IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the movie things got a little dark. The first night back the funny man crawled into bed and wept into his wife’s shoulder until he exhausted himself into sleep and when he woke to her worried face he declared that he was not having a breakdown, he just needed some space to figure some shit out. It will take several months to piece what was done into something that will be shown to test audiences, besides, if he is lucky and/or the studio has any sense, the movie will be quietly euthanized in the editing room.
He did not know what was going on with his mind. He was simultaneously overjoyed to see his wife and son and deeply ashamed about so much and grieving for what he was certain was the end of his career, and so he was having a hard time facing them. From the massage chair, his “throne” (his wife’s sarcastic term) he saw a household that seemed to operate just fine without him, as though his absence while filming illustrated that he was the gunk in the gears holding everything back. The child looked good, walking more steadily, making eye contact and asking for things in multi-word sentences. The funny man counted the boy’s age on his fingers, almost needing his thumb, and couldn’t believe it. As the boy passed by the chair the funny man would beckon him closer, like one would a dog, and the boy would stand just out of arm’s reach and say, “Daddy’s sad,” (this came from the wife as well) and sprint off to somewhere else.
At the insistence of just about everyone he started seeing a therapist and one of the first breakthroughs was that one source of the funny man’s discontent was his feeling of “superfluousness.”
The first session with the therapist was his first foray outside of the house since the end of the filming and he blinked hard at the sun as he made his way toward the car. He’d chosen the same guy everyone uses because he’s the best and most expensive, or maybe he’s the most expensive because he’s the best. Whatever. He specializes in “performers,” which was made to sound like an affliction to the funny man, even though it was (probably) not meant that way. Pilar was tasked with the driving since no one was going to trust him with that, and she jacked the seat as far up as it would go and still it seemed like she had to look through the space between the top of the steering wheel and the dash to see out. On the way to the therapist’s office the funny man punched the radio presets and all of them connected with Spanish-language stations. He had no idea there were so many. He settled on what was either a soccer game or stock market report. The therapist was all the way in the city because people said that suburban therapists are for teenage girls who like to cut themselves, so the drive took awhile and he laid his head back and waited for the inevitable crash that never came. When they arrived, Pilar said, “right here, one hour,” like it was a command and then disappeared down the street leaving the funny man wavering on the sidewalk.
The therapist started the session the way he would start every session from then forward by asking the funny man what had been on his mind lately and the funny man talked about the film and the child and Pilar and the radio stations in the car and he did not stop until his time was up. The therapist asked how he was feeling now and the funny man said, quite honestly, “better.” At the third session, the therapist introduced the “superfluousness” thing and the word lodged in the funny man’s head like a puzzle piece locking into place and he asked the therapist what he should do about it and the therapist said he should make himself “useful,” that this would bolster both his self-esteem and his self-worth.
The therapist also gave him a prescription for some pink, ovoid pills that he said should help.
And boy, did they.
In fact, he is now considering firing Pilar. He has not told his wife this because she and Pilar are pretty friendly; not just friendly, they appear to be friends, chuckling over coffee in the kitchen mornings. His wife majored in Spanish so when they chat the funny man has no idea what they’re saying, save the stray word here or there, but this is not why he is considering firing Pilar, no way. It is because she is no longer necessary, more anchor than buoy to the good ship of his family.
The household goings-on had previously looked to the funny man like a category 5 rapids rushing by him with no safe point of entry, but three weeks to the day after the third therapy session, having ingested a sufficient loading dose of the pink, ovoid pills, as Pilar and his wife discuss who will take the child to the toy store in order to buy a gift for a little friend from kindergarten’s birthday party, the funny man announces confidently, “I’ll do it.” The two women stare at him, but he stands resolute and his wife looks at Pilar, who nods, and his wife says, “Okay.”
The trip to the toy store proves to be simultaneously triumphant and horrifying, a real turning point in the story of the funny man. Where he grew up, the toy store was just that, a storefront in a small downtown strip, next to the clothing store, two doors down from the hardware store, in the same area as the grocery and stationery stores. The toy store he is sent to with the child is easily the size of all of those stores combined, much more like a toy warehouse. The funny man had, of course, known of the existence of this kind of store, but they were indigenous to the late-blooming suburbs and during his time there, the funny man had always had enough money and people to ensure that he did not have to go inside them.
