Bad Animals (8 page)

“Think before you complain,” Joy Berry writes. “Complain only if complaining will help to change something that needs to be changed. If things cannot be changed accept them the way they are ...”

“Daddy, knock-knock ...”

Stay calm, now. Be patient.
Cynthia's instruction is so clearly audible in my head, I turn to the front door to see if she's arrived home and I've failed to notice. Or if maybe I've read this plain-spoken directive in an advanced reviewer's copy of Berry's yet-to-be-published
Let's Talk About Impatience.
Or
Let's Talk About Pessimism.
Or maybe
Let's Talk About Fucking Up.
In any case, it's too late for advice now.

“Jonah, for God's sake just read the damn book! This is for five-year-olds. You're not trying. Damn it, why do you have to be ... like ... like this?”

Tears accumulate in Jonah's eyes, and it will take all the patience and hopefulness I can call on to get him back on track. While he bravely tries not to cry, I know what I should do: I should leave the room.
Make yourself scarce, sweetheart, don't make matters worse.
Instead, all I can think is:
It's barely October and this is what we have in store for us
—
Read and Non-respond. For the next nine months.

THE MORE I THINK ABOUT working with Jonah on the sequel to
Bad Animals
the more sense it makes, which is saying something around here, where making sense of things can be a full-time job. But writing has become one of the ways Jonah copes with stress. Some evenings, after he's fallen asleep, I find notes scattered throughout the house. Scraps of paper turn up everywhere: in his books, in the bathroom cabinet, in our bed, once even in the refrigerator. They aren't exactly stories; more like memos, negotiations, pleas, clues. Just this opening phrase, for example: “I'm so angry that________” You fill in the blank.

Sometimes, the message is easy to decipher, as it is in
Bad Animals.
Other times, it can take a while to figure out what the accumulation of negatives adds up to: “I don't think I won't go to school no more. I don't think school will be no fun.” Do the negatives cancel each other out? Does this mean he likes school? Or he doesn't? There are also arcane facts written down about animals I have never heard of before and I'm not sure exist; who knew, for instance, that the capybara is the largest rodent in the world? Or that the gharial, a crocodile native to India, is the longest-living of all crocodilians? Thanks to Jonah, I know.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to me that my son's writing requires decoding. All writing does. I'm a literary critic, after all—well, a book reviewer—and I should know this. So I read Jonah's stories critically, the same way I would read Philip Roth's latest Zuckerman novel, let's say, with foreknowledge of Roth's obsessions, but also on the lookout for a new thread, some new entry point into the mind of the author. In a way, this is hardly a new job for me. It's just never been essential before.

“The Book of Job
is the only book,” the late Stanley Elkin once said and proved repeatedly in his own writing. “I would never write about someone,” he also said, “who was not at the end of his rope.” Elkin understood what it meant to be hanging by a thread. He lived most of his adult life with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, and his work, while always brashly, blackly funny was imbued with his awareness of the raw deal he'd been handed. In his most
Book of Job-like
work,
The Living End,
Elkin s hero, a good but otherwise unremarkable man named Ellerbee, dies, goes to hell, and can't figure out why. It's the question always at play in Elkin. Why me? So when Ellerbee is offered the chance to confront God, face to face, so to speak, he passionately pleads his case. He was a good man, seriously good. He never stole or bore false witness. “‘Where were You when I picked up checks and popped for drinks all round? When I shelled out for charity and voted Yes on the bond issues?'” Ellerbee lobbies God.

The Almighty, being all mighty, has His own explanation for why things have gone so badly for His faithful servant, though it tends to make matters worse. God runs down a long list of Ellerbee's offences—like the time he opened his liquor store on the Sabbath; the time he said goddamn; the time he admired his neighbour's wife. “‘You had a big boner,'” God reminds him. And there's more: “‘You went dancing. You wore zippers in your pants and drove automobiles. You smoked cigarettes and sold the demon rum.'” Ellerbee can't believe what he's hearing. This is God's cosmic explanation: a list of petty grievances, a sum total of nothing much. Here you have it: God's renowned and so-called mysterious ways.

I first read
The Book of Job
in earnest when I was twenty-one, not long after my mother died. At the time, I considered it research for a short story I was trying to write. That's what I told myself anyway—
research.
Really, I was looking, like Ellerbee and Elkin, for an explanation. My mother's death blindsided me. A year later, my reaction to my father's death couldn't have been more different. I was prepared for it. And I have been prepared for every bad thing that's happened in my life ever since: break-ups, betrayals, rejections, lost opportunities. Until Jonah's diagnosis: with that, I was blindsided all over again.

