In response to what he seemed to be seeing in her facial expressions, Cavanaugh said, “We’re fine, just a little misunderstanding about the toy bag, the rucksack here, regarding Christmas, pretending it’s Christmas, trying to keep him calm. I mean to say,” he said, as he fingered the dimple on his tie, “I was trying to recharge these toys, so to speak, to make them surprising again, you know, and Gunner became disappointed and began to cry. Not that crying isn’t normal in these circumstances.”
Something stony seemed to enter the nurse’s features as she listened, taking another step into the room, nodding slightly, looking down at the boy and then up at Cavanaugh. Did her eyes narrow slightly? Was there a shift, barely perceptible, in the set of her teeth? Did some interrogative element enter her eyes, brightening the corneas? It seemed to him that she was thinking: We clearly have a situation here. To cup a boy’s mouth like that is wrong, sinful, actually, and just a precursor to more violent acts; God knows what’s going on behind closed doors. And it seemed to him that her face (and the way she moved up to Gunner and touched his head lightly, patting him, and then moved to adjust the collecting device) also said: I’ve seen a thousand such moments, entering rooms to witness patients adjusting their postures, ashamed, awkward around the impersonal equipment, awaiting test results that may change their future. I’ve entered rooms to find patients yanking out IV needles. I’ve opened the door to scenes of fornication, to urine-stained old men with pocked behinds. I’ve opened doors to couples enfolded in weeping embraces, so seized with grief that they had to be pried apart. I’ve opened doors to bald-headed children with angelic eyes and shattering smiles. But this is different because of the cry itself — the desperation and the tonal quality in relation (again) to your unusually guilty face, in relation (once again) to the boy’s self-protective, conspiratorial slack expression, as if he were hiding something, in relation (once again) to the position of the hand held over the mouth, in relation to the finger marks on the flesh around the mouth. Then her lips tightened and her cheekbones — yes, cheekbones! — seemed to sharpen, and her face seemed to say to Cavanaugh: I might have to report this to the resident social worker, just as a matter of protocol. Not because I’m absolutely certain that you struck the child but because I’m not certain, and if I don’t do it and further harm comes to this boy I’ll never forgive myself and I’ll sit forever down in my own particular hell.
Then the nurse said, “Oh, you poor little boy. We’re a long way off from Christmas. But we’re not a long way off from finishing the test. You’re a brave boy. A brave, brave boy.”
Woe to the man whose child is on the verge of a diagnosis, her face then seemed to say as she ran her fingers along the tape, removed the electrode wires, cleaned Gunner’s arm with a gauze pad, secured the collecting device, checked the tubing, and then, without another word, heaved out of the chamber, latched the door, tested the seal, and glanced back through the oval window with a face that said: I understand that your game with the toys in the bag was creative and a sign that you’re a good father, if somewhat desperate, and then she was gone and he turned to Gunner and said, “Daddy got in trouble because you were crying. Daddy got scolded, not verbally, but facially, so let’s pretend again, and do the Christmas grab bag, but do it right this time and really pretend I’m Santa.” And he opened the bag and pulled out his trump card, a toy he had left out in the first rotation, one of Gunner’s all-time favorites, Weird Willy the Spasmodic Doll. When switched on, Weird Willy flexed and yawed spastically, like an injured athlete, and performed a ballet of crude movements while his internal mechanisms poked and prodded through his rubbery skin. The toy, seemingly crucified from within, proved agonizing to watch. Not long ago, back in August, Weird Willy had provided a full afternoon of entertainment in a patch of sunlight beneath the dining room table. Gunner and Willy had spent a good hour conversing, Gunner saying softly, “Stop that, you stupid freak, you pathetic idiot, you stupid stupid.” Now, in the sweat chamber, Weird Willy said, “Haa wee, haa wee,” while Gunner said, “Die, die, die,” and wrung Willy’s torso with both hands, trying his best to tear him limb from limb.
“And that was the end of Weird Willy, the end of the toys, and the end of my Christmas morning scheme, as I think of it now,” Cavanaugh muttered to himself as he started home from the hospital, barely moving his lips over the words, imagining what he might say to his shrink, Dr. Brackett, at his next appointment. In the rearview mirror, Gunner, strapped into his safety seat, gave him a suspicious frown. Cavanaugh closed his lips and imagined saying, “When I’m with him, I’m always aware of the value timewise. I mean, in terms of using up time, of entertainment value, so to speak, of whatever catches his attention. Even when I’m not with him. For example, just a few months ago I was on location in California, working on Draconian, and I was driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, trying to solve a design problem. President Gleason, after his big defeat, goes off on his own for a few weeks to a cabin near Big Sur to ponder his past and begin writing his memoirs, because he sees himself — according to the script — as part of a great lineage of memoir writers stretching back to Ulysses S. Grant and, strangely, up to Jack Kerouac.
“Anyway, I envisioned the scene as a biblical moment that mirrored Jesus’ desert solitude. Something had to point away from the stereotypical writer gestures (Gleason leaning morosely over his laptop keyboard; Gleason flipping his pencil between his fingers, biting his lip, pacing the room; Gleason pouring himself a huge glass of Scotch and swirling it gently before he takes a drink) and direct the audience subtly to the deeper perplexities of his crestfallen state. So I designed chinks in the cabin’s mortar that, when lit from behind, shot small beams — or maybe you’d call them shafts — of light through the walls and the dust motes, forming crosses through which he might walk during one of his pacing-for-inspiration scenes.
“In any case, I was driving up the coast, thinking about this problem, when I became acutely aware of the vista — the hard, purging waves roiling in, the whitecaps foaming far out, and the milky blue of the water — and it suddenly occurred to me that I could, with great precision, calculate the exact amount of time that Gunner would, if prompted (Hey, Gunner, take a look at that), examine each scene before turning away. I could decipher — is that the word? — the exact amount of entertainment value specific scenes on the coast would offer my boy. Waves slamming around hard, bountiful rocks, breaking in a dramatic foam, no matter how fantastically beautiful, would distract him for twenty-eight seconds. Sea lions — if we walked down to get a close look — would tap out at three minutes of distraction value. A frigate, viewed through a pair of field glasses? Five minutes and thirty seconds. A supertanker, not too far from shore, but in heavy surf on the edge of trouble? Six good, solid minutes. (The field glasses would have to be new and never used before.) A frigate on fire? Seven, or possibly eight, minutes of attention. A supertanker engulfed in a raging inferno, belching a thick plume of fire? Nine. A sinking ship (with attendant oil spill and terror-stricken passengers waving frantically, some of them dashing across the deck, on fire)? Ten minutes. Albeit none of these calculations, no matter how accurate they might have felt, were really precise, because one had to go plus or minus twenty seconds on one side or the other to account for various other distractions (fiddling, scratching, eye rubbing, and snot blowing) that might cut into his attention span.