hundred pages of information to get out the door in one week and I was about ready to kill three different people and we thought we’d better head for the woods for a while.”
“I can hardly remember what part of the woods we were in. Head just spinning with engineering data, and anyway Chris was just screaming. We couldn’t touch him, until I finally saw I was going to have to pick him up fast and get him to the hospital, and where that was I’ll never remember, but they found nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No. But it happened again on other occasions too.”
“Don’t they have any idea?” Sylvia asks.
“This spring they diagnosed it as the beginning symptoms of mental illness.”
“What?” John says.
It’s too dark to see Sylvia or John now or even the outlines of the hills. I listen for sounds in the distance, but hear none. I don’t know what to answer and so say nothing.
When I look hard I can make out stars overhead but the fire in front of us makes it hard to see them. The night all around is thick and obscure. My cigarette is down to my fingers and I put it out.
“I didn’t know that”, Sylvia’s voice says. All traces of anger are gone. “We wondered why you brought him instead of your wife”, she says. “I’m glad you told us.”
John shoves some of the unburned ends of the wood into the fire.
Sylvia says, “What do you suppose the cause is?”
John’s voice rasps, as if to cut it off, but I answer, “I don’t know. Causes and effects don’t seem to fit. Causes and effects are a result of thought. I would think mental illness comes before thought.” This doesn’t make sense to them, I’m sure. It doesn’t make much sense to me and I’m too tired to try to think it out and give it up.
“What do the psychiatrists think?” John asks.
“Nothing. I stopped it.”
“Stopped it?”
“Yes.”
“Is that good?”
“I don’t know. There’s no rational reason I can think of for saying it’s not good. Just a mental block of my own. I think about it and all the good reasons for it and make plans for an appointment and even look for the phone number and then the block hits, and it’s just like a door slammed shut.”
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“No one else thinks so either. I suppose I can’t hold out forever.”
“But why?” Sylvia asks.
“I don’t know why — it’s just that — I don’t know — they’re not kin.” — Surprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kin — sounds like hillbilly talk — not of a kind — same root — kindness, too — they can’t have real kindness toward him, they’re not his kin. That’s exactly the feeling.
Old word, so ancient it’s almost drowned out. What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be “kind.” And everybody’s supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn’t help. Now it’s just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. But what do they really know about kindness who are not kin.
It goes over and over again through my thoughts — mein Kind… my child. There it is in another language. Mein Kinder — “Wer reitet so spat durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind.”
Strange feeling from that.
“What are you thinking about?” Sylvia asks.
“An old poem, by Goethe. It must be two hundred years old. I had to learn it a long time ago. I don’t know why I should remember it now, except — ” The strange feeling comes back.
“How does it go?” Sylvia asks.
I try to recall. “A man is riding along a beach at night, through the wind. It’s a father, with his son, whom he holds fast in his arm. He asks his son why he looks so pale, and the son replies, ‘Father, don’t you see the ghost?’ The father tried to reassure the boy it’s only a bank of fog along the beach that he sees and only the rustling of the leaves in the wind that he hears but the son keeps saying it is the ghost and the father rides harder and harder through the night.”
“How does it end?”
“In failure — death of the child. The ghost wins.”
The wind blows light up from the coals and I see Sylvia look at me startled.
“But that’s another land and another time”, I say. “Here life is the end and ghosts have no meaning. I believe that. I believe in all this too”, I say, looking out at the darkened prairie, “although I’m not sure of what it all means yet — I’m not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that’s why I talk so much.”
The coals die lower and lower. We smoke our last cigarettes. Chris is off somewhere in the darkness but I’m not going to shag after him. John is carefully silent and Sylvia is silent and suddenly we are all separate, all alone in our private universes, and there is no communication among us. We douse the fire and go back to the sleeping bags in the pines.
I discover that this one tiny refuge of scrub pines where I have put the sleeping bags is also the refuge from the wind of millions of mosquitos up from the reservoir. The mosquito repellent doesn’t stop them at all. I crawl deep into the sleeping bag and make one little hole for breathing. I am almost asleep when Chris finally shows up.
“There’s a great big sandpile over there”, he says, crunching around on the pine needles.
“Yes”, I say. “Get to sleep.”
“You should see it. Will you come and see it tomorrow?”
“We won’t have time.”
“Can I play over there tomorrow morning?”
“Yes.”
He makes interminable noises getting undressed and into the sleeping bag. He is in it. Then he rolls around. Then he is silent, and then rolls some more. Then he says, “Dad?”
“What?”
“What was it like when you were a kid?”
“Go to sleep, Chris!” There are limits to what you can listen to.
Later I hear a sharp inhaling of phlegm that tells me he has been crying, and though I’m exhausted, I don’t sleep. A few words of consolation might have helped there. He was trying to be friendly. But the words weren’t forthcoming for some reason. Consoling words are more for strangers, for hospitals, not kin. Little emotional Band- Aids like that aren’t what he needs or what’s sought. I don’t know what he needs, or what’s sought.
A gibbous moon comes up from the horizon beyond the pines, and by its slow, patient arc across the sky I measure hour after hour of semisleep. Too much fatigue. The moon and strange dreams and sounds of mosquitos and odd fragments of memory become jumbled and mixed in an unreal lost landscape in which the moon is shining and yet there is a bank of fog and I am riding a horse and Chris is with me and the horse jumps over a small stream that runs through the sand toward the ocean somewhere beyond. And then that is broken. And then it reappears.
And in the fog there appears an intimation of a figure. It disappears when I look at it directly, but then reappears in the corner of my vision when I turn my glance. I am about to say something, to call to it, to recognize it, but then do not, knowing that to recognize it by any gesture or action is to give it a reality which it must not have. But it is a figure I recognize even though I do not let on. It is Ph?drus.
Evil spirit. Insane. From a world without life or death.
The figure fades and I hold panic down — tight — not rushing it — just letting it sink in — not believing it, not disbelieving it — but the hair crawls slowly on the back of my skull — he is calling Chris, is that it? — Yes? —
6
