Anyone who has exploited prepubescence for any campaign, however well meaning, anybody who has ever trotted out pasteurized, freckled, fairybook simperers to pitch their wholesome radiance, has forgotten the lay of this land. Traveled too far in the interim. Remember the children. What of the children? Doesn't anyone care about the children? Rubbish, all of it. For Linda's money, these sales reps confuse innocence with a lack of opportunity. Been too long since they've gotten down on their shins to consider the turf. It's desperate down here at half-pint level. They're clutching and mean, and they take no prisoners.
Childhood is not that parade of vibrant kids teaching the world to sing. That's a new one: as far as Espera has read, the product of the last fifty years. She knows the histories from school. Time was when domestic theory wrote the whole batch off as changeling babies, perversely truculent sub- and semihumans. The prescribed treatment was to beat the devils out of their tiny, ripe habitations. No wonder childhood is just waiting for her to turn around and leave the room so it can retaliate for the running lancet sores inflicted on it by ages of adulthood.
Purity is an adult bills of goods. The sweet-meaning child is just an icon, a tool in this power struggle, the power struggle, the first, original, quintessential holy war between supreme exploiter and victim. Real children — the pet mutilators, the medicine cabinet moles, the ones that refuse to pee until their bladders burst — have all lost their innocence long before they learned to speak. They had it drilled out of them at the first vindictive parental backhand.
Small wonder. Her kids are an ad hoc delegation of oppressed, low-income, minority, viciously sick, festering, powerless, disenfranchised, and condescended-to culprits. They know in their intuitively subterfuging hearts that they are the test rats, scapegoats, and pack animals of the entitled — their mature dominators, the holders of vested interests, those of the despotic head start.
Hence their incredible attraction to an adult kid. Only that can explain how Nico charges in and takes over in a matter of days. His packaging says it all. The guy's old, and consequently brings out the natural submission to one's elders. Yet at the same time, he's this double agent, a traitor to his class. Here's this adult chucking it all in and coming back. And there's no champion like one that's just crossed over from enemy lines.
The last thing Linda wants to do is tangle with him, to pull rank. But what are you supposed to do when the monster calls his quadriplegic buddy a beanbag? When he threatens to attach a friend's catheter to the wheelchair motor if the malingerer doesn't at least try to stand? When, trying out his own remedy on Ben's suicidal depression, he gives the double amputee a highly prized board and orders him to skate or die?
Linda's charges refuse to protect themselves from this self-appointed terrorist therapist. Nor do they want her protection. They rush, instead, to that universal tendency of the oppressed, the victim's eternal willingness to exchange one cruelty for the other on symbolic grounds. He may be a tyrant, but he's our tyrant. Better him than one of you.
And the real adults, who have all read his chart, are just as disposed to let him run amok. The mere thought of telling him not to run in the corridors paralyzes them with shame. Nico, still possessed of boyhood's thought tap, knows he can get away with just about anything. He's unopposable, a berserk Mickey Rooney-Freddie Bartholomew mutant cross gone rampant, just before the boxer priest comes to straighten him out.
Only, there's not going to be any reforming priest popping up this time. Nico's parents have been preparing their only man-child for his impending kiss-off by assuring him that whatever he says is holy law. The one potential surrogate dad that Linda tries to trick into assisting with Nico moans at her softly from his side of the suddenly Siberian bed. "I said, leave me off this one. It's. Not. A. Surgical. Case."
She wants to hit him. Slap his impassive face for treating her like, well, like a willful child. She would in a second, if she thought it might help. In the man's current condition, it wouldn't even arouse him. At least he's talking again, and all she can do is let him.
"Not my rotation. I shouldn't even know of this kid's existence." He lashes the words with a ferocity that shifts her concern from the man-boy to the boy-man. One thing is clear, whatever other creeping etiologies come to bear here. Ricky too is spooked out of his composure by this freak visitor.
etiologies come to bear here. Ricky too is spooked out of his composure by this freak visitor.
Her resident-in-absentia lies on his back in the dark, in her bed. Even his spending the night here is a major concession. His arms stay folded over unremoved surgical scrubs. He lies stiff, a magician's hypnotized assistant or Gothic knight posing for the sculptured upper deck of his terminal stone bunk. Gross miscalculation on her part, to have brought up the Nico thing. They are back to the friction of their first tête-à-tête, without the erotic charge. She feels the slow spit of nebulous theories churning in him, where she had meant to forestall them. I know, she can feel his forcibly relaxed muscles thinking. I know who this creature is.
She dare not even ask him what he thinks he knows. He would dissolve in an ironic laugh at his own expense, pull back into a deeper pillbox, even as he turned to play with her. Play more perfunctory, with their every successive foray. Fondling as sop. She cannot even say anymore—already? just three weeks this time? — what she most requires from him. What she knows better than to want or say. To tell him how, with each new separation, she grows ever more frantic to have him up inside her, alive and covered and safe, would rush the day when he goes impotent at the mere sight of her eager need.
She refrains from the impulse to touch his chest, already feeling the obligatory, patterned echo from him. A quick panic fills her here in her own bed, invaded by this invité. She must have chosen him for this, singled him out before she knew him. But she did know already. Knew his reputation for Dial-a-Nurse. Knew the brutal occupation, the sardonic "Your patient, Doctor." Knew he was the very man who could replay her private nightmare scenario, the repeat foreclosure she seems intent on engineering.
She can ask him for nothing. Any request at all would be fatal for them both. The last thing she wants is confrontation. Just knowing that she dare not ask makes her a slave, sick with the irresistible question. She tries his shoulder, tentatively, feels it tense in feigned relaxation. She slithers in toward his ear. And what form will compulsion take tonight, what surrogate truce? Talk to the boy. Straighten him out, break him of cruelty's bafflement. Take him under your wing. Take care of this helplessness. Give it the protection only you can give.
Or she might speak to him for real. Might unleash at last the whispered accusations against her betrayer in age. This man, so much her senior, a decade: Was that the secret appeal? Old enough to be her grubby little uncle. He lies there across the minefield of acrylic blend, already a casualty in this single-elimination, sudden-death tournament. He lies cross-armed, denying, refusing the explanation she needs from him. She needs him to say, just once, what lies behind the pudgy, glowing, poster faces' pretended innocence. Don't you see why the boy runs manic? The dependent's bewilderment, the dazed, mislaid trust.