Awash

Only animal nerves are articulated in war. I doubted my son would remember the exact words of advice I gave him, but I spoke hoping they might serve in some slight aural way. We were at the table when he began weeping unobtrusively into his breakfast cereal. It was a surprise—he was not an unhappy or weak boy at all. One of the many taut cords that upheld my posture was cut and my bowels flinched. What does one really say to a weeping child? I hesitated to put down my newspaper. The financial section was making me alternately nervous and amused. My wife was likely buying new curtains if she had already dropped off our youngest daughter at pre-school. We could afford new curtains, but we certainly didn’t need them. In war, our decisions are made by random electronic surges and we have only enough wit to call it reasoning. I folded my newspaper and put it slowly on the table, hoping not to embarrass my son further. Inez’s cats chased across the parquet floor making tacking sounds with their claws. The cats had been a point of contention when we’d bought the house. I knew they would ruin the floor, but I could only ever remain adamant with Inez for a few moments—half a day at the most. She showed me her faint smile-smirk and said that floors were meant to be scratched by cats and imprinted by crawling babies’ hands. She held my elbow for a moment and the matter of pets was decided. The cats were so intent and reckless in their play as to shift my son’s chair slightly when they bumped against its legs. The jolt made him weep more desperately—whether with conviction or abandon, I’m unsure. The cats fled into the living room snarling as though they remembered the time when they were lions. The sunlight coming through our large bay window made the mounds of fruit in a bowl between us seem cheerfully waxen. A cloud need only pass and the fruit would look dark and real again.
‘Jimmy,’ I wanted my voice to be both firm and filled with all of the unhinging love I felt for him. As ever, it was a voice that came from an alien larynx: a growling and pleading breeze that passed through dried cattails and reeds. What would I say now that his rainy mortified eyes and upturned mouth were aimed at me? I checked an impulse to rise and wipe the snot from his nose with a napkin from the table. ‘Jim, tell me what’s wrong.’ It would have to do. Inez had jumped atop me once after sex and laughingly said I would remain practical even when being drawn and quartered or having my fingernails ripped out. I forget what I’d said to inspire her. We were lying in our sweat, the lust-stained sheets scattered around us, looking at the ceiling and I must have mentioned a payment that needed to be made. Mason, our first born, was sleeping in his crib in the adjoining room. It reminds me that I should tell Inez of how much I like the word ‘crib’. It will make those supernatural eyes of hers flare. And that is something I need to see, now that she’s given the curves of her girlish body to birthing and nursing five children.
Jimmy had to catch his breath before answering. He was such an unnervingly honest child—he would not stall his own thoughts and tell me nothing was wrong. He only needed wait for his body to catch up with his mind. I looked at him while he sniveled and his breath hitched. He didn’t once lower his imploring fluid eyes. His ears stuck out from beneath his baseball cap. When I’d first met Inez, we’d smoked cannabis at her insistence and walked through the city until it was nearly dawn. I became entirely fixated on people’s ears. They seemed to give everyone a rodent aspect. I was horrified, but when I told Inez, she laughed as though I’d said something so revelatory as to be hilarious. She laughed and kissed my neck and broke away from me to get distance enough to look clearly at my face. I laughed too and said that her laughter sounded bluish. She opened her mouth into a delighted O, leapt onto me and straddled my midriff with her legs. The multitudes ignored us, walked around us as we kissed. Her legs still make me blush and make my prick brave. I was grateful, at least, that she was away on one of her frivolous domestic missions. I wasn’t sure why, but I wanted to be able to stand up for my son on my own.
Jimmy was near to speaking. I looked slightly away from him. Past his shoulder, I could see the cats seated and very still, leaning into one another on top of a bookshelf. They were hunters now—they must have seen the colors and shadows of distant savannahs in the tail feathers of Pavarotti, our parakeet. Pavarotti whistled obliviously in his cage. Jimmy had wanted the bird and then had wanted to free it. He realized, he’d told me, that there are two sides to every cage. He was only six at the time. He didn’t weep that day—he said it to me with the strange brave solemnity that only children have. The cats flicked their tails and motionlessly watched the bird’s trilling orange beak and riffling feathers.
Jimmy turned eleven three months ago. Something about the constancy and dumb enthusiasm of Pavarotti’s singing reminded me of his birthday, and I attached myself to the remembrance of his age with something like hope. What could be so troubling to an eleven year old boy? I had grown accustomed to surviving on lukewarm dishwater hope—I had a strong sense we would survive, Inez, Mason, Jimmy, Adonis, Lilly, Sapphire and even me. I tried for a moment to recall what made me anxious enough to weep when I was eleven. I nearly smiled at the sprawling collection of names Glenda had given our children. Jimmy put his slender fingers on the table and spoke.
‘Dad…I like my friends…I mean I like to go over to…to go to Parsons Woods with Emmanuel and stuff…’ He was breathing excitedly and his eyes were already changing now that the confession had begun. He would be unburdened soon. We would all survive. ‘…I really like him, Daddy, and shooting his BB-gun and stuff…but…I…I don’t want…I’m not like him so much because he wants to hunt birds and I just want to shoot bottles or even just at the trees….’ Jimmy had Inez’s eyes—that was why I favored him. It was an incomprehensibly strange thing to realize in that instant. I nearly swooned with relief. ‘…But the thing really, Dad, is that when we go to the rope swing out at the river…the one you know about cause you were there once…Emmanuel can swing on it and he flies out into the river, but I can’t hold on and I always drop straight into the water.’ Now he looked down in shame at the table cloth and his eyelashes looked as though they were painted with antimony. He looked up again, anguished and grimacing again, and said, ‘I can’t hold onto the rope.’
I have never felt so capable and ready and may never again in likelihood. My son was weeping because he was not as strong as Emmanuel. We would survive. Mason would be waking up soon, so I had to speak more quickly than I would have liked. Mason and Jimmy were almost always wildly affectionate with one another, but the younger, undyingly sensitive boy idolized his brother and could not allow himself to be seen so undone. It had not always been this way. Mason had just begun listening to death metal music. He would strut around the house all day howling inane lyrics in a manic falsetto. ‘The white light! The white light! The serpent dies tonight!’ Jimmy had picked up that chorus and they would sing it together if Mason were in an obliging mood towards his brother. Inez and I suspected Mason had discovered cannabis, and she was waiting for me to say something practical so that she could laugh at it. I was slyer than that and had remained mum, waiting for some undeniably wise phrase to turn toward the matter. I wondered how much longer I must wait.
Now I would to speak to Jimmy—but there was a very small eternity before Mason trudged down the stairs to begin telling us that he was going to get a biohazard symbol tattooed on his forehead. I wondered if I could speak without my voice trembling with the love I felt for Jimmy. And what would I say in particular? It would be snide and cruel and irrelevant to tell him that Emmanuel would someday be bagging his groceries—though that was the unlovely truth. He would understand me if I told him that we all have different strengths and that these blossom in strange and unpredictable ways—but the thought would not give him immediate comfort. I inhaled steeply through my nostrils. The cats were still frozen—all of their perfect predatory muscles straining into their glowing yellow-flecked marble eyes. I write prose poetry on little scraps of paper sometimes when the household is finally sleeping. Not even Inez knows of it. When insomnia makes my head so fuzzy I can’t imagine full phrases, I write lists of new colors for the objects of this world. Some are inglorious and necessary like ‘trauma-room green’, and others are hopelessly ardent, like ‘archetypal red’. What color would I invent for those cats’ eyes? I looked at my son, stood up and went towards him with my arms open. He rose from his chair to be embraced by me. I wished I could have held him as I did when he was a baby. I said, ‘Jimmy….’