Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“Let’s talk about that day again,” Dr. Sandman said to Carl. I was watching them from behind a piece of one-way glass, along with the rest of the “team,” two residents and a nurse practitioner and a social worker and a ridiculous medical student who only looked a couple months older than Carl. We had been there for a week and a half already, and I had gotten to know their secret-spy room quite intimately. They asked a lot of questions, and they watched Carl sitting by himself, refusing to play with the variety of toys they put in front of him, watched him reduce another resident to tears, watched him sitting there doing nothing at all. They watched me talking to him, and listened as the thing I was coming to know as the entity listed my sins, personal and paternal and civic, all the ways I had disappointed these thousands of strangers. I kept saying, “Carl, Carl, come out from in there,” though I wasn’t supposed to say that, I wasn’t supposed to do anything that would make Carl feel uncomfortable, or like he had to do something. They were always telling me what not to do with him, and always in the friendliest way: You might not want to raise your voice at him. You might not want to tell him that he’s making you angry. You might not want to tell him he is making you sad .

“Our birthday,” Carl said, smiling.

“Is that what it was?” Dr. Sandman asked. He was a large man, three inches taller than me, with at least fifty pounds on me, and not fat. He looked more suited to hunting down bail-skipping criminals than ferreting out the secret pain of children.

“Of course. We were born in the fire even as we died from it.”

“Yes, you’ve told me that. But what were you doing? What was happening in the house when you heard about the planes. It was a long time ago, but do you remember?” He had asked me the same question, in the same room, before I was brought to the other side of the glass. He asked if we let Carl watch the television footage of the planes crashing into the buildings and I said not we, but somebody did. His mother wanted him to see it. She thought that it was important.

“Other people forget,” Carl said to Sandman. “We never will. We were doing. . everything. You could never understand. You have always been just one, we are thousands.”

“Help me understand.” So his mother went away after the. . disaster? he had asked me, and I said yes , for the first time. And he sat there tapping his pencil against his teeth for something like a full minute.

“Help you? Help you ? We are dead, you are alive. There is an arithmetic of obligation. Why don’t you help us?”

“I’m trying to help you. By talking with you.” Does he ever ask about his mother now , Sandman had asked me. Does he ever ask where she is? I said that we didn’t really talk about her much.

“Words are not sufficient. Words are not justice. You promised that everything would be different, that everything would be better, but everything is the same, or worse. Now we require satisfaction, and words do not satisfy us.”

“Talking is the best way to feel better,” Dr. Sandman said. “You’ve got to trust me on that one, Carl.”

Then Carl wouldn’t say any more, but only glared furiously around the room, and every time Sandman spoke he only mocked him by raising his hand and moving it like a gibbering mouth. You may not want to tell him to trust you, I thought. You may not want to call him Carl.

Back in his room I sat with him, waiting for my father to come and take over. We split the days, and Carl was never alone, but it was harder than having him at home is, because we were always with him. He had a roommate, a bald six-year-old who seemed more peculiar than psychotic. A loose-lipped nurse told me that he pulled out all his hair and ate it. He always called my father and me “sir,” and otherwise did not speak much to us.

I fell asleep that afternoon in the chair next to Carl’s bed, because he was so quiet, probably still angry from Sandman’s questioning. It wasn’t for long. Carl woke me again, talking, and before I was fully awake I realized there was something different about his voice. It still had that electric, many-voiced quality, but it was kind, or at least not accusatory, and not angry.

“Every promise is broken,” he was saying, “but we must take up the broken promises and bind them whole again with blood.”

“I like blood,” said a voice behind me, and I understood that Carl was talking to the weird bald kid. “It makes me happy when I drink it.”

“We are never happy,” Carl said. “For those who can get happiness from drinking blood, we say let them do it, but my blood bindings are not red. Blood is sacrifice. Everything else is irrelevant, or a worse mistake.”

“You are sad spirits,” said the boy. “I think you must be missing your brother, like me.”

“We miss everyone. We are a host but we are utterly alone. Yet it is the faithlessness of brothers that pains us, too.”

“Sad spirits! I knew so many, when I was younger. Do you speak the language of grief, then?” And the kid started to make barking, sobbing noises at Carl.

“We speak every language,” said Carl, and he started to bark and sob back at the bald kid. My father came through the door, thinking, I knew, that things could not possibly get any more fucked-up than this.

“Time for me to go, pal,” I said and stood up too quickly. I knocked my head hard against a heavy lamp suspended over Carl’s bed, and it hurt like hell. I shouted, “Fuck!” Carl’s eyes went wide, at the curse, I thought, and then his sobbing barks turned to ordinary sobbing, and for the first time in a week and a half he sounded like himself. In his own voice he asked me what time it was.

My father has a lifelong habit of never staying angry at me for long, even when he’s on the right side of the argument. We make spaghetti for dinner, because Carl is still back, despite the risk of a mess if he should go away again. “What did you do?” my father asked me, looking at my bruised face and hands for new marks, but my burn is covered by my sleeve.

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all. He’s just. . back.” And then I say, though I know I shouldn’t, “Maybe it’s over. Maybe it’s just over.”

It’s harder getting the medication into Carl when he’s back, but he’s supposed to take it at dinnertime. There are tears before he’ll take it, but that doesn’t make the slightest difference to my good mood, or my father’s, and we rub off on him.

“It tastes like feet!” he says, but he’s smiling. We eat downstairs, for once, and my father sets the table as if for a holiday, with fancy plates and candles. Carl twirls his pasta expertly and pretends that he’s been in a coma for ten years.

“Do we have a lady president yet?” he asks.

“Yes,” says my father. “A black lady.”

“All right ! Are people living on the moon?”

“And Mars,” I say. “Terraforming is under way.”

“Cool,” he says. “Cancer?”

“Defeated,” my father says.

“Finally,” Carl says. “But who’s at war?”

“Nobody,” I say.

“Peace everywhere,” my father says.

“And nobody is starving except the teenagers who kind of want to,” I say.

“A perfect world,” my father says, leaning back and laughing as he raises his wineglass to us, and I smile, too, but uneasily, because I realize all of a sudden that we are all pretending, and maybe that’s not the best thing for us to be doing as a family. And as if on cue Carl’s smile vanishes, and he sneers, and in the electric voice he shouts, “Liar!”

It’s just a spasm, but the rest of dinner is somber. We don’t play any more games, and limit our conversation. Carl tells us about the way a dynamo works.