Right this minute, my entire body is knotted with anger. I could strangle him.
I understand how parents can kill their kids—I have great sympathy for them. Just shaking some sense into the little turds. Shaking a bit too hard. It’s a thin fucking cut, man.
Ben, my kid’s name. Benny. A set of lungs on him. He’s a precision-engineered mutant made to do one thing, and do it at a paint-peeling pitch. The kid cries. Only at night. During the day he’s an angel. He makes me proud to be a father. But as soon as the lights go off the nightly screamfest begins. And then I sort of hate him.
John Goggins. That’s my name. Thirty-four years old. Foreman at the Kirkland Construction Co. Rosa, my wife, she’s a mess. Ben cries until he pukes. Rosa’s washing the sour sick off his pajamas daily. The dumb kid—Christ, he’s old enough to know better—shrieks until his vocal cords fray. I go into his room in the morning and there’s blood on his pillow from screaming, if you can believe it. He practically rips his throat out.
Rosa’s a softie. Me? Hard as a millstone.
He’s going to learn, though. The hard way, if that’s how he wants it.
That’s what parenting is, right? A battle of wills. Give an inch, they take a mile. So you hold onto that fucking inch like hoary old death. Ben can take that inch from me when I’m old and gray. Take it from my cold, dead hands. He’s our first kid. I wanted a brood, six or seven, but Rosa’s not built for it. She’s got the hips, but not the mind. There are some things you only discover about your partner when you’re chucked into the meat-grinder together. Those things aren’t always cheery.
At first, I let his crying slide. Hell, he even slept in our room the first month or so. It wasn’t a problem then. I swaddled him in a blanket and he slept between us. The sleep of the damned, too, let me tell you. But you can’t get in the habit of letting a kid sleep in your bed. He’ll grow up to be a mealy-mouthed little wiener. No son of John Goggins is gonna be that kid, understand? So into his own room he went.
Rosa breastfed the boy. When he screeched from the nursery in the dead of night, her milk let down. An instinctual thing. These two wet blotches on the front of her nightgown, her tits leaking like drippy faucets. Plus a kid’s supposed to eat every few hours in the early months, so no use in him starving. But he’d scream when she put him back in the crib, even with a bellyful of milk. She tried to stay in there with him. Nope. Not happening. I went in there and dragged her out—not by the hair or anything, mind you, but she knew I wasn’t fucking around. You’ve got to be that way with women or children. An asshole, basically. Suits me fine. And did Benny shriek like a banshee? You bet! And did Rosa cry into her pillow? You can take that to the bank! Me? I slept. I had a job to do in the morning. You think those freehold townhouses build themselves?
After three months of this Rosa suggested we get a sleep doula. A doula—the fuck? What are we, vegan mystics? Mona, the doula’s name. A white chick with dreadlocks who smelled of alfalfa or something. I just about threw her out of the house on her ear as soon as she showed up, but I’d promised Rosa. Mona told us to keep to our room while she stayed with Benny at night. I said she ought to make breakfast in the morning with what she was charging. It was a quiet week, sure. But Mona slept on the floor curled up beside Benny’s crib. I’d have the same success if I lied there like an Irish setter. But I’m not doing that because I’m not a flake.
Mona left after five days. We paid her for a week but she refunded us for the final two days. Her eyes were bloodshot. She mentioned a draft in Benny’s room. Inconstant but very cold, coming from the wall beside the crib.
“A draft, huh?” I said.
“That’s what I said,” went ole Crazypants.
“The walls are double insulated. I supervised the insulation myself.”
“I’m telling you what I felt, Mr. Goggins.”
“You goddamn shyster,” I said, highly pissed. “When you fail, just admit it. Go peddle your snake oil someplace else.”
The next night Benny was screaming before the lights switched off. Rosa started to sob, too. Christ. I wanted to walk out the door, to the bar, get drunk and hop a bus somewhere. Anywhere that didn’t involve me sitting in the basement while my wife blubbered on the main floor and my son’s screeches traveled down the vents to my ears.
He screamed himself to sleep the next week, the next, the next. He wasn’t swaddled anymore by then; you could hear him shaking the bars of his crib as his squeals shot through the house and mainlined straight to my nerves.
