Sewanee Review

You didn't arrive the way I'd imagined: inching your way, slow and steady. Instead, there was the top of your head and then the rest of you in a burst, unfolding like an acrobat.

I asked if I could hold you.

"She's your kid," our dry-witted doctor said, which I thought was very funny, until you were in my arms and the neat truth of it landed.

She was already washing her hands. She was already heading for the door. Of course the doctor had used that line before. What could be more commonplace than a child born and her bewildered father?

Soon the three of us were alone in the green glow of machines.

When I was young, I was terrified by madness and its looming characters: the Hallelujah Lady rattling the fence of our elementary school playground; the Giant of Fourth Street under the August sun, swaddled in blankets and coats, gloves and hats, a brick in his huge fist. [End Page 299]

In one of the early nights, when your mother and I were still hallucinating from exhaustion, you began to choke. We saw outrage in your face. Until then, you had cycled between peace and discomfort. Either you were happy, or you were not. But now your eyes bulged, as if to say: Fix this, goddammit.

I was calm then. In times of immediate threat, I tend to go cold and rational. I don't remember what we did to make it so, but you survived and were at peace again. I had never loved your mother more.

Later, we were driving somewhere, I don't remember where or when, maybe into town, maybe in those first months, when we were mostly alone, sequestered, when the menace and mystery of disease plagued the country. I caught your eyes in the rearview mirror and was sure I saw there an expression of absence, of dislocation. Something alien, controlled by a foreign power, and in it I thought I detected danger.

I was frightened because I knew the look. I'd seen it on my own face when my own face was most unfamiliar. Frightened because, really, it wasn't alien at all.

I tried the few shabby tricks I knew then—clownish tools of the novice. To no avail, so I let you be. Which seemed then, as it does now, the only way. I know this of myself. We can't be played into joy. There is no distraction good enough. I wish there were, but I've tried them all. Joy must reappear the way that sadness does. Of its own volition. All at once, or gradually.

On that subject, I'm afraid the best wisdom I'll ever have to offer you is that they both inevitably return.

Know this and you will be better prepared than I was.

I was only fourteen years old when it came for me, this thing I saw, or imagined I saw, reflected in your face. Would it come for you, too? Was it lying in wait? [End Page 300]

I was on my bike, alone by the river, and there it was: the first visit on a magnificent summer day.

Treacherous territory, describing this thing. I tried once, in a novel. I made it tar and a circling bird. That seemed right then, and it seems good enough now.

The spreading weight, the constant hunter.

It's often misunderstood as simple sadness by those fortunate enough to misunderstand. But it is a far more complex creature, one that inhabits the body. An occupying force, it comes with weight and volume. Both of which are tremendous. Neither of which is inert.

That day, it was baffling and brutal enough that I had to stop riding and sit on a bench. I don't remember going home, or when it left. As quickly and inexplicably as it had come, it was gone.

The other night you were watching me cook dinner, and I saw that look again. When I asked what was wrong you said, "I'm just a little sad." I turned off the stove and picked you...