A pneumatic burst of freezing air blasts the funny man as he crosses the threshold of the store, sapping the fluid from his eyeballs, and he gazes at the extra high, girdered ceilings and the layout like a maze, where each aisle must be traversed in order to make it to the payoff of the registers and he feels very small. There appear to be thousands of everything in the store, enough of each item that every child in the world could have one if they were just willing to pay for it. Surely, not all of these sell, the funny man thinks. What happens to the leftovers? The less popular? The castoffs?
The child is of the age where his walking is perfectly sufficient, though obviously he is much slower than a full-sized person. The funny man would like to toss him into the cart and wheel the boy around to speed things along, but the boy walks until he gets tired and reverts to a younger, more helpless self in which case he will beg to be carried, but he is heavy enough that carrying the boy for anything other than short distances is a chore, a real catch-22. Because of the shelves’ height, the child can only see maybe one-eighth of the merchandise and he is predisposed to inspect almost each and every item in his viewing range. Doing a quick calculation the funny man guesses that at this pace, it will take better than a day to navigate the entire store, so he makes an effort at moving things along.
“Whose birthday is it, buddy?”
The child inspects a plastic unicorn with a rainbow mane where when you push a button the head bobs up and down mechanically and the unicorn plays a seven-note scale, up and then back down. “Nico’s.”
“And what does Nico like?”
“Nico likes cars.” The child presses the button again, satisfying himself that the head bobbing and music are the limits of the unicorn’s powers.
“So maybe we should look at the cars, then?” The child looks at the funny man with a face that says “duh” before edging down the aisle and picking up a hyper-muscular dwarf doll that has long rainbow-colored hair and is apparently a companion of the unicorn’s. The arms rotate at the shoulder and the legs at the hips and the child works them back and forth, first like the doll is hammering something with his fist and then like he’s walking stiffly in the air. The child takes the dwarf and straddles him across the unicorn’s back, and even though the figure is a dwarf, in scale, it would surely break the unicorn’s spine.
“I think the cars are somewhere else, pal.” The funny man gently puts his hand on the child’s shoulder while reaching with the other for the dwarf figure but the child shrugs him off and pulls the figure away and works the limbs some more, his face focused in concentration. The boy is careful, knowing they are not his. He has been well-brought up. The funny man considers heading to the car section and coming back with some choices for the boy to peruse, but it’s several aisles over and he doesn’t want to leave his son unattended.
There is a small commotion behind them and the funny man sees a woman pushing a shopping cart with one hand while the other grips a girl, a year or two older than his boy, underneath the arm, pulling her up and along high and fast enough that the girl’s toes touch the ground only every other stride. The woman is thin, sinewy, dressed in a workout tank top and tight, three-quarter-length pants elasticed just below the knee. Her calves are knotty, hard, and her bicep tenses at the effort of holding the girl just off the ground. The girl’s face is a mask of fury, her features crowded together in the center and as the woman weaves around the funny man and his son, the girl grabs an item off the shelf and hurls it to the ground. So quickly that the funny man can barely register it as happening, the woman releases the girl from her grip and swats her on the behind hard enough to cause the girl to jump. “We don’t have time for this shit, Margie,” the woman says, low and menacing, one eye sliding to look at the funny man as she speaks.
The girl works herself into a cry. The funny man has seen this kind of thing before in his own child, a situation where the boy knows that crying is plausible, but not imperative—say following a fall and a glancing blow from an end table—and there’s a beat before his eyes scrunch and the wailing starts.
At first, the girl is unconvincing. The crying tones are too shallow, an obvious force, but as she warms to the task the tears appear genuine enough and as the mother finishes replacing the item on the shelf, she turns deliberately and slaps the girl across the face, hard and quick, and when the girl doesn’t stop crying, she does it again and then again, whap whap. The funny man looks down now and sees blackened circles marring the gray-specked linoleum, and he recognizes them as spots where gum has made itself a permanent feature of the floorscape. The girl, now having been silenced, her mouth a perfect, stunned O, is re-gripped under her arm and dragged away from the funny man and his son. The girl touches her hand to her cheek where the funny man is sure it must be red before her fingertips again brush the toys, grasping. “Please stop,” the funny man thinks.
