A Better Angel

by Chris Adrian

  “You have to be ready at any time to have the conversation,” Janie Finn told me, meaning the conversation where you sorted everything out and said your goodbyes, and the dying person sorted everything out and lost all their regrets. “You talk about things and then you let go,” she said, making an expansive gesture with her hands, as if she were setting free a bunch of doves or balloons. It was just the sort of thing that hospice people always say, and it’s because they say things like this that I think they should all be put slowly to death, half of them ministering to the others as they expire by deadly injection, having their conversations and dwindling, half by half, until there are only two, and then one, and a little midget comes in and shoots the last one in the face.

  But suddenly I thought that this must be the conversation, as we opened our mouths in turn and shared something wordless and important and lovely, and the whole room seemed like a great relief to me, and I knew it must to him, too. The angel was struggling, though, seeming to wrestle with herself. Her face was beautiful but then her body was ugly again and my bottles were almost empty. My father’s mouth was open but I took the last of the morphine myself and gave him a drop of water. He opened his eyes and looked at me and said it again, “You!” and he shook his head, then closed his eyes again. But when I put my head on his chest he didn’t push it away, and though one hand was reaching out blindly above him, he let me put the other on my neck. “I want a better angel, Dad,” I told him. “That’s all I need.”

  “I’ll take a nap now,” he said. “Batten down the hatches and go to your room.” But I stayed where I was, and took a nap myself. I woke up the next morning on the couch, the fake rain still drumming at the shuttered window, with no recollection of how I got across the room. The angel was in the corner, her face ugly again, but only in that way that all weeping faces are ugly. I sat down next to my father, who must have died sometime very recently, because though his face was cold and his open eyes already had the look of spoiling grapes, his chest and his belly were warm. I put my hands on his chest, and my head on my hands, and stayed that way for a long time before I called Janie to tell her that it had happened.

  THE CHANGELING

  My father and I stand in the kitchen, staring at the toaster and waiting for the waffles. Since my son became ill, we have been taking turns with the meals, so he handles breakfast and I do lunch and then we both take care of dinner. We have a waffle iron, but the prospect of making the batter was somehow too much this morning, and though I believe that waffles made from scratch would carry some premium of affection, I know once-frozen waffles won’t matter to Carl, and I recognize my father’s exhausted posture from the latter days of my mother’s illness and my divorce, and I know better than to suggest that frozen waffles will somehow work against us today. Our stretched and inverted images look back at us from within the toaster-chrome.

  A spring is broken inside the toaster, so nothing jumps up like it should. The waffles rise slow and stately. Carl used to say that the toast looked like it was rising from out of a grave, and made jokes about zombie-strudel and vampire Pop-Tarts. He wasn’t an entirely normal kid, even before he got sick. My father takes the waffles out, butters them up, and puts them on a plate, then puts that on a gigantic silver tray of the sort a butler would carry around, complete with a handled silver dome. “Get the syrup,” he tells me, and starts upstairs.

  He pauses outside the door and knocks. He always knocks; I never do. He says it’s important to treat Carl with respect, and I agree, but the thing presently in his bed could care less if we are polite toward it. It asks of us a specific set of behaviors and everything else is superfluous. “Who is it?” comes the reply. The voice sounds like dozens of voices speaking at once. Sometimes I convince myself that I can hear Carl’s voice in there, sounding very small and incredibly far away.

  “Who else?” my father says as he opens the door.

  “I was hoping for satisfaction,” Carl says from the bed. He is restrained there by soft straps that we took from the hospital. They are called posies and bring to mind the image of someone tied down with flowers, but they are not so benign as that. We only tie him down at night, and only because if we didn’t he would wander into high places, the tops of bookshelves or the roof or a tall tree in the yard, to shout out requests for justice and vengeance and satisfaction. Aside from the restraints, it is his same old bed, done up in baseball sheets, and his same old room, covered with pictures of historical personages and dams and bridges and other engineering marvels, except that we have had to take down every picture of an airplane, because these made him cower and cry out in fear.

  “Behold!” my father says, after I’ve undone the straps and shifted Carl up into a position he can eat from. My father takes away the silver dome with a flourish. He can manage the flourish even when he is dispirited and tired. “Waffles!”

  “We are not satisfied with waffles,” Carl says, his face drawn up in a look of haughty disapproval, but despite that look and his words his mouth snaps at the fork when my father brings it close, and chews and swallows eagerly. Though his words and his expressions seem to have passed into the possession of another, Carl’s appetites remain his own and have become more childish as the weeks have passed. The mouth spews complex obscenities and harsh judgments but is partial to waffles and cheesy mac and vienna sausages. “Waffles are not justice,” he says with his mouth full.

  “But justice isn’t delicious,” says my father, though he is always telling me not to talk to “It,” especially when we are trying to get Carl to eat. “And justice will never be the most important meal of the day.”

  “We are the dead,” Carl says. “Where is our blood sacrifice? What have you done for us today?”