“Those are scared screams,” Rosa would say. “Not angry ones or hungry ones, but scared. A mother can tell.”
“I don’t give a shit.” I was tired of indulging her. “We’re not coddling him. A child sleeps in his room, in his bed. That’s natural. You want to breastfeed him until he’s eighteen?”
One night I got pissed. I mean, really pissed. It was gone past eleven and he was still screeching. Five straight hours! A new record. Rosa was out late at some therapy group. Was I going to some touchy-feely session where everyone braided marigolds into each other’s hair after spilling their guts? Like fuck I was! I didn’t need help. I wasn’t broken. My kid was. But I’d fix his wagon.
I went into his room. It was dark, shadows stretching over the walls. Benny stood in his crib clutching the rails. Screaming holy hell. A wave of rage crashed over me. A blanketing sheet of red. He was my kid, blood of my blood, but in that moment all I saw was some little freak, a fat disgusting grub with a soupy mouth whose sole function was to make life hell for everyone around it.
I grabbed him and lifted him up. He weighed next to nothing. My fingers dug into his arms. Snot was webbed down his face. I squeezed. I felt the heat of him, the flush of his face, the spasms of his little heart. He kept crying. Even louder, by Christ. He reached towards me even though I had his arms manacled. As if to hug me—to keep me there with him. I shook him. I shouldn’t have, I know that, but my rage was redlined.
“Shut up!” I said. “SHHHHHH!”
His skull snapped back and forth. A rope of drool whipped out of his mouth. My heart was hammering in my own chest. It was something I could go to jail for if Rosa had put a fiber-optic video camera in one of Benny’s teddy bears. He started to gag like he’d swallowed his tongue. I stopped rattling him around. His face was pink and swollen like a fleshy balloon set to burst.
Oh, Jesus. Oh, God. What had I done? My world came thundering down around me in that moment. I’d hurt him real bad. My boy. I visualized him in an electric wheelchair blowing on a tube to pilot his sagging body around.
Then his eyes focused and his gagging quit. He looked at me with that wretched look only a child can get—this why are you doing this? look, as if the world had been drastically reformatted in a way that terrified him.
Predictably, he started to scream. My teeth snicked together. I put him back in bed as he grasped desperately for me. I shut the door on his agonized shrieks. He would learn, goddamn it. The same way my daddy taught me and his daddy taught him. Hard lessons, sure, but needful ones.
The next morning I noticed a crack in the nursery wall. A hairline fucker. It started at the top of the wall where it met the ceiling and ran five inches down. A spidery crack. Just the one.
Cracks piss me off. I’m a foreman. A crack is a sign of shoddy workmanship. It means the walls don’t line up true. But I supervised the build of my house. Me. Every detail. I centered the bubble on my level on these very walls. So it couldn’t be my fuckup. Who the hell did the drywall? I’d check the work order and fire the prick if he still worked on my crew.
I put my hand over the crack. Cold. A draft traveling down the fireplace flue? A rupture in the bathroom vent running behind the wall? Was Crazypants right? Christ. Heads would roll.
I put my ear to the wall. Nothing but the low hum of the furnace drifting up from the basement…
But behind that sound was something else.
I couldn’t put a finger on it. Weird, inconstant, like
… like bugs? Beetles or crickets or mealworms maybe?—thousands of them, tens of thousands—crawling over each other, the dry rubbing of their bodies making this chittering, vaguely metallic burr that almost sounded like whispers. I pressed my ear to the wall, straining to catch a different register of that sound; my eyes rolled upwards and my chin, too, my neck muscles tensed with strain. There was something gross about that noise—lewd, was the word that fit. You get roaches in your walls and man, they’re a bitch to get out. But we didn’t have insects in the walls; I knew that to a certainty. Foam insulation with a protective mesh wraparound—there’s no fucking way.
I patched the crack with drywall filler and sanded it smooth. Then I painted over it. I didn’t tell Rosa. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
And Ben kept screaming.
Night after night. Two, three hours. By this point, I spanked him pretty regularly. Some people would say a twelve-month-old is too young for a big league ass-paddling. I’m not one of them. I’d pull his sleeper off, tug down his diaper and spank his bare ass. It made a nice, meaty smack. His body juddered over my knee. He screamed louder, sure, but there was some pleasure in that for me.
