On the way home Jacob had to go potty.
“Pull over, Alan. Jacob has to go potty.”
“Can’t he wait until we get home? It’ll just be another ten minutes or so.”
“Can you wait, honey? Can you wait to go potty when we get home?”
“NO! I need to go potty now, Mommy! NOW, Mommy!”
“Alan! Pull over! Find a place where Jacob can go potty!”
“All right! All right!” I yelled, craning my neck in six directions to make sure I could move the car safely out of traffic. We were on a major thoroughfare, moving out of the city and into suburbia, and were surrounded by strip malls and fast food joints. There shouldn’t be a problem finding a place to make a pit stop.
I pulled into a parking lot as Jenny continued to coo her soothing incantations to Jacob and his sensitive bladder. It’s okay, honey. It’s okay. Daddy’s finding a place. Just hold it a little longer. It’s okay. As I said before, Jacob was pretty much potty trained, but he usually waited until the absolute last minute to communicate his need to pee. He could have gone at Jenny’s aunt’s house, of course -- if he needed to go this bad, he clearly would have been able to go fifteen minutes ago when we were getting goodbye hugs from everyone in the foyer -- but that would have been the furthest thing from his mind. We’d been through this before, and there had been times when Jacob had wet himself in the car when we couldn’t find a bathroom quickly enough for him.
I stopped in front of a sandwich shop and put the car into park. In a flash Jenny was out of the car and the top half of her appeared in the back seat, quickly unbuckling Jacob from his car seat and dragging him out and down onto the blacktop. The door slammed shut and I watched as Jenny waddled hurriedly into the store, her arm tethered to Jacob’s and dragging him along behind her.
“I’ll just wait here,” I said to no one.
Initially I just sat there. Through the glare on the plate glass window I could see dimly into the sandwich shop, where there was a long line of people standing and waiting to place their orders, and my wife and child weaving their way apologetically through them until they disappeared around a corner and down the hallway where the restrooms were.
Part of me felt relieved that we had made it, that we had found a place and it looked like the accident had been avoided, but there was another and much larger part of me that was still steaming from what had happened back at the birthday party. No one had been able to determine how that accident had happened -- how the television set had been pulled down and broken -- the only two witnesses being Jacob and the even younger Hunter, and trying to get a credible account out of either one of them was a waste of time. When questioned, Hunter was unable to do anything other than cry, and Jacob seemed completely unaware that any sort of crime had even been committed.
Jacob, what happened to the TV?
It broke, Daddy. It fell over and got broke.
How, Jacob? How did it get broken?
It fell over.
Yes, but how did it fall over? Did you push it? Did you touch it?
It fell over, Daddy. It fell over and got broke.
It was infuriating, but I knew he wasn’t lying or consciously trying to cover anything up. He honestly didn’t know how the TV got broken. He was still too young. He lived in a world where effect didn’t follow cause. Things just happened around him. Any agency of his own was so focused on the satiation of his own overwhelming desire that it seemed to him more like animal instinct than the workings of a rational mind.
Nevertheless, I knew. I went to Jenny’s Aunt Carol to apologize on behalf of my overly rambunctious son and to offer to replace the set, but Carol would hear none of it.
“Alan,” she said, a glass of white wine in one had and an oven mitt in the other, “don’t be silly. That old TV needed replacing anyway.”
I pressed her again, knowing from the size and the slim profile of the television that it had to have been in a box at an electronics store no more than three months ago. But she was supremely unconcerned. She just asked me to hold her wine as she bent over and brought the warm artichoke dip out of the oven.
But I was still running the numbers in my head. I was going to buy them a new TV. I didn’t know where I was going to find the two thousand dollars, but I’d be damned if I’d let Carol brush this off like it was a broken dinner plate.
I was still stewing in those juices when I realized that a lot of time had passed since Jenny had gone into the store with Jacob. Longer, far longer that should have been necessary for that little man to empty his bladder. Was he pooping, too? Sometimes Jacob would take his own sweet time when he had to go number two, secretly enjoying, I thought, the extra time on the toilet. I held up my hand to reduce the growing glare on the store window and could still make out the long line of customers, but saw no sign of either my wife or child.
I fished my phone out of my pocket, thinking that I could call Jenny on her cell phone, but before I could dial I noticed her purse on the car seat next to me. Peering inside, I saw her phone nestled in next to her pocketbook.