  “Every good boy loves waffles,” my father says, and shovels them in. I dart in with the napkin between bites, and catch the bits and half-chewed pieces that fall out of Carl’s mouth. It’s always easier to keep him clean during a meal than it is to clean him up afterward. He fought like a cat the one time we tried to get him in the tub, and even a sponge bath makes him wriggly and abusive. I keep my eyes down and try to tune out the noise Carl is making, bits of song in a dozen voices, and noises that are not words. But just as we are finishing up I look too long on my son’s face, and his eyes, which have been rolling every which way in his head, following the action in some waking dreamscape, suddenly lock on to mine. It is always very hard to look away when this happens.

  “Do you love your son?” the voices ask me.

  My father hisses at me in an unnecessary warning. I know I am being baited but can never be silent in the face of that question.

  “You know I do,” I say.

  “Well, what a way to show it, to abandon him. Abandonment is practiced in degrees, and you have gone beyond the pale, it’s true. He is practically one of us now.”

  My father is shaking his head. “Breakfast is over,” he says. He puts the lid on his Jeevesy platter and walks toward the door. “Come on,” he adds, because I am still sitting on the bed.

  “I’ll be right there,” I say.

  “It’s not going to help,” he says. “It’s not . . .” He doesn’t finish, just shakes his head again. He looks terribly sad, and Carl is smiling quite fiendishly.

  “I’ll be down in a second,” I say.

  “Goddamn it,” my father says, and shuts the door.

  “Goddamn it all,” says Carl. “Goddamn your faithlessness and your short memory and your tiny selfish heart and your . . . ah!” I interrupt the tirade by slamming my finger in the drawer of his nightstand. I watch his face as I do it: It opens up and becomes a child’s face again, even before it becomes particularly his own face again. There is awe and delight written upon it, and then it falls into an expression of sadness and confusion and Carl starts to cry in the ordinary sobbing of a nine-year-old, without any keening choir overtones or screeching old-lady echoes. Every time this happens he acts the same way, sleepy and confused and sad.


  He cries and looks around his room and recognizes me.

  “Dad,” he says, “what time is it? What time is it?” which is exactly what he said when he woke up from his operation.

  I say, “Nine o’clock, pal. It’s going to be a great day.” And I draw him over into my lap and hold him against me while he cries. From the way my finger is already bruising I figure we have at least an hour.

  One night he went to bed as Carl, a not entirely ordinary nine-year-old who read too much and hated sports and had a somewhat morbid imagination; the next morning he awoke as something else: a vengeful spirit, thousands of angry strangers, a changeling. I knocked on his door to wake him like always, and didn’t actually go into his room until he failed to show himself downstairs with only twenty minutes left before the school bus would come. In his room I found him still in bed, a lump under the covers. This usually meant that he had been up reading until only a few hours before. My father and I always checked to make sure his light stayed off, but he kept a dozen little penlights here and there around his room, and we could never manage to take them all away.

  “Pal,” I said. “Are you awake?”

  “We are awake,” came the reply, and I didn’t really notice the difference in his voice because it was muffled by the sheets and blankets.

  “Well, Your Highness, the bus will be here in twenty minutes. So let’s get moving.” Lately he had been reading obsessively about Elizabeth I, and my father had even caught him dressed up in one of his mother’s old nightgowns with a lampshade turned upside down around his neck, issuing decrees to his own reflection. I thought he was just using the royal “we.”

  “We do not ride in buses,” he said, and then sat up, flexing straight from the waist, still covered in his blanket. Even before the blanket fell away, and he turned toward me so I could see his face, I was afraid for him. “Or in automobiles or airplanes, but we drift on the original wind that rose up as the towers fell, and we are always restless.”

  He stared at me with alien eyes, looking at me, not like he didn’t know me, but like he knew me very well and didn’t like me at all.

  “Carl,” I said, “knock it off. This isn’t funny.”

  “He’s gone away,” he said. “Don’t worry too much, we’ll keep him perfectly safe.”

  I opened my mouth to yell at him, and stepped forward toward the bed to give him a shake, to tell him to snap out of it. Knock it the fuck off, I was about to say, though I hadn’t cursed at him or around him since before his mother left. But somehow I knew he wasn’t trying to be funny, and that, whatever was happening, he wasn’t doing it on purpose. This was something very different from every other time he had pretended to be someone he was not, dead kings and queens, Old Yeller, Miss Piggy . . . he had a long history of transient impersonations. Someone in a book or television show caught his fancy and he decided to be them, but no matter how hard he pretended he never before managed to seem so not like himself as he did now. I didn’t yell at him. I didn’t even stay in the room. I went and got my father instead.

  Carl sticks around for a while. Eventually he calmed, like he always does, and we had the same conversation about what was happening to him, how he was sick, how he was asleep a lot. And he said, like he always did, that he was sure he had been dreaming, though he couldn’t remember even the briefest scene of the dreams, or recall if they were good dreams or bad dreams. When I had him on these visitations I always wanted to just sit with him and talk about nothing, or listen to him tell me fascinating trivia about some dead president or king, something that had passed for normal in the old days. He always got bored with me, though, and when I wouldn’t let him go to school or go for a bike ride or to a friend’s house or to read by himself he would get angry, and usually I would calm him by reading to him from some dull biography until he was gone again. But today I take him for a walk.

