Scott Thill
The baby gleamed, fixed in the center of the widening circle of curious relatives that had gathered in the living room, murmuring in assent, a tribe at the conclusion of some significant ritual. Atmosphere had now become noticeable, the pockets of air between twitching bodies, slow rushes of breath locked eye-to-eye with the glowing child: every movement betrayed the religious equilibrium of awe. And there it sat, squarely entrenched in permissible aura, as if a traveler from a distant time had placed it there for the precise colonization of this atheistic mass. On the Megascreen dug into the corner of the room, videos of the baby's life played in an endless loop: it crawled, slithered from open arms to opening arms, surrounded by makeshift parties and exuberations; members of the family were interviewed, each chanting their respective praises and adorations, creating and prospering in the consensual language of fealty. I was not present on the tape; I had been away at school. The tape completed its cycle, then rewound invisibly and played again. The baby leapt to life on the flat obsidian. I attempted to remember when I had last seen the baby conscious.
They pressed forward, knotting the sweat between competing hands, for a touch a newborn skin and hair, to feel baby fingers constrict their grown appendages, to catch a glimpse of a yawning mouth that betrayed toothless, pink gums. Neighbors filed in from all over the block. The house squatted in the nadir of an imposing cul-de-sac, beneath the barbed wire of pruned treebranches. Nights here were warm with the oppressive air of the desert. It was good for the baby's lungs, a relative confided. It would grow with the satisfactory aid of the heat. I fished for a beer in the refrigerator.
I felt out of place. It was Thanksgiving.
It shone biblically, a recovered jewel, stolen from an ancient land. Babble surrounded it like glowing currents of brilliant lava.
--Oh! It yawned!
--Smooth skin. Smooth skin.
--Have you given it shots yet? How long was it in the incubator?
--My daughter was eight full pounds when she came out, crippled hand and all!
--Look, it winked!
The crowd surged forward to witness this and subsided in disappointment as the baby's alleged wink vanished. My mother, bent over the baby like an ancient scholar scrutinizing runes, chimed in, between bursts of infuriated awe:
--Cooper, when are you going to get on with your life, get married and give me some grandchildren!? I'm almost 45! Get a full-time job. You're a grown-up now. School is out, there is no more school. Get a full-time job and get married and get me some grandchildren!
(I was 25, school had been out for me for three years but I was planning on going back because the jobmeatmarket was the bitter taste of blood from the back of a slave and I remembered the countless sheets praising myself sent by fourth-class mail to bulging corporates across this shrinking country how I was the pick of the litter in all stages and including this stage that should I be given the chance to prove myself that I would shine in the excellence of my innate abilities to accomplish the tasks set before me no matter how demeaning or inflammatory)
She clutched the baby, its back nestled between her legs, eyes bulging when she addressed it. From what I could ascertain, in some prelingual tongue:
--Ooooooyesyou'reagoodlittlesweetthingaren'tyouyesyouare!
I offered my lonely excuse.
--I'm not going to get married, Ma until I get out of grad school. I'm too...
--Who cares? Get married, have kids! What's the problem? What important things do you have to do?
Then to the baby:
--Oooooyeshe'swastyinghislifedoingnothingnojobyesheisyesheis!
--Don't listen to your mother, Cooper, she just wants your kid for herself anyway.
My uncle's muffled voice barely reached my ears, the sincerity of his speech suspect due to his spatial removal from the baby. Circling the ring like a wayward electron, he seemed overearnest, as if trying to draw my mother into a feud so as to steal her spot in the crowd next to the baby. They growled at his deliberate jostling, spitting him farther from the circle with each attempt. I opened my beer and used his statement as an excuse to respond.
--Yeah, Ma, why don't you just adopt a kid and get off my case.
My father stirred from his Stoic contemplation, raised his eyes from the baby to interject:
--Don't talk to your mother that way.
The crowd around the baby had increased with the ceaseless migration of the neighbors. I wondered aloud how large the city was. No one answered. The entire family seemed poised in anticipation of the baby's coming bodily motions (which never came/it sat there fat and arcane) growing hostile to any conversation not emanating from its vital, shriveled lips. My Otheruncle, who was the honored grandparent to it bellowed in enforcement:
--Be quiet, I'm trying to listen to the baby! If anyone says another word, I will go into my garage, retrieve my twelve-gauge and blow their fucking head off!
