Einstein's Monsters (9 page)

Motor-normalcy loss and abrupt personality mutation.
Often when Fran is trying to change her or clothe her or feed her or wipe her or indeed do anything which requires the baby’s passive cooperation, Harriet will suddenly resist. She will go stiff, or flaccid, thus characteristically alternating between the rigid and the overrelaxed.

I could go on: time disperception, the way she often interprets humor as insult, her interludes of excessive affection, the hypomania that prevents her from sleeping. Of course, the baby is perfectly well aware that I am onto her, and that is why she has turned against me at night. She has deceived her parents very cleverly—schizophrenics often show great cunning—and I don’t think either Fran or Ned suspects for a moment that the baby can talk.

Ned’s Diary

August 1.
A pinch and a punch, the first of the month. Born four weeks early on New Year’s Day, the baby is now two-thirds of a year old. Keep it up, Hattie.… Fran tells me of a rather spooky conversation she had with Dan. It happened while she was feeding the baby in the living room. Apparently Dan starts in by saying that he thinks he’s a homosexual! Just blurts it out. Strange, the new precocity—they all feel they’re wised-up in their heads. Fran asked him his reasons for thinking this and Dan shrugged, admitting that he had never had a homosexual experience or encounter of any kind. He said it was to do with his “histamine count”—at least, that’s how Fran remembers it. Also he accidentally busted her in the tub the other day. Fran says he was out of that door like a scalded cat. Now he leaves the room or turns his chair around whenever Fran hikes her shirt to give the baby a suck. He
does
say the damnedest things, and not all of them are off the wall by any means—he’s bright, no question about it. This morning at breakfast I was fanning myself and scratching my hair over some new baby-battering atrocity in the newspaper and I said—Is it just me, or the media, or is there a boom in child abuse? And Dan said, “It’s exponential, like everything else these days.” Himself a hostage to heredity, Dan naturally argued that if you abuse your children, well, then they will abuse theirs. It adds up. In fact it multiplies. Yes, but would that make any difference proportionately? Do people who abuse their children have more children than people who don’t? I’m not sure how the math pans out on this, but maybe the kid is onto something. Sold the jeep. $125. Benson Holloway is a canny sonofabitch and you never know what he’s planning or where he’s really coming from. Still great, great heat. I don’t think the sun can keep this up much longer.

Dan’s Notebook

In common with Harriet, or
Hattie
, the “baby,” I have had no sleep for four nights.

But who needs it? True, I sometimes achieve unpleasant half-states that are further from wakefulness than from its opposite. Often, now, when I jerk upright in my bed, the baby is hiding nearby. I hope she will soon tire of this vicious frolic or tedious torture. My
insight
, though certainly a remarkable tool, is no help to me here. Of course whenever I rouse myself, with infinite pain and difficulty, and get up and go to her room, the baby is back in her crib. She lies there and pretends to be asleep. I watch over her for hours but she never weakens in her imposture. Schizophrenics can do this because, you see, they don’t
need
sleep. And when at last I return to bed she comes creeping in immediately. The baby is trying to make me do something that I will never do.

Thwarted in her plans and ambitions, Francesca is wounded and remote, and feigns indifference. She concentrates on the baby in that finessing, wouldn’t-you-know strategy always employed by females and fate. Ned is understandably angry about this too. He wanted Fran to take me as her lover; he is so old that he cannot expect to satisfy her for very much longer. So Uncle Ned ignores me, furiously busying himself elsewhere. All day I am very nice to the baby, repeatedly imploring her not to come to me at night. But she takes no notice and just pretends to be an unexceptional little creature called Harriet. When she does reveal her feelings, when she stares at me with a scowl of almost farcical hatred, they just think she’s crying, like a baby.

They all seem to love each other here and maybe that’s the point I’m missing. Ned loves Fran, who loves Harriet, who loves Fran, who loves Ned, who loves Harriet, who loves Ned. You know, through all this somber torment and disgusting confusion I sometimes imagine that if I weren’t so sick I’d just be feeling lovelorn, love-beleaguered. I’d just be lovesick. Dad is gone, and my mother, so to speak, has always been conspicuous by her absence. I’d just be lovesick. For when it comes to the love match around here, I have lost, I am wiped out, love-six, love-six, love-six.

