Time of the Locust (18 page)

P
ART
III

Jewelry Box

S
ephiri awoke to the hum of locusts buzzing in his ears. What happened? He didn't want to open his eyes and find out. He tried to sink back into the safety of slumber but was unable to do so. He stayed still on his back and did not move. To calm his nerves, he thought of an afternoon he spent with his friend the dolphin. They floated on the sea together on their backs with their eyes closed. The sun blazed warm above them . . .

“You know,” said the dolphin, flicking water with his fins, “I've seen many Air children before, standing on the decks of ships and boats. I've even tried to swim up and say hello to them, but none seemed to understand my greeting. You're the only one.”

Sephiri felt special and honored.

“And you know what?” continued the dolphin. “I hope you can stay for a very long time.”

Sephiri opened his eyes and righted himself and looked at the dolphin, treading water. “What do you mean,
stay
?”

Realizing his carelessness too late, the dolphin squeezed his eyes tighter in the gentle breeze. He did not want to spoil their fun with the way of things. “I've always told you what I know, right, Sephiri?”

“Yes, you have.”

“And don't you think we'll always be friends?”

“Sure, I do,” said Sephiri. “But you didn't answer my question.”

The dolphin sighed. “Well, certain things are not my place to say. I have to keep my place, you know. That's how I stay happy. That's how I keep our cheer.”

Sephiri could respect that. He did not want the dolphin to risk his place by pressing the matter further. All things ought to stay in place, where they belonged.

The dolphin brightened.“But I know that we're friends now, and we'll be friends tomorrow, and we'll always be friends. There's only one you, and there will never be another so wonderful . . .”

Thinking back on that sunny afternoon conversation with the dolphin now, in a different place and too afraid to open his eyes, Sephiri felt ill at ease. He turned his head without opening his eyes and felt something cool and firm beneath his head—a pillow, he guessed. Then he remembered what it was like when he tried to fight off the sounds and hands and fingers. The Air people asking and telling. The sensation that someone was lifting his body and someone was putting him down. Things got worse when he realized that his room and place and space of being had been changed at the center. He was desperate to get back to the Obsidians. He tried everything to let the Air people know—screaming, biting, hitting, flailing, jumping. He had even thrown up a few times to pour out some of what was too much, but still they did not understand. He tried to make the journey to the Obsidians. But somehow, on his way out to the water, he lost his strength. He was all worn out.

That was when his head felt very light, as if it could lift right off his shoulders, and his eyes rolled up in his head. He fell back into the warm black, and it pulled down over him like a drawn shade, more impenetrable and opaque than even the darkness of the cube. The black clung to every limb of his body. Sometimes this happened when the Land of Air proved to be too much. Like when he had to get his immunization shots and he knocked the needle from the nurse's hand before being pinned down by two others. Or the time he wandered away at the car wash and slipped into the backseat of someone's station wagon. The big blue brushes and long tangles of cloth tresses terrorized him so, and he screamed for what felt like hours, until someone stopped the machine. So it was in this between state that he felt soothed, and he wanted to hide inside of it until the Air people went away. Time went by—he couldn't tell how much—and he thought that maybe it was safe to open his eyes.

His head was aching, and it was then that he remembered his screaming. His throat was scratchy and dry. Slowly, he opened his eyes. Above, there was the familiar track lighting. He was at the center, but the ceiling was different. There was a bright mural of a summer sky painted there. For a moment, he imagined that the great swarms of flying creatures he saw in his dreams were sweeping across the fluffy clouds in the mural. Then he realized that he was lying on the white sheets of a small bed that he did not recognize. He thought about screeching to clarify and settle his jumbled feelings, to take control of the alarm rising within him like tidewater, but his head and throat were hurting.

He sat up slowly and looked around. The room was different. The cerulean-blue carpet beneath his feet was bathed in a soft yellow light. The walls were all made of glass, and a disquieting feeling crept over him that he was inside a giant jewelry box like the one he saw on his mother's dresser. He could see what was inside of it, but the lid didn't open. Worse, he could feel that there was someone standing behind the glass looking in, but he did not look at the person. He did not want to see the questions in the person's eyes right now. The solace of the grandfather clock was not there, and he began to rock to the pendulum in his head for comfort, to keep rhythm and order. He moved cautiously, turned, and scooted to the edge of the bed. He rocked back, forth, back, forth . . . he was beginning to feel better. He was moving back and forth with the ticking of the clock, the tide of the ocean, the cycles of the moon.