Great. Well, his royal highness must be taking a shit, and if so, there was no telling how long I was going to be sitting there. My phone already in my hand, I flipped it open and began scrolling through my recent texts. And, of course, there they were, the texts Bethany had sent while I had been in Boston.
R U THERE?
I NEED 2 TALK 2 U.
PLEASE CALL ME IF U CAN.
I started deleting them from my phone and then realized that there were more from Bethany, still texts that she had sent me the last time I had been at Carol’s house. I deleted those, too, and actually considered, but refrained from deleting Bethany entirely from my contacts.
I hadn’t heard from Bethany at all that weekend -- not since our secret and somewhat abrupt conversation on Thursday night, the night before my interview in Boston. That shouldn’t be odd. As far as I could remember, we had never spoken to each other on any other weekend in history, but since she had started texting me, and since the time we had spent together in Miami, it felt like none of the old rules applied anymore. She had called my home, I now remembered. She had called my home looking for me, and had spoken to Jenny a few minutes before or after she had spoken to me. That still didn’t make much sense to me, but it felt way safer to let that sleeping dog lie than go over and kick it. I didn’t want anything more to do with her, outside the bounds of a professional relationship at least. I supposed I would see what she was thinking and feeling when I saw her back in the office on Monday.
There was still no sign of Jenny or Jacob, and now I was starting to get a little worried. Did he fall in? And did he drag Jenny down with him? What the hell were they doing in there so goddamn long?
I decided to go in and investigate. I turned off the car, got out and shut and locked the doors. I then walked around the back end of the vehicle and started making my way towards the glass door of the sandwich shop -- but stopped dead in my tracks. With the car shielding some of the glare on the windows I could see more clearly into the store, and I saw both Jenny and Jacob framed in the glass pane of the door. Jacob was red-faced, contorted, in the middle of a full-blown tantrum, and Jenny had her hands cupped into each of his armpits, struggling and somewhat failing to keep him from flopping down onto the floor. I pulled the door open and the force of Jacob’s cries hit me like a wall of sound. I hesitated just a second, supremely conscious of all the staring eyes around the scene, in a flash contemplating the feasibility of getting back in the car and driving away, but then I rushed forward, claiming, in front of witnesses, the screaming and broken child as my own.
“What the fuck is going on!” I found myself yelling, the rage overwhelming me in an instant, like a geyser of hot lava rushing up through my chest.
“He wanted a cookie!” Jenny screamed back, her voice matching the milky tears on her own face. “Help me! Help me get him out of here!”
I grabbed Jacob around the middle, his flailing limbs blindly kicking and punching me in the process, lifted him clear of his pregnant mother, and turned to leave the store with him. He was wet and hot, like a sick animal, and our movements threw me off balance, and I fell roughly to the floor. Jacob flopped out of my grasp and banged his head on the tile.
“Alan! OH MY GOD!”
If he was seriously hurt, Jacob seemed oblivious to it. He was in the throes of his all-consuming tantrum, a searing fire that burned at the heart of a super massive star. He screamed, but he was already screaming. He writhed about on the floor, but he was already writhing.
I scrambled back to my hands and knees and shot across the floor to him, scooping him up again, and holding him tight against my chest before attempting to stand. Using a nearby wall for support, I skooched myself up with him and then resumed my hasty exit. A new customer was just entering the sandwich shop -- an elderly woman with tightly permed hair and a magenta jogging suit -- and I barrelled past her, almost knocking her down the process -- desperate to get the two of us out of there.
“Jenny! Open the goddamn door!” I barked, meaning the car door, and in a moment Jenny was ahead of me. She pulled on the door handle and it popped out of her hand without budging.
“It’s locked!”
The keys were in my pocket and Jenny had to fish them out while I held Jacob tight, tying and failing to keep his hard rubber shoes from connecting with his mother’s head.
“JACOB!” I shouted in his ear. “CALM THE FUCK DOWN!”
His wet face had been pressed against mine, and now he gave himself another great twist, his head moving away, turning, and then coming swiftly back to smack me right in the nose, watering my eyes and causing blood to flow. If I had been strapped into the rocket ship of anger before, this mindless, useless, and oblivious action blast me off into orbit around planet fury. It took everything I had to stop myself from throwing him down onto the pavement and kicking him.