Of course, what keeps drawing me back to
The Book of Job
is not very different from what draws me to most literature—the central character. Job is my kind of hero, after all—passive-aggressive. He takes everything God can dish out—the devastation of his livestock and servants and children, not to mention his complexion, boils head to toe—with what appears to be heroic equanimity. Patience is the adjective so often ascribed to him. Read between the lines, though, and what becomes evident is that right from the start, Job's legendary patience is only skin deep. He is a fair-weather optimist, an unrepentant complainer. Sure, at first he tries to be a good sport, all the while thinking,
maybe this is just a mix-up.
Mistakes happen. Wires get crossed even now, so you can imagine how it was back then, with CNN, Google News, Facebook, and Twitter still several thousand years away.
So take a deep breath and relax, Job.
And, while you're at it, cut the Almighty some slack. Almighty is really just a nickname. In the first chapter, Job is still in a daze when he famously says: “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” The words sound as if they were spoken by someone in deep denial, someone still waiting on a recount or, at the very least, a good reason. But one isn't forthcoming, and a few pages later Job changes his tune. Who can blame him? Job had it all: the camels and goats, the big, devoted family. What must he have been thinking when it finally sunk in that all of it was gone? Only one thing:
It wasn't supposed to be like this.

THE RECORD OF JONAH'S earliest days is incomplete. My sisters bought a new video camera the day he was born and started filming. Often, they would leave the camera with us on the condition that we record every moment of potential cuteness. I'm pretty sure we had tape of that spot of mucus on his forehead. But one day they took the camera home with them and made the mistake of leaving it in plain sight on the backseat of the car. The next morning they found the car's back window smashed and the camera, along with its case, containing several other videos of Jonah as a baby, gone. I remember we kept expecting the tapes to be returned. That a classified ad would be placed in the community newspaper or that we'd receive an anonymous phone call saying we could pick up our valuable property at some out-of-the-way spot. We expected the thieves to go to considerable effort to find us. Maybe because they knew how much those early images meant to us and that we'd pay a ransom for their return. Or maybe because Jonah was so adorable and this record of his babyhood so endearing that they'd have to be utterly inhuman, in a way we hoped that penny-ante thieves weren't, to resist making things right again. The Tightness of things—of which Jonah's birth seemed to be the main proof in those days—was out of whack, and the camera thieves would know, as we did, that it needed to be restored. No such thing happened. We took solace, instead, in old photos, but it wasn't the same as seeing Jonah in action, even if his actions were limited to sleeping or nursing or bathing. My sisters were heartbroken and, after that, became super-diligent. They bought another camera and took it with them everywhere, filming every move Jonah made for the next three years. The filming stopped abruptly then. Nobody can say why exactly, but I have a hunch. I'm guessing we didn't want to look at Jonah too closely, not once our complicated concern for him started to outdistance our simple pleasure.

I had forgotten about those videotapes until my older sister told me the other day she was thinking of transferring them to DVD so we could watch them more conveniently on our television set. She wanted to know what I thought of the idea, if I had any objections. Normally, she would have gone ahead and done this sort of thing without asking permission, the way, for instance, she and my other sister bought Jonah clothes. They are responsible for purchasing almost everything he wears, in fact. Cynthia and I trust them with those decisions. We trust their good taste and unrivalled shopping skills. But this decision about the DVDs was fraught, the way so many simple decisions are now. Besides, I'd blown up at my sisters more than once over the last seven years, launching into a rant about one thing or another to do with Jonah, a rant that invariably ended with me sounding ridiculously like Jack Nicholson delivering his “You-can't-handle-the-truth” speech.

It doesn't take much for the people you love to set you off. Their offence can be minuscule or imaginary. Like the way I imagine they're watching me watching Jonah when I am frustrated and out of patience. I sense their disappointment at my disappointment, their impatience with my impatience. And, once again, I end up thinking and sometimes saying aloud things I shouldn't:
You don't know how much I keep from you. You have no idea.

Then again, I don't think a lot about what they're going through. How helpless they must feel; how hard unconditional love can be to sustain in the face of the confusing and contradictory facts I keep presenting them with. They are experts at explaining away all of their nephew's odd behaviours; all our worries seem overblown to them. It's not that they refuse to acknowledge something is wrong, they refuse to acknowledge that it is wrong enough to change the way they feel about Jonah. So wrong that buying him a new argyle vest won't, somehow, make our situation marginally better. And they're right; it does. It makes it marginally better.

As for transferring those videos to DVD, I remained noncommittal, so I'm betting my sister has already gone ahead and done it. “It will be nice to have,” she said, during her original pitch. “I've been looking at some of it on the video camera. We have his first birthday party. And the time he walked.”

“The first time?”

“Could be.”