Even with my
time disperception
I know that I spend hours contemplating the firebreaks of the water.
Insight.
Will I cross them? Together the bugs and fauna in the wood make a noise like a great dry-hinged door slowly closing forever, closing ahead of me, closing behind me. Loathed am I too by the fierce and beautiful dragonflies that keep guard over Flame Lake.

Ned’s Diary

August 5.
Dan is kind of gruff or matter-of-fact with the baby—but extraordinarily gentle. When Harriet, pleased to see Dan, opens her arms to him from her highchair, his face is studious as he bends to pick her up, and he shows the extra care of the clumsy person, feeling in her armpits to get the balance just right before hoisting her skyward, anxious not to strain those little joints. Out on the scorched lake-front, when the baby is kneeling there and stuffing God knows what into her mouth, or crawling at top speed toward the water, Dan is always in frowning attendance and never lets her out of his sight. I notice that he talks to her a lot, and that’s good, because I don’t. Harriet adores him. It’s beautiful to see. Fran and I can think of no more natural therapy, no simpler recommendation of life and living, than to be with a baby as it makes its first acquaintance with the world.… I don’t know about this “exponential” business. Maybe there’s just more of every kind of crap these days. I’ve been badly disturbed by that case of the four-year-old girl and her stepfather, step-uncle, and step-grandfather. Every night they—No. Clearly, we cannot think about that. But we can think about this: the great eyes of the child when they open and focus, as the first of the men enters the room. Thought the weather was breaking. Wrong. We will obviously have to take this heat until the end of time. Saw Benson Holloway sailing out of town in the jeep. He must have been doing sixty-five. Dan’s bites are back.

Dan’s Notebook

Only the mosquitoes love me. Only the mosquitoes love my blood.

I look up from writing those words and on the other side of the wire screen eight or nine of them are clustered, two feet away, forming the shape of my face as surely as the stars delineate Draco, the firebreather, up in the circumpolar heavens. They are waiting. Soon I will go to them, my pretty ones. With the help of my
size inconstancy
they will change, in far less than a second, from flecks of foulness to horn-nosed hummingbirds as they settle and sip (heat-seeking, blood-seeking) on my open face.

The pile of the lake grows critical. And the baby is asking me why I am waiting.

“Tyramine,” she will typically begin (after calling my name for hour after hour). “Bufotenine. Sorotonin. Malvaria. Reserpine. Spermadine. Tyramine.”

Later I looked up and the “baby” was standing over my bed. With tears stinging the bites on my cheeks I begged her to return quietly to her room and cease this miserable experiment, but her eyes were lit by all the glitter-sizzle of schizophrenia as she told me how—together—we might end our trial by fire. She wants me to take her out into the sleeping warhead of Flame Lake, and so foreclose the great suspense. Even now, in the dead of night, as we both knew, the water would be black and boiling like vulcan pitch while, above, the leptons of the stars warily encircled the waiting Earth and its strong force. Toward dawn she left me, with a warning. But I know tonight I must decide.

I think it’s cruel and senseless that in the daytime, when we might discuss things rather more sensibly, the baby just lies there smiling and pretends to be a baby.

Ned’s Diary

August 6
. I ought to describe this morning’s events in as much detail as I can muster. I rose at eight and fixed a pot of coffee, Fran being something of a late starter, since the baby. Apparently Dan was not yet up, which surprised me—he is usually there in the kitchen, patiently waiting. I drank a cup and looked out into Flame Lake. And into broken weather. The water was heavily cured in mist, its colorlessness touched with dabs of silver, dabs of gold. I remember thinking: So the lake was a dud, a fizzle—it never quite went off. I opened the door to Dan’s room and the coffee cup dropped from my hand and broke, silently, so it seemed. The bedclothes and curtains had been torn to pieces, torn to rags. As I stood there and stared I had the sense of great violence, violence compressed and controlled—everything was scrunched up, squeezed, strangled, impacted, imploded. Yes, and there were bites on the wooden surfaces, deep bites, and long scratch marks on the walls. I went outside and at once I saw his thin body, face-down in the shallows.… I woke Fran. I called Sheriff Groves. I called Dr. Slizard, who showed shock but no surprise. Then we straightened the whole thing out. Fortunately it would seem that the baby slept through it all. She’s fine, and the commotion hasn’t appeared to unsettle her. She just looks around every now and then, wonderingly—for him, for Dan. Sweet Jesus, the poor, poor kid. He would have been thirteen in January.

