Man, Boy and Monster Part 1: Childhood

I. Childhood
My uncle Rodney returned from Vietnam in a wheelchair and among my father’s four brothers was the typical inspirational-triumph over adversity-Chicken Soup for the Soul good guy. My father didn’t know Rodney well since there were about eight years between them, but he knew that Rodney had come back changed. He knew that it was possible for a man to be both brave and terrified at the same time, and knew that while Rodney had grown braver in the face of the obstacles in his way, he was terrified by the ones that had passed. My father didn’t believe in people being traumatized, he instead believed that what is scary once will be scary forever. Trauma, he felt came after the fact, but with things that were scary enough there was no after the fact. When something is all you can dream about, it is still happening. To my father, Rodney was even more of a hero, because every day, until he died in 1978 (three years before I was born) Uncle Rodney was shot in the spine again. 
    Every time there wasn’t enough money for a new bike or I was laid up with a cold, my father told me stories of Uncle Rodney and the wheelchair that rolled eternally through the jungles where he had lost the ability to walk. My mother usually scolded him for this, and he would apologize, making a face the begged for forgiveness, a face full of shame that you would hardly think a grown man capable of. My mother said she could see that any time I snuck an extra cookie or broke something she could see that I’d inherited my father’s hangdog expression. He never could take a scolding from my mother, since he’d grown up being scolded for one thing or another almost constantly.
See, while Rodney was the hero, my father was the runt. He was short and stocky with small limbs, and as a kid, he was quite clumsy I’ve been told. His coordination was pretty selective. He could fix a piece of farm machinery or build a model airplane kit, but catching a baseball was nigh impossible, climbing a tree terrifying, and running, swimming and most of the things a kid growing up on a farm in Vermont did for fun were awkward for him at best. A runt, a misfit and an utter mystery to my grandparents, they must have been quite relieved when they sent him off to engineering school. He tried to join the Army, but his clumsiness and his recently diagnosed manic depression made him look more like a liability than an asset to the recruiters.
Instead, he went into defense technologies, becoming obsessed with safer planes and bulletproof vests that were actually bulletproof. He wanted to be Rodney’s equal by preventing others from turning into Rodney, comforting himself with the knowledge that he could prevent other brave men from ever having to feel the inside of a wheelchair. Engineering became his life, and his wild, perhaps irrational dream of a world that would finally be safe became his chief concern. It devoured his days, starting at about six am and ending at around 8 pm. There was nothing my father felt so deserved his time as this obsession. Nothing, that is, until he met my mother.
My mother was a smart woman, although not especially fond of the rigid discipline that school carried with it. She was much too free and breezy a woman to take pride in writing essays and taking tests. She ended up getting a degree in hotel management and hospitality from the community college, which led to a position as a desk clerk at what even my father had to admit was  “a pretty cozy little place”. My father was in town staying at this place during a conference, and saw my mother every time he popped out of the hotel. My father got a position in Boston and they started to see each around. They dated for awhile and were happy. Happy, that is, until Uncle Rodney died. My father didn’t call her for three months, yet she never gave up on him. She came to him, and she brought love and faith and the hopes that he would escape his grief and be able to both work and live with his bipolar.  Somehow he did, and then they were married and then they had me. And we were happy. Her loving bright nature balanced out the aloof disciplinarian my father was, so my  childhood was okay.
It made me end up thinking that mothers were there to assure that the world wasn’t cold and nasty and that fathers are there to show you that it is, but to make sure that you’d be tough enough to get around safely. With all of the horror out there, maybe the truthful part of parenting’s the more useful of the two, or maybe loving and reassurance that you live in a safe world are self fulfilling prophecies; as long as you are loved and you can feel the warmth of it and live safely and confidently in your skin, it isn’t so bad. But, even if it’s true, my father still had at least one foot in a horrifying world that even as a little kid I had enough good sense to stay the hell out of. That was up until the day that my father’s world came to me, that the gravity, climate and ecosystems of my life changed into those of his. I don’t know why I like scary stories to this day, or why I feel such an urge to tell my own, but everything became a scary story that day, when my father’s paranoid science ruled the earth.
