A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

by Peter Ho Davies

  “No,” he says now. “Would you recommend it?”

  “Oh, yes! Life’s empty without them. My advice, find a nice girl, start a family before you get too long in the tooth.”

  Later, in the home, the grandfather will look at the boy and call him by the father’s name, ask him if he’s been good, share candy with him. But the grandfather will only look at the father, his own son, and frown. As if he doesn’t know him or, worse, as if he knows he’s the one who put him here. For the father, watching grandson and grandfather together is like looking at an old family photo. He can see the love, but he can’t quite feel it.

  At least the boy enjoys visiting Grandpa. The caregivers dote on him. He begs for rides on Grandpa’s lap in his wheelchair. Afterward, the pair of them sit happily together watching the fish in the aquarium, gliding back and forth, back and forth, while the father talks to the nurses.

  * * *

  The boy is fearless. Snakes and spiders at the zoo fascinate him. Jellyfish on the beach. He runs to see the Madagascar hissing cockroach as if it were an old friend. At the Sears Tower he bounces and sprawls on the glass floor of the viewing platform, the city yawning beneath him.

  The boy is terrified. Of bees, of shots, of curly slides (he split his lip on one once). The threats he knows, can imagine. Of death he has no sense. The father wonders when that will come, what it’ll mean. Lost toys, broken toys, floating goldfish—these are the tiny harbingers.

  And then the hamster dies. “She was old and in pain,” the father explains. “The vet put her down.” Down where? “Put her to sleep, I mean.” When will she wake up? “They’re euphemisms,” the father explains. White lies? “Kind lies.” The boy nods.

  The real lie, the bit he leaves out, is that he had a choice. The vet put her down, true, but first she asked him what he wanted to do. A formality. The animal was in pain, on its side, legs turning stiffly, no hope and nothing to do. But still, “I have to ask.” He had paused, frozen really, and the vet frowned in her white coat, explained it all again as if to an idiot. No hope. Painless. Quick. A mercy. And still he’d been unable to say. She told him she’d give them a moment alone. Them—him and the hamster. Though he suspected it was only an excuse for her to step away before she lost her patience. He felt like a fool. He feared telling the child. He thought about lying. He thought about asking for a second opinion. He thought about calling his wife. Instead, he thanked the hamster, “for being a good pet.” Oh, he felt like a fool. Apologized to the hamster, anyway. Stroked its shivering side. Told it, “Goodbye, girl.” Jesus! He was sweating, shaking when the vet came back, but he managed to nod, to stay for the end.

  At home they find a small box, dig a small hole, have a small funeral. “We put her down in the ground,” the boy tells his mother with solemn precision. Their son believes in Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Force, and now heaven. But that night he asks shyly, “Can we get a cat now?” And the father—stricken with grief, stricken with embarrassment at his own grief—promises, chokingly, “Sure!”

  When the boy was a baby, they took turns to put him down, to put him to sleep.

  “Thanks for taking care of that,” the mother says that night, and he shrugs. Taking care, he thinks. Is that what it was? What he says is: “No need for us both to be there.”

  Some parents have funerals for their aborted fetuses, he has heard. Their genetic counselor had suggested a similar ceremony of remembrance. It eases some people. We have a quiet place if you’d like to use it. But they shook their heads. How do you mourn something you killed?

  Now there’s talk of some states mandating such funerals.

  If only a mercy killing included some mercy for the killers.

  * * *

  He suddenly remembers friends, a couple, years ago who when they knew they were having a baby got rid of their cat. They’d heard that cats can smother infants, attracted by the smell of milk on their breath. An urban legend—he checks—a superstition dating back to the sixteen and seventeenth centuries, likely influenced by the idea of cats as witches’ familiars. What he can’t recall is how the couple got rid of the cat. Whether they killed it or gave it away or abandoned it. Whether the cat was alive or dead. Will a vet even put a healthy cat to sleep? he wonders. The answer, yes; the term of art, “convenience euthanasia.”

