by Wesley Holtermann

 

OWEN WANTS TO impregnate Alice with a child genius.

He eats blueberries. Salmon. Vegetables with folic acid. He eats these things to make his brain work faster. To make his synapses fire like what. Cannons maybe. Somehow, he thinks, this will make his baby smarter.

I tell Owen that this is not how heredity works.

 

Owen and Alice call. Their voices sound metallic and hollow through the phone, though they seem extremely excited and are both talking with all-over-the-place, bouncy inflection.

It is like talking to yelling gay robots.

"We're pregnant!" they say in unison. They have looked at the ultrasound. At the shadow of their baby, into the lampshade-shaped field of vision on the screen, and they have found out that it is a boy.

Owen tells me they are thinking about naming him Rodney, which is a funny name for a baby, I think.

 

Owen calls from the payphone in the hall of the hospital. Machines are beeping. Dripping. Nurses' sneakers, white like lightning, hiccup on the glossy nine grain floor. The sounds of the hospital, all of them, no matter how small, are caught in the receiver like gnats on flypaper.

"Eight pounds, seven ounces," Owen tells me. "His head is huge."

We have been talking about it for months and have decided that this is the best case scenario. The baby's head needed to be substantial, we realized, to house its enormous brain.

"It's completely disproportionate to the rest of his body," Owen says. "Like an alien or a dwarf. He has dwarf-like proportions."

I ask him has he looked at other babies, because babies' heads are, in general, bigger-looking.

 

He calls me back and tells me that actually, Rodney's head is comparatively normal.

 

 

 

I don't know how to be a godfather, so I bring hats. A new one each time I visit. This time, a lobster hat, because I have been to Bar Harbor, Maine, and in Bar Harbor they have these.

Alice says Rodney looks dumb, but I think the hat looks very sharp.

 

He is in bed. The light is on, on the dresser, and the yellow fluorescence that seeps through the lampshade covers us like linen. The Venetian blinds are closed, but Rodney still stares at the window. His breath is silent, subtle. His small body expands and contracts under the knit white blanket.

The kid never seems like he's having a good time, so I take it upon myself to do things that are entertaining. I read to him. P.G. Wodehouse in a British accent, and I change all the human characters to barnyard animals as I go. On the fly. This, I think, is very funny.

Because animals can't talk.

 

Rodney doesn't think it is funny, but he is only seven, so

 

He wants to be a surgeon. He pours over dense textbooks. Hunched and unblinking. He says odd things like hmm and ah as he highlights a passage about Microcephaly.

Rodney is considered a genius and has been tested for Autism on a number of occasions because of his remarkable and unusual adeptness with mathematics and the sciences.

But Owen and Alice are worried. Rodney is strange. They are positive that he has no friends at school. He is not interested in basketball or the rodeo like most boys his age. He spends his time operating on fruit. On apples. He makes an incision. Slowly. Straight. And works a pair of tweezers toward the seeds at the core. When the seeds are out, placed on the counter, he sews the open wound shut, pulling the apple's flesh together with the tensile pressure of the thread.

Often, his surgery is so precise that the apple can still be eaten. It doesn't even turn brown.

 

Owen is down. He is folded in half on the carpet, strangling the stomach of his t-shirt. His forehead is neatly glued with tiny, arranged beads of sweat. He half-wheezes at me to drive him to the hospital, so I drag him toward the car, his arm and torso draped over my shoulder like a Mexican poncho.

They operate. First they talk, we talk. Owen pushes words up his trachea like they were iron, and they sputter out, falling at the doctor's feet.

He says surgery. The doctor. He says it is an appendicitis.

 

Alice is at work and Owen is in bed, so I check on Rodney. He has locked himself downstairs. The scarred, white primed plywood door separates his air from the rest of the house's, but the smell still wafts through, plunging toward lungs through nostrils that flare, rear, horrified, and pulling guts upward. Wrenching and tearing.

It smells like death.