The murmuring quickly lowered to a rhythmic humming, pulsing in time with the slow pounding that had begun at my temples. This holiday had come upon me like a sure-handed beating, in Orwellian finality. Those who were here were here for the baby. Each was a dust-filled shell lowing proven psalms, knitting the community of disassociated skeletons with the spine of the statue brilliant at the center of their tightening web.
My mother whispered:
--Last week, when you called the cops on us, you sure seemed concerned with parenting, Cooper, why now all of a sudden have you lost interest?
The gathering seemed to have shed its identity like a useless skin at this point (where I started to remember the time when I was thirteen fourteen and out in the condemned alley kicking various trash on the way to gifted programs and saw the coolest jacket leather like the covering of my childhood mediaheroes rotting away hanging lifeless over the edge of the neighbor's trashbin its light beige stuffing like pulsing innards pulled from the lining and it was only when I stepped with lightest toes as if on melting glass I got closer and with dreams of assured notoriety and complete acceptance to lift it out that I realized that the pulsing was in my hands and my head and not the innards and that the innards were pulsing because there was a family of cockroaches crawling all over it in manic feeding chaos until it seemed a mass of crawling cloth), aimlessly wandering in out of the conversation the audible humming of breath and awe surrounding the baby.
The room grew cold as its details became sharp and immobile. I followed a line, starting from one corner, running inevitably to an opposing corner and back. Each line followed in the room resisted derivations, curves, improbability. Every point ended logically in another point, in pure, Euclidean confidence. Outside the steel clicks of passing machines collided into the cricket din of noon. The baby opened its eyes.
--Oooooooohhhhhhh! It is awake, yes it is!
--Look at its eyes!
--It is looking directly at me!
--Look, everyone. Omigod! A yawn!
Everyone cries uniformly:
--I want to hold, I want to hold, now. Give to me.
My mother broke outside the circle and scooped the baby up in the mounting tide of her arms. She drew the baby closer to her aging chest, her eyes widening like a cat's, closed into a corner.
--You have all your life to hold this baby, my son here has yet to have a baby so let me hold yours!
I am embarrassed by this. The crowd changed moods completely. It surged toward my mother, aware of her vicious apostasy. She had transgressed the circle, spurred on by the baby's silent language. I downed my beer. My Otheruncle said:
--That is it!
and headed for his garage. I intervened.
--Ma, give it back. They haven't held their own baby for the whole holiday, you've been hogging it all day. Put it down, and let everyone else look at it now that it has finally awakened.
--IT has a name, you know! It is not an it. It is a...
(and there was that time on the way home from school very young about ten maybe less singing some stupid disco song and a clot of roughs punks gangers cinematically rounds the corner in a thunderous rumble armed with bats heavy sticks one perhaps a pipe looking right at me directly in the middle of their exodus and i could feel my throat so purely every gland the smooth pink skin the epiglottis the threat of imminent pain overwhelmed my senses as my legs started pumping as if to push myself into the brilliant white sky as the roughs decide and pursue breathe fire down my neck and if you can picture yourself as a camera propped at a far corner the action comes toward you into your space so to speak i am running can feel the hot concrete give way like rubber to my legs and I am not going anywhere as the clot thickens and pursues an amorphous mass of evil a black cloud fat with pain rolling toward me almost on the melting heels of my sneakers and there is my house I pass the gate and break it open as I burn into the yard and up the porch while the clot has passed on down the street as if chasing another idiot i never noticed that i was safe but my heart was still full of terror and my mother telling me to go back out and stand up to the mass face it squarely with the stoic resolve of her popular heroes who never existed and mine which were her who never existed)
The awed admirers of the child had come upon me like a wave before I became aware of them attempting to suffocate me with pillows they had extracted from the couch. I felt my Otheruncle somewhere near with his shotgun. My father was the closest to me with the wide manic Southern stare of my mother over his left shoulder. They were pressing in on me like the irrefutable collapse of a star.
--Bastard...bastard...
--Kill him, son of a bitch...
My uncle had pierced the circle, having brought a carving knife from the kitchen and was attempting to cut each finger from my left hand which was firmly wrapped around the baby's skinny neck, as it dangled limply from my outstretched arm this laugh shook me it was the strangest feeling.
