Colin Harrison: The Havana Room

And what he accepts most, now anyway, is that his wife is asleep and unavailable, if not unwilling. He's not getting any action, not tonight anyway- and he accepts that, yes, he does.

So, mouth still full of Thai food, nutty and chickeny and hot, he returns to his den and flicks through the cable channels, hoping for some T amp;A. He'll take anything. Television's standards of indecency rise quickly after midnight, the networks desperate to grab anyone not snagged by the Internet's pornucopia. Anything will do. He's not particular. He's generic. He's a minivan, remember! He has a face full of Thai food, grease on his hands and face and shirt, and is sort of nudging himself, who cares if he gets grease on his pants, just to get the feedback loop started, penis-to-head, head-to-penis. He flicks through two dozen channels with genius reflexes, identifying each show's whack-off potential in perhaps a second before moving on- and yes! Here's some kind of spring-break concert, girls in bikinis, dudes in hats spinning turntables, the girls lewdly greased up with suntan lotion, white girls, black girls, dancing around, tits jiggling, fine, this is sufficient, not porn exactly, but sufficient, he'll pay his bills afterward, just get it done with, and he unbuckles his belt, mouth burning a bit from the food, and then- then he hears footsteps in the hall.

"Yeah?" he calls anxiously, pulling out his shirt to cover his groin.

"I'm thirsty."

"Okay," he calls heartily, filled with relief he hasn't been seen.

It's one of the boys, which one he doesn't know, standing in the doorway, blinking sleepily, warmly rumpled in pajamas that recapitulate the uniform of the Jets' starting quarterback.

"I'm Timmy's dad. You want something to drink?"

"Okay. Yes, please."

The old Bill Wyeth now jumps up and hurries to the kitchen to pour the boy some milk. Skim? Regular? He chooses regular, which will be a little heavier in the boy's stomach and perhaps help him sleep better. He hurries back to the hall. The boy is so sleep-slumpy that Bill has to help him hold the glass, greasy from Bill's hands. The boy lifts the glass slowly. The milk is just what he wants. A darling kid, long lashes, hair fuzzed up by his pillow. He swallows the last of the milk, leaving a white mustache over his lip. "Thanks," he says, drifting toward the bedroom. Bill follows, stepping carefully over the other boys, and helps him settle into his sleeping bag, with a few fatherly pats on the back.

Then he retreats to the den, locks the door, finds his dancing sluts on the television, and whacks off- very economically, using the greasy Thai food carton as a receptacle. Then he pays bills for half an hour, also making a donation to an environmental group that's fighting global warming. Oceans on the rise, deserts spreading, apocalypse guaranteed. Having done this, he puts the boy's glass in the dishwasher and tidies up the kitchen. This will please Judith. Always good to please the wife a bit. At one point he is on his knees scraping green bubble gum from the slate floor that the designer insisted was low maintenance. Next he gets a garbage bag and fills it with party debris, bill notices, junk mail, the dual-purpose Thai food carton, and whatever other refuse he can find and drops it all into the building's trash chute. Then he pokes his head into the boys' room again. One of them is snoring thickly, gurgling with a stuffed nose. Then Bill Wyeth undresses and slips into bed next to his wife. The tip of his penis has a dab of residual wetness on it, a tickle, a stickum of memory, as if he and Judith have actually just had sex. He shifts his limbs, he grinds against the sheets, he eases joints and releases breath, he pushes away the work worries that quickly grow frondlike on the walls of sleep. He has done nothing wrong, he is loyal and true. He pays his taxes and doesn't sit in the handicapped seating on the subway. He has earned his rest, and now, dropping into sleep, feels something close to happiness.

Bill Wyeth is safe.

In the morning the boys rushed one by one into the dining room. Judith, up early, had arranged perhaps ten different brands of cereal in the middle of the table.

"Did Wilson get up?" she said after a few minutes.

"He was asleep," answered our son, reading the back of a cereal box.

Judith walked out of the kitchen. I returned my attention to the paper.

"Bill?" came her voice from the hall. "Come here."

I didn't worry until I saw Judith kneeling next to the boy to whom I'd given the milk. She gently rubbed his back, trying to wake him. "Wilson?" she said. "Wilson, sweetie?" She stopped rubbing his back and waited for a reaction, for him to stir. But nothing happened.

"Wilson? We've got breakfast ready," Judith cooed.

"I don't like the way he's just lying there," I said.

"Wilson?" Judith tried again.

I thought the boy's face looked oddly puffy, his fingers pale.

"Wilson? Wilson?" Judith turned to me. "I can't wake him up!"

And neither could I. I knelt down and shook him. He was cold, his head too floppy. "We need an ambulance!"

As Judith raced to the phone, I rolled Wilson to his side, releasing pizza-lumpy vomit from his mouth. One of his eyes, nearly closed, showed only a slit of white; the other studied a poster of the great Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter. The surfaces of both eyes were dry. The boy looked dead. But he couldn't be. I felt hot, stupid, sickish.

My wife returned, closing the door behind her, phone to her ear. "We have a problem," she announced, trying to stay calm, "we need an ambulance… we have an eight-year-old boy who isn't breathing… What? I don't know! We just woke up! No, no, we just woke up, he didn't! Oh, please, come- I don't know how long-" And then our address and phone number. "Please, please hurry!"

"He was fine last night."

The door opened. Timothy poked his head in, eyes panicked. "Mom?"

"I want you to close the door, Timmy."

" Mom."

"Do as I say."

He glanced at me. "The other boys-"

Judith growled, "Close… the door."

He did. He did what his mother told him, and would in the future. Now Judith knelt next to Wilson. "What did you say? He was fine?"

"Yes."

"You checked on all the boys?"

"Wilson woke up."

"What did you do?" Something twisted in Judith's voice.

"I gave him a glass of milk and put him back to bed."

She seemed to be searching around him, lifting up the other boys' sleeping bags and pillows. "Not peanut butter?"

"I gave him milk," I repeated.

Judith shook her head violently, in anger or frustration. "He has a severe peanut allergy, it's this crazy, crazy thing!" She grabbed Wilson's backpack and frantically pulled out underwear adorned by Jets insignias, a fresh shirt, and socks. "His mother made me swear not to give him anything with peanuts in it. Not the tiniest bit. Even molecules. It sets off a chain reaction in his immune system. She had to call the restaurant ahead of time to explain, and he carries a shot just in case." She looked at her watch. "It's too late, it's- I threw away all the peanut butter in the house! I threw away the eggs and the cashews! I looked at all the candy!"

"Judith, I gave him milk."

She unzipped the boy's sleeping bag and pulled it back, finding aplastic case marked EPINEPHRINE INJECTION- FOR USE IN ANAPHYLACTIC EMERGENCY. "It's empty!" she cried. She pulled the sleeping bag open further. Next to the boy's limp hand lay a yellow plastic injector device with a short needle sticking out of it. "There it is!" she said. "He was trying to- he knew… oh, he knew!" Weeping, she bent down to kiss the boy, as if trying to bring him back to life. "Oh God, I promised… I promised his mother-" She looked up and faced me savagely. "Was anything on the glass?"

"Like what?"