Something Happened

time because he was always around somewhere listening and watching. (I got weary headaches over my eyes instead.) We couldn't tell dirty jokes, I couldn't be obscene, not even when we had people in. I couldn't flirt. He was there and would see me. (At least my daughter, God bless her benevolent heart, had been considerate enough to pack up her troubles in her old duffel bag and foot-locker and go off to camp to be miserable far away from us for the summer and pester us from afar.) He was right there. He was always right there. (I couldn't say or do anything I wouldn't want him to witness. There were so many ways I might upset him.) When I turned around sometimes, he was underfoot and I would step on him, and we would both feel terrible and blurt clumsy, incoherent apologies. (I wanted to curse. I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream: 'Get out of here!') I couldn't decide what to say. I didn't know how to handle it. Finally, I figured it out. I said: 'Get lost.'

To make him realize he was capable of leaving us and finding his way around without getting lost, I made him go for a long walk alone; and, of course, he got lost.

'Get lost,' I repeated more sharply, when he appeared not to understand.

'Huh?'

'I've got nothing to do,' he had grumbled a moment before.

'Go someplace.'

'Where?'

'Away. Take a walk.'

'With who?'

'With yourself. Mommy and I want to be here on the beach alone for a while.'

'I won't know how.'

'Yes, you will.'

'I won't get back.'

'Yes, you will.'

'Now?'

'When then?'

My wife stared away from him stonily. 'You'd better go,' she advised unsympathetically.

'Go down the beach to the amusement pier. Then turn around and come back. Just follow the water down the beach to the amusement pier. Then turn around and follow the water back.'

'I want to stay here.'

'I want you to go.'

'I'll get lost.'

'You'd have to be pretty damned smart to do that.'

I was determined. He stood up, rubbing sand slowly from his palms, and walked off submissively in mute dejection without looking back. He was soon gone from sight behind the heads and torsos of other people jamming the shoreline. The amusement pier looked farther away than ever before, the beach more densely packed. I was afraid he'd get lost. (I was afraid I'd get lost if I had to do what I'd sent him to do.)

'Why did you do it?' my wife asked critically, already repenting her own passive cooperation.

'You wanted me to do it, didn't you?'

I kept craning my neck to keep slim flashes of him in view for as long as I could and grew worried and sorry also as soon as he was gone.

'I know,' my wife admitted. She nodded absently. 'I couldn't stand him hanging around here anymore.'

'Me neither.'

'He's always here. It breaks my heart.'

'Mine too.'

'He always looks so unhappy.'

'That's one of the things I can't stand.'

'Do you think he'll get lost?'

'He can't get lost. It's that damned play group, damn them. None of this would have happened if they'd kept closer watch of things. I want him to see that he can go from place to place alone without having something terrible happen to him.'

'The beach is so crowded.'

'He won't get lost.'

He got lost.

(At least we thought he was lost.)

When twenty-five minutes passed and he did not return, we went surging after him in panic, my wife scurrying along the shore, myself trudging through deeper sand in the middle of the beach in the direction of the amusement pier. (I thought of homosexual perverts or of other kids from the play group spotting him, mocking him, ganging up on him.

'The sky is falling!' I wanted to shout in horror at groups of adults I hurried past with a thundering heart. 'Have you seen a little kid? He's lost. He'll look worried.')

We found him standing by himself along the shore about two hundred yards away, floundering in one spot as though lost: he was not certain if he had overshot us already, and he did not know, therefore, in which direction to proceed. His cheeks were white, his eyes were distant, and his jaws were clamped shut. The tendons in his neck were taut, and he had a lump in his throat. The landmarks along the boardwalk — all those familiar signs and structures — meant nothing to him.

My first impulse was to kill him. 'Were you lost?' I shouted to him.

'I don't know.' He shrugged. I wanted to kill him. I was enraged and disgusted with him for his helplessness and incompetence (standing there like that on the sidewalk in town that day as though all the bones in his ankles were broken. I was ashamed of him and wanted to disown him. I was sorry he was mine), then I wanted to clasp him to me lovingly and protectively and shed tears of misery and deepest compassion over him (because I had wanted to kill him. Imagine having a father that wanted to kill you. That's the part they all leave out of the Oedipus story. Poor Oedipus has been much maligned. He didn't want to kill his father. His father wanted to kill him). I don't know what I felt when I found him standing there like that, immense gratitude that he was unharmed and intense, depressing disappointment over everything else, a terrible rush of ungovernable, dissonant emotions in which landmarks made no sense to me, either. (I don't always know what I feel now.) (I wish I were a chimpanzee.) The next day my wife and I had a scathing quarrel in the house over money and sex that had nothing at all to do with him (although he could not know that). We snarled and snapped and sneered at each other like barking jackals. She yelled at me and I yelled back (we called each other bastard and bitch and told each other to go fuck ourselves), and when I stormed away into the kitchen to fling some ice cubes into my glass of whiskey, nearly shattering it in my hand with my violent force, I heard my boy move into the living room timidly and say, softly, to my wife:

'Should I go for a walk again? To the amusement pier?'

I heard myself sigh. I wanted to weep.

'Is that why Daddy's unhappy?'

I felt myself feel so utterly awful.

My wife came into the kitchen quietly.

'Did you hear him?' she murmured, her anger against me gone. (I said nothing.) 'He wants to know if he should go for a walk again. He thinks that's why you're unhappy now.'

'He did not,' I denied finally, without spirit.

'You must have heard him. Go ask him.'

'I don't believe you.'

'You get crazy when you're this way,' my wife lamented. 'I can't talk to you. None of us can. You won't listen and you won't see. Go ask him. Go see what he looks like if you don't believe me.'

I knew what I would see (and did not want to). I stepped around my wife without looking at her or touching her and walked into the living room. He was standing docile and repentant (as though he were to blame) near the door leading out to the porch, awaiting my directions. His skin was shaded blue. (He would do whatever I asked. He did not want me to be angry or unhappy because of him. His eyes were wide and serious. I have never before or since in all my life felt so totally cruel, so rotten, depraved, and inhuman. He was prepared to yield himself to any sacrifice I requested of him. I did not want him that way.) His look was expectant, grave, and resigned. I did