--Leggo, son of a bitch, fucking leggo!
As my father was older and possessed of lesser abilities, I freed my right hand from beneath his knee and shoved a finger into his eye digging deeply reaching for an unfamiliar matter giggling the crowd sweating collectively on me he screamed and clutching his head spun out from the center of the crowd at this moment of chaos I leapt from the mass and hand still throttling the baby holding it at arm's length like a captured rat I ran from the living room and into the cacophonous streets.
From there, I ducked into a bar with the rat and found the dingy mensroom. No one paid any attention to me. In the stall I tried to shove the baby down the toilet but its head was too big. Its eyes were silent clocks of ivory.
I.
Three in the afternoon, returning from my second fifteen-minute break, a mandate enforced by the BBB, I ran into Deftone, the B-ball pickup gym's most reputable point-guard. Deftone and I were slightly acquainted, we had played a few games together, exchanging only the briefest of words that the male ritual of the golden court would allow. Any lengthy conversations were looked down upon by all the players. For this reason, Deftone made me nervous because he always wanted to talk. I never knew exactly how to delicately derail conversation. Deftone was, however, never easily rebuffed. He found his way into the most impenetrable of circles, groupings, and aggregates. I kept mostly to myself. The exercise in the gradual destruction of my body was my point in even showing up to the court.
--Hey there, 2Grand, my man! What's the word?
--Just got off my break, Deftone. Heading back to work.
I once saw Deftone split the lane with the swiftest, most unimaginable double-crossover. He had forced a steal on the slow-witted, clumsy-handed opposing point guard (a manchild we at the gym had come to know as Kool "Baby Huey" Topos, a reject from tenth-grade who had permanently extracted himself from the demands of High School, having landed a job working for his father's autoshop) and, racing toward the hoop, faked a dish to an invisible forward (slicing, like a cleanly cut wound, the two-man wall that had lazily stretched itself skyward in the paint), extended, jamming the ball through with two hands. That was the Twelfth Point. Game. Deftone later caught up with me on my way out the front doors. With the bewildered countenance of a newly born child, he put his hand, palm first, to my forehead, squealing "An unbeliever!" I smacked him across the back, offering:
--Later, Deftone.
I walked towards my car. As I leaned in to the front seat, I saw his silhouette tainting the double doors of the facility, face blotted by the fog of his breath on the glass. He had not moved. He stood there as I drove away. It was when I hit fifth gear on the freeway that I noticed my car stereo had been pilfered.
--Waittaminute, Two Grand, where ya goin'?
--Work, man, gotta go.
--Check it, I've been down at the Center all day, helping out some of our less fortunate brothers and sisters.
--That's nice of you, man, real nice.
--Know what?
--Gotta go, Deftone, work, man.
--You look like you could use some guidance, my boy.
I was two years out of college. The day that I graduated my family traveled all the way from the Basin to see me shake the hands of some of the most esteemed educators and scholars the country had to offer. The only member of my family to make it into the university, I was the fatted calf for the poisonous appetites of those around me. Later, at the celebration dinner, random fixtures on the bar were slapping my back, grunting approval and warnings. I was thrown limply from one intoxicated mass to another, like a hot potato, sweating heavily beneath the gown I refused to take off. People began to tear my hair, bite my cheek, anonymous women and known relatives tried to put their tongues in my mouth. My robe was steadily being torn off of me. Colors were slowly drained from my field of vision; only endless shades of black and white substituted for the spinning wheels of red and green I had stared endlessly at during my patient sitting at the ceremony. The growls increased. I plowed through the methodically rotating gears of crowded forms into the bitterly cold City Night. I took what was left of my robe off slowly, wiped off the blood, and, having folded it in Spartan tightness, heaved it into the ocean. After all my clothes slowly floated out into the moon, I stiffened immediately. Hard and knotted, I felt a ghost pass through me. When I looked down at my feet, there was a bloated fish, belly up, a shiny hook stuck through its throat, bobbing, with the rhythm of the tide, against the pier.
--Here, Two Grand, take this. I gotta go, my brother. Duty calls. I'll see you at another time on the golden court.
