John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

“Robbie,” Erin said in a different voice, “don’t cry.”

“Quiet,” I said. “I know what he’s thinking.”

And maybe I did, maybe, because otherwise there’s no good reason for the way that sentence galvanized him. Robbie sat up. He went back on his haunches, showing us an impossible face, where tears mingled with blood from the new cuts on his forehead. Showing us also that beneath his elastic pyjama waistband, against his belly, he’d tucked what appeared to be a sizable pad of stiff construction paper. What ? When he yanked the pad out from under his waistband, his eyes were enormous with decision. The paper actually rattled. What was it? Then in another moment he’d picked up one of the larger mirror shards, and clumsily Robbie began to hack apart what he’d smuggled into our bedroom under his belt; the contact sheets of his mad negatives.

“Stop!” He was weeping but giving orders. “Stop! Your! Sobbing!”

I realized that, for some time now, Erin had been squeezing my arm. My elbow burned already from the pressure. I shook free by thrusting that arm across her breasts, as if to protect her.

“Get out of here, Erin. I’ll handle Robbie.”

In fact by the time I’d finished saying that my feet were on the floor. My solid calm voice, the solid cool floor.

“Tommy—” Erin’s voice on the other hand was changing at practically every new syllable.

From the foot of the bed I picked up the robe I’d worn for my faked trip to the bathroom. Seemed like hours ago, and hours ago too I’d peeled off my rubber. It was pleasant to feel the inside of the robe’s sleeves again tickling the insides of my arms.

“Tommy,” Erin said, “Look, look I know I’ve been teasing you, kind of testing you lately but please, look—”

I pressed the back of my arm against her breasts again. The mattresses I’d tumbled into so many months ago, tumbled into tricked by paint, were at last giving way. The truer stuff was making itself felt. And so I took my place beside Robbie. I enjoyed the swag of my genitals as I spread my knees against the floor and I felt my sinuses wince at the unwashed smell of his hair. Behind me Erin continued to natter. But I’d mixed it up with Erin before. I got one good deep breath before my chest was dented against Robbie’s shoulder blade. He sat on his heels now, hunched forward again, hunched over his butcherwork. I went for the half nelson. Robbie slammed me onto the floor so quick I didn’t notice when Erin left.

Perhaps that hadn’t been her talking I’d heard a moment earlier. Perhaps it was only the clock-radio going off at the hour we’d set for waking up.

Look one way, there was the blunt camera he’d brought in with him; look the other, there was his outsize slice of mirror. I lay on my back on broken glass. But even as my awareness flooded with dread about getting cut where I couldn’t see, I felt also how I was trapped. The front of my robe had opened and he’d straddled me. His weight on my intestines cut my breath to shreds while something loose inside his pyjamas tickled my diaphragm awfully. My left arm was helpless against one corner of the vanity table and my right, he ground into the floorboards beneath his knee. Smothered. Truly roped in for the first time. Even my face was covered, spattered with his blood and sniffling. I had to blink and I saw him go crazy in strobes, my view drawn up closer and closer in a flickering pus-colored montage. The red hood of his open mouth, the dented metal walls of his back teeth, the spit-sheen from the tunnel that led in still farther. And now Robbie moved. With another of those weeping groans, that noise which seemed kicked from under his deepest sediments, he brought nearer the length of glass in his hand. He brought it between our two faces and turned it slowly. My breath made the mirror darken.

“Robbie—” But what could I ever say to him?

I actually hit on a plan, then. I started to think I could buck up my middle hard enough to get him off me. And I was willing to believe the mirror wouldn’t hit anything vital, I’d gotten that desperate, when over the unending grind of his sobs I heard the noise on the stairs. Erin banged into the room. I could see enough to tell her arms were full. And her robe too had opened; catching a glimpse of one thigh, I suffered an absurd pang of want. But the thigh moved, my wife moved, I couldn’t see much besides the blur of a shape like a dump-bucket, and then with an explosion of water Robbie’s weight was off me, his reflecting weapon was out of my face. I sat up wet and uncertain.

My deep breaths still tasted of his sickness. The renewed circulation of blood froze my elbows and the palms of my hands. Erin wasn’t allowing anyone time to calm down.

Of course time itself was a different shape by now, every available fraction of a second cram-packed.

I discovered her behind me. I felt a knee or a touch at my back — or was it blood? Had my back got cut? In any case I whipped my head round — she was holding the living-room flower vase at waist level. Around it her body appeared drawn, nervy, and her robe was a single hard red. Even as I understood she’d used the vase to drench Robbie and me, she turned away from us and set the thing on the bed. She started to tug the covers straight around it. I’d just had my life saved, but here my perspective still felt unsettled, unrelieved, and my neck hurt from turning so fast to look at her. Now the sound of the bedclothes stretching — so pointlessly, with that mammoth urn in the way — was as bad as anything I’d heard since I’d left the door open.

“Robbie,” Erin began, “I know you’re really just sitting back in your easy chair.” She was moving more than necessary; her robe bent back my arm-hairs. “I know we’re supposed to get all upset over you, and you, you just go right on sitting back in your easy chair.”

I blinked vase-water off my eyelashes. Again the strobe effect. But now it was Erin who flickered, Erin’s looks coming round in montage as she turned to confront Robbie. Her breath was short as if she’d been in here wrestling with us.

“You could still jump up right now, you could jump up and get us both.” I touched her thigh, but she wouldn’t stop. “But you can’t be bothered . You can’t make up your mind .”

The way Erin pulled together her robe — with one neat hand to her throat, a womanly gesture — was so at odds with the shakes that got into every syllable she spoke.

“I’m sick of worrying about you. I know you can’t ever hurt us.”

No time to calm down. No choice except to see again about Robbie. But there, God, the shock of my relief. Robbie looked finished for the day. He lounged, with knees crookedly splayed, against one edge of the fallen table. In those speckled pyjamas he might have been a caterpillar drowned in the rains (plus possibly even then I was responding in part to some hint of the change in him, some newly calm line in his forehead or in the drooping oval of his chin). But Robbie also was holding another piece of mirror. Smaller than his last, yes, and that one detail alone couldn’t change his battered general appearance. Nonetheless, however, he was frowning into the glass. His knuckles were trembling around it. And Erin, worst of all…to hear my wife’s exasperation changed my thinking finally…Erin, you kept going after him . When you stamped your foot I could feel it right up my spine. That familiar stubborn rant cleared out whole seconds in the otherwise bumper-to-bumper cram of my fright. But Erin, no. No, there’s nothing there. I admit I’d been the one to let him in — I mean I can see what you had in mind exactly. Because why else would I leave the bedroom door open? I too couldn’t live any longer with these blind household cycles, sex and damages and do-it-again. I too couldn’t stand it. And Erin — I’d mixed it up with you before — your promise of last things had proved no good. We’d merely gone limping from one blind alley to another. Therefore earlier this morning I’d arrived at the same conclusion you had now, namely, that Robbie and no one else could strip away our life’s elastic wraps of pain. The bone in my heel knocking flatly against the base of the bedroom door had been the gavel banging down on my decision. But look where it had got me. Instead of breaking any syndromes, I’d been laid out, useless as the rubber mat beneath my shower-stall tears. I’d practically gone blinking up into Robbie’s sick mouth. Now at least the poor wrecked child sat away from me — Erin, away from you and me both — we had him away from us at least, at last.