Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (23 page)

He could not return to what had been. Until that day when it seemed he would be thrown to the polar bear and he was on the verge of losing his mind, the fat man had wandered around, sprawled on the floor, and eaten all his meals together with his son, allowing nothing to separate them. And this permitted him a perfectly concrete sense of the child as primarily a heavy and troublesome restraint which menaced, even as it regulated, his daily life. In truth, he enjoyed thinking of himself as a passive victim quietly enduring a bondage imposed by his son.

The fat man had always liked children; in college he had qualified for three kinds of teaching licenses. And as the time approached for his own child to be born he was
unable to sit still for the spasms of anxiety and expectation which rippled through his body. Later, looking back, he had the feeling he had been counting on the birth of his child as a first step toward a new life for himself which would be out of the shadow of his dead father. But when the moment finally arrived and the fat man, painfully thin in those days, nervously questioned the doctor who emerged from the delivery room, he was told in an even voice that his child had been born with a grave defect.

____Even if we operate I’m afraid the infant will either die or be an idiot, one or the other.

That instant, something inside the fat man irreparably broke. And the baby who was either to die or to be an idiot quickly elbowed out the breakage, as cancer destroys and then replaces normal cells. In arranging for the operation the fat man dashed around so frantically that his own in those days still meager body might well have broken down. His nervous system was like a chaos of numbness and hypersensitivity, an inflamed wound which had begun to heal but only in spots: fearfully he would touch places in himself and feel no pain at all; a moment later, when relief had lowered his guard, a scorching pain would make him rattle.

The deadline for registering the new infant arrived, and the fat man went to the ward office. But until the girl at the desk asked what it was to be, he hadn’t even considered a name for his son. At the time the operation was in progress, his baby was in the process of being required to decide whether he would die or be an idiot, one or the other. Could such an existence be given a name?

The fat man (let it be repeated that at the time, exhausted, he was thinner than ever in his life) took the
registration form nonetheless and, recalling from the Latin vocabulary he had learned at college a word which should have related both to death and idiocy, wrote down the character for “forest” and named his son Mori. Then he took the form into the bathroom, sat down in one of the stalls, and began to giggle uncontrollably. This ignoble seizure was due in part to the state of the fat man’s nerves at the time. And yet even as a child there had been something inside him, something fundamental, which now and then impelled him to frivolous derision of his own and others’ lives. And this was something he was obliged to recognize in himself when his son finally left the hospital and came to live at home. Mori!—every time he called the child by name it seemed to him that he could hear, in the profound darkness in his head, his own lewd and unrepentant laughter mocking the entirety of his life. So he proposed giving his son a nickname and using it at home, though he had difficulty satisfying his wife with a reason. It was in this way that the fat man, borrowing the name of the misanthropic donkey in Winnie the Pooh, came to call his son Eeyore.

He moreover concluded, with renewed conviction, that his relationship with his own father, who had died suddenly when he was a child, must be the source of the somehow mistaken, insincere, unbalanced quality he had to recognize in himself, and he undertook somehow to recreate a whole image of the man, whom he remembered only vaguely. This produced a new repetition of collisions with his mother, who had never spoken about his father’s self-confinement and death and had combatted him for years by pretending to go mad whenever he questioned her. Not only did she refuse to cooperate; during a stay at his home while he was traveling abroad she had stolen his
notes and incomplete manuscript for a biography of his father and had retained them to this day. For all he knew, she had already burned the manuscript, but since the thought alone made him want to kill his mother, he had no choice but not to think it.

And yet the fat man was dependent on his mother to a degree extraordinary for an adult of his age, another truth he was obliged to recognize. Drunk one night on the whiskey he relied on instead of sleeping pills, he was toying with a clay dog he had brought all the way from Mexico when he discovered a hole beneath the creature’s tail and blew into it hard, as if he were playing on a flute. Unexpectedly, a cloud of fine black dust billowed out of the hole and plastered his eyes. The fat man supposed he had gone blind, and in his distraction and his fear he called out to his mother: Mother, oh, Mother, help me, please! If I should go blind and lose my mind the way Father did, what will become of my son? Teach me, mother, how we can all outgrow our madness!