Deftone put a quaintly printed pamphlet into my palm and moved past me, down the hill towards the Hub. After watching his form fade into the distance, I looked down at the item he gave me. In strict black and white, on the cover was a picture of a heavily-veined hand reaching out of a planet towards the streaming light of a distant star. Imprinted in the perfect middle of the star was this sign:
+
Beneath the graphic, in bold caps: FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE. Another cracked ideogram. Multiple meanings. Two words which, together, canceled the energies of the other. I turned to look back down the hill, to the vibrantly lighted microchip of the Hub, but Deftone had gone, leaving only the swirling heat rising from the pavement.
At work, while the drone of managerial policies were repeatedly announced from my terminal, I opened Deftone's pamphlet and read a little. My superior, Superior Jane, circled Jensen's cubicle, suspicious of his incessant use of the company programmatic information transfer (PIT). Everyone at the BBB knew of Jensen's data leaks. Since he was my workmate, Superior Jane made it her business to be my best friend. As she peered over the five-foot wall at his back, peeping his data input, I took the opportunity to insert the pamphlet into my file, using it as a decoy for my illicit reading activity. It read as follows:
It's forbidden in the classroom, not allowed in most homes, prohibited in government, and considered offensive in the public square. At the movies it is virtually censored; for the most part, it is either ridiculed, ignored, misrepresented, or selfishly used as a tool for making money. The most defiant attacks are reserved for the weekend nights where it is dragged through the mud by the masters of the house, who also exorcize the people of any trace of openness to the forbidden knowledge. In fact our very own minds often forbid it, not daring to face the potential consequences of being socially ostracized.
Driving home that night, through the streetlight-streaked fog, there was a traffic jam. The music of the Twins wafted ephemeral from my new stereo (a detachable unit). A hole appeared in the layer overhead and, looking through my sunroof, I spied a multicolored flicker of light fly from one end of space to the other. Only a lone star, the November Betelgeuse, remained in its wake. We were going nowhere. The slowly increasing blare of carhorns littered the evening like the ululation of forgotten souls. I crawled out of my car, through the sunroof, and peered into the linear glow of homeward-bound automobiles. In the distance, at the head of the halted exodus, a series of red lights swirled violently. An accident, probably. People began to shout. I left my car and walked casually, hands in pockets, towards the cops. Two city blocks later, I moved to the center of the action. Eight police cars, two fire trucks, one ambulance, an overturned automobile (shattered glass, a limp hand dangling uselessly from the driver's side window), and a motionless form in the middle of the street. It was Deftone, his head a full-bloomed flower of blood and flesh. Flat. At the end of his twisted arm, a mashed hand, like a waiter's tray, supported two pamphlets. Two yellow-suited ambulance drivers spread a white sheet over him like a picnic blanket.
II.
At home, my arms hands knotted behind my head, I stared at the ceiling and thought of sports. I thought of game theory. Tug of war. Direction and misdirection, hide and seek. It would be a long time until I went back to the pickup court, I decided. I imagined a mirror on my ceiling where my doppelganger engaged me in a game of deceit and desire. What could he see that I was trying to obscure from his vision? What did he want from me? Was it what he really asked for? Preferences. The pamphlet triggering the precise window in the course of events. The next move made. Pickup, capture, scrutiny, signification. The clock ticked audibly in the corner, the second hand marking out moves in annoying clicks. The Show was still on, reverberating through the Flat. Voices w/o bodies bounced from wall to wall and fell to dust in the corners. The room rotated a full 180 degrees. There was a time, when I was very young, in the ruined town off of the once-proud Port Economicus, a wide-eyed straggler hopped our security fence to escape a gang of blood-seeking gangbangers. My sister screamed when she saw the threatening stranger cowering in our backyard. As my father moved cautiously toward him, the truth of his calculation impressed me to no determined degree. I found it to be the diamond-sharp result of a massively gifted critical apparatus. Survival. My father calmed him down and we drove him home. As he left our van, he violently grabbed me, cautioning:
First, you need to know the rules of the game because they will tell you what actions are permitted at any time.
Then he bit me on the arm as hard as I have ever been bitten.
Later, Deftone's death popped up on the television screen. A stentorian voice-over chronicled the jutting events of the camera's memory, punctuating the dense air. My stomach squealed.