“It’s open!”
And so it was. Jenny waddled out of the way to reveal a wide open car door, a child’s fish cracker-encrusted booster seat and a pile of toys and torn activity books. I rushed forward again and body slammed him into the seat, his wailing temporarily stifled as the breath whooshed out of him. His kicking and flailing continued unabated and I tried desperately to both keep him pinned in place and snake the straps of his restraints out from underneath him. I could feel the blood dripping out of my nose, and I took half a second to wipe some of it away with an errant hand, but that just bloodied my fingers and made the job of manipulating and snapping the buckles into place that much more difficult.
“JACOB!” I could hear my own voice screaming -- screaming to the point of breaking, but still somehow muffled, as if I was under water. “STOP IT! GODDAMN YOU! STOP IT!”
He was inexhaustible, raging on and on, grunting and bleating now, his throat worn raw, the gyrating movements of his plump limbs expressing only his own helpless fury. He began to slide down in his seat, his shirt coming up to his neck and revealing his soft belly and sunken chest. I had to grab him by the armpits and move back into position, and his head rocked back and forth, unable to shake the fabric of his shirt off his face.
It was the moment I needed to finally get the buckles snapped over him, pinching his pink flesh at least once in the process. Secured and cinched tight, I was able to take my hands off of him and pull his shirt, thick with slobber, down from over his face.
“STOP IT!” I shouted at him again. “FOR FUCK SAKE JUST FUCKING STOP IT!” I was lost in my own rage and was oblivious to what was going on around me. In that moment I hated him, hated him and myself in equal measure, and I wanted to do something hurtful, something to show him who was boss, something that would get him from being the horrible monster he had become.
Possessed with such wickedness, I began grabbing his toys one by one, holding each up in front of his face, and then chucking it, throwing it as far from the car as I possibly could. First up was his doodle pad, a purple piece of plastic with a stubby magnetic pen hanging by a cord. It sailed across the parking lot and smashed to pieces on the roadway we had so recently left.
“Alan!” Jenny screamed behind me. “Stop it!”
Next up was a coloring book, happy cartoon animals smiling at me, each smeared with a blur of color across its black lines. It flapped like a wounded bird and landed less than six feet away. The back seat of the car was so full of his junk that I had no shortage of things to choose from. I taunted Jacob with each item before it left, cruelly telling him it was gone, gone forever, and that he needed to stop his tantrum if he didn’t want to lose everything.
“Alan!” Jenny screamed again, now actually tugging on my shirt and trying to pull me away.
Nothing was premeditated. I was acting on instinct. An evil and base instinct, one that couldn’t abide anyone or anything getting the better of me. And they were. They were all getting the better of me. They were all spitting on me. My career, my job, my wife, my son, my own roaring sense of my own inadequacy -- they were all spitting on me, spitting their poison venom and hatred right in my goddamn eyes.
Suddenly Milo was in my bloody hand, the little blue puppy dog that Jacob treasured above all else. When the stuffed animal was thrust momentarily into Jacob’s face, his breath hitched and his eyes went wide, but I was too far gone to even notice that I had finally penetrated Jacob’s own cloud of rage. As quick as Milo appeared to him, he was gone, sailing across the parking lot and landing in the curb.
“Alan!” Jenny screamed again. “That’s enough!” And now she started hitting me, clubbing me on the back of my head and neck with her heavy fists and forearms. “Stop it, goddammit! You fucking monster!”
Grunting with desperate effort, she managed to shove me aside and I found myself stumbling and falling to the pavement. In a flash Jenny’s wide form filled the space of the open car door, and then she had Jacob in her arms, his crying loud but his tantrum over.
“Go get it!” she spat at me.
I felt like an alien abductee who had just been plopped back into a deserted cornfield. One second a tornado had been raging around me, a freight train roaring in my ears, and now I could hear the birds chirping and the warm sun on my skin. There were pebbles pushing into my palms, and over me stood a mother, her crying son in her arms. I thought I knew her. She seemed strangely familiar.
“Do it, you son of a bitch! Go get Milo!”
And then the shame filled me. Filled me so close to bursting that had there been a knife I would have cut my own throat. People were staring and she hated me -- and they were both justified. People should stare, and women should hate a monster such as me. Only slowly was I able to find my feet and stagger over to where the little blue puppy had landed.
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
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