But the room was different. He saw that there was a round play table made of light pine with a single chair in the center of the room. In the corner, to his great delight, was a bathtub, but it was not the bathtub he knew of turquoise water. He looked down and realized he was dressed in bathing trunks that he had never seen before. He tried to accept the difference of this place, feeling his apprehension grow. He tried to fight the need to climb to the top of the tallest mountain and scream, to write “NO” in the sky with his finger. He rocked again and listened to his heartbeat, felt his lungs fill with air. He could breathe, at least. He might live. He continued rocking until he calmed down enough to listen. He craned his neck toward the glass walls and listened for the familiar voice of his mother.

He did not want to look around too much, anticipating that he might see the ruffled smock of the attendant or the rimmed glasses of one of the doctors. He missed the known world of the Obsidians, the medicine cabinet, the coat closet. Sleep called strongly to him again. He fell back onto the little bed, took in the coolness of the sheets, and closed his eyes. Although the new place had not devoured him whole as he feared, he was not prepared for the scale of effort it would take to process it, to glean some sense of understanding and meaning.

To beckon sleep, he would not think of any of that now, lest he scream again, and he was too tired to get up and spin or flail or flap. He would not think of the things that were still a mystery, like that place he drew, the giant black box with the dark figures that hovered on the edges of it, the mountains that stood behind it, the flying creatures riding the wind. Before sinking deeper into the black, Sephiri listened once more for his mother's voice. He would not think about the fear he pushed aside when, from the corner of his eye, he did not see her large frame behind the glass. He did not want to look and confirm that she was not there.

Impressions

B
renda pulled her car into a two-hour parking space near the Takoma Park Autism Center. She did not want to stand out front and wait for Manden this time. At the last appointment, she'd had the distraction of Sephiri's restlessness and the chilliness of the morning. This time, she didn't have the energy to struggle with Sephiri with the added apprehension that there were yet new dimensions to his autism that she was about to discover. She had put him on the van instead.

Sometimes, in the quiet of the car when Brenda turned off the engine and held the steering wheel to steady her nerves, fear of the future crept into her heart. The routines, the silences, the fixations, the limitations, the extremities stretched out before her like a long road. They would grow older together. Sephiri would grow bigger and would become an even greater mystery. She would grow larger and frailer under the weight of everything. And she would exist with Sephiri in a rift of time where she would be there to take care of him, to stand by the gate he held locked to the world. These things Brenda knew but felt she could do nothing about. Like the sugar in her blood.

Alone at the dinner table the other day, Brenda ate a large pizza. She wanted brownies to go with it, but she was too tired to stop at another store. She was only able to get Sephiri to eat half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before he threw the rest on the floor. She offered him a small plate of baby carrots, of which he ate two. She peeled a banana and set it next to the remaining carrots. Sephiri paid it no mind and left the table to wander the house, and she gave up and sat down. There was ice cream in the freezer, but only a half-gallon was left, not enough to satisfy her. She went to the pantry to examine the shelves: raisins, spaghetti sauce, boxes of macaroni and cheese, pretzels, pancake mix, parboiled rice, caramel popcorn, taco shells, graham crackers, goobers, canned tomatoes, egg noodles, tuna fish, marshmallows, pickles, cookies, and potato chips. There was nothing she wanted.

Sephiri slipped upstairs and got hold of a bag of M&M's she had hidden in her dresser drawer. By the time she discovered him, he had eaten almost the entire bag and launched into a sugar-powered, two-hour tirade of running and screaming all about the house. Her every effort to calm him was met with more screaming. She could not reach him, and this recurrent failure killed her inside. Frustrated, she left him rolling around on the living-room floor to wash the pans that were sitting since the day before. At the kitchen sink, she sliced her finger with the paring knife in the dishwater, but she was not sure if it was an accident. The cut stung under the running tap, and she was secretly pleased at the pain. It distracted her from Sephiri's fit in the next room. It fed something inside of her. She watched the blood ribbon swirl down the drain, her mind emptying.

