Rebecca Coleman: The Kingdom of Childhood

Yet stripped of reason, the memory is purely sensual. There is nothing before it, but much after; the quiet room, the cave-like warmth forming the Big Bang from which his consciousness unfurled. It occurred to him that he would have no recollection of that pleasure, had he not been caught in the act of disobedience.

But Zach knew that this consciousness, as he understood it, was nothing more than an island in the great stirring sea of his mind, that formless dark which informed everything. In it were his dreams, some remembered, most not; there lingered all the moments of pain and fear and pleasure his childmind had failed to process. But also there lived the ancient shapes his teachers called, altogether, the collective subconscious: the witch, the white knight, the princess in the tower, the devil. A body of archetypes, a language of symbols passed down through time, birth by birth, like the code for the shape of an eye, the blueprint of the human heart. A racial memory.

The room was different now—painted sky-blue rather than mint-green, and relocated to Maryland—but the bed was the same, a Colonial four-poster built by his dad, and the quilt was the same, although faded by wash after wash. And the child curled at his mother’s belly was not him but his sister, the not-yet-born. She carried a Christmas due date, and as the months wore on Zach found himself anticipating the birth with surprising eagerness. His friends, for the most part, expressed a sort of repulsion on his behalf, centering around the evidence that his parents were still having sex. Without exception Zach found these remarks amusing. Were their parents just really good at keeping it quiet and sneaking around? Wasn’t that the point of being an adult, that you could screw with impunity?

On this day, after his mother finished volunteering him to work with Scott’s bitchy mother on the holiday bazaar, she received a visit from the midwife, which redeemed the day somewhat. Zach liked the midwife. Her name was Rhianne, she was somewhere between his age and his mother’s, and every time she arrived at the Pattersons’ she appeared dressed for gardening. Faded blue jeans, rubber-toed boots from L.L. Bean, a flannel shirt with the sleeves folded up. Zach sat in a chair near the far wall of his parents’ bedroom while she examined his mother with a stethoscope, listening for the baby’s heartbeat. His mother’s belly, golden-pale above the indigo bedspread, looked like the moon.

“Do you want to listen, Zach?” Rhianne asked him.

He shook his head. “I heard it last time.”

“I can feel an elbow,” she said. His mother laughed, and Rhianne waved Zach over. “Feel it.”

He moved to the edge of the bed beside his mother’s legs and allowed Rhianne to position his hands on the giant expanse of belly. “Elbow,” she said, and then with her right hand over Zach’s, “spine, and her little tuckus.”

“That’s cool,” he said. His mother beamed at him.

“Have you started buying things yet?” asked Rhianne of his mother. “Sling, diapers, bassinet?”

“Here and there,” she replied. “We won’t be needing a bassinet. She’ll just sleep with us, like Zach did. Although hopefully not until she’s seven.” She shot him a look of loving reprimand.

“Wasn’t my idea,” said Zach.

“Every time we tried to put you in your own bed, you snuck back into ours.”

“So, you should have beaten my ass.”

The women both laughed. “Listen to the child,” said his mother.

“He’s hardly a child,” said Rhianne. “You’ve got one almost-newborn and one almost-man.”

“He’s still a child yet,” insisted his mother. “Take a look at his bedroom and you’ll see what I mean.”

After Rhianne packed up her instruments, Zach walked her to the door. He knew what was coming, because Rhianne pulled him aside after every visit. She considered it part of her job.

“Your mother is very invested in believing you’re still a little boy,” said Rhianne, “but we both know that’s not true.”

Zach shrugged. “She knows me pretty well. She’s just thinking like a mom.”

“I’m sure she’s concerned about displacing you with the new baby.”

“I don’t feel displaced.”

“Do you have any concerns you’d like to talk about?”

He shook his head. “I miss my old friends and stuff. But my new school’s okay.”

She nodded. “Do you feel healthy?”

He knew this was her way of asking the whole range of unaskables—whether he was using drugs, harboring suicidal thoughts, or living in terror that he would wake up one morning blind, with hair on his palms. But he had no such concerns. He said, “Yeah, I feel great.”

She reached into her bag and took out a purple drawstring pouch. With a tug, she pulled it open and held it toward him. He gave her a bashful smile and took out two condoms.

“Sure that’s all you need?” she asked.

“I’m sure I don’t even need these,” he replied, “but they’re fun to have around.”

“Someday you’ll find them useful.”

He smirked. “So people keep telling me.”

“You’re only sixteen,” she reminded him. “There’s no hurry. But when the time comes, make sure you have ’em handy. Because love comes and goes, but herpes is forever.”

Zach grimaced. “Gotcha.”

“And if you ever want to talk—” here she patted his shoulder “—you know where to find me.”

“I know.”

He let her out the door and retreated to his bedroom, where he dropped them in his underwear drawer with the others she had given him. They were useful, if only for experimenting with how long he could coast on the wave before losing control. He called it “Tantric Sex for One.”

In the beginning with Russ, when he was a bespectacled undergraduate with a simmering anger I mistook for understated masculinity, I had the soaring feeling that together we were really something special. He was the pet of the college’s top marine biology professor, the student president of the fledgling Greenpeace group, a member of the rowing team. Lanky and tall and argumentative, he had a talent for the verbal dogfight and took pride in reducing others to silence. In our dorm building I had grown accustomed to hearing his voice, clipped and strident, as a fixture of late-night conversations in the lounge. When, during those debates, he began to defend the views I quietly voiced—including me as the second member of his Russ-against-the-world faction—I felt exalted. When we began dating, I felt chosen. In the exhilaration of falling in love, either with him or with the idea of being worthwhile, it was easy to overlook the hulking shadows of what his untethered youthful traits would become. I was, one might say, otherwise occupied.

This is what I did see: visions of the two of us walking like overeducated angels into the urban squalor of New York City, him to clean up the Hudson River, me to educate the impoverished youth. With a baby on my hip, we would fly overseas and join the expatriate community in France while Russ devoted his expertise to cleaning up the Seine. After a few years we would move home to a nice brick Colonial and be the toast of our cadre of hip academic friends. There would be parties. There would be wine, and framed photos from a ski trip to Vermont, and a chocolate Lab with a red bandanna around his neck.

Well, I had the house.

But just as Russ had proven himself less brilliant than his professor suspected and downscaled his plans, my own vision of the Perfect Life had shifted. The passion I felt for the stories, the methods, the esoteric philosophies of Rudolf Steiner was all-enveloping; I threw myself into it with all the devotion a new convert has to offer. The Kingdom of Childhood, as Steiner called it, was like a magical forest we guarded with a human chain, in which young spirits unfolded like cabbage roses and children could explore with absolutely no fear. We draped their bassinets with pink silk so they would see the world, literally, through a rose-colored lens. We sliced their apples asymmetrically, so the idea of mass-produced form would not even enter their consciousness. What my friends found trivial, I embraced. God, or his philosophical equivalent, was in the details.