Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

I use up the last minutes of his presence with a quick bath; by the time he’s back in bed, he’s gone. “What did you do for us today?” he asks me as we strap him into his restraints for the night. “Have you made the change I asked you for?”

“Nighty night,” my father says, and kisses Carl on the head. Carl turns his head and spits, not much volume but he makes a loud noise, “Ptui.” My father goes to the door and waits for me, glaring, waiting for me to hurt myself again. I lean down close to Carl.

“You are breaking my heart,” I say.

“Yes,” say the voices. “Into two thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-eight pieces.”

I wasn’t the only one to leave work. Dozens of us disappeared, going home to be with our families as the world ended. I came home early that day. Carl’s mother had already picked him up. His teacher had called in a panic, as if the preschools were going to be the next target.

I expected to find them doing something ordinary — making cookies, playing a board game, reading a story in the yard. I don’t know why I expected his mother to manufacture a sense of peace around him, or to prepare one for me. As I said, she was a strange woman even before she became intolerably strange and selfishly crazy, before she went off on the journey that Carl and I were not allowed to accompany her on. This was the sort of thing she had been waiting for all her life, confirmation that the world outside was just as fucked-up as the one inside her.

I walked in the door and saw them standing hand in hand in front of the television, watching the replay footage of the towers falling.

“Do you see?” she said to him. “This is just what I mean. It’s kairos, breaking through time to make history. Do you feel it?” she asked him, and she shivered all over.

“Dad!” Carl said, when he saw me. “There’s people in there!”

He was three years old.

The house is old but not very big. My father will sleep through anything short of screams of bloody murder, and I have earplugs, but I’m afraid to put them in because I want to hear if Carl should happen to become himself in the middle of the night. I am thinking as I lie there, listening to him mutter, that that will never happen. I press on the burn on my wrist and regret the lie I told my father, that Carl had just gotten better, that whatever was in him had just tired of us and gone away, without anyone having paid some departure price. I wonder if things would be different if we had spent that day making cookies and playing games and pretending that the world had not changed, or if it would be different if his mother had never left, if the chaos she radiated would have been better for him than the dull peace that my father and I have provided. I wonder if it would have helped to have asked him every day if he missed his mother, if he thought I drove her away, if he worried that she was dead.

The answer to those questions is always that I don’t know, and usually I drift off to sleep to the mumbling voices in an agony of not-knowing, not knowing what I did wrong or what I am currently doing wrong or what I am going to do wrong tomorrow to perpetuate my son’s suffering and my own.

But tonight I just lie there, in unrelieved paralysis, until very suddenly the not-knowing breaks apart into a very clear certainty, and it’s like I always just fell asleep too soon for certainty, and a certain comfort, to come settling on me in my bed. I get up and go back to Carl’s room, undo his restraints, and sit him up.

“What do you want?” I ask him.

“You know it,” the voices say. “Every day we tell you. Justice. Satisfaction. Vengeance.”

“What do you want?” I ask again, and this time I poke him in the chest.

“You know!”

“Tell me!”

“You said it would be different, but everything is the same. You were supposed to become your better self, and where is he now? Pay us our blood price. Bring him back!”

“Him? My son?”

“Fool! Your self!”

“I just want my son back,” I say. “Just give me back my son.” I push him again, harder, so he falls back against the headboard we’ve padded with blankets, and the voices laugh.

“Prove to us that you deserve him. Prove to us that you will be different.” They laugh and laugh and laugh at me. I grab Carl by the front of his pajamas and haul him out of bed, and drag him with me, still laughing, downstairs to the kitchen, and I hold him dangling next to me while I look around frantically at the butcher knives, the oven, the microwave, the vacuum cleaner, trying to think. . what can I do that will be enough, a final proof, enough to get him back forever. I take him through the door and down the steps, around to the back of the house.

It’s a little rainy but warm. Low clouds reflect the streetlights back at us and the whole yard is bathed in a soft orange light. I push Carl down too roughly against the neat wall of wood my father has made, enough for two long winters. I kneel down beside him and take up my father’s ax. Carl has stopped laughing and smiling. His gaze is fixed on me.

“Coward,” he says. “Fool. Promise-breaker.” But the voices are speaking very softly. I put my hand down against the top of the stack of wood, looking at the bruises and the burns, and it occurs to me that I have always kept one hand whole and untouched, and that the vast majority of my body is unbruised and untouched by Carl’s ordeal.

I switch the ax to my injured hand. It’s not easy, not, like one might hope, a matter of a single stroke. I don’t know how many it is — three or four, I think, but it feels like I am chopping away in an eternity of effort at something much more durable than flesh and bone. I only look at my wrist for the first stroke; afterward I find my mark without looking at it. I am staring at Carl, at the thing that is in him, asking them both with every stroke, “Is it enough?” And I think I mean is it enough to prove to them I love my son, or that I deserve to have him back, that I mean it when I say I promise to take better care of him, that I promise to be a better father, to unroot whatever fault in me threw him into the company of these angry souls who died to make us all citizens of the world, and that I’ll be better to them, too, and never step out of the shadow of the day they died, if that’s what it means now to be good. “You fuckers !” I shout. “Is it enough?”

Carl’s face changes: he looks proud, then curious, then he seems to be gorging on the blood and anger and pain in the air. His face gets ruddy and full and more and more pleased, and then all of a sudden it is entirely blank, and then he is wearing an opposite face. His grinning mouth contracts to an O of sorrow and distress, and he waves his arms around so it looks like he is falling through the air, like he is falling back into himself. He gives a start in his whole body and his face is changed so fundamentally I feel sure there can’t be anything foreign left in him. I am listening so hard to him cry, trying to hear a trace of the other, that I forget to breathe and forget to cry myself, and I would not be surprised if I forgot to bleed. Then I fall over next to him, my wrist jammed against my side, and I can’t get the words out to tell him what time it is, or to answer when my father comes out with a flashlight to curse me to hell and ask me what I’ve done.

There is not much to do, when you are dying, but lie on your side and watch the progress of the battle. I have taken an early hit on the first day at Chickamauga. It’s an inglorious end, one for which my father and my brothers would never settle. They are still loading, shooting, advancing toward a field where Rebels sprout like contrary weeds. “Shoot one for me, Captain!” I shouted to my father as I fell. He did not look away from his aim, but said, not without some tenderness, “I’ll shoot you a brace of ’em, my boy.”