I get the sick urge to tell you it was some special day to contrast the horror with the specialness, to make this day poison to you, to enhance and draw off your memories of Christmas, Thanksgiving, your birthday or whatnot. I couldn’t hurt if I also painted a big, fat, cloudy full moon in the sky. But none of those things were true about this day. It was just one night, but one night that my life needed to change forever.
    I had been asleep until the tapping at my window woke me. In my head, I heard a sound like the laughing of many packs of hyenas on a nature show, and a strong urge to investigate the tapping washed over me. But it felt like a trick. So, I did the exact opposite thing that the tapping seemed to want. I dashed out my door and down the hall, and began to pound on my parents’ door, begging and screaming for them to let me in. As I pounded, I heard the sound of tiny rocks batting against my window, the thing outside could leisurely seek entry, while I had to make a ton of noise. The dynamics of power were clear, and my desperation more justified by the second. Lucky for me, my mother got to the door before whatever was at the window got in. She knelt down, hugged me and patted my back.
    “You have a nightmare?” she asked. There was a touch of annoyance behind her sweetness and serenity. It must have been incredibly late. My father was behind her, shaking his head, I was surprised that he didn’t seem angry.
“Must have been some nightmare,” he said, “I think the kid actually heard a noise or saw something.”
“Well, whatever happened,” said my mother, “I’ll stay with you until you get to sleep. It’s a school night and you need your rest.”
I could still hear the thumping of the rocks against the window from down the hall. My mother didn’t seem to notice, but I swore my father perked up his ears for a second.
In my room, I had an ugly orange armchair that my mother would sit in to read me stories or help me with my homework. She was seated in the chair when she heard the sound of the stones, and then rose from it to check the window. She looked out, and then she pulled back and gave a truly horrendous shriek. My father heard her, and he dashed down the hall on wings of adrenaline to the door, which he kicked open like he was a police detective on tv. As the door flew open, my mother dropped to the ground, holding me tightly. I knew that those planes and bulletproof vests that ate up my father’s life would come in handy right now. It wasn’t a stone that made the window finally give way, it was one swipe of an enormous, strong arm.
The first time you see a monster, you expect a Frankenstein, a vampire, Jason Voorhees, a great big dragon or a horde of stop motion skeletons with swords. But monsters aren’t like that. Real monsters are nightmares and nightmares aren’t always like scary movies. Nightmares don’t care if you’re entertained, or if you go out to see them again, or if you’ll recommend renting them to your friends. Nightmares are like computer viruses, cold and destructive, motivated by twisted, inhuman logic that seeks out the holes in the little pieces of program code that make your mind work. The monster that came through the window was a nightmare, the sort of monster that people who were dead certain was coming to eat them warned their children about for centuries with what now look like morbid bedtime stories. It was almost twice my mother’s height, and it had to hunch over so that it didn’t hit the ceiling. It was used to hunching over, bending down and picking things up to grab them. Its skin was black and scaly, covered in little hairs, its hands large and webbed between fingers which ended with claws like fabric scissors. It smelled like brine, fish and garbage, a polluted river on its most polluted day. Its hair was long, thin and white, a tangle of dental floss and from its strangely human face, yellow eyes stared through translucent eyelids. It smiled, showing huge square teeth made for crunching through bone.
My father tried to stop my mother from getting in its way. He knew I had to be protected, but he couldn’t stand to see her do it. It was too late, though. His scream for her to run wasn’t enough. It squeezed her in its big, black scaly arms and he could her ribs crack. As soon as it came, it left with my mother and there was nothing we could do at that point. It was lucky that it left the huge, but human-looking footprints, so the police believed my father’s story about a kidnapping. They said it must have been a homeless vagrant that lived by the river. Of course they didn’t think of what it could really be. Amazing how people can ignore that footprints must belong to something far bigger than a person. Amazing how when things like this happen, the only people who get to bear the truth are the witnesses.
My father’s eyes were full of tears for hours. When he finally calmed down, he realized he had a clue, and if he had a clue, he had a chance. I was sent to stay with my Uncle Phillip, while he made a decision. A decision, or a mistake, that changed everything even more.