His son, engrossed in a mermaid figure that is part of the dwarf and unicorn group, has registered none of it. Crying children must be a regular feature in the life of a preschooler. Slapping as well, though usually of the child-on-child variety. The funny man looks at his boy and tries to imagine slapping him, or grabbing him by his plump forearm and twisting it until the boy feels his skin burning, or kicking his legs out from under him and knocking him to the ground, or later, when the boy is older, pounding his knuckles into the boy’s nose, mashing the cartilage in on itself, and the blood pouring into the boy’s shocked, open mouth, quickly coloring his teeth red, and the funny man is pleased to realize he can’t imagine such a thing, that it just wouldn’t and couldn’t happen, that he would never do that.
For several hours, the funny man follows his son around the toy warehouse as his son inspects seemingly every item, or at least every item in his sightline, before settling eventually on what looks like a briefcase that when you open it holds thirty different toy cars, each with its own slot. “It’s a good choice,” the funny man tells him. On the way out he asks the boy if he wants anything for himself, and he replies, “Mom said it was just a trip for Nico’s present,” and the funny man’s eyes fill with tears. Such a good boy.
When they arrive home, hours past the expected time, dinner congealing on the stove, both his wife and Pilar look at the funny man disapprovingly, but the funny man waves them off, a fresh confidence to his bearing. “It took awhile to get the right thing,” he says. The boy stops to show the women his choice while the funny man exits the room, leaving the women’s mouths hanging and because he is enjoying the drama of the gesture, he goes to the massage chair and with a mighty, sweating effort shoves it toward the door and out into the yard and to the curb, slapping his hands together as if to say, “that’s enough of that.”
The funny man marches back inside and tucks into dinner and even though it is well past prime, he eats quickly and ravenously, plunging a fork into the spaghetti while the opposite hand grips a large wedge of garlic bread that he periodically chomps from, chewing with his mouth open because he is smiling at every other person at the table in turn.
Pilar and his wife aren’t talking, so the funny man converses with his son, though the dialogue is more like a monologue, punctuated only by the boy’s nodding agreement and the sound of the funny man’s own chewing.
“We killed that store, didn’t we, buddy? I mean, we laid that place to waste. There was nothing left when we got out of there. We crushed that mother.” (Turning to his wife now.) “You wouldn’t have believed it, honey. I think we took a look at every last toy and game and action figure and puzzle and doll in the entire place and this boy here,” (gestures at son) “this magnificent little shit—sorry, hon, I’m just so goddamned proud—he found the best choice. Nico likes cars and he picked out cars. Damn. And I want to tell you something.” (Here he raised his fork and used it to point at his wife and then Pilar.) “I realized something today, something important, which is that I am a fucking good father. There’s some real maniacs in this world, some real monsters and I’m. Not. One. Of. Them.” That night, for the first time in what seemed like forever, the funny man gives it to his wife, hard, and because in those moments he has the intellectual capacity of Australopithecus, as he climaxes he shouts, “Making babies!”
After the toy outing, the funny man inserts himself more aggressively into the day-to-day household goings-on and upon close inspection, he finds some things lacking. Much of Pilar’s day consists of talking to the funny man’s wife or drinking coffee while watching telenovelas in the kitchen. Yes, the boy loves her, his face lights up when he comes home from his half day of school, and no doubt, her food is good, she’s got a real flair for spices, and no, he does not know how much Pilar costs because his wife had commandeered the finances after some unfortunate lapses on the funny man’s part, so maybe as a housekeeper-nanny-buddy she is a bargain, but the general slow pace of Pilar’s work rate, the deliberate, methodical way she folds the laundry or wipes down the counter or vacuums bothers the funny man. “This is sloth disguised as industry,” he thinks.
For a week he begins preempting her tasks, intercepting the towels out of the dryer just before cycle’s end, or having the boy’s snack prepared and stashed in the fridge for his return home, pulling it out with a flourish even as the child disengages from his hug with Pilar. The pills have both clarified and energized his brain and in the sessions with the therapist the funny man has raised the possibility of cure, even suggesting that nothing had ever ailed him. Pilar circles behind him, inspecting his work, re-tucking a corner on a perfectly straightened sheet or swiping at some nonexistent dust. The language barrier keeps them from having a direct confrontation, but he can tell Pilar gets the subtext, she is no dummy. He is trying to derail her gravy train. To rub it in her face, one afternoon he goes outside and reseals the fence and then spreads a mound of ground cover over the dirt around the bushes, work normally reserved not even for Pilar, but the lawn service. Pilar watches him through the front picture window and he strips off his shirt as he works and each shovelful says, “You can’t touch this, bitch.”
