In the Country of Fear

My son traveled alone, of course, a hard fate for a boy not yet two years old, and I have heard him talk of that time to his twin brother; and while I traveled with my wife and family and friends, each of us was in the end alone in that land. We were, in a real sense, abroad —not at home, but in a foreign nation, a country of unfa-miliar topography and tongues, in an ocean of strangers, assailed by woes and wonders here-tofore unknown. The woes were imaginable, if unbearable; the wonders were astonishing, and had to do with love.

 

I remember that I became hard of hearing in those days, and that food seemed less savory. I remember that I could never get physically comfortable, that I wriggled in chairs and waggled in bed, unable to relax or sleep. Being in that country was a kind of sickness, a seizure of the heart, and everything slowed excruciatingly. In the way of writers I kept notes, as a form of defense against horror, perhaps, and here are some:

 

My son may be fine. My son may have some minor problems. My son may have some major problems. My son may die. I try to imagine what it would be like if my son died. I cannot. I try again—try to envision a house where there is only one infant, one bottle, one stroller, one car seat, one boy. I cannot. When I concentrate on my writing I gnaw at my fingers, an unconscious habit for which I was often scolded in grade school by enormous nuns with faint mustaches and dockworkers’ forearms. The scolding didn’t take and I still chew my own skin, without thinking, when I am thinking. I eat myself. As I am thinking about Liam’s death—about the way that his heart might stop on the glaringly bright table, under all those masked faces, under the lamps that are so bright they will make him cry, about how he might die a few nights later in the dark when his sliced and hammered body sighs and gives up, about how he might die a few years later on a sunny afternoon at the beach when a tube a pipe a duct a baffle a shunt a vein pops in his battered heart and that ferocious relentless muscle sags and the blood in his veins slogs to a halt and he falls to his pink knees near the water as his mother looks up from the porch and drops her book her tea her heart—I notice with a start that I am savagely eating myself and that my fingers are bleeding. The blood is rich bright frightening red, the product of my perfect red heart. As bubbles of blood swell from the corners of my fingers I think suddenly of Liam’s crooked gunslinger’s grin, which starts out normally on the left side of his face like anyone’s everyone’s smile but slides down into a sly sardonic slice of merriment on the other side—and then slides into me like a brilliant perfect knife.