I don’t know what is wrong. I have just read Dan’s notebook, before sending it off to Slizard at the Section, as requested. I feel a fool, and an old one. To a culpable extent I lacked—I lacked insight. And what else? I have just read Dan’s notebook and all I have in my head is a thought straight out of left field. Yesterday, at breakfast, Dan was there. As he drank his juice he gazed at the backs of the cereal boxes. What could be more—what could be more natural? I used to do that myself as a kid: toy-aircraft designs, send-in competitions, funnies, waffle and cookie recipes. But now? On the back of the high-fiber bran package there are dietary tips for avoiding cancer. On the back of the half-gallon carton of homogenized, pasteurized, vitamin D-fortified milk there are two mugshots of smiling children, gone, missing. (Have You Seen Them?). Date of birth, 7/7/79. Height, 3′6″. Hair, brown. Eyes, blue. Missing, and missed, too, I’ll bet—oh, most certainly. Done away with, probably, fucked and thrown over a wall somewhere, fucked and murdered, yeah, that’s the most likely thing. I don’t know what is wrong.

THE TIME

DISEASE

Twenty-twenty, and the
time
disease is epidemic. In my credit group, anyway. And yours too, friend, unless I miss my guess. Nobody thinks about anything else anymore. Nobody even pretends to think about anything else anymore. Oh yeah, except the sky, of course. The poor sky.… It’s a thing. It’s a situation. We all think about
time
, catching
time
, coming down with
time. I’m
still okay, I think, for the time being.

I took out my hand mirror. Everybody carries at least one hand mirror now. On the zip trains you see whole carloads jackknifed over in taut scrutiny of their hairlines and eye sockets. The anxiety is as electric as the twanging cable above our heads. They say more people are laid low by
time-
anxiety than by
time
itself. But only
time
is fatal. It’s a problem, we agree, a definite feature. How can you change the subject when there’s only one subject? People don’t want to talk about the sky. They don’t want to talk about the sky, and I don’t blame them.

I took out my hand mirror and gave myself a ten-second scan: lower gumline, left eyelash count. I felt so heartened that I moved carefully into the kitchen and cracked out a beer. I ate a
hero
, and a
ham salad.
I lit another cigarette. I activated the TV and keyed myself in to the Therapy Channel. I watched a seventy-year-old documentary about a road-widening scheme in a place called Orpington, over in England there.… Boredom is meant to be highly prophylactic when it comes to
time.
We are all advised to experience as much boredom as we possibly can. To bore somebody is said to be even more sanative than to be bored oneself. That’s why we’re always raising our voices in company and going on and on about anything that enters our heads. Me I go on about
time
the whole time: a reckless habit. Listen to me. I’m at it again.

The outercom sounded. I switched from Therapy to Intake. No visual. “Who is it?” I asked the TV. The TV told me. I sighed and put the call on a half-minute hold. Soothing music. Boring music.… Okay—you want to hear my theory? Now, some say that
time
was caused by congestion, air plague, city life (and city life is the only kind of life there is these days). Others say that
time
was a result of the first nuclear conflicts (limited theater, Persia
v.
Pakistan, Zaire
v.
Nigeria, and so on, no really big deal or anything: they took the heat and the light, and we took the cold and the dark; it helped fuck the sky, that factor) and more particularly of the saturation TV coverage that followed: all day the screen writhed with flesh, flesh dying or living in a queer state of age. Still others say that
time
was an evolutionary consequence of humankind’s ventures into space (they shouldn’t have gone out there, what with things so rocky back home).
Food
, pornography, the cancer cure.… Me I think it was the twentieth century that did it. The twentieth century was all it took.