Jonah walked at thirteen months. He hit all the marks, all the milestones set out for him in whatever unspeakably horrifying baby manual we happened to be reading. Late in Cynthia's pregnancy, she suffered from epic indigestion. Often, it would wake her in the middle of the night. She'd have a hard time getting back to sleep, so she would ask me to tell her a story, a boring one, if possible. After a while, I ran out of material so I started reading to her from
What to Expect When You're Expecting.
I did so dutifully for a while, trying to keep my voice steady and unaffected as I skimmed the endless catalogues of catastrophic occurrences to watch out for. All the things you never previously imagined going wrong; all the things you never imagined period.
What to Expect When You're Expecting
is not a book for the squeamish. Described in detail, the most innocuous ailments and conditions—cradle cap or colic—sound not only dire but inevitable. As I kept reading, night after night, I began to wonder if it were possible to have chosen a scarier bedtime story. Finally, it was Cynthia who gave the book away to a friend in her first trimester and replaced
What to Expect
with a jumbo-size bottle of Turns.

Even so, after Jonah was born, we felt compelled to buy a new set of manuals—
What to Expect: The First Years, What to Expect: The Toddler Years.
We didn't read them exactly, but we kept them on hand to confirm that,
yes,
he's sitting up right on schedule. He's pointing on time, very important, pointing, the book said. He's talking when he should and standing when he's supposed to. He's leaning ahead of time. Actually, there was nothing about leaning, but Jonah looked so clever, so cool and deliberate doing it that I considered writing the
What to Expect
publishers with my own carefully considered observations: “For the truly advanced child: look for
the lean
at ten months.”

Jonah started walking short distances right on cue, too, balancing himself on furniture, cruising, until he went solo, navigating the short, direct line between Cynthia's gentle nudge and my outstretched arms. Gradually, we increased the distance between us; gradually, his
eyes
straight ahead, he crossed the divide. Until one day, a day my sister apparently has on video and now I'm guessing DVD, he took an unexpected left turn and headed for the kitchen—uncharted territory. He walked maybe twenty feet, wobbled for a few more, but it was this image of him setting out on his own that made us all collectively hold our breath. It seemed we'd all inhaled together. He didn't make it to the kitchen. He fell on his diaper-padded behind, with a considerable thump considering his size. Still, he didn't cry. He simply waited for someone to help him up again and kept on walking in the same trailblazing direction. Someone, likely me, started singing “Sunrise, Sunset.” At least that's how I remember the event. I suppose the DVD will confirm if my memory of any of this is accurate. That is, if I had any intention of watching the DVDs.

Here's what you want to avoid: comparisons, particularly between how things once were and how they are now.
Weltschmerz
lingers like indigestion. “You can't tell anything,” my sister told me the other day, finally confessing the deed was done. She had the discs—twelve hours (so far). “I mean, you know what I mean. He looks just ... like ... he looks.”

“THEREFORE I WILL NOT refrain my mouth,” Job tells the three uninvited fair-weather friends who have come to comfort him but prove to be no comfort at all. God's little comic twist there, reminiscent of Kafka's deathbed complaint about his doctors: “So the help goes away again without helping.” (Kafka was another writer always rewriting
The Book of Job.)

Job also does what he vowed he wouldn't. He curses his fate: “I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.” Here, his suppressed anger at God is redirected inward—as he comes up with one reason after another why he'd be better off never existing. The guy could be poster boy for the passive-aggressive. “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me,” Job says. “I was not in safety; neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.”

Blah, blah, blah. The whining continues, rising in intensity and bitterness, and you could argue that by the end of
The Book of Job,
even God can't take it any more. Maybe He's feeling a little guilty since He was the one who set all this in motion, who made a bet with Satan about Job's steadfast, incorruptible character. Remember, too, it's when Satan says in effect, “You call that trouble,” that God turns up the heat and does so without a second thought. By the end of the story, after all Job's complaining, even God, the supreme practical joker, recognizes, as practical jokers occasionally do, that maybe He's gone too far. So in a rare Old Testament moment, God relents. Like
Punk'd
on rewind, He restores Job's wealth and gives him a new family. Job seems satisfied, but that only confirms the story as fiction. After all, it needs an ending, a quick wrap-up. So why not the old storytelling standby:
And they lived happily ever after?
Endings are difficult, and even the Bible can't get this one right. Who lives happily ever after? Who's naive enough to take a writer's word for that? We all know the score: Cinderella looks dreadful most mornings before her coffee and makeup; she's also too groggy to fix a proper breakfast for the prince. As for Charming, he can't find a real job. He's either over-or under-qualified. He watches a lot of daytime TV and drinks too much mead. His eye wanders. There are, he remembers from the good old days, other glass slippers to fill. Are we not supposed to wonder if Job ever picks at those old scabs on his skin, a reminder of his bad old days? Are we expected to believe he never thinks about his first family—all those dead kids? Is he—are we—supposed to just put that out of our minds?