Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

They had his arms. Take my hands off. Take my leg, take me away, I stay here in Mommy.

“Come on, baby,” Daddy said.

No! He pulled for Mommy, swim to her. “I’ll carry him,” Mommy said.

Face on her, press against the eye. Go away. Go away before the doctor.

Mommy pulled, pulled on his head. “Luke, look at me. Look at me, Luke.”

Can’t look. Close on the burning hurt. Be away, away.

Mommy came inside his eyes, a huge doll. “Luke, don’t be so scared. We’re going to a different place than your regular doctor, but they’re nice there. And we’ll be with you the whole time. They just need to look in your eye.”

Don’t want my eye. Don’t want to see. Let me sleep, let me go away.

“Okay? Shhh.” Soft kisses. Daddy, in his coat, turns on the light. The hall glows.

“The elevator’s here.”

Sleep. Sleep. He leaned on Mommy and held the worry in, poking in his chest to get out. In, in. Good-bye, home.

GET READY to be a man.

Eric Gold, Wizard of Wall Street, walks boldly, people moving out of his way at the mere sight of his imposing body .

In the street, his long arm signaled for a taxi. A couple on the other corner dropped their competing hands when Nina appeared behind Eric, Luke loose in her arms.

“Fourteenth and First,” he said, fully in command. “It’s the Eye and Ear Clinic. The entrance is on Fourteenth.”

Eric reached for Luke’s hand. Luke’s fingers fell into his palm, drooped leaves soaked with fear. Nina kissed Luke on the forehead over and over, a steady patter of love.

The stupid traffic made the ride endless. He could have walked it faster. If anything really serious ever happens, I could carry Luke to the emergency room. Remember that.

This is what it means to be a man. Don’t hesitate, don’t doubt, get it done. You sat with him for three hours doing nothing. Luke’s doctor would have still been available. You’ve made enough mistakes for one night.

“He’s asleep,” Nina said when the clinic was in sight.

“Oh, no” escaped from Eric. Don’t whine, don’t worry. But Luke’s so cranky just after he wakes up. Is Nina angry at me? I should have handled this. Better for him. Better for her.

I should have bought four times the amount of DNA Tech than I did. Either make a bold move or don’t make it at all. What’s the point of a little position?

On Monday, I’ll quadruple Tom’s exposure.

Luke looked so small, his head decapitated on Nina’s shoulder, the big eyelids closed, their tiny veins showing purple through his pale skin.

Eric Gold, discoverer of undiscovered values in the OTC market, a frequent panelist on Wall Street Week, rated number two among money managers for the last year, moves past the lingering bums at the clinic’s entrance and holds the door wide for his beautiful wife and wounded son .

Out of my way, out of my way. An Indian nurse stood beside a security guard at a reception desk. “Yes?”

“My son has something in his eye.”

Luke woke up crying. “Shhh, shhh,” Nina said.

“Oh, the poor baby,” a gigantic black woman said. She was seated in a row of plastic chairs. Around her, sprawled in funny positions, like discarded clothes, were five children.

“Geuss?” the nurse said to Eric.

“Excuse me?”

“It was geuss?”

“No, not gas. Sand.”

The nurse laughed at Eric as though he were a cute child. “Oh, sand. Not geuss. You have to wait. Fill this form out, please.”

Luke wailed. His arms arched into the air, grabbing for what he already had — his mother. He grabbed for Nina as though she were incorporeal. “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” he screamed. “It hurts! It hurts!”

“You take the baby first,” the black woman as big as the Stock Exchange said to the nurse.

“I see if Doctor can see him now,” the nurse said to Nina.

“Thank you,” Nina said. “Thank you very much,” she added to the black woman.

Why are you thanking her? She’s not running this place, Eric thought. He answered the questions on the paper. Glass, the nurse meant glass, he realized and wondered if many people got examined for wrong things in their eye. Of course, a nurse who can’t speak English well is perfect for the job of emergency room triage. And she laughed at me for misunderstanding her. The world is mad.

“Shhh, shhh, it’s okay, okay,” Nina kept on saying over Luke’s cries of pain. Eric wrote quickly. His answers on the form looked like the scrawls of a maniac.

“Car? You have a car?” The nurse was back.

“Yes, I have a car.”

The nurse laughed at him again, as if he were just the cutest and silliest thing she’d ever seen. “Medical car-d!” she said, and smiled.

“It hurts! It hurts!” Luke’s voice scratched the air. All the waiting people hunched their shoulders, fighting the cold wind of his cries.

“Can he see us?” Nina said.

“You’re necks.”

Next, next. “I’ll pay cash,” Eric said. He was tearing his wallet apart; he couldn’t find the fucking Blue Cross card.

“Oh. No car? Need a boucher. Wait.”

The black mother tapped Eric. “Don’t give ’em no cash, mister.”

“Here it is!” The Blue Cross card. It was old. From when he first married Nina.

“There you go,” the black mother said. Her children looked as if they’d been there several weeks, their eyes crossed with boredom, their hair flattened in odd spots by their using the chairs’ plastic arms as pillows. The girls’ skirts were pushed up, the boys’ shirts pulled out. None of them seemed to have anything wrong with their eyes other than a dead hopelessness, a glaze of enraged resignation.

Thank God I’m not her, Eric thought. Thank God those aren’t my kids.

I’m going to buy the shit out of DNA Tech on Monday.

“Eric!” Nina was following a pretty Asian woman wearing a doctor’s clothes.

“Sweet baby,” the black woman said as Eric turned to go.

I should give her some money, Eric thought, but that was ridiculous. “Thank you,” he said.

He rushed after Nina and Luke. Luke’s eye looked bad now, swollen, red, and he was gasping from tears, choking, whimpering, blind, clutching Nina’s clothes with arched fingers, a cat climbing a tree.

Nina was talking over him, reciting the chronology, the Asian doctor nodding as if the information were familiar.

“Can you open your eye?” the doctor interrupted, speaking to Luke. She had no accent; she was like a TV anchorwoman, her pronunciation without geography.

“He fell asleep in the cab. It seems to be—”

“He’s probably scratched his cornea,” she said casually, and moved to a tray, getting implements. “There’s probably no sand still in there, but the pain of the scratch gets worse, especially if the lid is closed for a while. We’ll take a look. Could you turn the lights out?”

“Is that permanent? A scratch?” Who asked that? Eric thought. Me. That’s who.

“No, no. I’m guessing. I shouldn’t. You’d better hold him.”

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” Luke screamed to be saved, a condemned man pleading for mercy.

We’re helping you, Luke. We really are.

“The lights?” the doctor said to Eric.

With the room dark, Luke’s desperate cries were horrible. Three giants eating him alive in the dark—

“Let me look!” The doctor’s fingers tried to spread Luke’s eyelid, squeezed shut by terror. “Let me look!”

Luke’s flailing arms whacked Nina in the face. “Ow!” she yelled.

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

The black woman looked in. “He all right?” she said to Eric.

“Please leave!” the doctor said to her. The nurse appeared and led the black woman off. “You’d better hold him,” the doctor said to Eric.