I stepped into the mouth of the chimaera.
It’s big; it’s bad,
I know it’s coming—
What it is, when it was,
Why it was, where it hurt
I don’t know—
It’s so big I can’t imagine
How big it is.
It’s so bad I can’t imagine
How bad it is.
But the child knows.
He won’t tell me right now—
But it’s coming.
It’s coming.
I opened my eyes, the light hurting them, my stomach sick, my head woozy. I struggled to sit up, frightened of everyone, not knowing why. Wrong. I’d done wrong. What wrong? Unknown. Just wrong.
My mother sitting in a white chair, looking at me. A doctor in a white coat standing by an open window. Through the window I could see green leaves, golden edges where the sunlight touched them. Beyond the leaves a pale blue sky. So much I wanted to be out in the sunshine, playing, having friends, having fun, being a child.
“Do you remember?”
The sound of Shields’s voice in my head startled me out from behind my own eyes. Now I was off to the side, looking back at the little boy with the halo of white hair. The boy was looking at the window, his brow creased with a frown, his eyes refusing to cry.
“I remember,” I whispered, although no one save Shields could hear me. “I’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills and almost died.”
“How old we’re you?”
The pieces of the puzzle were there. All I had to do was pick them up and put them in their places. I picked up the first piece. “I was four years old.”
I remembered. I remembered remembering nothing.
The boy sat on the edge of the bed, tried to stand, and his legs collapsed beneath him. The doctor and his mother laughed. Not cruel laughter. It was, instead, this is no big deal kind of laughter.
No big deal. I’d forgotten how to walk. I’d been in a coma for so long I’d lost the ability to walk. I remembered the terror in my heart at not being able to walk. The terror of it being my fault. The terror of not wanting to remember why, yet knowing the answer lurked in every pause, every shadow. And I remembered my mother telling me the lie.
The lie.
The birth of the mushroom boy. I was the mushroom boy: kept in the dark and fed horseshit.
“You mistook some sleeping pills for candy and ate the whole bottle. It was just a silly accident. You remember. It was right after you had that bad dream. Of course you remember.”
Remember?
I remembered telling myself to neither believe nor disbelieve the lie. Instead, accept it. Use it. Make it a working hypothesis within which a child might survive his own existence.
If I believed the candy story, that made me stupid, an idiot, a fool, a danger to myself and others. If I disbelieved the candy story, my mother was a liar, which meant the truth would kill me. Safety lay somewhere in between. Accept. Judge not lest ye stumble upon the truth; the nightmare.
It’s so big I can’t imagine
How big it is.
It’s so bad I can’t imagine
How bad it is.
But the child knows.
The child knows.
The boy was dizzy and the doctor put him back on his bed. “You’ve been out for a long time, youngster. But you’ll be all right. And next time be certain that what you’re eating is really candy.”
The doctor, a grown-up, believed the lie. The candy story. The doctor believed it. Grown-ups are smarter than children. Maybe I really had mistaken the pills for candy—
“No,” I protested to all of them. “No kid eats candy without chewing it. No kid eats candy like swallowing pills. The only things you swallow like pills are pills.”
I was the son of a drug addict. Before I knew how to talk I knew how to take pills, what they were for, and what they could do. I knew that if I swallowed too many of the yellow capsules, I would die.
I swallowed them because I wanted to die.
Attempted suicide.
Four years old.
Something happened that was too horrible to live with, and I took the pills because I wanted out.
The boy, the room, faded to be replaced by the interior of an old automobile.
A year, two years, three years later?
I was in back, my mother in the passenger seat up front. I couldn’t make out who was driving. Brothers and sisters without name sat on either side of me. The talking was loud and happy. The family out riding somewhere for some reason. There were the trees, the grass. The boy did not feel a part of things; a real part of the family. He wanted desperately to belong; he needed to matter. He didn’t know how and he hid in silence.
They were talking about someone named Earl who had an accident and had broken his arm. The little boy saw a way to participate in the talk. “I never had any broken bones,” he said proudly.
“You’ve had lots of broken bones,” said his oldest brother. The brother had a name: Derek. There was a smirk on his face, the hint of a sneer in his voice. The sounds in the car ceased. I frowned because I didn’t understand.
I, the boy, we frowned because we didn’t understand. We didn’t know what was going on in the car. We didn’t know what Derek meant. We didn’t know what the silence meant.
How could I have had lots of broken bones and not remember them? What did everyone know that I didn’t? I looked and Derek’s face was bright red. There was another brother: Vern. Vern’s face was red, too, but dark and frowning.
My mother turned her head, glanced with narrowed eyes at the older children, looked down at me, and fed the mushroom boy yet another load of horseshit.
Broken bones used to happen to me because I would be standing on the car seat, the driver would hit the brakes, and someone would grab me to keep me from hitting the dashboard. The force of the grab would crack my bones. They were really “greenstick fractures,” not broken bones.
So the broken bones really hadn’t been broken bones after all, and all was once more well in the mushroom shed.
How stupid that all sounded. I wasn’t that fragile. Even if I was I would’ve had to have been a very stupid child not to have learned from the first broken bone to sit down in a moving car. My family must have been very stupid to have drivers that would allow me to stand in a moving car.
Believe it and I was stupid, an idiot, a fool, part of a stupid family. Believe it and the world made no sense.
Refuse to believe and, again, my mother was a liar. And a liar who would cover up this terrible thing, all of my broken bones, with such a stupid lie would only do so because she believed I was stupid enough to believe it. Either way I was stupid. Either way the world made no sense.
Again, accept it. Neither believe nor refuse to believe. Accept. Judge not.
How many lies? Was I the only one in my family who didn’t know the truth about me?
Truth.
The truth was not in the car. The truth was not in the hospital. Earlier. Before my “accident” with the candy.
The boy with the halo of white hair. His face was stony calm, the eyes dull, as he took the brown plastic bottle of yellow capsules. One by one he took them all, swallowing each one with a sip of water.
The pills made Mama sleep. She had once given him one of the yellow capsules to help him get to sleep. She had done that a number of times. She had said a hundred times that too many of the pills could kill a grown man. How many, the little boy had asked. She didn’t know. Eight. Ten.