Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (24 page)

When his son began to raise not simple screams as much as rash shouts of protest, the fat man was sprawled on his living room couch, reading a magazine; and although behind his eyelids, where his tears were beginning to well, he could see with surrealistic clarity, as if he were watching a film in slow motion, the spectacle of the pan filled with boiling water tilting up and tipping over, he did not rise and dash into the kitchen in aid of his son. He lay as he was submerged in a feebleness like the disembodiment that accompanies a high fever, and chorused his son’s shouts with a thick moaning of his own. Yet even then it couldn’t have been said that he had achieved a firm hold on physical pain. He strapped his son’s heavy, thrashing body into a rusty baby carriage which he dragged out of his shed and somehow managed to secure the scalded foot. And although he groaned heavily all the way to the distant clinic as he slowly pushed the carriage past the strangers halted in the street to watch his eery progress, he could not have said with certainty that he was actually feeling Eeyore’s pain in his own flesh.

However, as he bore down against the explosive thrashing of his son’s small projectile of a body so the doctor could bare and treat the blistered foot, the following question coalesced in the fat man’s mind: could any conscious state be so full of fright and hurt as perceiving pain and not its cause, and perceiving pain only, because an idiot infant’s murky brain could not begin to grasp the logic of a situation in which pain persisted and was apparently to go unsoothed and, as if that were not enough, a stranger stepped in officiously to inflict still another pain while even Father cooperated? That instant,
the fat man began through clenched teeth to express cries of pain himself which so resembled his son’s screams that they merged with them indistinguishably and could not have shocked the doctor or the nurses. His leg had actually begun to throb (he believed!) with the pain of a burn.

By the time the wound had been bandaged, the fat man himself, at the side of his pale, limp son was too exhausted to speak. His wife, who had been in the examination room helping to hold the patient down, went home with Eeyore in a taxi, leaving the fat man to return alone down the narrow street which paralleled the railroad tracks, the rope he had used to secure his son coiled inside the empty carriage. As he walked along the fat man wondered why his wife had wrested Eeyore away from him and raced away in a taxicab. If he had put his son back in the carriage and they had returned together down this same street, had she been afraid he might have launched himself and the carriage between the used ties which had been newly erected to fence off the tracks and attempted to escape the pain which now gripped them both by throwing himself and the child beneath the filthy wheels of the commuter express? Possibly, for even if his cries had not reached the ears of the doctor and the nurses, merging with his son’s screams, to his wife they must have been clearly audible; for in pinning his son’s shoulders she had leaned so far over the table toward him that her head had nearly touched his own. Although he handled the empty carriage roughly, the fat man made his way down the street with excessive care, as though he were favoring a leg which had been just treated for a burn, and if he had to skip over a small puddle he produced an earnest cry of pain.

From that day on, insofar as the fat man was aware,
whatever pain his son was feeling communicated to him through their clasped hands and never failed to produce in his own body a tremor of pain in unison. If the fat man was able to attach positive significance to this phenomenon of pain shared, it was because he managed to believe that his own understanding of the pain resonating sympathetically in himself, for example as resulting from blistered and dead skin being peeled away from a burn with a tweezers, would flow backward like light through his son’s hand, which he held in his own, and impart a certain order to the chaos of fear and pain in the child’s dark, dulled mind. The fat man began to function as a window in his son’s mind, permitting the light from the outside to penetrate to the dark interior which trembled with pain not adequately understood. And so long as Eeyore did not step forward to repudiate his function, there was no reason the fat man should have doubted it. Since now he was able to proclaim to himself that he was accepting painful bondage to his son happily, his new role even permitted him the consolation of feeling like an innocent victim.

Shortly after Eeyore’s fourth birthday, the fat man took him for an eye examination at a certain university hospital. No matter who the eye specialist, examining an idiot child who never spoke at all except to babble something of little relevance in a severely limited vocabulary, or to utter noises in response to pain or simple pleasure, would certainly prove a difficult, vexatious task. And this young patient was not only fat and heavy, and therefore difficult to hold, he was abnormally strong in his arms and legs, so that once fear had risen in him he was as impossible to manage as a frightened animal.

The fat man’s wife, having noticed right away something
distinctively abnormal about Eeyore’s sight, and having speculated in a variety of amateur ways on the possible connections to his retardation, long had wanted a specialist to examine his eyes. But at every clinic he had visited, the fat man had been turned away. Finally, he went to see the brain surgeon who had enabled the child whose alternatives were death or idiocy to escape at least from death, and managed to obtain a letter of introduction to the department of opthalmology in the same university hospital.