For no good reason, the fat man had been seized by the suspicion that his mother soon would age and die without having disclosed the explanation she had kept secret all these years, not only for his father’s self-confinement and death but the freakish something which underlay it and must also account for his own instability and for the existence of his idiot son, an existence which, inasmuch as it presented itself in palpable form, he assumed he could never detach from himself.

The fat man’s loneliness that night as he slept in the bed too large for even his bloated body has already been described, but the truth is that still another circumstance can be included as having contributed to it. That the fat man spent all his time in the company of his fat son Mori,
called Eeyore, was known to most of the citizens in the neighborhood. What even the most curious of them did not know was that, until the decisive day when he was nearly thrown to a polar bear, the fat man had never failed to sleep with one arm extended toward his son’s crib, which he had installed at the head of his bed. In fact, his wife had quit his bed and secluded herself in another part of the house not so much because of strife between them as a desire of her own not to interfere with this intimacy between father and son. It had always been the fat man’s intention that he was acting on a wholesome parental impulse—if his son should awaken in the middle of the night he would always be able to touch his father’s fleshy hand in the darkness above his head. But now, when he examined them in light of the breakage which had resulted in himself when hoodlums had lifted him by his head and ankles and swung him back and forth as if to hurl him to the polar bear eyeing him curiously from the pool below, the fat man could not help discovering, in even these details of his life, a certain incongruity, as if a few grains of sand had sifted into his socks. Wasn’t it possible that he had slept with his arm outstretched so that the hand with which he groped in the darkness when uneasy dreams threatened him awake at night might encounter at once the comforting warmth of his son’s hand? Once he had recognized the objection being raised inside himself, the details of their life together, which to him had always seemed to represent his bondage to his son, one by one disclosed new faces which added to his confusion. Yet the very simplest details of their life together troubled him only rarely with this disharmony, and in this the fat man took solace as he grew more and more absorbed, feeling very much alone, in the battle with
his mother. The fact was, even after his experience at the zoo, that he continued to enact certain of the daily rituals he shared with his son.

Rain or shine, not figuratively but in fact, the fat man and his son bicycled once a day to a Chinese restaurant and ordered pork noodles in broth and Pepsi-Cola. In the days before his son was quite so fat, the fat man would sit him in a light metal seat which he attached to the handlebars. And how often he had been obliged to fight with policemen who held that the metal seat was illegal, not to mention riding double on a bike! The fat man had always protested earnestly, because he had believed his own claim. Now, when he looked back from his new point of view, he had to wonder if he really had believed what he had argued so vehemently, that his son was retarded (precisely because he so loathed the word itself he always used it as a weapon against the police) and that the only pleasure available to him, his only consolation, was climbing into a metal seat attached to the handlebars illegally and bicycling in search of pork noodles in broth and Pepsi-Cola. Sooner or later his son would tire of sitting on a bicycle halted precariously in the middle of the street and would begin to groan in displeasure, whereupon the fat man himself would raise his own hoarse voice in the manner of a groan and increase the fervor of his argument, with the result that the dispute generally ended with the policeman giving way. Then, as if he had been long a victim of police oppression with regard to some matter of grave importance, the fat man would announce to his son, staring at the road ahead with utter indifference to his father’s feverish whisper

____Eeyore, we really showed that cop! We won, boy, that
makes eighteen wins in a row! and pedal off triumphantly toward the Chinese restaurant.

