About My Son

One day I got a letter from a girl that I used to date.  She asked me to come see her, and I followed the address that she gave me to an old run down apartment building.  As I was climbing the stairs, she met me in the stairwell.  She didn't waste any time.  She came right out and told me that I had a son.  A dark-haired, dark-eyed boy peeked out shyly from behind her.

I stayed with them for the next couple of weeks, but oddly enough, all subsequent developments took place in that same stairwell.  We never made it up to the apartment.  I never took my shoes off and settled in where it was comfortable and warm.  We stayed in this cold stairwell like people locked out of their lives, that long waiting slide down the wall, gnawing tense and uncommitted.  The girl went to work and left me with the boy.  He brought a crude crayon drawing over to show me.  I realized that I felt no connection to this kid at all.

A friend of mine finally helped me to see it.  He dropped by the stairwell and told me I had to search my heart; I had to look at the boy's face and see if I saw anything of myself.  I had to accept this unsettled feeling that I had.  I stared into the boy's eyes for a long, long time.  There was nothing.  The girl had made a mistake.  This wasn't my son.  I handed him his drawing back to him, tousled his hair regretfully, and then I turned and headed back down those dank stairs and out of the building.     

Moving the Cosmic Levers

We moved into a new house.  The master bedroom was spacious and the entire ceiling was a huge domed skylight, giving the unmistakable impression of sleeping out in the open air.  Over by the mantelpiece there was a fairly large, rusty, contraption of levers.  The levers were marked "day", "month", etc.  They were heavy and hard to turn and I could feel gears inside the mechanism spinning in different directions as I slid the lever along its track.  Releasing the lever, it would pop up and lock into place.  I moved all of the levers to the proper settings, so that they matched with the current date,year, and time.

Once the mechanism was set, I turned and looked up towards the sky, somehow instinctively knowing that I would see the results of my manipulations there.  Nothing happened at first, but after a blink or two, I began to notice that the stars were moving, swimming, twirling, undulating even.  As it went on, it suggested music, although I heard nothing.  "Because there's no sound in space!", I reminded myself.  I just shook my head at the non-sequitur and smiled up at the orchestration of the stars.    

Gun Safety Tip

We ran into a small group of people and my brother decided to tell them the story about a mishap I'd had many years ago.  It was back when I was a teenager.  I was hanging out with my friends and we were drinking and someone had a handgun with them.  At some point I got a hold of the gun, and I randomly fired six rounds out the window laughing.  Well, it turns out that this kid that I had gone to school with was out for a walk that night, enjoying the nice summer air.  The bullet caught him right through the neck.  I shook my head in regret and told the group, "If you ever shoot a gun, make sure that you're always aiming a specific target and you're shooting directly at it.  Never fire aimlessly out a window." 

A People Whisperer

My job was to go in and deal with people who had been emotionally damaged or disturbed.  I wasn't there to provide therapy or analysis or anything like that.  I was just there to get them back on track, to ease the transition, to get them to a place where they could function in their lives again.

I showed up one morning to visit a client.  Her apartment was laid out in such a way that you had to cut through the kitchen on your way in, and as I was passing through I noticed two cold slices of toast sticking up from the toaster.  I found the client, Karen, in the living room clutching to a third slice of toast with both hands as she nibbled nervously at it.  "Karen", I said gently, as I typically did in such situations, "you know that there are already two slices of toast in the toaster."

"I can't go back in there.", she shook her head on the verge of panic.  Her eyes were sore and bulging, and for a second I saw it just as she did, the shadow lurking in the doorway at the end of the counter.  I crossed the room and took her in my arms, drawing her towards me.  "I know there are dark places sometimes.  It's alright.  It's all going to be okay."

But as she started away from me, I began to think of the worst thing I could do at the moment.  I thought of how awful it would be if I came up behind her and grabbed her and let out a loud yelp.  You know, like a joke.  And then somehow I found myself compelled forward, actually doing it whether I wanted to or not.  I grabbed her and yelled, and I ended up startling myself so much that I woke up. 

The Box

This woman that we knew had been in some kind of accident.  The only thing that the doctors had been able to save was her brain, which for some reason, they were keeping alive in this big concrete slab that was rooted to the ground in a dark corner of the local park.  My wife and I went to see her.  There were wet leaves scattered on the ground around the box and more leaves blowing in the air.  We huddled in our coats as we approached the box, stealing nervous glances at it, not sure what to say.  There was something inscribed on the front of it, but it was half-covered by the leaves, and we were too afraid to even touch the box and brush the leaves aside.

Still, we tried to talk to this woman, trapped somewhere inside the box.  But other than the mechanical sounds of the internal apparatus keeping the brain alive, there was nothing.  There was no sign that there was anything conscious in there.  We had nothing but the doctor's word that she was still a living, thinking, being.  I tried to imagine it, existing as nothing but a brain in a box, completely cut off from the world, totally alone in a dark, damp, corner of the park.  I made me sick to think about it.