Randall Brown
Creatures of the Night
Noah wrote a story, "The Creature of the Night," told in second-person. Every minute, every hour, while you are here or elsewhere, he waits for you. Noah cannot sleep at night. The "he" of his story is really himself, his thoughts that we might bury him alive, his fear of what goes on around him while he sleeps. He cannot live with not knowing, for certain, that he will wake up. He wants guarantees no one can give him. He's become afraid of being afraid. Throughout the day, he gets nauseous, anxious, terribly separate. Of course, if he is to get better, he must choose to stay in his room, with that all-encompassing kid kind-of-afraid. And I must choose to stay in my office, not answering the cries, not holding him until he falls asleep, unaware that he's left the waking world.
It takes two milligrams of Xanax—for me, not him—to keep me out of his room. It's like a marijuana high. Whatever he does to get him through the fear becomes a ritual without which he cannot survive. He cries out, "I love you, Daddy" because he wants my counter-cry. But if I give it to him, then he'll think it's my answer that saved him. He's crying out now, "I'm scared. Really scared, Dad. I can't do this." I can only give him nothingness, surround him with it, leave him with his self. Maybe it's the pills, but I sense something wrong and frightening in the necessity of that divide between us—he counted it out as ten steps.
He hums, murmurs threats to the scary thoughts. "...my house...go away...can't let you..."
I'm sitting in the frame of the office door. Eight grown-up strides away. It's unbearable, this world that cannot give him the certainty he desires, the blame falling upon him for not accepting this condition of existence.
"I can do this." His voice disintegrates, stripped of its certainty, rises at the end like a question.
It's my fault, the therapist and my wife agreed. I had to promise not to go in. I'm keeping him trapped by fear and attached to me; it is I who cannot live with what must be done. It's been eleven-years. Enough is enough. He cancelled summer camp this past June, a trip to Disney World with his grandparents, a sleepover party in the school gym.
"Oh God, I hate this," he yells, punches the headboard, screams a tiny yawp like Horton must've heard on that dustball. "I am here," it says to me. "Still here. Still suffering. And you are still out there."
What was his transgression? To be born my son.
Make it end. He says this seven times.
It goes on, the chatter and unanswered tiny yells. He gets the echo of his own fear and I wonder if it's like an answer to him, the bounce of Self off of walls covered in stuck-on football players, life-size Elway and Sanders and Rice, gazing upon him like gods, demanding something of him he cannot give them.
I fade in, out, asleep and then awake against the office doorframe. Some unknown time has passed, and my son's head rests on my lap and he lies stretched out in the hall. I've failed him, maybe from the moment of conception onwards. He stirs awake with the movement of my legs, the brush of my hand across his hair, ears, and cheek.
"Don't make me go back there," he says.
"When I choose," Sartre is to said to have said, "I choose for the whole world." It's a terrible thing, a thing that will have the worst repercussions, but I choose it anyway, choose to have him lay his head back down, choose for me to be the creature of the night who takes away his chance of making it through not only this night, but every night. I choose to go against wife and medicine—and in doing so make it clear that I am the weak one, the one with the sickness. I choose this crime against life and world.
I get the sense that Noah knows what this choice means. "You sure?" he says. He's heard the whole spiel about staying in his room and facing the fear that can only be diminished by this confrontation with Self. "Oh I forgot," he says. "I don't get to be sure, do I? Is it just for tonight or tomorrow too?"
I don't know about tomorrow. I don't know fucking anything. There's got to be
something to give him instead of just himself in there. It's hard to believe that's
all you get. You cannot escape him, because he knows where you are going, disguises
himself as a pillow, a picture on the wall, maybe even your dad.
"You think God could help?" he asks out of nowhere.
"I thought you didn't believe in God."
"I don't know. I was just thinking if he were there, he might, I don't know, do something."
"Like what?"
"I don't know, Dad. Just something."
God. He wants God and got father instead. He's tired, so tired he even snuggles me, making father and son, a tiny something, huddled against the world's uncertainty, that beast in the bedroom, crying "Come out!"
©2007 by Randall Brown