One night it got pretty serious. Rosa was screaming herself, pleading for me to stop. Nope. We’re doing this, babe. I’ll give you something to cry about, me bucko! His little butt went red as a beet. My hand stung. I stood him on my knees. His eyes bulged out, his nose leaked snot. Calmly, I said: “If you don’t stop crying, Benny, I’ll come back and do it again. And again, and again.” He kept shrieking and blubbering, completely hysterical. I pulled his diaper up and put him back in his crib. His screams intensified. He pressed himself to the bars, clawing through them as he tried to clutch at me. You’d think he’d prefer I was in the room, even if it meant I was spanking him, rather than sleep on his own. Then he puked—of course he puked. All over the mattress, the sweet pablum-y ralf of a baby. “Rosa!” I yelled, storming out.
He’d learn, goddammit. He would.
Later that month, he got real sick. His eyes went yellow. He stopped eating or drinking much. His stools had a sour acidic smell. His skin had this greasy feel to it, like he’d been spritzed with cooking oil. He lost three pounds almost overnight, which was like twenty percent of his body weight.
We took him to the ER. Was I scared? Yeah, I’ll cop to that. I mean, I love the kid, damn it. What father wants to see his boy in pain, right?
The doctors did bloodwork, turning the poor kid into a pincushion. They tied a bag around his penis to collect his pee and stuck a cold thermometer up his caboose. Benny didn’t even cry. He just gazed at me with wide bewildered eyes. Took it like a champ! The docs had figured maybe uremic poisoning, but they couldn’t find anything. Tickety-boo, according to them. Fucking morons. My kid was yellow. How was that fine? They put him on IVs and gave us drops for his eyes. We spent the night in the hospital. Benny slept as peacefully as any baby ever has, I’d say. Why wouldn’t he do the same in his comfy crib?
When we brought Benny home, Rosa wanted him to sleep in our bed. I caved. We were both pretty raw. Dodged a bullet, maybe, although we never got a good look at it. Benny was doing better. His color came back. He slept with us three nights. And slept well. We had to wake him up every morning because he slept so deeply, kind of like a prisoner subjected to sleep deprivation finally getting a few nights of shut-eye. There was plenty of room in our bed—we’ve got a California king, so Rosa and I can spread out like starfish and still not touch each other. But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that a boy’s got to sleep in his own bed—unless that boy’s father wants a pansy on his hands.
On the fourth night, I put him back in his crib. Rosa pleaded with me not to, but the grace period was over. Back to business! Did he scream? Does a bear shit in the woods? Did that stop me? Not for one hot minute!
I could have soundproofed his room—I refurbished a recording studio one time; I could get the honeycomb panels at discount—but Rosa would have had a bird. I bought a fan at the hardware store instead. With it running full blast and the door shut, we could barely hear him in our bedroom.
A few days later, he fell out of his crib and broke his arm.
I don’t know how he managed it. It happened at night. We didn’t hear. An arm-break scream sounds the same as every other scream, apparently. The next morning, Rosa found him curled up next to the door, his body packed into the corner and his arm tucked under him at a funny angle. She screamed. First with horror, then at me. Did I feel a little bad? Okay, sure. But I didn’t make him fall out of the damn crib, did I? He’s a fucking willful child. Sometimes you’ve got to pay a price for that stubborn streak.
We took him to the ER again. A doctor set the break and put a cast on. It’s sad to see your baby in a cast. That perfection’s been ruined just a little, y’know? The world had left its first real mark on him. Rosa said we weren’t going to switch the fan on anymore. Okay, fine. But he wasn’t sleeping with us. I went out and bought some mosquito-netting-type stuff at the baby store, which I draped over his crib to stop him from clambering out.
It was later that same week that Rosa came downstairs while I was packing my lunchbox and said, “There’s a crack in the wall in Benny’s room.”
A wave of unfocused anger washed through me. Anger at the house for falling apart around us; anger at Rosa for bringing this shit to me when I was set to head out the door; anger at my son for crying all night and leaving my nerve endings raw. And there was something else behind that anger, nibbling away at the edges of my mind. I couldn’t tell you what that was.
