Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“Just a plane,” I say, and strap him back in, then push the chair over to a bench and sit down next to him. He doesn’t mention the slide again. Already there is something accusatory in his eyes, though his voice is still his own. A boy across the playground is bouncing a red ball, and Carl tells me that Mars years are almost three years longer than Earth years before he falls entirely silent. I don’t want to go home yet. I don’t want him trapped again, in his sickroom in our sickhouse, and I don’t want to be trapped there with him. The voices come back but there is nobody around my bench.

“Guilty,” he says, pointing at the moms and the nannies. “Guilty, guilty, guilty.” The boy with the ball kicks it our way and runs after. I kick it back but he runs up to us anyway, ignoring the ball when it shoots past him, and he stands before us, three or four years old, smiling, not saying a thing. “Not guilty,” says the entity. “Yet.”

In the ER they diagnosed Carl with altered mental status, after subjecting him to a gaggle of tests that were all normal. Eventually they let me understand that they didn’t know what was going on, but that something was going on, unless he was faking it all, which they put forth as a distinct possibility. I thought you’d have to be a pretty committed malingerer to submit to a spinal tap. During that procedure Carl lay absolutely still, not even squeezing my hand though they didn’t give him anything but a little local anesthetic around his spine. When, halfway done, the doctor asked him how he was doing, he said, “We are the dead, and what is a needle compared to a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pound airplane? Or two? Poke away, physician. You can’t hurt us like that .”

They called in the psychiatrist, and the nature of our visit seemed to change. A police officer took a permanent seat outside our room, and everyone except a kindly clinical assistant named Rebecca treated us a little differently. I think they were afraid of Carl, of the terribly unusual things he was saying to them, and about them, and of the electric sound of his voice. I was still too afraid for him to be afraid of him.

Where the ER doctors poked and prodded and irradiated in search of an answer, the psychiatrist just talked and talked. She wanted to know everything— everything —that had ever happened to us. Though it was only the late afternoon, we got a resident with a middle-of-the-night quality about her — she seemed exhausted and tired and not happy to meet any of us this late in her day. She talked to all of us together, then each of us alone, first me, then my father, and then Carl. When she talked to me her little yellow pencil would flutter madly in her notebook, and she made sympathetic noises when I told her about the divorce and then about my mother’s death, and she kept saying, “You’ve been through a lot lately,” then, “He’s been through a lot lately.” I wasn’t sure if she meant my father or Carl or even me.

Finally she talked to Carl, kicking my father and me out and shutting the door, waving the policeman down with a practiced gesture when he stood up. We paced outside, trying not to intrude on other people’s emergencies, until Rebecca showed us to a little waiting room down the hall, but it was too far away from Carl, and after five minutes in there we both stood up without discussing it and walked back to stand quietly outside the room. The resident came out crying a few minutes later.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I just need to talk to my attending,” she said and walked off down the hall. In the exam room Carl was lying flat on his stretcher, looking at a picture of Elmo waving benevolently from the ceiling.

“What did you say to her?” I asked him.

“What we say to everyone,” the voices answered, though he didn’t look at me. “You will weep, too, at our message, and harder, since we bring it specifically for you. We are here because your faithlessness called us to you, and we will stay until you remedy it with sincerity and sacrifice.” He had pointed at me while he said this, though he still didn’t turn his head, and for the next ten minutes he pointed at me wherever I went in the room, and when my father tried to fold Carl’s arm back over his chest he couldn’t move it. In ten more minutes the resident came back and said cheerfully, “We’re going to keep him!” As if that were the best news in the world.

It’s macaroni and cheese for lunch. I am making it from scratch, more for my own sake than Carl’s. He prefers it from a box, even in his natural state, but I like the process of grating the cheese and boiling the pasta, and there is something soothing about the circular motion of stirring and stirring. Outside, my father is still chopping, but he’s slowed down considerably, and though I can’t see him from the window I know he’s spending most of the time sitting on an upended log, with the ax head on the ground between his feet, his hands folded on top of the handle and his chin on his hands, staring out at the woods.

Noontime is always a little pensive for us. I get lost in complicating some very simple dish and my father takes a nap or plays his guitar, and the high sun always has a calming effect on the entity. Carl is quiet in his room now, unrestrained and sitting on the edge of his bed. He’ll stay that way for hours if we let him.

I am thinking of Carl’s mother, wondering, as always, where she is, and wondering if it would make any difference if she was around and could have been called to her son’s sickbed. He hardly remembered her, and never asked about her, which they said was part of his problem in the hospital. When I think about it I usually decide that she would just make things worse if she were still around, because she had always been a deeply strange woman, and this was just the sort of illness that would have appealed to her. It’s occurred to me more than once that she probably would have been jealous that Carl had gotten it instead of her.

“This dumb shit has got to stop,” my father says behind me. Still stirring the mac, I turn to look at him, half-expecting him to have the ax with him to enforce his demand, but he’s empty-handed. I turn back.

“He stays a little longer every time,” I say. “Have you noticed?”

“You talk like he’s not always there. Like it’s ever anybody but him.”

I shrug.

“It’s the worse thing for him, to play along with it. You know it is.”

“I don’t know anything lately, except what works.”

“What you’re doing isn’t working,” he says. “It’s not progress. It’s hurting him.”

“You want to help me bring this up?” When he doesn’t answer I turn around to ask him again but he’s gone. I listen for the sound of the ax again, but the house stays entirely silent. I stand there a little while, stirring aggressively, wondering how he can look at Carl and think that he could contain such a reserve of pathology to pull off this unwitting impersonation, this utter ruination, this scourge. I don’t know what’s worse, or harder, to believe, that a little boy could be fucked-up enough to harbor the sort of sadness and rage that the entity presents us with every day, or that thousands of souls could be fused by a firebomb into a restless collection of spirits that hungers for a justice it can only define in terms of punishment.

I don’t know how many times I’ve made macaroni and cheese in the same pot, on the same burner, at the same time of day over the past few weeks, but I seem to have noticed for the first time that the side of the pot is immensely hot, and I lay my forearm against it for as long as I can stand, and then as long as I can stand again, before I take the bowl upstairs. Not knowing where my father is in the house, I never make a sound except inside my head, but I don’t even have to show Carl my blistered skin before he is falling back into himself.