The family went to the hospital together, but at first his wife left the fat man in the waiting room and went upstairs alone with Eeyore. Half an hour later, dragging her heavy, shrieking son and obviously exhausted, she staggered back. The examination had scarcely begun, and already the doctor, the nurses, even his wife was prostrate, while Eeyore himself presented a picture of such cruel abuse that the other patients were looking on in dismay. The fat man, furious to see his son in such a state, and menaced, understood why his wife had left him in the waiting room and gone upstairs alone with Eeyore. There was no longer room for doubt that a thorough examination of a child’s eyes was an uninterrupted ordeal, rife with some kind of grotesque and virulent terror.

Eeyore was still producing at the back of his throat something like the echo of a feeble scream when the fat man dropped to his knees on the dirty floor and embraced his pudgy body. The hand which Eeyore wound around his neck was moist with the sweat of fear, like the pads on the foot of a cat that had tasted danger. And the touch of his hand infused the fat man with the essence of his son’s entire experience during the thirty minutes past (so he believed at the time). Every hollow and rise of the fat
man’s body was possessed by an aching numbness that followed thirty long minutes in the spiney clamps of medical instruments he had never actually seen: had not Eeyore quieted gradually in his arms until now he was only whimpering, he might have raised a terrific scream and begun writhing on the floor himself.

Unique in his household for her excessive leanness, the fat man’s provident wife had taken the precaution of stopping downstairs in hopes of preventing the two of them, himself and his son, from behaving in just this lunatic way.

____They must have been horrible to him, the fat man moaned, sighing hoarsely. What the hell did they think he is, the bastards!

____It was Eeyore who was horrible: he kept kicking the doctors and the nurses away, one after the other, and he broke all kinds of things, said the fat man’s wife. It wasn’t that she always tried for fairness or objectivity so much as that she refused to participate in the fat man’s paranoia. The fat man listened to her sighing now, mournfully angry at her violent son, and felt that he was included in her attack.

____No, there must have been something wrong basically, otherwise Eeyore wouldn’t have been so wild. Think how gentle he always is! And you said the examination had just begun—then how did Eeyore know there was something so bad in store for him that he had to fight that way? There has to be something fundamentally wrong, I mean with the eye department here, and you just missed it, that’s all, the fat man said rapidly, forestalling his wife’s almost certainly accurate rebuttal and beginning to believe, because he was insisting it, that there was indeed something wrong with the hospital. He even established
arbitrary grounds for the judgment: his son, who had finished rubbing the back of his neck with his sweaty palm and was simply moaning softly at his side, had communicated it to him telepathically.

____I’m going to take Eeyore back up there. We may not be able to get a diagnosis, but at least I’ll see what they’re doing wrong, the fat man rasped, his round face an angry red. Otherwise it will be the same business all over again, no matter how many times you come back, and Eeyore’s experience here will haunt him like the memory of an awful nightmare without ever making any sense to him!

____It won’t take Eeyore long to forget about it—he’s nearly forgotten already.

____That’s nonsense, Eeyore won’t forget. Do you know that he’s been crying a lot in the middle of the night recently? It’s frightening enough just that Eeyore’s frightened, can you stand to think of him having nightmares he can’t make any sense of?

With this the fat man decisively silenced his wife, who did not sleep in her son’s room at night. He then swung Eeyore on to his shoulders with the same emphaticness and marched up the stairs toward the examination room, the dirt from the floor still on his coat. Being able to parade the truth this way, that the existence essential to his pudgy son was not his mother but himself, inspired the fat man with a courage close to gallantry. At the same time, the prospect of the cruel ordeal the two of them might have to undergo left him pale and dizzy, and at each breathless step he climbed his head flashed hot and his body shook with chill.

____Eeyore! we have to keep a sharp watch, you and I, to see they don’t put anything over on us, said the fat man, lifting his voice in an appeal to the warm and heavy
presence on his shoulders which sometimes felt, to his confusion, more like his guardian spirit than his ward.

____Eeyore, if we can finish this up together, we’ll go out for some pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola!

____Eeyore, the pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola were good! his fat son lazily replied, satisfied to be riding on his father’s shoulder and seemingly liberated from the memory of his experience a while ago.