The crack was bigger this time. A lot bigger. A foot-and-a-half. And wider: a jagged split in the wall, this narrow “V” of darkness. I didn’t have to put a hand up to feel the cold this time: it was obvious even a few feet away. A meat-locker chill that pebbled the flesh on my forearms. Fucking Christ! I pounded my fist on the wall harder than I meant to—as if I was trying to frighten away something on the other side. Which was silly because there wasn’t a damn thing there. Not a goddamn thing.
There was an odor, too, almost too faint to credit. It was like… well, my son has a smell. New baby, you might call it. All babies have it. You put your nose right on their heads and smell their scalp. It’s a wonderful scent. The best. Kind of sweet, sort of milky, a bit summery. The smell of a factory-fresh, showroom-mint human. The smell of youth, of innocence. It makes the world feel a little less grim. They should figure out a way to bottle it.
The smell coming from the crack had a hint of that new-baby smell, but corrupted somehow. I can’t describe it except to say… think of the smell that permeates an old-folks’ home: a mixture of ointments and iodine and the yellowing sick smell of bodies rotting from the inside out. That smell terrifies a lot of us. It makes us not want to visit our great-aunt Gertie at Shady Acres, because it’s the smell of death. Living death. Now imagine a person even older than anyone you’d find at one of those homes—so old that their certificate, the one they get for making it to their hundredth birthday, has gone ancient as old parchment. Unnaturally old—I’m talking two hundred, three hundred years old. So old that this person, whoever it is, maybe isn’t fully human anymore; they’ve lived so long, seen so much with their egg-yolky eyes, that they’ve surrendered the fundamentals of humanity… or maybe they were never human in the first place. Now imagine such a creature with its ancient pruney body and the face of a baby. Its face has undergone the same ravages as the rest of it—but there’s still that trace of an infant in its toothless smile, in its high-pitched giggle. Now imagine this corrupted thing giving off a scent, and that scent having some remnant of the new-baby smell, except remade to suit its age. Rancid and mealy, infused with that burnt-dust stink you get when you turn on the furnace for the first time in the winter. The perverted stench of youth that some wizened old thing might give off, if such a thing were to exist.
That was what I pictured, only for a moment: an ineffably ancient creature, some twiste
d goblin with the leering wrinkled face of a baby squatting behind my wall, in the dark chasm between the drywall and brick. Tapping with one black-nailed finger, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, until the wall cracked and its revolting stink wafted up to perfume my son’s room.
Which was the stupidest fucking thing in the world. Which is why I slammed my fist into the wall, pissed at myself.
I put my eyeball to the crack. I couldn’t see or hear anything. No movement. Not the rustle of animals that had built a nest, not the whistling of wind. Maybe the attic was the culprit—had something up there caused the crack? I didn’t hear any dripping water and the drywall wasn’t water-fattened. Plus the attic was only a few feet high and packed with pink fiberglass insulation.
I filled the crack, sanded and painted it. I went downstairs where Rosa sat in the kitchen with Benny, who was doodling on his cast with a crayon. “I took care of it,” I said, and left. That night I came back with flowers for Rosa and a wooden train for Benny. No reason. Just, I love them both.
Then I started having a hard time sleeping.
Living with Benny at night was like living with a grenade with the pin pulled—you never knew when it was going to go off. So even when it was quiet, you couldn’t trust that silence to last. I’d lay in bed, acidly awake at 4:00 AM. Sometimes I’d get up while he shrieked and pace the main floor… sometimes I put my ear to the wall directly below the nursery and listened. Nothing but Benny’s hoarse screams traveling through the vents.
One time, when Benny fell into an exhausted sleep, I stood outside his room. The house was utterly dark. I could hear him breathing… and—this is idiotic, but here it is—I swear I heard someone else breathing as well. This doubled breathing, a breath taken after my son’s own nasally inhale. The other breath was lower, more subtle, a weird echo of my son’s. I opened the door to check, which was stupid for many reasons, but primarily because Benny is such a light sleeper that I swear he can be awoken by air pressure shifts, such as the subtle one that registers when you open his door. He was wedged at the edge of his crib in the same uncomfortable position he always falls asleep in… one that puts him furthest away from the wall.
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