Leaving the Sea: Stories (12 page)

Mather lowers his window when they pull out of the garage, and the woman beside him huffs. He’ll consider himself scolded. They turn onto the Hills Parkway and the car picks up speed. Outside, it’s a flat, gray morning, but the air is warm, and Mather lets the wind cover his face. There are sweet, smoky streaks in the sky, the kind of clouds that scatter if a bird so much as flies through them. Mather almost feels that he could sleep, and he wishes the ride were longer. He’d love to stay in the car like this all day, driving around town, sleeping a little, looking out the window, doing nothing, while someone else keeps the boy busy at home.

The temps are at his desk when he gets to work.

“Okay, guys, break it up,” he says, wanting to sound jovial.

They’re engrossed in their work and don’t look up. It’s the same two temps from yesterday, and a third one leans over them, staring at the computer screen. They have coffees and food wrappers cluttering the desk, and Mather’s own inbox is nowhere to be seen. There’s hardly room for him to put down his briefcase.

“I’m back,” Mather says, this time more softly.

“We’re pretty hunkered down,” the young man from yesterday says. Mather isn’t sure, but the young man’s hand motion may be waving him away.

Mather says, “I can see that.” It’s important to stay friendly, extend an olive branch. He was a temp once. There’s no reason to lord his rank over them. “Would you guys like to take a minute to find another place to work?”

The young man seems to consider this but mentions their deadline and how settled in they are at Mather’s desk. He says that they’re good where they are, but thanks for the offer.

Of course it’s a misunderstanding, and a small one, but Mather feels that he hasn’t been at his desk in ages and he’d like things to return to normal. How long has it been since he’s had a normal workday? He looks around for some sort of backup, commiseration from the other full-timers, but his colleagues are hopelessly entranced by their computers. Unfortunately, he has to go higher up on this one. He’d have liked to avoid that, but the temps have given him no choice. Ferguson’s assistant tells Mather that his appointment isn’t until eleven.

Mather says, “I didn’t make that appointment. Remember? I need to see him now. The temps are at my desk and I have to get to work. It’s already after nine.”

“So are you canceling the eleven o’clock?” the assistant asks, crossing something out in his book.

“No,” Mather says quietly, “because I never made it.”

“Never made what?” a voice booms behind him.

It’s Ferguson walking in, acting as though he’d missed the beginning of a joke. Mather wonders if Ferguson ever gets tired, smiling like that. The assistant disengages, returns to his work.

“I never made an appointment with you,” Mather explains, realizing that this will only confuse Ferguson, but Ferguson has the ability not to show confusion, perhaps not to even experience it. A man like Ferguson can remain impervious to all messages beyond his own internal script, which drives him with purpose from room to room.

Ferguson pats Mather on the back.

“So you got rid of him, huh?” he asks.

“Who?” Mather says.

“Who!” Ferguson laughs. “The kid! You finally fobbed him off! Good work!”

“Oh,” Mather says. “I did. Yeah.”

“Just a quick thing,” he says to Ferguson, using a serious, professional tone.

He would like Ferguson, if possible, to resolve this situation with the temps, he says, because he needs to get back to work, and why does he always have to vacate people from his desk every morning? It’s stressful, if Ferguson wants to know the truth, and Ferguson nods with sympathy. The temps should have marching orders and time frames before they even sit down at someone else’s desk. Mather explains that it creates tension and it’s maybe not a great idea for office morale.

“The temps left at eight today,” Ferguson says, “as usual. But let me introduce you to our new team. We’ve made some pretty killer hires. Morale couldn’t be better.”

At Mather’s desk, Ferguson presents the three new hotshot employees, but Mather doesn’t listen to their names. Ferguson is boasting about the marketing initiative they took as temps and how they’re the first temps in a year to move up the ladder like this. Straight up the ladder. Fire at their heels.

The three of them, still caught up in the seriousness flowing from Mather’s computer, are flushed with Ferguson’s praise, as if they believe that soon they’ll be running the company. And somehow Mather is supposed to feel happy for them, which he tells Ferguson he is, but of course, this is his desk, where his unfinished projects remain and can’t the new team work somewhere else?

Ferguson says that he and Mather should go talk at the elevator. His voice is soft, and he tries to shepherd Mather away, placing an arm around him.

Mather imagines Ferguson obeying his internal voice:
Walk employee to a quiet place. Present bad news in positive terms.