He does not want to overplay his hand, so in bed with his wife one night several months into his reemergence he suggests a vacation for Pilar.
“Let’s send Pilar on a cruise,” he says. “Or home, I’m sure she doesn’t get home enough. On me, I mean … us, we’ll pay.”
His wife wears just a T-shirt and panties, a look he finds far sexier than any bustier or lingerie. She is sitting up, her legs straight in front of her, reading a magazine focused on exotic travel, picking out somewhere they will go together now that he has come out of his alleged “crisis,” and equilibrium has been regained. The funny man squeezes her leg just above the knee, making sure he has her attention.
“Who will take care of the house? You know the big fund-raiser is coming up and I’ll be pretty tied up for the next few weeks. I’m even staying in the city two nights,” she replies.
The funny man is a little hurt that she does not get it, but he plows on. “Me. I will take care of the house.”
His wife snorts from behind her magazine.
“What?” The hurt in his voice is now on full display. “Seems like way back when, I did it fine.”
She tents the magazine over her thighs and touches him on the cheek and he sees love in her eyes, but it is a patronizing kind of love, a you-poor-delusional-sucker kind of love. He knows that the “breakdown” (if they want to call it that) after the movie scared her, but his recovery is impressive, even the therapist says so (though he gave the funny man a similar patronizing look—sans the love— when the funny man brought up the idea of being “cured”) and the funny man thinks this deserves some recognition.
“I’ve been practically doing everything already, anyway,” he says. Her look changes only slightly, the eyes narrowing as if to say, it’s your funeral, pal. “Sure,” she says. “We owe her some time off, knock yourself out.”
HERE’S THE THING: The child gets sick.
For awhile, with Pilar gone, everything was great, just two pals hanging out, playing games, watching some television, running through the big house in their tube socks, playing tag and hide-and-go-seek and a game of their own invention called “pillow grenade” that’s too complicated to explain, mostly because the rules seem to change constantly in the boy’s favor. It was like old times, except even better because now the boy could talk and run and shout and had a full head of hair and spontaneously says, “I love you, Daddy.” Every time the funny man catches or finds his boy he grabs him up and turns him upside down and tickles him and the boy squeals and it is the best.
While she is home, the wife looks on approvingly. Nights his wife leaves out her diaphragm, and after rough, athletic sex followed by a session of sweet and tender love they talk about whether or not the seed for another one has been successfully planted.
“I wonder if Pilar is enjoying herself,” the funny man says over perfect flapjacks prepared by him that he flips in the pan without the aid of a spatula, by which he means: She does not need to come back. We don’t need her here. He thinks he may see agreement in his wife’s eyes, along with the love and admiration for a man who has been so successful, yet remains truly grounded, a rock, just like his father before him, but with a larger bank account and the ability to do domestic duties that his father wouldn’t have even considered.
When she prepares to leave for her overnights to administer the final preparations for the charity event, he quizzes her on what she’s packed, making sure she is properly outfitted and accoutremented, and she says she wishes he could be there with her and he says, “I’ll be there in spirit,” and before she leaves they do it one last time on top of the clothes that haven’t yet made it into the suitcase.
Under previous circumstances, the boy becoming ill had not been a problem. Back when they still lived in the apartment and the funny man had significant caregiving responsibilities, he had dealt with child sickness often, as for a time the boy had an undiagnosed food allergy that produced projectile vomiting as reliable as Old Faithful, which was followed by several hours of inconsolable crying from the pain of cramps and an empty stomach.
But back then, it was shift work, handing the boy back and forth as one of them would head for the bed and a blissful couple of hours of rest and sleep. The knowledge that it was a team effort, that there was relief coming, made it seem possible, even as the boy’s screams turned his face from red to purple and the doctors in the emergency room swore that they could offer no solution but were pretty sure the child was not in any serious danger. Some children just “fuss,” they claimed.
