The young father sits in a hospital by the bed of his baby boy. Maybe they had waited too long to take him to the doctor. The doctor’s eyes had said as much when they arrived. The baby was now hooked up to tubes and wires and machines and had cried so long and so hard that its mouth was open but making no sound anymore. It was wailing without sound. Like it was so far away his father couldn’t hear it, like it was beyond reach, already in another dimension, already in the valley of the shadow of death. The father realized he was thinking of the boy as “it,” a thing, creating distance. He must stop that. A corpse was an it, the boy was still a he. The father wanted to kill himself at his boy’s pain, he wanted to jump out a window, jump out of his own skin. It was unbearable.
The little lungs were filling with fluid. It could be meningitis. They would do a spinal tap. They would stick a needle in his young son’s spine, a spike to the root of his existence; they would stab him and withdraw fluid, life’s blood. And then he would murder the doctor for hurting his son. The father leaned in; the boy smelled of sick. His failure to protect, the one thing a father must do, he had not done. He wanted to go and forget it all. Start again. Meet another woman, have another son, make this all a bad dream. Go to another country, learn another language, change his name.
He put his finger in the boy’s tiny palm. The little hand did not respond. One of the first reactions the child had had, barely born, would be to squeeze a finger in his palm—as if to say yes to life, yes, I’m taking hold, yes, I’m grabbing on. Yes, I’ll play the game of life. Now, nothing. The father leaned into the small head. It was cold and wet and sticky. The wispy hairs matted. He knew there was a demon in there, rooted in the lungs. He knew it. A devil had taken residence. He would remove the demon.
The father spoke to the boy, into the boy, through the boy to the demon. “You coward. You son of a bitch. Have you no pride? You destroy an infant. Why don’t you pick a fair fight? You think you’re a killer? Jump into me. Faggot. Cocksucker. Nazi. Come into me.” The father moved closer still and put his lips on his boy’s mouth.
The mother looked on from across the room and heard “faggot” and “cocksucker” and did not know what it meant. She was spiraling down into her own abyss of helplessness. She would put her faith in science, in the doctors, let her husband put his faith in anger and magic and curses. They would cover the bases that way, fill in the gaps. That’s what two parents do. The father put his lips on his boy’s lips and opened them. Like he was going to give him some of his own air, the breath of life, like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But he did not breathe out and in, he sucked up and out. Sucked the poisoned air from the boy’s lungs into his own. Or so he thought. That was his thought process.
He swallowed the air and sucked deeply again and held it in; as he exhaled, he said, “Come into me, demon. Come into me and see if you can kill a man. You pussy, you cunt. Leave that child be and take me, try to take a man, you dirty piece of shit. You Nazi faggot cocksucker.”
The boy’s eyes focused on his father, and for a moment, the father knew that the boy misunderstood the invective, thought he had been called weak and worthless by his own father. Faggot. Cocksucker. Nazi. The words, not yet understood, were filed away in the tiny elastic pliable mind and taken to heart, translated into feeling. Stamped onto the passport of his very being. The father knew this, knew there was a misunderstanding that he could not redress now. Or ever. That he had committed an unpardonable sin in a preverbal world and therefore made a wounding forever unmentionable, irredeemable. That he had condemned his son to a life of doubt.
The father had no time to regret this. A life of doubt was still a life. And this was the trade-off. He could live with this pain. They both could live with this pain. This was life now. There was no time. The doctors were worthless. He opened his mouth against his son’s opened mouth a third time and inhaled the virus again, the demon, deeply. The father felt something noxious and powerful enter him, like smoke from ancient ritual fires, something tasting of death now and in the future. The little boy closed his eyes and decided to believe in this man, in all the man thought and did, good and bad. The boy exhaled fully, lovingly, surrenderingly into his father’s mouth. He was a worthless piece of shit, but he would live on. He would live. He took up the fight. The boy’s little palm closed over his father’s finger and held tight.