About the only way that Mather can have an edge on Ferguson is to hold his ground and force this conversation to happen right here. He can feel his coworkers pretending not to look at him.

Ferguson says, “I think the next step is a good strategy talk down in H.R. They’ll have a really tactical perspective on what might be next for you. It’s never a bad time to talk strategy. You think you’ve considered all your options, but you never have. There’s always something you haven’t thought of.”

Mather’s cell phone rings and he doesn’t recognize the number, but he feels he must pick up, even though the timing is bad. It could be Maureen calling from someone else’s phone. Maybe she lost her phone, which is why she hasn’t picked up for so long. Maybe she’s calling to say she’s sorry, and how is baby Alan, and can she see him soon?

Except it’s not Maureen, it’s someone with poor English, on a poor connection, who asks several times for Mr. Mather.

“This is he,” Mather says, as Ferguson and the new employees look at him with polite curiosity.

The caller asks again for Mather, and again he says, “This is he,” until it occurs to him that she doesn’t understand the expression.

“This is Mr. Mather. Who’s calling, please?” Without people watching him, he might have hung up already.

Mather figures out that it’s the sitter, and what she’s saying to him, over and over, is the name of his boy. She’s saying “Alan,” except with her accent it sounds like “Allah.” She has little ability to elaborate. Something is wrong with the boy. She needs him to come home right away.

Mather stays calm.

“I have to go. It’s my son.”

“I guess you can’t get rid of him that easy!” Ferguson laughs.

Mather rushes to the elevator, and behind him Ferguson calls out that business about H.R. again and scheduling an appointment.

“Strategy!” Ferguson shouts, as the elevator doors close.

It’s not until Mather gets on the bus that he realizes precisely what has happened. This is how it’s done. No doubt Ferguson took a workshop to learn the exact language. Perhaps he was excited to practice it on Mather. Firing is an opportunity, the start of something wonderful and new.

While Mather is on the bus, the sitter calls again, but there’s nothing he can do. He’s on his way, she has to hold tight, and he will be there as soon as he can.

His phone rings once more as he approaches the back of his building. This time it’s Maureen.

“Finally,” he says. It’s as if the whole crisis were over, simply because she has called. He’s not even mad, just relieved.

“Where are you?” Maureen demands.

“Where am I? Where am I?” Mather can’t believe it. “Are you kidding me? Where the fuck are you?”

Then he sees, across the parking lot, at the entrance to his building, Maureen talking on her phone. Robert is with her, and he’s got the boy. Next to them is the sitter, and even from here Mather can see that she’s crying hysterically.

“You left him with a stranger,” Maureen hisses into the phone. “I can’t go away for one minute. I can’t leave him with you for a single second. A stranger who knows nothing about children.”

Mather sees the full hatred in her body, how she’d like to crawl into her phone and kill him as she stalks around the parking lot.

“I’m right here,” Mather says. “Look up,” and he watches her uncoil.

Maureen sees Mather and takes the boy from Robert. They’ve got him wrapped up in his snowsuit, and he’s wearing one of those white stocking caps they give to babies at the hospital. Somehow it still fits him.

“We’re leaving,” she announces, and Robert falls into step behind her.

Mather approaches and the sitter rushes at him, frantic.

“I don’t give them Allah. They take Allah. It’s okay they take Allah?”

Mather tells Maureen to wait, to hold on, there’s a lot to talk about. She can’t just barge over and take Alan like that. She has a lot to account for.

“Really?” Maureen says, and she looks almost excited, as if she can’t wait to tear into Mather over this.

Mather wants to see the boy, and, when he approaches, Alan looks at him with his pink-rimmed eyes, crusty and dry in the corners, and his skin not so much pale as yellow. Mather goes to touch the boy gently—this is his little son, he would like to give him a kiss—and the boy cringes, nestling further into his mother.

Mather backs away.

“It’s okay, Mr. Mather?” the sitter says. “It’s okay they take him?” She’s acting like Mather’s only friend.

“You’re asking the wrong person, you bitch,” Maureen says. But Mather calms the sitter down and says, “Yes, it’s okay, don’t worry.”

“Leave my friends alone,” Maureen spits. “Don’t call my work. Don’t call us.”

Robert looks at Mather, and there’s not even malice in his eyes. Just boredom.