  “Why do I have to sit in this stupid chair?” he asks me as I strap him into his fancy wheelchair. It was sort of a gift from the hospital. Not that we didn’t pay for it, but one of the puppyish residents wrangled it for him, insisting that there wasn’t any reason that he should have to stay inside all the time when he went home. It was one of the fancy chairs that cerebral palsy kids get. “I look like a retard,” Carl said.

  “You might fall asleep,” I told him as I tightened his seatbelt. He never fell asleep outside, but he might chase somebody, shouting “Fire on Babylon!” if he could get out of the chair too easily. “That’s what happens,” I say. “One minute you’re playing tennis and the next you’re sound asleep.”

  “That’s narcolepsy,” he says. “Do I have narcolepsy?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “But you sleep a lot. You’re getting better, though.”

  “I hate tennis. When was I playing tennis?”

  “It’s a figure of speech,” I say, and then my father comes stomping into the room. He usually hides when Carl is back, and when Carl asks after him I say he is out for a drive or buying new teeth or on a date with some lady who is a hundred and five. “Look who’s back,” I say to him.

  “You’re a fool,” he says, so quietly and so close to my ear I am probably the only one who can hear him. “It’s not right. It’s not what they told us to do.” I shrug, and turn the chair around, as if presenting him with his grandson. It’s the only answer I can give him, to say, Look, I don’t care what they told us in the hospital. They don’t have a fucking clue what’s happening, but here’s Carl back, for a little while.

  “Look at me, Grandpa,” Carl says. “I’m a retard.”

  “The retard is standing behind you,” my father says, then bends down and clutches him in a death hug.

  “Ouch,” Carl says. “I’m coming back.” My father doesn’t say anything else to either of us, just turns and goes outside behind the house, where he starts chopping wood. It’s still too early in the autumn for a fire, but this is what he does when he’s very upset. We already have enough to last through the whole winter.

  “Where do you want to go?” I ask Carl as I maneuver the wheelchair down the jury-rigged ramp that goes from the side door off the kitchen to the driveway.

  “Where haven’t I been lately?” he asks cheerily, and I’m struck by how quickly he seems to recover from his time away, and how ordinary he seems. It’s hard to believe that there’s anything wrong.

  “Everywhere,” I tell him, which is true, and we make a plan to walk all the way down to the river, but we only get as far as the park before he says he wants to stop and asks if he can go on the slide. “Better not,” I say. “It’s high up. What if you fell asleep?”

  “Then I’d just slide down,” he says, and I have a hard time arguing with that, or else I am just being careless, and hoping without any evidence or precedent that he might just stay how he is. I don’t even have him unstrapped from the chair when a plane flies a bit lower than usual overhead and he cowers away from it, trying to throw himself out of his chair. “Get down!” he shouts. “It’s in the sky . . . it’s coming!” We don’t live anywhere near an airport, and I shout at the plane as it flies over, because there’s no reason it should be here, or that it should fly so low, except to torture us. The mothers and nannies look away from their toddlers to watch us, and the whole playground seems to go silent as the jet noise fades away. And then Carl straightens up and says, “What was that?” and the regular playground sounds are back again.

  “Just a plane,” I say, and strap him back in, then push the chair over to a bench and sit down next to him. He doesn’t mention the slide again. Already there is something accusatory in his eyes, though his voice is still his own. A boy across the playground is bouncing a red ball, and Carl tells me that Mars years are almost three years longer than Earth years before he falls entirely silent. I don’t want to go home yet. I don’t want him trapped again, in his sickroom in our sickhouse, and I don’t want to be trapped there with him. The voices come back but there is nobody around my bench.

  “Guilty,” he
says, pointing at the moms and the nannies. “Guilty, guilty, guilty.” The boy with the ball kicks it our way and runs after. I kick it back but he runs up to us anyway, ignoring the ball when it shoots past him, and he stands before us, three or four years old, smiling, not saying a thing. “Not guilty,” says the entity. “Yet.”

  In the ER they diagnosed Carl with altered mental status, after subjecting him to a gaggle of tests that were all normal. Eventually they let me understand that they didn’t know what was going on, but that something was going on, unless he was faking it all, which they put forth as a distinct possibility. I thought you’d have to be a pretty committed malingerer to submit to a spinal tap. During that procedure Carl lay absolutely still, not even squeezing my hand though they didn’t give him anything but a little local anesthetic around his spine. When, halfway done, the doctor asked him how he was doing, he said, “We are the dead, and what is a needle compared to a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pound airplane? Or two? Poke away, physician. You can’t hurt us like that.”

  They called in the psychiatrist, and the nature of our visit seemed to change. A police officer took a permanent seat outside our room, and everyone except a kindly clinical assistant named Rebecca treated us a little differently. I think they were afraid of Carl, of the terribly unusual things he was saying to them, and about them, and of the electric sound of his voice. I was still too afraid for him to be afraid of him.