Inside, while they waited for their pork noodles in broth, Eeyore drank his Pepsi-Cola and the fat man raptly watched him drinking it. As prepared at the restaurant they frequented, the dish amounted to some noodles in broth garnished with mushrooms and some spinach and a piece of meat from a pork bone fried in a thin batter. When it was finally brought to their table, the fat man would empty two-thirds of the noodles and some of the mushrooms and spinach into a small bowl which he placed in front of his son, carefully watch the boy eating until the food had cooled, and only then begin to eat the pork himself, probing with his tongue for the gristle between the batter and the meat and then disposing of the halved, white spheres, after examining them minutely, in an ashtray out of Eeyore’s reach. Finally, he would eat his share of the noodles, timing himself so the two of them would finish together. Then, as he rode them home on his bike with his face flushed from the steaming noodles and burning in the wind, he would ask repeatedly,

____Eeyore, the pork noodles and the Pepsi-Cola were good? and when his son answered,

____Eeyore, the pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola were good! he would judge that complete communication had been achieved between them and would feel happy. Often he believed sincerely that of all the food he had ever eaten, that day’s pork noodles was the most delicious.

One of the major causes of the fat man’s corpulence and his son’s must have been those pork noodles in broth. From time to time his wife cautioned him about this, but he prevailed in arguments at home with the same reasoning
he used against the police. When his son’s buttocks eventually grew too fat to fit into the metal seat, the fat man hunted up a special bicycle with a ridiculously long saddle, and propped Eeyore up in front of him when they rode off for their daily meal.

The fat man had concluded that this bicycle trip in quest of pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola was a procedure to enable his idiot son to feel, in the core of his body, the pleasure of eating. However, after his experience above the polar bears’ pool, it no longer made him profoundly happy to separate the gristle from the pork rib with his tongue and inspect the shiny hemispheres; and the joy of appetite in Eeyore, eating noodles in silence at his side as always, communicated to the core of his own body as but a feeble tremor. He wondered sometimes if Eeyore’s craving for pork noodles and Pepsi might not be a groundless illusion of his own, if his son had grown so fat because, pathetically, he had been eating mechanically whatever had been placed in front of him. One day when doubts like these had ruined the fat man’s appetite and he had left the restaurant without even finishing his pork rib, the Chinese cook, who until then had never emerged from the kitchen, caught up with them on a bicycle which glistened with grease and inquired in a frighteningly emphatic accent whether anything was wrong with the food that day. The fat man, already so deflated that he lacked even the courage to ignore the cook, passed the question on to Eeyore and then shared the Chinaman’s relief when his son intoned his answer in the usual way:

____Eeyore, the pork noodles in broth and Pepsi-Cola were good!

By accumulating numerous procedures of this kind between himself and his son, the fat man had structured a
life unique to themselves. And that the structure demanded his bondage to his idiot son long had been his secret belief. But when he reconsidered now, with his experience above the polar bears’ pool behind him, he began to see that the maintenance of this extraordinary structure had been most ardently desired by himself.

Until his son began to peel from his consciousness like a scab, the fat man was convinced that he experienced directly whatever physical pain his son was feeling. When he read somewhere that the male celatius, a deep-sea fish common to Danish waters, lived its life attached like a wart to the larger body of the female, he dreamed that he was the female fish suspended deep in the sea with his son embedded in his body like the smaller male, a dream so sweet that waking up was cruel.

In the beginning no one would believe, even when they saw it happening, that the fat man suffered the same pain as his son. But in time even his most skeptical wife came to accept this as fact. It didn’t begin the minute the child was born; several years had passed when the fat man suddenly awoke to it one day. Until then, for example when his son underwent brain surgery as an infant, although the fat man caused the doctors to wonder about him queasily when he pressed them to extract from his own body for his son’s transfusions a quantity of blood not simply excessive but medically unthinkable, he did not experience faintness while his son was under anesthesia, nor did he share any physical pain. The conduit of pain between the fat man and his fat son was connected unmistakably (or so it seemed, for even now the fat man found it difficult to establish whether the pain he once had felt was real or sham, and had been made to realize that in general nothing was so difficult to recreate as pain
remaining only as a memory) when Eeyore scalded his foot in the summer of his third year.