Sephiri threw up on the living-room carpet while she was straightening up the kitchen. In her despair at the mess, Brenda consoled herself with the thought of the box of apple pie in the freezer. But then she thought of the long preparation (sixty minutes in the oven or thirty-five minutes in the microwave). The microwave, broken since Sephiri stuffed it with the filling from a sofa pillow and turned it on, stared back at Brenda from the kitchen counter, shiny and untouched. She saw her largeness reflected in the gleaming door of the microwave oven and wondered how much more it would take to bury the origins and components of her ordeal, how deep the hole she was digging had to be.

If you want to be around for your son
 . . .

Brenda got out of the car and walked to the Autism Center entrance. As far as she could tell, Manden had not yet arrived. She pulled the door handle and walked into the building. As she stepped inside, she tried to prepare herself to hear how Sephiri suddenly could not stay awake. How he had entered yet another labyrinth that led to other dimensions. He was sleepy all the time. There were suggestions to get his hormone levels checked again by his pediatrician, to run another neurological diagnosis. But she had just taken him for all of that when she discovered he was holding his bowels. She had taken Sephiri to the doctor so many times in his short life to try to find the answer to a million questions. What was it that set off a particularly violent episode? Why didn't he sleep? Why was he biting? What triggered him to hide in closets? The possibilities were endless. Dairy products. Overexposure to light. Sensitivity to fabrics. Unfamiliar smells. Something swallowed that she had not known about. It could have been anything, but it was nothing anyone could figure out.

Brenda sighed and looked over her shoulder once more, but she did not see Manden. He would catch up with her, she thought. Or he would not come at all. She could not be angry with him either way. It was not his responsibility. Sephiri was not his obligation. Beyond the envelope every month (which Manden offered without her asking) and his name on forms where the father's name was to be listed, what else could she ask of him? She opened the door and walked slowly toward the office at the end of the hall. Back when she had been painting the portrait of a perfect family in her mind, she planned to have more than one child. She wanted a home filled with the laughter of many children. But she ended up with silence after all. Sephiri lived as if he was the only boy in the world, a singular being around which other beings were the same as furniture. And still, she had never seen her boy smile and had been robbed even of this one small gift of solace. She had only his stiffened body and soapstone face. Hugs were a foreign concept. Kisses did not exist. There were only attempts at schedules and routines to guide them through the thick fog of their lives. Days were made remarkable only by the occasions when Sephiri grabbed her hand and bit it.

Brenda arrived at the end of the hallway. At the office door, she was greeted by Sephiri's speech pathologist, Dr. Susan Watson. A tear in the young doctor's nylon stockings exposed her pink ankle beneath the strap of one of her Italian leather slingback shoes, rubbing it raw so that she limped slightly. Brenda followed her in.

“Good to see you again, Mrs. Thompson,” said Dr. Watson as they headed to her office. She opened the door and motioned for Brenda to go in first. The walls were painted a warm yellow, with matching guest chairs. Powder-blue pillows and a paisley-print throw rug accented the inviting color scheme. Van Gogh's
Starry Night
hung on the wall.

“Is Manden Thompson coming as well?” Dr. Watson casually asked without looking at Brenda.

“He should be along soon,” said Brenda.

The doctor offered a thin smile. “Why don't we get comfortable first?” she said, gesturing toward the chairs.

Brenda sat down.

Dr. Watson poured them each a cup of coffee from the little brewer she kept atop her file cabinet. “I felt we should talk in a more private setting. The other meeting was rather formal, no?”

“A little,” said Brenda.

“Well, Sephiri is doing fine right now. He's awake. He had something to eat, and he's quiet.”

Brenda knew that this could mean any number of things, from staring at the wall, to shaking his head violently, to pacing the room. A shadow descended on her when she thought of the fact that she was not up to seeing her boy in this state now, in that unreachable place.

“We haven't allowed him to get into the tub again since that last scare when he drifted off to sleep,” the doctor continued. “And we still don't know to what degree the room change affected him or what exactly triggered his extreme tantrum. As you know, it was a bit rougher than we expected, enough that he passed out. We did have our pediatrician take a look at him, though, and she didn't find anything out of the ordinary.” The doctor shook her head. “But as I told you on the telephone, Mrs. Thompson, his unusual sleeping is anything but ordinary.”

Brenda thought of all the nights Sephiri startled her, when she opened her eyes and found him standing over her dresser or heard him creeping around the hallway and downstairs. Now, incredibly, he could not stay awake. She listened to the silence outside the office door. Manden had not yet arrived.