Mather watches them drive away and he goes upstairs, alone, to his apartment. It’s not even noon. He’ll start by doing laundry, all the boy’s clothes. He takes everything down to the machines in the basement, then upstairs he vacuums, opens the windows for air.

From the boy’s crib he removes the humidifier. What Mather will do is take off the tubes and soak them in a good, hot solution. The plastic water tank has to be soaked, too. The mask pulls easily from the hose and it still smells a little bit of the boy, his sleeping breath. When Mather puts it back together it will be as clean as new.

Later, Mather will go shopping and he’ll buy the boy’s favorite foods. He’ll stock up on distilled water for the tank. He’ll even lay in some candy, for those times when nothing else works. If it’s not too late after that and he has the energy, Mather will take the bus down to Rollingwood to the toy store he loved when he was young, if it’s even still there, and he will pick up something fun for the boy. There has to be something that Alan will love to play with, maybe a train table, which he’s too young for at the moment, though not really for long. He’s growing up. It’s not a bad idea to start thinking about getting the right train table built up in the living room.

At home tonight, Mather will lay the pieces out on the floor, and he’ll start building, because it could take a few days to get it done, and this way he’ll have a head start. He wants to be ready for next time. He wants to bring the boy in and present it to him and see the look in the boy’s eyes when he lowers him into place and pushes that very first train into view.

—How long have you been a child?

—Seventy-one years.

—Who did you work with?

—Meyerowits for the first phase: colic, teething, walking, talking. He taught me how to produce false prodigy markers and developmental reversals, to test the power in the room without speaking. I was encouraged to look beyond the tantrum and drastic mood migrations that depended on the environment, and if you know my work you have an idea what resulted. The rest is a hodgepodge, but I don’t advocate linear apprenticeships. A stint in the Bonn Residency. Fellowships at the Cleveland Place, then later a
stage
at Quebec Center. I entered that Appalachian Trail retreat in 1974, before Krenov revised it, but had to get helicoptered out. Probably my first infant crisis, before I knew to deliberately court interference. The debt to Meyerowits is huge, obviously, if just for the innocence training. Probably I should have laid off after that, because now it’s all about unlearning.

—Unlearning as Kugler practices it? That radical?

—I skip the hostility to animals. I skip the forced submersion and the chelation flush. That’s proven to be a dead end. But Kugler is a walking contradiction in that respect, isn’t he? He keeps a horse barn. He does twilight childishness, and now he’s suddenly opposing the Phoenix baby-talk crowd, who I think are not as threatening as he makes out.

—They’re not registered.

—True, but they’re pro-family, and I still believe, when I’m out in the field, in a pro-parent regimen, in supporting those with maturity fixations.

—Which is contradictory, isn’t it, given how many adult families you’ve worked with, and how many of them have ultimately disbanded?

—The term
adult
is problematic, I think, and it’s too easy to say that my childwork is directly divisive to Matures, particularly Rigid or Bolted Matures. I may help accelerate a latent behavior, I may enable conflict vectors along the lines of the Michiganders, who fasted as a form of warfare, and I feign indifference to familial tension, but I think that success itself has been fetishized, and a certain nostalgia for growth has spoiled our thinking. I can be pro-family without coddling actual families. I can support familial fear-based clustering even if it involves admitting that we are most likely members of the wrong family. There is that famous German phrase, which I can’t remember exactly, that describes a certain way to hold a gun to someone’s head. The literal meaning of the phrase is that you love that person deeply, just not at the moment. I argue for a love that functions perfectly in theory.

—But you have destroyed an unprecedented number of families.

—I don’t destroy anything. I do question the term limits of parents, and I’m not the first to promote child-driven power reversals. We have to remember how much thought Benner-Louis put into this subject, and how resonant her geological metaphors were. If prodding an object for flaws causes a momentarily resolved family to unravel, then what you’re saying is that we should stay silent and paralyzed, the classic demand placed upon children. It is not my problem that families are hurt when we notice how they have hardened into stone, how they stoke each other’s failure instinct, and if Matures are not powerful enough to admit a stagnation, they are welcome to blame me, but that’s merely evasive. I give choices to children, and I supply functional tunnels to those who have yet to become children. This is mapping as Parsons envisioned it: you don’t map a route that has been spoiled by the progress of others. Adulthood looks like an exhaustion farm. Who would knowingly purchase a ticket to that? In my work, I re-child certain people who have presumed a premature adulthood, and, most importantly, I question adulthood as a retreat from the power of infancy. I’m a supplier.