  He finds that shocking for a split second.

  * * *

  In any event, it turns out they can’t get a cat now. Turns out the boy is allergic; he comes home from a friend’s house with itchy eyes. Allergic and inconsolable. For days, he mourns the cat he never had.

  The father is secretly relieved. An older colleague told him once cats were baby substitutes. “They weigh the same, they sleep on you, they roll around on their backs kicking their legs in the air. They mewl.” “What about dogs?” he asked the same animal lover. “Kids! ’Tweens and teens, tearing around in circles in the park, chasing each other, rolling in the mud, yapping.”

  And smaller creatures? he doesn’t ask. Mice, gerbils, hamsters? Fish?

  At the zoo, the father recalls, everyone’s favorites are the monkeys, the meerkats, the lemurs. The animals that play. The rest—listless or neurotic—are inmates, lifers, imprisoned and institutionalized. Adults, in other words. A tiger rips at a cardboard box, the kind refrigerators come in, shredding it with long, lazy twists of his huge head. Doing the recycling, the father thinks with a nod of recognition to the big cat.

  * * *

  The boy settles for Snoopy. Peanuts is his new favorite. They hear him chuckling manically from under the covers after lights-out. He’s taken to exclaiming Good grief! at every opportunity.

  Clean your plate. Good grief!

  Tidy your room. Good grief!

  What do you say? Good grief!

  * * *

  But why, the father wonders, did Schrödinger pick a cat? It’s a thought experiment—he could have put anything in the box. A mouse, a rat, a rabbit—those traditional experimental subjects. Why not a dog or a monkey or an elephant, for that matter (it’s a thought experiment—no apparatus to build, the box could be as big as a house)? Did Schrödinger have a cat? Have something against cats? The father imagines a mouse in a box ​— wouldn’t it make noise, rustle around? You’d know it’s status without looking. But a cat, a cat could just sleep in there. (And in fact, more recent versions of the thought experiment imagine not poison, but knock-out gas in the box, so that the cat might be either awake or asleep. But really, how sentimental are we that we need to imagine a humane thought experiment? We can imagine a quantum paradox, but not the death of a cat.)

  Schrödinger is said to have owned a cat called Milton. Or Toby. To-by or not To-by, as the joke goes. Its existence is likely apocryphal.

  It is known he had a dog. And an aunt who owned six cats, whose “yowling” (the cats’ not the aunt’s) he disapproved.

  He disapproved of his own cat, too, of course, called his famous paradox a “ridiculous case,” intended it as a critique of quantum theory, its “blurred model” of reality. “There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.” Or, as Einstein wrote in agreement: “One cannot get around the assumption of reality—if only one is honest.” Both of them loath to believe that atomic randomness could give rise to real-world uncertainty.

  If only, the father thinks.

  Winters they go to the botanical gardens to bask in the hothouse fug; to the park with the good sledding hill; to the mall to see Santa in his fat suit; to the local petting farm to see Jesus in his manger, live goats and sheep and chickens and cows grazing among the plaster figures.

  Does it start here, the father thinks, or at the art museum, another winter destination, with all those Madonna-and-childs lining the walls as if the Renaissance were one big Mommy and Me class. Is this where the deification of babies begins?

  “Not forgetting the impossible standard set by Mary,” his wife points out. “Mother and v
irgin. No competing with that.” She stands before a beatific painting of the holy family. “Talk about smug parents.” The father nods. He’s lousy at DIY, stumped by IKEA instructions, can’t even live up to Joseph. “And to think,” the wife whispers, moving on, “underage girl, pregnant by someone other than her husband, she’d be a prime candidate . . .”

  * * *

  The boy comes home from school with colds; he comes home with coughs. He gives them to his parents, face flushed and shining, as if presenting a painting he’s actually proud of. But how not to kiss a sick child, how not to hug him, as if love will cure him. When in fact he cures himself, invariably within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, while his parents catch cold for a week, marveling at his immune system—envious and reassured.