I knock on the door, but Rodney never says anything. I can hear him moving around. Doing something. Maybe turning the page of a book. Trying to cure something. Trying to cure himself. What if he is trying to cure himself? The smell could be anything. A rare skin desease. Flesh eating insects, exotic and toothed. I should go in there.

I pat the door and decide that it is too strong to kick down. Actually I think it's made of balsa wood, but why would I kick down the door. I jog outside, virile, a hero, until I am in the front yard outside his window. The glass is framed by cracked, wooden trim. In the reflection, a bough shakes with the weight of a squirrel, the leaves clacking together like tap shoes or refrigerator magnets; in unison, they sound like quietly shattering glass. West Oakland is static behind me, like a photograph of a kind of Victorian ghetto. Willow Street fades in the window pane, blanketed by trees. The sky seeps through their loosely crocheted branches.

Through the dense reflection I can see Rodney. He is sitting at his desk, pressing the flat side of a knife against something horrible. Raccoon bones maybe. Sprawled, wide open under his table lamp. A carcass in knots with untied ribs. Its mouth is open, dull black lips furled above charcoal gums and bright teeth. Papercut white. My stomach muscles clench, clamp, wringing my insides.

His gloved hands are now pressed inside the freshly murdered raccoon, feeling around and stopping at each new organ. He wraps his hand around something and grabs the knife. Wrist-deep inside the hot carcass, he cuts out a dark, blood-dripped organ the size of a Mike and Ike and puts it in a cooler at the foot of his desk.

As he pushes a threaded needle into the raccoon's abdomen, stitching it casually, precisely, Alice pulls into the driveway. This American Life spills out of the windows of her car.

I pretend not to be spying on her first-born son.

 

 

There is blood everywhere. On the rug. The linen.

 

"It shouldn't still be bleeding like this," the doctor says. "I don't understand."

We have gone back to the hospital. Owen's sheets were stained this morning. A thick butternut squash shape on the bed, deep crimson that was turning brown. Slowly. Like a polaroid. When he started to feel faint, presumably from the loss of blood, we threw him in the car, and now we are here, in this tall, square building on the hill, talking again to this doctor, this very tall man with hair like a lion's. He orders a blood test. It comes back negative.

The blood, says the doctor, seems to be coagulating again, so he sends Owen home.

 

Owen is asleep, and once again I am watching Rodney's staggering surgical dexterity through the window. He pulls the raccoon's sliced skin apart, peeling the matted fur to either side of its stomach. This time he uses big tweezers, surgical tongs maybe, to pluck a soft organ from the small, gnarled corpse, this one about the size of a plum, dark, bloody and melting.

He sees me, so I give him a thumbs up. He walks slowly, straightfaced toward me and twists the venetian blinds shut.

 

 Owen is back in the hospital. He is showing classic signs of hemophilia, they say. Classic signs of Leukemia. His wound should not be reopening, but the blood tests, once again, come back negative.

The doctors cauterize the incision and send Owen home. They tell us to call immediately if the bleeding happens again.

 

It does.

This time, a week later, his blood is stretched over the kitchen floor like carmine saran wrap.

The doctors say there is nothing in the medical textbooks. There is no kind of condition they can think of that they have not tested for. There is nothing they can do, these doctors. They are stumped and so call a specialist. A guy from Serbia. He too is completely bewildered.

They are going to do exploratory surgery.

 

The babysitter calls screaming.

Owen is in the other room. In the O.R. His stomach is peeled apart, a panoply of hands feeling inside him.

Something about a dead raccoon. She is yelling. Rodney is sick, she says. Rodney is not all right. A raccoon is on his table. A dead fucking raccoon.

Owen is unconscious.

I tell the babysitter that she can go home. That Rodney will be all right by himself. That he is just practicing surgery.

Owen is being wheeled into a room on the gurney.

The surgeon says he found foreign objects. Foreign organs. Embedded inside Owen. Sewn. Attatched perfectly, functionally. Organs belonging to a large rodent or a marsupial.