That night I had a dream:
I sat patiently in my car, belt buckled, hands folded in my lap, in the eye of a hurricane. Everything outside the carwindows was dark, but the omniscience that dreams afford made me completely aware of my surroundings. Trees were ripped from their nurturing soils. Houses crumbled like cracked leaves. With a heave, the wind lifted the car from the street and slammed it against an invisible posterior wall. With this blow came a crushing gravitational force that started at my solar plexus and (this is a slowmotion rendering of the lightning-quick progression of events) pushed through my body, out of my back, and into the wall. Shattered into innumerable pieces, I slowly fused again into a whole. On my knees, I turned towards the wall, finding myself reflected in a mirror that miraculously had survived the collision. My irises had disappeared.
Screaming, of course, I awoke. On the floor of my bedroom were my clothes in a neat, folded pile. My shaking hands searched for the pamphlet in the jeans' backpocket. Where I left off:
Contrary to the misinformation routinely presented in your schools, the forbidden knowledge is not a "literary work" or the mere mixture of myths with history. It has withstood all unbiased historical, archaeological and other tests. Most of the evidence confirming this has been intentionally and unintentionally censored from your classrooms.
A voice from beneath my bed whispered:
--It's all right.
III.
At work, Superior Jane confided:
--I think Jensen is illegally transferring data. You know, I caught him toggling the mainframe security board. He's going to be in big trouble. Without him knowing it, I activated his terminal's video option so it captured all operations for that hour. He's busted. Are you coming to the Company dinner?
--No. Yes.
--Great.
She moved past my cell, walking her route, turning to me in confidence when she reached Jensen's. She winked, gave me the thumbs-up, then moved on, chin raised, eyes peering down into each cubicle as she progressed. Her stiff Company suit reflected the buzzing artificial light.
I looked over my shoulder to Jensen. He was looking right at me. He straightened his arm in my direction, palm facing so I could see. On it, was tattooed a sign that looked like this:
+
I lowered my head and kept my eyes to the ground.
Heading past home after work, I drove to Stepson's Beach, a difficult sinew which passes through suggestive National Park forest before it reaches the rolling, repetitious surf. Detaching my stereo, I headed out onto the dusky beach, squeezing sand between my toes in a quirky duck walk until I reached the water. Fully breathing in the sea air, I spotted, out of the corner of my eye, another person on the beach staring out into the sky. Hurriedly walking over, I fished my pamphlet out of my backpack.
--Hey!
It was a woman. Hearing my voice, she immediately turned and ran the other way, kicking up minute puffs of sand. Behind me, a low voice warned:
--You should know better.
I turned around. It was Jensen. He had a small pistol in his fist, pointed at my midsection.
--Give me the pamphlet, 2Grand.
--What for?
--You know exactly what for.
--Jensen, tell me about the pamphlet.
He kept his eyes attached to the receding figure of the woman I had chased away. She drifted off the right of my shoulder into the mist issued from the collapse of descending waves. I pressed on.
--Jensen, I have questions. I need answers.
I turned my back to him and squinted at the tiny blip the running woman registered on the matrix of this beautiful night. I tightened my lids until my vision blurred, creating her imaginary double. The two dots bounced off the shore and out of sight.
Ordinal utilities, Cardinal utilities, Expected utilities.
--Nevermind. She's almost gone now. She probably won't hear it.
Then he shot me. The quaint stature of his gun promised that there wouldn't be much noise. I realized that he chose the weapon for that very reason. I grunted and fell. The pamphlet flew from my hands on paper wings and settled in the sand, while the backpack rolled towards the water. He rushed over and snatched up the pamphlet. Rolling me over onto my stomach, he trailed back toward his car. As he left, I noticed the granules of sand which swirled in the short exhalations from my mouth and nose. I would bleed to death soon. No one was out on the beach. No one heard. In the cinematic fashion of the dying antihero, I grudgingly rolled over onto my back and, expiring, read the stars. There was an invisible question bracketed between Orion's belt demanding a response. Words tripped off my lips and, saturated with sand, were too heavy to rise. The pamphlet appeared in the sky then, open to page 12, the page I never read. On the back was crucial information:
We are all confronted with a choice. There is no neutral ground in this matter. We will have to answer for the way we live and pay the stiff price of rebellion ourselves. Come learn at our regular meetings. Call 845-1804 and find out where we meet.