It compounded the tragedy of my mother’s death that I was sent to stay with Uncle Phillip and Aunt Grace. It isn’t that Uncle Phillip was mean, it was more that he was closed off, distant and had no clue what to do with me. There was never a time when he said “so, what do you want to do?” or “you wanna go out for ice cream”? I was treated as if I were a perpetually uncooperative housecat; fed, checked up on occasionally, and mostly left to my own devices. My own devices were pretty limited there. I couldn’t really bring myself to play with the small selection of toys that I had packed in my forest green backpack and there were no toys or videogames or anything at Phillip and Grace’s house. I spent most of my time drawing, doing homework and watching TV. There wasn’t a whole lot on, but it was noise in a quiet, lonely house that had no clue what to do with me. I wondered if anybody knew what to do with me now that my mother was gone. I couldn’t imagine my father raising me, and I couldn’t imagine staying with Phillip and Grace.
The next time I saw my father was the day after he was put into the hospital. They found my father by the bank of the Charles with his loaded shotgun, deep claw marks on his chest and a trail of blood beside him that lead upriver. They said to Phillip that it was the most baffling suicide attempt that they had ever seen. He hadn’t shot himself, and it didn’t look like the chest wound came from a knife. I knew where these cuts had to have come from and I was horrified and impressed by it. They came from whatever had tried to eat my mother. If she had died from cancer, he would have found a way to go out and shoot cancer, but he hadn’t fought cancer, he’d fought that medicine and science couldn’t fathom at all, and though I thought he would die, his eyes opened when I came into the room and he whispered to me.
“I got it. It’s not gonna get us,” he said.
“Did you find her?” I asked.
Maybe she’d survived. Maybe she was a few rooms over. Maybe he had found her, half-breathing in a weird cocoon that would preserve her so the monster could eat her later. Any answer he would give would prevent me from ever wondering whether my life could be safe or good again. He didn’t have to. He began to cry and I noticed that he was wearing wedding rings on both of his fingers. When I got back, I waited until I was alone with the TV, and drew pictures of the monster, even though I felt they were mocking me.
A few days later, I got a call and found out that my father had committed himself, deciding not to interact with an outside world full of chaos, irrationality and evil. I could understand quite well why he never wanted to see the light of day again, but I wanted my life back, I wanted to leave Uncle Phillip’s house and go back to my own, even if it had been the seen of a crime. I couldn’t take the awkward monosyllabic conversation, or the expensive, inedible food or the constant pity. It made my realize that if I had to live without my mother, I certainly couldn’t live without my father, so with Aunt Grace’s help, I did something inordinately brave for an 8 year old.
Aunt Grace sat just outside the psych ward, having convinced the front desk that I was visiting accompanied by an adult. She was too scared of all the crazy people to go past the big white doors that separated the insane from the merely sick. I wasn’t sure I wanted her moral support anyway. Walking through those doors alone, I knew there could be no surrender. I was bringing my father home.
I hadn’t quite known what to expect, as my perception of institutions was a caricature, a portrait drawn by Vincent Price movies and a highly overactive imagination. I didn’t expect a calm rec room full of lost, frightened people watching tv, playing board games and reading. The only truly scary thing was seeing people’s worlds eaten by their sickness. The ones who stared into space all had something to stare at, something that was only there when they needed it to be. Something like a troll that comes out of the river to eat your mother. My father stared at that all the time. As he played checkers with a nervous man who couldn’t stop counting, his eyes would shift, and then he would breathe a sigh of relief, seeing it wasn’t there after all. When he saw me, his checkers game stopped and fear crawled like a nest of caterpillars over his face, making it squirm into uncomfortable positions.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, though he knew the answer.
“I don’t want to live with Aunt Grace. She wouldn’t even come in with me.”
I got the feeling that he still wanted nothing more than to sit and play checkers and be safe from the thought that maybe his tragedy had actually occurred, but he was angry. He checked himself out and we walked together into a life of wandering a country full of monsters that needed vanquishing.