Mark Doten - The Infernal

He used to be light as a bird. Not anymore. Me and Charlie, we’re both getting a little fat, I guess. But sometimes when he’s coughing he turns really easy, like the coughing’s started to lift him right off the bed — like it’s little wings all over him, lifting him up. I’m pretty good at working with his energy — at taking whatever’s going on in his body and helping him get comfortable.

Can you blame Shawna for going a little crazy sometimes? Me with my leg, Charlie with his multiple disabilities and button. Me wheeling Charlie into our bedroom every night because the wife says the monitor’s not enough when we’re asleep — we’ve got to have him right there in case he starts coughing.

I fixed myself another drink, a more serious one. I left enough for her to have another, though, holding the monitor as O0AP O.70 QRHZY 2Q0EOCWN WSRUCW

I empathize 100 percent with Shawna’s point of view. She works full-time at a shitty little dentist’s office, then comes home to this freak show. And as charming and wonderful as I’m sure I am, there are, to add yet another wrinkle, cultural issues — I can’t be there for her, support her, all the time, in every way she’d like. I see her talk to certain coworkers, her sister, and it’s different. It’s a whole different side of her.

My wife is black, I’m white. And sometimes she acts closed off around me and other white people. Not judging, just observing. People of all races have all kinds of reactions to all kinds of things. I do! But here’s what I don’t do. I don’t get a whole different voice and way of talking and even of holding my body and, my god, laughing when I’m around my people — which is not saying I’m better or more authentic than Shawna, it’s just kind of fascinating to see how these things play out. When the laughter is genuine and when it’s choked off, sarcastic, halfhearted. Maybe in some weird small way that’s her disability. Again, no big deal. Compared to what she puts up with from me and Charlie, it’s a piece of cake.

No, it’s something else that bothers me. It’s how she acts around our son these days — how she doesn’t touch him unless she has to. Diapers, or hooking up the bag with his nourishment — sure, then she touches him. But otherwise — at least when I’m watching — she stays back out of the frame. Doesn’t stroke his forehead, doesn’t hold his hand and read him stories like how she used to. At first I thought it was that her love for him had … that it had just died. Maybe when I was in Iraq. I even found myself thinking I was part of it. This interracial kid. That he’s broken, somehow — genetically — not because of the racial component, but not not because of it. And Dad’s off being some sort of hero in Iraq, and here she is, with a kid who’s become a series of chores, all these frankly disgusting little tasks and obligations she can see stretching out for the rest of her life. I thought: maybe she had loved the baby — this malfunctioning, mixed-race baby — for as long as she could love him, but then she couldn’t anymore. Couldn’t bear it — loving a child like that. I thought maybe that was it. But then one night the camera was knocked a little off its usual angle, and I saw her at the foot of the bed, holding his ankle with one hand, kneeling and watching him and her lips were moving, I guess in prayer.

And I saw so much love, it almost stopped my heart.

I felt my blood — could feel it pounding in my stump. Hell, I could feel it pounding past the stump — into the leg that was gone. And right there on the couch, watching the monitor sitting up on top, and the TV still churning with sex and murder and commercial breaks in the room I knew so well, with its carpet that’s prematurely old and stained and almost somehow zipped open in places, and the windows reflecting my face and the play of the overhead and TV lights, I could feel the blood pounding through my stump — I could feel it pounding through the whole room!

Poor Shawna! On the one hand: love. And on the other: a lifetime sentence of disgusting chores. An existence you never wanted or expected — never made room for in all the pretty visions of the future you might have had as a child, or young woman.

That’s why I try to wrap my own leg. Today, when I told her I’d done it myself, that was a lie. But I would do it. Because I don’t want Shawna spending one more second on me and my problems than she absolutely has to.

I heard the shower stop. I hadn’t heard it go on, I hadn’t heard it going, but I heard it stop, and I heard her drying herself, and I realized she wasn’t in with Charlie anymore. Then she stepped into the bedroom and approached the closet. I heard all of this, and I heard her open the closet door. Then — what else? — she pulled out several dresses and laid them on the bed — the red dress and the white dress and the black dress, let’s say. I knew she’d end up with the black dress, that was her favorite. Mine too. A year earlier on the phone I’d asked if she’d wear that on our next anniversary. And since getting back, whenever I told her to put it on she always said, No way, Mister , she was waiting for our anniversary, it was her anniversary dress.

My leg started to insist a little — started to throb. But there was no time.

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“The Gallant Arms,” she said, when she was back down. “OK,” she said. “I like the sound of that.”

So, here’s where we were: I was seated at the computer, she was bent at the waist behind me, and our son was upstairs, resting comfortably. My wife and I, we were cheek-to-cheek — cheek-to-cheek on our anniversary.

“Love you, babe,” I said.

I pulled up the search engine and started typing “Gallant Arms.”

That’s when it happened. Something that threatened to derail the whole evening. Two words flashed. Only for a split second, but right in our faces, highlighted in blue.

If I’d been feeling a buzz from the drink, that killed it dead. Those words, well, they sobered me right up.

And sure, it was bad. I knew that. But I could see everything so clearly.

Background: I use one browser for porn and another for everything else. The porn browser you’ve got to dig down through a couple folders to get to. My wife isn’t on the Internet much — she follows the message boards about kids with multiple disabilities, runs symptoms, real or imagined, through medical sites. E-mails herself little logs of when Charlie’s button’s been rotated and swabbed, his urine hue, etc. My point being: I doubt she’d ever stumble on the porn browser. And even if she did, I’m diligent in clearing the history, the cache, the saved forms. I do everything possible to prevent what just happened from happening, an autofill like that — for something questionable to pop up.

Well, those two words had flicked. And maybe I had gotten lazy recently. I’d been online earlier that day, and I must have slipped up, left the browser open and uncleared, my brain too fucked by all this anniversary busines PSALOTRBIXYAOT D

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Think of all the times I’d brooded over our anniversary in the last months — hundreds, let’s say thousands of times. Whole nights torn up, the sheets all knotted. The kind of care it takes to knot just my side of the sheets, to leave her sweetly dreaming while anniversary concerns, the whole anniversary minefield, rages across my half. And her restless leg syndrome didn’t help, either.

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