Chris Bachelder - The Throwback Special

“Twelve forty-five,” Charles said.

Robert tidied his sewing kit, and Charles regarded the chinstrap. Was it moths, he asked, that had damaged the strap?

“What?”

“Moths?”

“Not mine,” Robert said. “Wesley’s. Year before last.”

“Wesley, yes,” Charles said, with a scorn not linked to conviction. Wesley’s gear was often musty. Both men idly remembered the year that Vince’s Russ Grimm jersey ripped while he was pulling it over his shoulder pads.

“Where is everyone?” Robert said.

Charles, who counseled adolescent girls with eating disorders, wanted to tell Robert to put that thought in his worry box. “They’ll be here,” he said. “They always are.”

Charles rose from his chair and walked through the lobby. He circled the dry fountain. The woman at the front desk did not look up from her monitor. The woman, like so many women, was formidably attractive to Charles, primarily because she was so unaware of him. A sense of his own insignificance often made him lustful. He gripped the yellow tape surrounding the fountain. The woman took a long strand of hair from the back of her head and pulled it over to the front. She stared at it cross-eyed for a moment, then yanked with grim determination. She frowned, dropped the hair to the carpet, stared at her screen. Her nudity was a fantastical premise, as speculative in its particulars as dark matter or quarks. Charles vaulted lust, arriving somehow in jealousy, which confused him. This seemed grounds for expulsion, and he left the lobby beneath the arbor of dusty vines. An easel outside the conference room door displayed a rudimentary sketch of a porpoise. He peered in, observed the new carpet, the burnished lectern. He returned briskly through the lobby to the sitting area, but did not sit.

Robert asked if Charles had seen the conference room schedule, and Charles shook his head.

“It’s booked for a retreat,” Robert said. “All weekend it’s booked. Premium Vantage Systems or something.” In Robert’s imagination the retreatists all looked like sinister Bible salesmen. They just do whatever they want, Robert thought. They just despoil the environment and establish tax havens and seize conference rooms. They don’t benefit society.

Charles stood looking out the window to the parking lot. If it was not already raining, it would be soon. The sky had descended, gray and gravid. The automatic doors of the lobby opened, admitting only the wind, then closed.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Charles said. “We always have the conference room.”

Gripping the mended chinstrap with both hands, Robert pressed it into his chin, testing its strength. His anger abated. It was difficult to sustain one’s anger in a chair so large and soft. As it turned out, Robert needed to talk to Charles. There was something he had been worried about.

“I’m glad you’re here, Charles,” he said.

“Okay,” Charles said, wishing he were still sleeping in a rest area.

“It’s something that happened to my daughter.”

“How old is she?”

Robert hesitated, wanting to get the answer right. “Six,” he said.

Charles indicated that Robert should continue.

“Well,” Robert said, “she broke her arm a couple of months ago on the playground.”

Charles noticed all of the smudges on the glass of the plate window. It was a record of desire. People touch windows, he thought, for reassurance. Running counter to the narrative of expansion was an equally prominent narrative of containment. “Robert,” he said, “you know I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a psychologist.”

“I know. This isn’t about her arm. Her arm healed up fine. It’s somehow probably stronger now than it was before. Can you sit down?”

“I don’t work with young children.”

“No,” Robert said. “This is more about me.”

“I work with adolescents with eating disorders.”

“The mind is the mind, right?”

Charles said that no, that was not right at all.

“When it happened,” Robert said, “I was upset. When she broke her arm, I mean. I was upset.”

“Sure. Of course.”

“It was upsetting. Do not get me wrong. She fell off the monkey bars and landed on her elbow. I was standing right there. It wasn’t like I was being inattentive. I was right there. Look, this would be easier for me if you were sitting down.”

“It’s not your fault, Robert. These things happen. Monkey bars, trampolines, bikes. When my son was—”

“She insisted on doing it. Absolutely insisted.”

“So you feel guilty?” Charles asked. He felt both relieved and disappointed to have arrived at such conventional trouble. “Are you talking about feelings of guilt?”

“She was crying in a way that I could tell was not fake. She has a fake cry that makes me want to jump through a plate-glass window. Do you know that kind of fake cry I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” Charles said. “I do.”

“But this was real, I could tell. And I was upset. I wasn’t glad about it.”

“Why would you be?”

“Exactly,” Robert said, laughing. “No. What?”

“Exactly,” Charles said.

“It’s not like I was happy when my own daughter broke her arm.”

“Robert. The idea of normalcy in human thought is something of a controversial concept, but I can absolutely assure you that your response was normal.”

“But still, I felt something weird. A twinge.”

Charles closed his eyes, placed his forehead against the cool smudged glass. “A twinge?”

“A small one,” Robert said, flailing for comfort in the enormous chair. With a calm voice Charles asked once again about the nature of the twinge.

“Not happiness!”

“What?”

“Not gladness,” Robert said, pulling the chinstrap hard against his chin. “Maybe, I don’t know, a kind of satisfaction?”

“Satisfaction at her broken arm?”

“Not satisfaction. Not that at all. Not satisfaction. Come on. She was really hurt. I felt terrible for her, and I was upset. She fell asleep in the car, Charles. Just passed out. Her body kind of shut down. I don’t know, a certain kind of pleasure. But not pleasure. Maybe a twinge of vindication? It’s hard to describe. Not joy. I wanted to talk to someone about it. That’s why I was glad you came early.”

“I always come early.”

“This is a kid who just assumes everything is going to go exactly the way she wants it to go. She just knows everything works out. Maybe all kids are like this. Are all kids like this? She gets taken from the pool to the playground to the large inflatable climbing structures. She gets ice cream at all hours of the day. She has a thousand stuffed animals. We don’t have a real pet, Charles, but the vacuum cleaner is clogged with hair. All day long I say No. No, no, no, but as I’m saying it, I’m reaching for my wallet.”

Charles scanned the parking lot. Where was Tommy? Where was Gil? Where were Vince, Derek, and Steven?

“I drive her around looking for rainbows. We listen to princess music. Her booster seat has all these features. She hands me trash. ‘Here,’ she says, handing me fruit strips and chewed straws. I wipe food off her forehead and her neck , and I’m the bad guy, the mean dad. She has an idea about the way the world works, and this accident — falling off the monkey bars — was kind of a small — I don’t know — corrective. I wasn’t pleased, and I certainly never would have intentionally—”

“What?”

“—and I can’t imagine I wouldn’t have tried to catch her if I had been a step closer. But I did feel, for just a second, this awful sense of certainly not gladness but maybe approval . Because I thought that it would be a good lesson? — do you see, Charles? — about the way the world actually works. You know, gravity . The body. Force times velocity. There’s not always some soft fairy bed of moss to—”