  Only when he comes home with lice does his mother scream, “Stay away from me!”

  He comes home with valentines and black eyes. He comes home with homework and paperwork. The only thing he doesn’t come home with are both gloves.

  * * *

  They enroll him in soccer. He loves watching it on TV, and the view is even better from the field as he stands and watches the other kids run around him.

  They enroll him in ballet. It’s good for balance and coordination, but at the recital he freezes, until coaxed off the stage into the father’s arms. The boy sits on his lap for the rest of the show, the pair of them performing their love.

  Swim club, flag football, street hockey, basketball come and go with the seasons. Then it’s soccer again. And the boy scores a goal! And the father thinks his heart will burst.

  * * *

  At college all his students are writing coming-of-age stories. It’s the Age of Coming of Age.

  When he first started teaching, he worried he was too young, only a few years ahead of many of them. He used to dress up—dress to profess, his wife called it—in jacket and tie. It took him a while to figure out that teaching, simply standing up in front of a board, adds ten years.

  Back then being in loco parentis felt like a fraud; now the students look like children. He used to hope they’d keep him young; now they make him feel mortal.

  They keep on coming of age, he groans, class after class, year after year. It’s exhausting.

  You’d be out of work otherwise, his wife points out.

  It’s true. His livelihood depends on procreation. There are students not yet conceived that he’ll teach before he retires.

  And you need the job, she reminds him, nodding at the boy, to pay for his college.

  * * *

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “A soccer player,” the boy says. His backup plan is astronaut.

  The father wanted to be a crossing guard at that age. “Lollipop Ladies,” he called them, for the STOP signs they carried.

  “Why?”

  He can’t remember. Maybe to look after people.

  And then he wanted to be a writer.

  “And now you are one!”

  The father isn’t sure this is a good lesson. You can be anything you want to be, except the boy isn’t going to be a professional soccer player. Yet secretly he thinks this is the great achievement of his life, the source of his happiness, that he grew up to be what he’d always wanted to be. Almost always wanted.

  A crossing guard! But somehow escorting kids across a busy street, staring down the traffic with nothing but a sign (a cross between a lance and a shield), was the closest thing to heroism in his young life. He still feels a righteous rage when cars roll through the intersection in front of their house.

  Of course, he’s also grown up to be a man who aborts babies, puts his own father in a home.

  His mother asked him once—no, she didn’t ask, didn’t dare, instead she told him—how hard that must have been for him, and he nodded heavily. But it wasn’t. Not really. Not compared. It wasn’t a choice; it was an eventuality. Besides it’s not like he was killing his father. Something else—time, age, Alzheimer’s—will take care of that, only infinitely more slowly. And who is that a mercy for?

  His father had told him once, years earlier, half in jest, half in earnest, if he ever got like that—they were talking about his grandmother, far gone by then—just do me in, knock me on the head. But the day hasn’t yet come when old people are put to sleep like animals.

  Yet.

  He wonders what his own son will do when he grows up. What he is teaching him.

  It is the Age of Doctor Who. Time travel. That perennial fantasy. They read H. G. Wells together. The father can’t wait to show him Terminator, Star Trek, Back to the Future. The DVD player, a time machine to take them back to his own nerdy youth.

  They read A Wrinkle in Time.

  “What would you do if you had a time machine?” he asks the boy.

  “Grow up!”

  “Your little body already is a time machine.”

  “Grow up faster.”

  (He yearns to be THIS tall to ride.)

  “What would you do?” the boy asks.

  “Travel to the future to see you all grown up.”

  “Silly, you’ll be there already.”

  “But older!”

  “Oh, right.” He ponders this gravely. “Too old to play, like Grandpa.”

  “But my younger self could.”

  The boy nods against his chest.

  And the past? the father wonders, after the boy’s light is out. What would he change? What would he undo? When would he go back to?

  That day the boy fell downstairs, he thinks. To catch him as he tipped.

