“Charlene!” he called after her. “You forgot your pages.”
“Keep them,” she said without turning around.
• • •
IN THE WEEKS and months after, she fell into a kind of mourning. A month passed without any word from the doctor’s office. Charlene finally caved and called his secretary, who was polite but evasive. She said Dr. Fitzgerald had gone to Europe to promote his skin classification system. And no, she didn’t know when he would return. But she said this in such a way that it was clear she knew exactly when he would return and had been instructed not to share the information.
Two months went by. Then four. What could he be writing? During her visits, Charlene’s sense of smell had calmed somewhat, but now, as she waited for his article, it returned with a vengeance. Some days it was so bad she would wear a swimmer’s nose clip around the house. She found the mild sense of asphyxiation comforting. After dinner, Charlene would lean out their bathroom window and smoke cigarettes into the night. She had not smoked in years. The smoke tasted awful — the tarry remnants would linger and fester in her sinuses for days — but still she found herself leaning out that window again and again.
Sensing a weight he could not name, Kermin started to sleep several nights a week at his communications shop, tinkering away with dismantled cathodes and diodes and dusty vacuum tubes — the tender ligaments of long-distance communication. When he had nothing to work on, he passed the nights turning black-and-white televisions into color and back again.
Radar turned three. He was constantly speaking now, as if making up for lost time. His finger extended, he pointed at the world around him.
House, he said. Birdie. Doggy. Raisin. Man. Choo-choo.
After every word, he would look back at Charlene, seeking confirmation. Sometimes she wondered what would happen if she did not nod in agreement, if she instead taught him all the wrong words for things. What if a birdie became a man and a choo-choo became a raisin? She had the power to completely rewire his perception, to enclose him within a false reality. Except when she started to think about her son’s development in this way, she would feel the panic begin to rise — at all the choices she had and hadn’t made, all of the thousands of parental failures she would only come to realize later, when it was already much too late.
Time’s persistence had slowly dulled her preoccupation with the doctor’s verdict. Life settled into the uneasy routine of homebound motherhood, a life she had never thought would be hers. She woke; she made Radar breakfast; she took him to the playground; she made lunch; she read him a book; she napped with Radar; she went for a walk with Radar; she made dinner; Kermin came home; she put Radar to bed; she and Kermin watched television until he began to snore
Repeat.
Still, even if her day was consumed by the business of mothering, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was still an impostor, as if all of this would be taken away from her at any moment. And a part of her wished it would be, even though she could not imagine her life any other way.
And then, nearly nine months after her final meeting with the doctor, on a day like all the rest, Charlene opened the mailbox and found a cream-colored envelope lying inside.
“Dr. Thomas K. Fitzgerald,” read the return address. She caught her breath and then tore open the envelope. The typewritten letter alerted her to a forthcoming article in the next month’s Journal of Investigative Dermatology concerning their son’s “chronic hyperpigmentation.” Standing by the mailbox, Charlene brought the paper to her nose. She searched for a hint of the doctor’s aftershave but found only the elliptical aroma of ink and his secretary’s cheap lilac perfume.
The wait each day for the mail’s arrival became excruciating. Charlene began to hate the mailman, shooting him looks of reproach when he did not deliver what she was looking for.
“You cannot fix him,” Kermin said out of the blue one night as they sat watching a fuzzy episode of Three’s Company on the refurbished Zenith television. “He is not broken.”
She was so startled by this declaration that she didn’t say anything at first.
“You know that’s not what I’m trying to do,” she said finally.
“I don’t know what you are trying to do,” he said.
“Kerm,” she said as he got up and began adjusting the aerials.
“Kerm,” she said. “You have no idea what it’s like.”
On the television screen, John Ritter dissolved into static and then became whole again. Kermin moved the antennae about like a conductor, quietly swearing to himself, but after a while it was no longer clear whether he was trying to clear up the picture or make it worse.
• • •
ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, Charlene unlocked their mailbox as usual and nearly cried out. Inside was the beckoning glint of plastic wrap.
“Hey Kermin!” she yelled. She reached for it slowly, her hand trembling. A diagram of a hair follicle graced its cover. She felt herself recoil. Her son’s condition was not worthy of the lead article? A finger loosened the plastic seam on one side. She inhaled its pages, again searching for his elusive aftershave, but all she smelled was the buttery, slightly sterile aroma of processed paper and glue.
“Kermin!” she called up the hallway. “It’s here!”
She was searching the table of contents for the doctor’s name, the electricity flaring out into her fingertips. His name, his name — she wanted to touch his name. And there it was: page 349.
Kermin came down with Radar in his arms. He took a seat on the bottom step.
She read. Neighbors came and went around them. When she was done, she looked up, bewildered.
“So?” said Kermin. “What does it say?”
“I don’t know,” she said. The article was short. Barely three pages. She had expected it to be longer. She thought real science would demand pages and pages. Not this.
Radar was singing to himself, “Den we all say goodnight bunnee. Den we all say goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.”
Kermin rubbed his son’s head.
She sat down beside them and read it again. This time, she even read the figures and the footnotes. Radar grew bored and began walking up and down the stairs, counting each railing as he went. Kermin leaned over and looked briefly at the page, then shook his head.
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know,” she said, exasperated. “I’m not sure it says anything.”
Indeed, as far as she could tell, “On an Isolated Incidence of Non-Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male” was nothing more than a professional shrug of the shoulders. “The unusual uniform darkening in this individual can be linked to a marked increase in melanocyte-stimulating and adrenocorticotropic hormones, though all other pituitary and adrenal gland functions appear normal,” Dr. Fitzgerald wrote in his conclusion, hiding behind the oddly disembodied language of the medical professional. “No doubt further genetic studies need to be performed to ascertain the precise catalyst for the over-production of these hormones, which are not present in either parent or gene group. In all other areas, however, the patient is a normal, functioning male infant. Chance transmutation, it seems, has struck again” (354).
Fig. 1.2. Patient R, Longitudinal Section 8
From Fitzgerald, T., “On an Isolated Incidence of Non- Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male,” Journal of Investigative Dermatology 72: 351
“Chance transmutation?” said Charlene. She slowly collapsed onto the bottom step, let out a long, withering breath, and covered her face with her hands.