Oh, what a load of bullshit that was! What a crock of slimy horseshit these jerkoffs with their degrees and their white coats with the pen protectors were trying to feed them! And the funny man said so, making a spectacle, pointing his finger and overturning some equipment as they stormed out with yet another prescription for baby Pepto. As he and his wife returned home, the boy hugged between them in the back of a taxi, the funny man looked at his wife and he could tell that she saw him as he was, a warrior, a tiger who would not relent when it comes to the well-being of his child.
Together, they got through it, thanks to a new pediatrician who diagnosed the allergy in minutes, and once they were on the other side of the exhaustion and worry, both the funny man and his wife saw it as strengthening. A real trial-by-fire bit of survival. Forged steel.
But even with his recent flurry of domestic activity, the funny man is rusty and the boy is larger than before, which means a greater volume of sickness that is coming out both ends and it’s fucking impossible to keep up with the laundry like this, and goddamn if the little guy doesn’t look like he’s suffering, wriggling around the bed, not even wanting to watch a video. The temperature is only 101.5, high, but tolerable, not dangerous in any real sense, but he’s just so miserable. The incidents when he was a baby come back to the funny man not as a source of strength and experience, but more like post-traumatic stress disorder, distant memories reawakening in him, feeling like they happened minutes, rather than years before, and Pilar is whale watching in Alaska and his wife is in the city. His wife would race home in less than a heartbeat, fuck all those victims of whatever it is she’s volunteering for, let them find their own cure for dysentery/clubfoot/malnourishment/sickle-cell/drought/nonspecific ennui/school bullying/eczema/media bias, but the funny man is not ready to admit defeat.
The pink, ovoid pills seem to be helping—not the boy, who has the flu—only time and the body’s natural defenses can help the boy. The pills help the funny man, so he takes a couple extra. Even when the boy’s insides are out of ammo he sweats through his pj’s and whimpers in his sleep. Any time not spent washing and folding is at the child’s bedside, urging him to take spoonfuls of broth or sip juice through a bendy straw.
When his wife calls in to check how things are going he is nonchalant, describing the boy as “peaked,” but okay. She asks right away if she should come back, but he says, “No, of course not.”
And okay, he was unfamiliar with some of the nuances of the front-loading washer. Perhaps Pilar has been a kind of safety net there, coming in behind and averting disaster. She could have told him that he was doing it wrong. This is sabotage. The front loaders are supposed to be superior to the traditional top loaders that the funny man knows from the coin-op models in the basement of the old apartment. Such a great place, that apartment, where magazines didn’t fit in the tiny lobby mailboxes, so if you were home first, or just often (as in the case of the funny man) it was like a well-stocked lending library. Oh, and they’d laughed so many times over the stairs, how the landlord had carpeted each one in a different colored remnant, one more nauseating than another. The machines in the basement were big, Laundromat-sized, and if they overflowed (which happened once when the funny man used too much detergent) it just went to the drain in the middle of the concrete floor, no harm done.
Should the front-loading washer even turn on if the door is not shut and latched? Shouldn’t there be some sort of fail-safe there? Isn’t that a design flaw? Yes, he could have noticed the water streaming down the hallway sooner, but the boy had mercifully gone down for some semi-peaceful rest, and the funny man was trying to snatch some sleep for himself and why wouldn’t such a high-end machine know when enough water has been pumped, rather than having some sort of fill trigger that will never get triggered if the door is left just barely ajar, allowing the water to escape. Just barely.
It takes longer than it should to recognize that using a push broom to sort of schuss the water out of the front door and into the yard is better than trying to sop it up with paper towels. Sure, finding the shutoff valve for the water first would’ve been a better call as well, but hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that. Not thoroughly drying his hands before making sure the 115-volt dryer plug had not been compromised by the mini-flood also was not well thought out either, but at least the child—even through his sickness haze—got a kick out of how the funny man’s hair stood on end.
Running while the wood floor is still slick with soapy residue is a mistake as well. The funny man knows that the pink, ovoid pills are not designed specifically for the muscle spasms that radiate the length of his spine with occasional forays to his rib cage in order to constrict his breathing and drop him to his knees, fetaled over and crying, but they are the only ones he has, save the round blue ones that look like they have a poorly rendered heart carved out of their middles that the therapist gave him after the first session and said to take “only if things get unbearable.”