“Of course, we'll continue to run the usual checkups on him,” Dr. Watson continued. “But at this point, I'd like to know if there is anything different at home, any small changes at all?”

Brenda's eyes glimmered. What was this woman trying to say? She was doing her best with Sephiri. Although it hadn't been enough, she had been giving it her all. Sephiri had always been consistently bizarre in his own little way. There wasn't anything unusual at home. But this new issue about his drowsiness and heavy sleeping, in addition to the locust drawings, set her nerves on edge. “No, Dr. Watson. I can't think of anything that's been different lately. Sephiri's sleeping patterns were never regular. With all the trouble I have had getting him to sleep—to stay asleep—I can't imagine anyone actually having trouble waking him up. I don't think either of us has ever slept for more than a few hours at a time since he was born.”

The doctor looked at Brenda carefully. “What about Manden Thompson? Has anything changed in Sephiri's relationship with him?”

“What do you mean?” asked Brenda.

Dr. Watson took out a folder from her drawer and handed it to Brenda. “Sephiri drew this when he woke up this morning. Like the other drawings, the level of detail and skill is astonishing. It could have been done by an accomplished Impressionist. But this one is incredible for a different reason.”

Brenda stared at the drawing in disbelief. It was a beautiful rendering of the ocean in pencil. Most shocking were the delicate lines and shading. The currents and skeins of moving water skipped across the white paper. There were white-capped waves, which danced just above the surface, and hints of ocean spray stretched from the tops of the frothy peaks like strings of silk. There was a small fisherman's boat out on the water, and a figure sat in the boat in stark relief against what looked like a pale, lonely sky. In the foreground was a lovely sea line, with etched groves of sand that disappeared into the tide in some places. Hermit crabs and sand dollars were scattered about. There was a line of tiny turtles heading into the sea. And standing on the shore was the watery silhouette of a man waving to the figure in the distant boat.

The doctor shook her head in wonder. “It's very tender, don't you think? Beautiful, really. Perhaps that is Sephiri in the boat. But what strikes me the most is the man in the foreground. We've never known Sephiri to draw a picture of someone before. Who do you think it could be?”

Brenda said nothing and stared at the nebulous figure. Sephiri's watercolor-like crayon strokes made the man appear as if he were shrouded in smoke. She looked at the sketches of the water, whimsical and silent. It reminded her of a recurrent dream she used to have about Horus in the early days of his imprisonment. In it, he was on the Maryland shore, where they spent so many weekend holidays. The sun was setting down on the crystal water, melting like a great candle. She could see him as if she were floating above. He was lying on the sand, the landscape butterscotch and tan in the sunset. The tide was coming in. Slowly, the soft waves moved closer and closer to him. His feet. His legs. His chest. He made no attempt to move as the sand and silt filled the crevices of his body like the fossil of some long-dead creature washed ashore. He lay stiff and unblinking, staring upward. She did not know if he could see anything in the sky, if he could see her watching. The tide washed up higher still, covering his chest, then his shoulders. The water reached his neck, but still he did not move. The tide moved over his lips, then his nose.

In the dream, Brenda wanted to cry out to him, to warn him. But having no voice, no form of which she was aware, she could not do so. The water, black and sleek, moved over his motionless body, over the bridge of his nose, then his glasslike eyes. It covered the last of his head, and then there was nothing to see but the surface of the ocean. Brenda had that same dream many times, until the years slackened the flow to her subconscious. She did not dream that dream anymore.

Brenda looked at her son's drawing, at the wispy waves and the lonely boat floating on the horizon. His drawings had been the first glimpses she ever had of the interior of Sephiri's mind. She looked again at the shadowy figure. She had never gotten an indication that Sephiri noticed Manden in any meaningful way. He acted with Manden with the same indifference he had with everyone around him. People were objects, just outside his field of vision. Their voices were white noise to whatever Sephiri was listening to in his mind. Yet there was this drawing of a man. And what scared her more was what the man might represent. The law of God she felt she'd broken crept into her mind once more. She kept Sephiri a secret from Horus, and now her boy wanted a father, something she could not give him. And she was pained that there was no trace of her anywhere in Sephiri's drawings. To him, she was not there.

Brenda handed the drawing back to the young doctor and shook her head. She looked at the other empty chair in the office. Manden had decided not to come to the appointment, she guessed. He didn't have the strength for what she dealt with every day.