Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

You seem very calm, she says.

I just want my son, he says.

They talk for an hour. They go through the papers. His case for custody is sound. The wife lives in a small apartment in Pasadena with the lover who ended their marriage. Mr. Reis kept the four-bedroom house. The wife is unemployed. Mr. Reis owns a construction company with significant government contracts.

The son is fourteen years old with severe autism and a fixation on maps. Mr. Reis argues that the wife is negligent. She lets the teenage boy wear diapers. She dresses him in wrap dresses, as they are easier to get on and off. Lets him eat alone and with his hands. Lets him sit all day surrounded by atlases and globes, memorizing, reciting, drawing maps, the same ones over and over again. The boy, however, cannot answer geography questions when asked directly and is not classified as a savant. The boy is obese. (All this said on Helen’s recording in clipped, orderly sentences.)

Mr. Reis has drawn up a contract with a full-time ABA therapist, who will be with the boy eight hours a day, five days a week, if Mr. Reis is granted custody. Mr. Reis has consulted a psychiatrist, who will meet with the boy weekly. Mr. Reis has a plan.

Private negotiations between the parents fail. They go before a judge. Helen is confident. The therapists testify. Studies show, they say. Complex system of reward and punishment. Token economy. Alternative means of communication. Results, they say, and Helen smiles. In her youth, Mrs. Reis had a dropped charge for marijuana possession. Her housekeeper, whom they have quietly bribed through a third party, testifies to her continued use.

Mrs. Reis’s lawyer attempts to restrain his client, but Mrs. Reis shouts out in court anyway. He’s happy, she says. Look at him. He’s never going to have a job. He’s never going to be normal or productive. There’s only one thing in this goddamn world he enjoys, so why not let him have it?

These experts would disagree, Mrs. Reis, Helen says.

Mr. Reis smiles. It just takes hard work and time. His son will learn to tie his shoes, button his shirt, hold conversations, look people in the eye, sit at the dinner table. (“A simple win,” Helen says into the tape.)

I woke up on the floor. My ribs felt crushed from my sleeping on the tiles, and the throbbing in my head beat in time with the throbbing of my mosquito bites. My memory of the previous night faded out like a scene from a movie. I couldn’t remember how the tape had ended.

I found Helen in the kitchen, already showered and dressed, leaning on the counter with a mug of coffee and reading the paper. Her wet hair dripped and left a trail down the back of her blouse. She wore more makeup than the day before. “Good morning, Peter. Coffee?”

“Can I shower first?”

“Extra towel hanging up for you.”

The shower was enclosed by unfrosted glass. I watched a centipede crawling across my reflection in the mirror over the sink, lifting its iridescent body in waves. I thought about turning up the water temperature. It was still over a hundred degrees outside, but the steam would prevent me from having to see my shriveling male body.

I closed my eyes and opened my mouth. The water tasted milky and strange. I heard the door swing all the way open and hit the far wall. I was too tired to react or hide my nudity. I just stood there, naked in the shower stall, arms hanging down.

Helen raised her voice to be heard. “You haven’t done anything.”

Like it was that simple. Like we had talked about it in those stark terms, like I could have done the job with a pair of garden shears. “No.”

She hesitated, and then added, “I don’t think you should.”

“I know.”

I knew what Helen saw when she looked at my sunken chest and the thing clinging tight and shrunken between my legs: absolute, immutable truth. There is and there isn’t. And look, there, there is.

Helen entered and leaned her back against the wall. “He’s brain-dead.”

“Who?”

“The Reis boy. He attacked the ABA therapist. He broke her collarbone and gave her a concussion. She quit.” The voice on the tape started to come back to me. This was exactly what it had said, in the same loud, flat tone. “The psychologist put him on meds that kept the violence in check, at least most of the time. Then Marcus left him alone for a moment and the boy started ripping pages out of an atlas and cramming them down his own throat.”

The lukewarm water, heated from the hot earth around the pipes, finally started to run cold. “He had been without oxygen for too long when the paramedics arrived. He’s a vegetable. His mother wants to pull the plug. His father doesn’t. His father wanted me to get a court order preventing her from doing it.”

I felt a sickly movement in my gut. Alcohol poisoning, or hope.

“He was happy,” she said. “With his stupid fucking maps. He was happy. No amount of therapy was going to make him happier than that. I took it all away.”

I turned off the water, stepped out, and grabbed the towel off the rack. I wrapped it around myself under the armpits. She must have seen much worse in LA, people who molest their children, beat them senseless, hand them off to strangers to do the same. She had won cases for bad people before, had stayed up all night researching arcane precedents for them. There were judgment calls where she’d made the wrong call. This wasn’t such a call. She had known, without a doubt, that Mr. Reis was the better parent. Look at the documents. Anyone would agree. There is and there isn’t.

Helen looked at my feet, my legs, and the shapeless rectangle of the thick white towel before she found my face. Possibility bloomed like a fireball. She shrugged. I don’t know, it said. There is and there isn’t, and there could be. She strode out of the bathroom. I heard ice hitting the bottom of a glass, the bourbon that had sat open all night glugging as it was poured. I couldn’t believe it. Helen had shrugged and Father was dead.

I INTERVIEWED AT a French restaurant called Le Carré sur le Carré—the Square on the Square — in Angrignon, a wealthy Anglophone area of Montreal. They told me to come in at nine in the morning. The doors were locked, but I could see a waiter standing on a table scooping fly carcasses out of a chandelier with his hands.

I knocked on the glass. He dumped the flies into a bucket and let me in, then sent me to the kitchen. He was tall and stick-thin with the wet, buggy eyes of a lizard, and I could feel him watching me as I walked through the swinging doors.

“Hey! Whoa!”

I almost crashed into what appeared to be a child in a red baseball cap. I realized he was wearing a chef’s jacket and carrying a bag of garbage. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m…”

He put the garbage on the floor, wiped his hand on his jacket and extended it to me. He wore his chef’s jacket with the sleeves rolled all the way up to the elbow. His wide, red straight-laced skater shoes were the same color as his hat. “You must be Peter. I’m John. I’ll be trying you out.”

John was short and stocky, with a classically handsome face that seemed more of an objective fact than a matter of attraction. Bonnie called these men “picture handsome”—they looked good in photographs but were somehow too clean-cut for desire. I shook his hand. “Hi.”

He hefted the garbage bag again. “I read your resumé. I’d be surprised if we don’t hire you. Have any questions before we get started?”

The blond fuzz on his cheeks suggested the early days of puberty. “Do you mind if I ask how old you are?”

“Nineteen.”

“And what do you do here?”

“I’m the saucier. The saucy saucier.” He gave me a horsy, long-toothed grin. The waiter beside us was laying out place settings and stemware that flared like diamonds under the clean chandelier. I could feel him listening. Perhaps sending this kid to train me was some kind of test. “Just let me dump this outside and we’ll get started.”