Well, things are pretty damn near unbearable, so the funny man crawls to the bathroom and yanks out drawers in the vanity until he finds them and swallows them dry, followed by three aspirin and one more of the pink, ovoid jobbies just for good measure.
LATER, HE WISHES that his wife could’ve seen the effort it took to rise as the boy’s cries wash through the halls down to the funny man’s ears as he lays curled on the bathmat.
“Daddy?” Faint, questioning.
“Daddy?” Louder, more insistent, a tinge of urgency and worry.
“Daddy!” A demand. A tractor beam pulling the funny man upright, knuckles white on the bathroom counter, arms trembling, spine screaming, but now, thanks to those blue ones, feeling like the pain is coming from a distance. It is loud, undeniably powerful, but it is not all that near, a thunderstorm already passed. Each step toward the boy is easier than the last, floating on love, compelled by duty, lubricated by pills. In the apartment, he would’ve been with the boy long ago, no more than six or seven steps necessary to get from one room to another; so tidy, so perfect, a masterpiece of efficiency in design.
He should have moving walkways installed, like they have in the airports. He can afford that, you know.
“I need to go, Daddy.” Of course, the child has been “going” on his own for some time now. No assistance needed, other than the occasional reminder to wipe thoroughly, but the child is sick, scared, a reversion to something smaller, helpless.
“Sure, buddy, let’s go.”
He looks better, his skin dry, eyes clearer. As the boy sits on the toilet, the funny man touches his forehead and finds it cool. The worst has clearly passed, but back in the boy’s room, as he climbs under the covers, the elephants from the circus-themed wallpaper lift free and begin to dance on their thick hind legs. The boy seems unbothered by this development, so the funny man plays it casual, tucking the comforter under his son’s chin and giving his boy a reassuring smile.
But why are the elephants playing jazz out of their trunks? And are the stars shooting from their eyes dangerous to him or the boy? Have the clowns always had those fangs? Should walls really undulate like that?
WHEN THE FUNNY man’s wife arrives home, the boy is fine. The sickness has passed and as she breezes in, dropping her suitcase at the door, she finds her son in the kitchen trying to retrieve the gallon container of orange juice from the refrigerator, arms stretched overhead, grasping blindly for an upper shelf. She swoops in and rescues the boy before he dumps it over his own head. There is a bit of a musty smell in the air and no sign of her husband, the funny man. “Where’s Daddy?” she says.
The boy shrugs and she takes the juice from the boy’s hands and bends to kiss him on the forehead. “You need a bath, pal.” The boy nods in agreement, which is unusual.
The funny man’s wife installs the boy at the counter with his juice and some dry cereal and goes in search of her husband, calling his name. The carpet in the living room squishes under her feet, foam rising to the surface. She tries different tones with her calls—laughing, urgent, bemused, angry—all with no response. She searches everywhere on the first and second floors, yells into the multicar garage, scans the yard, and still, no husband.
She is pissed. She is terrified. Her husband had been erratic for a time, but that is done with, and even at his most erratic he would never jeopardize the boy.
Surely not the basement. The basement is unfinished, a concrete slab used exclusively for storage. There is talk of tricking it out once the boy is older, if they still live here, as a place for him and his pals to hang, play video games, shoot pool, karaoke if they don’t think that’s too dumb. The funny man and his wife have the resources to make it the coolest spot in the neighborhood.
But now, months pass without either of them having occasion to go into the basement. More often than not when they go down, whatever they thought was there wasn’t anyway, likely having been discarded as they moved from one house to the other.
All the reasons an erratic-acting person may go into a basement flash through the funny man’s wife’s head as she descends the stairs, plain pine boards, unsanded at the edges, purely utilitarian. She feels as though she should rush but cannot will herself to do more than tiptoe into the gloom. The single bulb with the dangling chain is on, 60 watts, and she knows he must be here somewhere, and she begins trembling and she gasps when she sees a body, huddled in the corner on its side, its back to her, curled in on itself. Perfectly still. She is about to run upstairs and dial 911 when the body raises its arm and she gasps and runs to the funny man and uncurls him and turns him over on to his back, which makes him tense and moan.
The funny man smiles up at his wife and reaches a hand toward her beautiful face. “I got sick,” he says. “I ran out of pills.”