Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“Goddamn it all,” says Carl. “Goddamn your faithlessness and your short memory and your tiny selfish heart and your. . ah!” I interrupt the tirade by slamming my finger in the drawer of his nightstand. I watch his face as I do it: It opens up and becomes a child’s face again, even before it becomes particularly his own face again. There is awe and delight written upon it, and then it falls into an expression of sadness and confusion and Carl starts to cry in the ordinary sobbing of a nine-year-old, without any keening choir overtones or screeching old-lady echoes. Every time this happens he acts the same way, sleepy and confused and sad.

He cries and looks around his room and recognizes me.

“Dad,” he says, “what time is it? What time is it?” which is exactly what he said when he woke up from his operation.

I say, “Nine o’clock, pal. It’s going to be a great day.” And I draw him over into my lap and hold him against me while he cries. From the way my finger is already bruising I figure we have at least an hour.

One night he went to bed as Carl, a not entirely ordinary nine-year-old who read too much and hated sports and had a somewhat morbid imagination; the next morning he awoke as something else: a vengeful spirit, thousands of angry strangers, a changeling. I knocked on his door to wake him like always, and didn’t actually go into his room until he failed to show himself downstairs with only twenty minutes left before the school bus would come. In his room I found him still in bed, a lump under the covers. This usually meant that he had been up reading until only a few hours before. My father and I always checked to make sure his light stayed off, but he kept a dozen little penlights here and there around his room, and we could never manage to take them all away.

“Pal,” I said. “Are you awake?”

“We are awake,” came the reply, and I didn’t really notice the difference in his voice because it was muffled by the sheets and blankets.

“Well, Your Highness, the bus will be here in twenty minutes. So let’s get moving.” Lately he had been reading obsessively about Elizabeth I, and my father had even caught him dressed up in one of his mother’s old nightgowns with a lampshade turned upside down around his neck, issuing decrees to his own reflection. I thought he was just using the royal “we.”

“We do not ride in buses,” he said, and then sat up, flexing straight from the waist, still covered in his blanket. Even before the blanket fell away, and he turned toward me so I could see his face, I was afraid for him. “Or in automobiles or airplanes, but we drift on the original wind that rose up as the towers fell, and we are always restless.”

He stared at me with alien eyes, looking at me, not like he didn’t know me, but like he knew me very well and didn’t like me at all.

“Carl,” I said, “knock it off. This isn’t funny.”

“He’s gone away,” he said. “Don’t worry too much, we’ll keep him perfectly safe.”

I opened my mouth to yell at him, and stepped forward toward the bed to give him a shake, to tell him to snap out of it. Knock it the fuck off, I was about to say, though I hadn’t cursed at him or around him since before his mother left. But somehow I knew he wasn’t trying to be funny, and that, whatever was happening, he wasn’t doing it on purpose. This was something very different from every other time he had pretended to be someone he was not, dead kings and queens, Old Yeller, Miss Piggy. . he had a long history of transient impersonations. Someone in a book or television show caught his fancy and he decided to be them, but no matter how hard he pretended he never before managed to seem so not like himself as he did now. I didn’t yell at him. I didn’t even stay in the room. I went and got my father instead.

Carl sticks around for a while. Eventually he calmed, like he always does, and we had the same conversation about what was happening to him, how he was sick, how he was asleep a lot. And he said, like he always did, that he was sure he had been dreaming, though he couldn’t remember even the briefest scene of the dreams, or recall if they were good dreams or bad dreams. When I had him on these visitations I always wanted to just sit with him and talk about nothing, or listen to him tell me fascinating trivia about some dead president or king, something that had passed for normal in the old days. He always got bored with me, though, and when I wouldn’t let him go to school or go for a bike ride or to a friend’s house or to read by himself he would get angry, and usually I would calm him by reading to him from some dull biography until he was gone again. But today I take him for a walk.

“Why do I have to sit in this stupid chair?” he asks me as I strap him into his fancy wheelchair. It was sort of a gift from the hospital. Not that we didn’t pay for it, but one of the puppyish residents wrangled it for him, insisting that there wasn’t any reason that he should have to stay inside all the time when he went home. It was one of the fancy chairs that cerebral palsy kids get. “I look like a retard,” Carl said.

“You might fall asleep,” I told him as I tightened his seatbelt. He never fell asleep outside, but he might chase somebody, shouting “Fire on Babylon!” if he could get out of the chair too easily. “That’s what happens,” I say. “One minute you’re playing tennis and the next you’re sound asleep.”

“That’s narcolepsy,” he says. “Do I have narcolepsy?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “But you sleep a lot. You’re getting better, though.”

“I hate tennis. When was I playing tennis?”

“It’s a figure of speech,” I say, and then my father comes stomping into the room. He usually hides when Carl is back, and when Carl asks after him I say he is out for a drive or buying new teeth or on a date with some lady who is a hundred and five. “Look who’s back,” I say to him.

“You’re a fool,” he says, so quietly and so close to my ear I am probably the only one who can hear him. “It’s not right. It’s not what they told us to do.” I shrug, and turn the chair around, as if presenting him with his grandson. It’s the only answer I can give him, to say, Look, I don’t care what they told us in the hospital. They don’t have a fucking clue what’s happening, but here’s Carl back, for a little while.

“Look at me, Grandpa,” Carl says. “I’m a retard.”

“The retard is standing behind you,” my father says, then bends down and clutches him in a death hug.

“Ouch,” Carl says. “I’m coming back .” My father doesn’t say anything else to either of us, just turns and goes outside behind the house, where he starts chopping wood. It’s still too early in the autumn for a fire, but this is what he does when he’s very upset. We already have enough to last through the whole winter.

“Where do you want to go?” I ask Carl as I maneuver the wheelchair down the jury-rigged ramp that goes from the side door off the kitchen to the driveway.

“Where haven’t I been lately?” he asks cheerily, and I’m struck by how quickly he seems to recover from his time away, and how ordinary he seems. It’s hard to believe that there’s anything wrong.

“Everywhere,” I tell him, which is true, and we make a plan to walk all the way down to the river, but we only get as far as the park before he says he wants to stop and asks if he can go on the slide. “Better not,” I say. “It’s high up. What if you fell asleep?”

“Then I’d just slide down,” he says, and I have a hard time arguing with that, or else I am just being careless, and hoping without any evidence or precedent that he might just stay how he is. I don’t even have him unstrapped from the chair when a plane flies a bit lower than usual overhead and he cowers away from it, trying to throw himself out of his chair. “Get down!” he shouts. “It’s in the sky. . it’s coming!” We don’t live anywhere near an airport, and I shout at the plane as it flies over, because there’s no reason it should be here, or that it should fly so low, except to torture us. The mothers and nannies look away from their toddlers to watch us, and the whole playground seems to go silent as the jet noise fades away. And then Carl straightens up and says, “What was that?” and the regular playground sounds are back again.