—Which brings us to Maryland.

—My tantrum work is still being fine-tuned, but you could reference an entire series of Chesapeake catastrophes that might seem now like open wounds, even as our daily perspective, as time passes and fewer of us can recall the perished, will refresh itself to show how essential, for instance, something like the Lake Maneuver was. Assertive Submersion may not be pleasant, in the lived sense, but if the values of a social group are being collectively ignored, forcing Matures, through panic, to relocate their child-state, it is an adequate way to broadcast a set of perspectives and beliefs that have been conveniently forgotten. Behaviors are advertised and promoted all the time. Why should we be penalized for making our case so powerfully that people nearly die from the overwhelming logic of it?

—But can you sketch for me a picture of your ethics?

—I think that fixed moral boundaries are harmful, even if they provide momentary comfort and save lives. I think our ethical duty is to eliminate the behavioral corsets that are cinched over children just as their explosive energy is at its most threatening. Is a tantrum disruptive, or does it point to an emotional tunnel we’re afraid of entering? The doctrines of the tantras involve meditation, mantras, ritual, and explosive behavior. We’re talking about ancient ideas that are elementary and obvious to high schoolers. My ethics? I’d like to shed the strictures of adulthood and make maturity an optional result of a freely lived human life, not the necessary path to power and success, lorded over by depressed, overweight, unimaginative corpses. The twenty most central mantras have their roots in baby talk. No one disputes this anymore. A syntax comprised of these mantras, which should not be confused with NASA’s failed language, can marshal the force of an entire infant society, but—and this is key—this syntax is not capable of instructional phrasings, so nothing can be taught, which keeps maturity and its death mask perfectly at bay.

—Has it been necessary to denounce such important figures in child development as Dr. Spock? Where has that adversarial approach benefited your child program?

—Dr. Spock reviewed existing children, but he didn’t promote new ones. His art was to survey the past and ensure a predictable persona outcome. He devised solutions for the escape of childhood, very good ones, I might add. I think that some of his approaches are worth modifying, if only in service of a kind of dark science. We can bottle that kind of curatorial approach to behavior, but it won’t save anyone. These were tonics for escape, and they should have been marketed that way from the start. I’ve simply asked for honesty. Spock’s entire approach presents infancy as a problem to be managed, to be grown out of, and I’m not alone in finding this condescending. Physical growth is (mostly) a necessity (although we’ll soon see about that), but emotional growth is something Matures crave strictly for others. Rarely is it satisfying to the person who accomplishes it. There’s a missionary zeal around this dirty word,
development,
and it’s exerted on otherwise defenseless people. A spell has been cast on us, and it leads to a spectacularly depressing failure we have come to call “adulthood.” The artwork of children is so often discarded because Matures cannot accept, let alone decipher, the chaos and disorder children depict after only briefly gazing at the crushed and gargantuan figures that supposedly parent them. Children’s art perfectly captures the sloppy, disordered, ugly world that awaits them if they choose the path of maturity.

—Many people would disagree with that.

—And I bet they’re old and “adult” and reasonable, accumulating comprehension as if it were food. It’s a laughable mistake, this certainty compulsion. Your entire line of questioning revolves around the notion that if not everyone agrees with me, there must be something wrong with my ideas. This is a classic rhetorical tactic—I think it’s called the Consensus Chalice—for a Mature.
The Fear of the Infant
wasn’t merely a successful film; it depicted a real aversion to the kinds of discoveries that might be possible if Matures didn’t operate with such staggering fear. Baby talk has tremendous potential, despite its obvious dangers and its near-total incomprehensibility. The only reason you don’t embrace it is your abject terror.

—What’s next for you?

—Meyerowits, for all of his accomplishments, died as an adult, and it has shamed his entire family. His legacy, in the end, means nothing, because he left this world knowing and thinking too much, headed down the wrong road, with a body that weighed as much as six children. He attacked his own theories, in fear of the complexities and richness of innocence, and now he’s dead. I want to die as I am, looking out at a world that I can admit is too complex to know and far too terrible to join. I want to die as a child: barely able to walk, careening through the fog of objects and people I can never know, wearing nothing but the tattered onesie my first mother bought me. This is my goal.