked back into the house, past our guests, down the hall. I wrapped my brown underwear in the mail and knew to place them somewhere innocuous, such as behind the television. Nobody would suspect a thing. They would just think Mom was making her goulash.

  It was all coming back to me now, how hard it had been to know what to do with my own bowels. My parents were clearly approaching senility. You have to, I guess. You have t
o forget about how hard everything was, such as the pooping, which I was already wanting to forget. Otherwise, you hate your children forever, and I did not want to hate my children forever, and I am sure my wife didn’t, either.

  What we needed were not Skittles and enemas. What we needed was patience.

  “Patience,” I said to my wife.

  “Patience?” she said. “Patience?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where she pooped this morning?”

  “No.”

  “The floor.”

  “The floor?”

  “The mothereffing floor.”

  How deep, I wanted to know, was our love?

  The child was sending us a message. The message was: “Cleanup on aisle two.”

  Let me tell you something. Poop smells bad wherever it is, but when it’s just lying there on the floor like a dead squirrel it does a whole other thing to your nose. It gets into your brain, makes you want to hurt people. It infected my wife’s brain, made her crazy. She’d get this wild look in her eye, surrounded by various anal creams and ointments, suppositories and laxatives, fibrous hardeners and softeners, rubber gloves and trash bags and spray bottles of antibacterial cleansers and bleach and gasoline, towels, buckets, mops, masks, anger.

  “Are you okay?” I would ask.

  “Do you smell something?” she would say. “ I smell something.”

  “I think it’s you,” I would say. “You haven’t showered in three days.”

  “I’m waiting for her stinky. I know it’s coming.”

  She would be looking out the window, up into the sky, as though it were coming by air. When it finally did drop, I would offer to clean it up, but the wife refused, entering the bedroom with her gear and closing the door and alternately retching, gagging, cursing her offspring, gagging, cursing her own gag reflex, and then retching some more.

  “Breathe through your mouth,” I said, from the safety of the hallway. “Let me know if you need some help.” I explained that I would be at the airport, leaving the country.

  If the floor was unavailable, the child would poop in the bathtub. The wife would scream. The child would scream. I would run into the kitchen and return with a weapon.