This seemed to testify to the accuracy of his wife’s prediction, and if the fat man had not been spurred by his son’s voice he would certainly have lost his courage at the entrance to the examination room and returned meekly as he had come. For not only was a young nurse bolting the door which she had just closed, with the unmistakable intention of locking further patients out, the clock having struck noon, but when she turned and saw the child riding on the fat man’s shoulders a look of panic and protest came over her face, as if she were re-encountering a ghost she had finally managed to be rid of, and she scurried behind the door to hide. The fat man, counting on the elitism of a university hospital, announced unbidden and as pretentiously as possible that he had been referred by a certain Professor of Medicine, and named the brain surgeon. The nurse didn’t answer him directly; it was unlikely she even considered chasing away by herself the large, fat man who had planted himself in front of the office without even lowering his son from his shoulders. Instead, leaving the door half open, she ran back inside to a dark corner which was curtained off at the rear of the room and began some kind of an appeal.

For just a minute, the fat man hesitated. Then he stepped over the lowered bolt and strode to the back of the room, where he encountered a shrill voice protesting
behind the curtain in what sounded like uncontainable anger.

____No, no, no! Absolutely not! It would take every man in the building to hold down that little blimp. What’s that? He’s here already? I don’t care if he is, the answer is No!

This was a point for the fat man’s side. With calm to spare, he slowly lowered Eeyore to the floor. Then he thrust his large head inside the curtain and discovered a doctor so diminutive that he looked in his surgical gown like a child dressed up in grownup clothes, arching backward in the dimness right under his nose a tiny head that recalled a praying mantis as he shouted at the disconcerted nurse. The fat man took a long, brazen look, then said with stunning politeness,

____I was referred here by Professor of Medicine X. Could we possibly try again, perhaps I can help?

So the examination began. How can you refuse when the patient’s enormous parent interrupts you with that deadly politeness in the middle of shrieking at your nurse? seemed to be the question smouldering in the praying mantis’s head as, peevishly ignoring the fat man, he began his examination by shining a pencil light in Eeyore’s eyes. It was to increase the efficiency of this tiny bulb that half the room was kept in shrouded darkness. The fat man crouched uncomfortably in the narrow space behind the swivel chair, his arms locked around Eeyore’s chest. It made him proud to think that the boy was sitting in the chair at all, although his body was straining backward and continued to shudder, because it was himself, who invariably stayed with his son through the night, who was holding him around the chest. Thirty minutes ago, not realizing that Eeyore’s fear of the dark could not be overcome unless it was directed through the conduit
between father and son, his wife and the doctor and these nurses must have driven the boy to the desperation of a small animal at bay in this same stage of the examination. But this time, he was able to think with satisfaction, the fat man had observed himself that the darkness in this room was not particularly frightening, and the essence of his judgment had been transmitted to Eeyore through the pressure of his hands and was lowering one by one the danger flags flapping in the boy’s dim mind.

Even so, Eeyore was afraid of the pencil light itself and refused to look in the direction the doctor desired, straight into its tiny beam. By tossing his head from side to side and watching out of the corner of his eye, he continued to evade the agitated pursuit of the pencil light in the little doctor’s hand. Presently, the young nurse stepped in to help, probably hoping to redeem herself with the doctor.
Garuk! Garuk!
The fat man heard an odious noise and felt Eeyore’s body contract with anxiety, and when he looked up in reproof he saw a hair-raising rubber frog, coated with phosphorescent paint which made it gleam in the dark, dancing back and forth in the nurse’s hand and croaking horribly,
garuk, garuk, garuk,
as she attempted to attract the patient’s attention. The fat man, more in response to the formidable protest rising from his own bowels than to stop the nurse for his son’s sake, was about to utter something angrily when Eeyore succumbed to total panic, began to rotate around the axis of his father’s arms, and kicked to the floor not only the doctor’s pencil light and the rubber frog in the nurse’s hand but a variety of objects on a small table diagonally in front of him. Even as he gave vent to a moan of rage in secret chorus with his son the fat man saw in a flash that Eeyore had brought clattering to the floor, in addition to
several large books, a bowl of rice and fried eel which seemed to be the doctor’s lunch. And from the abnormally rapid pitch of the examination after this, it was impossible to avoid the impression that the little doctor was indeed provoking his intractable patient, and out of anger which derived at least in part from hunger unappeased. This permitted them—the composite of his son and himself—to sample the pleasure of retaliation. At the same time, it was the basis for a very grave fear. Here was a doctor tired and hungry after a full morning of appointments, and now his lunch was in ruins, yet he lacked the courage openly to revile this idiot boy and his corpulent father who flaunted a letter of introduction from Professor of Medicine X—how could the fat man be sure the little man wouldn’t work some subtle vengeance on his son’s eyes? This new terror was accompanied by regret; the fat man withered.