  * * *

  But that last’s a lie. The boy did fall downstairs that one time, but it’s not the moment the father would go back to. That was a little later, the boy on the potty, crying, trying to get up, the father holding him down with one hand. But the circumstances don’t matter. The father had slapped the boy. Not hard, but that doesn’t matter either. Just to get his attention, to snap him out of it. But none of it matters. It was the instinctiveness, the absence of thought, the hand flicking out. A reflex. If he could go back, he’d stop it. Protect the boy from himself.

  Another time he snapped at the boy, You never think of anyone else, and the boy, red-faced, told him, Yes, I do! I love you more than anything in the world. A tantrum of love. A memory the father cherishes, though he cringes at the thought of the anger that provoked it.

  * * *

  The past.

  One winter afternoon, a deer trotting up their residential street. Look, look! A scatter of hoofbeats. And then it vaults the neighbor’s fence.

  A fall morning, on their way to see the marching band before the game, walking through the student ghetto, an armchair on fire in the middle of a yard.

  That spring, a backhoe in their driveway—Mike Mulligan!—demolishing the old garage, glass raining, rotten splinters somersaulting through the air.

  All of it perfectly normal to the boy; so much so that all he can say of the deer is “It should be on the sidewalk!” like someone’s dog; so much so, he’ll shake his head in years to come when one or the other says, Remember when? and he replies, Oh, you mean the past. The mercy and horror being that he won’t remember any of this.

  But do we? she asks him. He knows what she means. Those years are already becoming hazy, each age erasing the last. Vivid moments emerge out of a white mist. He puts it down to sleep deprivation. The past feels less remembered than dismembered.

  The look of shy wonder on the boy’s face in the rearview, driving home from the pet store, a cardboard box in his lap, a hamster, rustling inside.

  The same look as you, the mother says, when you first held him in the hospital.

  * * *

  The father is almost completely certain the boy doesn’t remember that slap.

  But, of course, he can’t ask.

  * * *

  And the future.

  In the future his own father will die. The boy may barely remember him, and if at all only in his twilight state. What
will he tell the boy about his grandfather? What stories?

  The father is a writer, after all. His first published story, in fact, was about his grandmother, his father’s mother, her own struggles with dementia. His father didn’t altogether like it, his writing about her, about the family. Luckily, the writer used to think, though perhaps also by choice, his father wasn’t a reader, didn’t read his son’s work. Had he, he might have thought it a betrayal of sorts, disrespectful. Parents keep secrets from children; children are not supposed to reveal their parents’ secrets.

  The grandmother he wrote about is long dead now; the writer’s father himself barely remembers her. Very soon now his story will be all that’s left of her.

  He doesn’t feel guilty, the writer, for writing about his grandmother, or about his parents as he has also done. Who else will tell a parent’s story if not a child, after all? How else will they be remembered? To him it seems the natural order of things. Writers write against death, it is said, for posterity, for immortality. But not necessarily, or primarily, their own.

  Telling a story about a child, though? Telling a version of a life that is still soft, still forming? Like a fontanel.

  In his writing classes the father talks about appropriation, the taking and telling of other people’s stories. Young writers get exercised about these things, what they are and aren’t allowed to write. They just want to be good people, he knows, except he’s not sure writers are good people (or even should be; maybe it helps to write flawed human characters, if you are one). Certainly they’re no respecters of rules. All fiction is appropriation. Only the narrowest, most solipsistic memoir—of life on a desert island, say—doesn’t appropriate from others. Still some appropriations, he knows, are more charged than others. It’s a challenge for a woman to write a male character, but it’s a different challenge for a man to write a female character (and yes, for a man to write about abortion). For a Black writer to write a white character is one thing; for a white writer to write a Black character something else again. Something shaped by society, and history, by power and the abuse of power. Writers are no respecters of rules, of “don’t” or “can’t,” but he wants his students to understand them in order to break them. To be good writers, if not good people.