In Baby Geniuses, scientists devise a graph showing genius plummet in the first year of a baby’s life. To ensure I hadn’t drawn up the graph myself, I’d re-watched the first thirty minutes of Baby Geniuses, which is not something I’d foreseen happening in my life. But with Baby Henry asleep, I had the time. It was nearly midnight. I liked being alone and drinking alone, and I didn’t trust anyone who didn’t occasionally drink alone. Baby Henry’s favorite food was time, so these opportunities were a luxury. The drool and the nonsense were great though. Drool was an easy one to like because drool was a kiss. Most people can’t be bothered with nonsense though. Genius and nonsense pursued one another in widening circles, exclaiming a mutual familiarity, a partiality even. Early in life, the baby also loses its casual relationship with body fluids. It was the beginning of hating our physical trappings, that first year, the rejection of the body and its wares, its spit and vigor. I wondered what those babies from the movie were doing now, especially the one called Basil, whose head they’d superimposed on a miniature body of John Travolta doing the Saturday Night Fever dance.
With me tonight by phone was Toronto Mark, whom I’d met seven years ago while playing a mobile videogame that preyed on our shared nostalgia for Star Trek. During the Star Trek Mobile Game Affair, we were members of a conclave whose members would pool resources to find new aliens and speak with them. We called ourselves Second Star to the Right, which comes from a Captain Kirk quote. I’d since learned the quote was borrowed from Peter Pan. Everything originated elsewhere, so when I told people I was embarrassed about being in a group called Second Star to the Right, which layer was the most shameful: Kirk, J.M. Barrie, or just the syntax? I learned Barrie wrote Peter Pan for his brother, who had perished. A boy who would never be a man, not a man who would always be a boy. Anyway. Toronto Mark would greet the chatroom with “Herro” a lot. I knew I either loved this person, or I hated him. It turned out he was Vietnamese, so the former. We’ve never met IRL although we intend to. His partner doesn’t want children, but he does, so as a compromise, they get lots of cats. I’m afraid our institutions have churned us up, squeezed us dry, and ejected us permanently. Maybe why there were less babies these days: people were afraid to drop more people into the structures that have abandoned us. People were terrified of mistakes.
Toronto Mark and I exchanged jokey pictures from the internet, like a recent one with the heading “How Not to Do Things.” In this picture, a father stands beside his adolescent daughter, whose shirt reads, “Stay Clear Boys, This is My Dad.” Beneath the entreaty is a picture of the father sneering and preening, his thick, ropey arms thrust downward, a parenthetical reference to his barrel torso. The shirt is too large, ending at the knees, and she is frowning. Juxtaposed is a picture of the same girl taken months later, now pregnant. She wears shredded jeans, her knees exposed. The hand of her wiry baby daddy presses against her stomach, now round and taut. She’s smiling, and her baby daddy wears a red Nike shirt and cap. His face betrays no feeling, and the blue ribbon pinned to his shirt makes it looks as though he made the best pie at the county fair. A week ago, when I sent Toronto Mark this image, I promised to tell him about a girl I knew in middle school who’d been impregnated by one among my cohort. During that school year, I saw her stomach grow. Her impeccably curled hair concealed under a hood. Her immaculate, permanent eyebrows set above permanently downcast eyes. These qualities betrayed a fastidiousness pointing in the opposite direction from her spirit of dejection. She wraithed past the open doors of classrooms, ghastly children turning and gawking as one. She kept her head down, her hands folded atop the growing child.
I’d promised him I’d find out what happened to this floating girl and her child. Inebriated assurances are more urgent than sober promises. Drenched in accelerant, you pay more attention to these assurances, satisfying them before they combust. And one time, he’d shown me a picture of himself as a child wearing a shirt with “I Am a Promise” on it, the cutest damn thing I’d ever seen. In this way, Drunk Fortune ordered my immediate ascent into the attic to find the girl in my middle school yearbooks.
Since Baby Henry slept, and because he’d been sleeping lightly due to ear infection, I gathered my supplies quietly, tiptoed to prevent waking him. Ah, the attic sat atop his room! I would be as silent above as I was below. And the creaking door to the garage was ten feet from his bedroom door.
Since I was a nudist, it would be difficult to climb a ladder laden with flashlight, baby monitor, phone, one opened can of beer, and one closed can for the road above. I ate the sour fruit from the tree of binary clothing logic. If a man shall require the maximum number of pockets as can be sewn on a garment, a woman shall require no pockets. Among the many absurdities of nature were kangaroos with pockets in their flesh and yet humans…I suppose a human pouch would be distasteful. It was frustrating. Ah, the teal makeup backpack we used to wear while bicycling! It held keys, water, a hand-held tire pump. Now, it would hold my baby-hunting supplies. Ah, a Packers ballcap for good measure! I was a cautious mantis, green my head and back, my hands extending in unison to turn the knob of the garage door slowly, silently, before crossing the threshold, pushing back against the door from inside the garage to pad its closure.
I activated the overheard garage lamp, which typically activated the attic light in tandem. I yanked the pull-string, allowing the ladder to spill forward as I caught it. There was no light in the attic. I reversed my mantis actions, sliding back to the kitchen for a replacement bulb. Finally, I returned and ascended, rung after rung, listening to the rattling of the lightbulb and its sundry compatriots.
Up there, after swapping bulbs, I laid out my supplies from left to right: baby monitor, then flashlight, dead lightbulb, beer, and beer. I took a photo to document the effort for Toronto Mark. He’d been teasing me about spirits as they are portrayed in the movie Hereditary, as some of the events of the movie take place in an attic. I told him my attic wasn’t frightening. It was compact and of course triangular, which I had to admit was an accursed shape. I felt triangles all around. In the northwestern corner of the darkness was a rust-colored blur I’d captured on a videoed status update for my friend. I rotated back around to stare at it again and waited for the ghost to do something. If this ghost wanted to remain still in its position, I would not protest. Toronto Mark was spooked by the rusty ghost because a spirit had visited him during his dreams the previous evening, asking where he lived. He evaded the question, because he believed if he told the ghost, it would be able to manifest itself in the waking world and wreak havoc upon him. I would probably tell a dream ghost where I lived. I yearned for something to be drawn to me so powerfully that it would risk passing through a threshold into a separate reality.
I grounded myself by looking at the baby monitor. His legs were lifted into the air, V-shaped. Somehow, he slept while they remained suspended. I was surrounded by the invisible ligament of a home. Opaque watering tubes extending up from a water heater and branching further into the bronchial distance. Surplus carpet and tile from the home’s construction rolled and forced into a corner. A garbage bag containing photo albums our cat drenched in piss that we wanted to keep but didn’t want to clean immediately. Behind the garbage bag, several boxes containing surplus books we didn’t reference enough to shelve within reach. And in the nearest box, my yearbooks. At the top was a copy of Penelope, the literary journal of my alma mater. In it are memories of the people and poems of that first year. There was a poem about a “carrot-topped” woman, written by the editor of the journal. There was my poem about being troubled by an errant strand of some stranger’s blonde hair. Here was one called ‘False Light’ I remembered well. It was about the ineffectiveness of our fleeting perceptions against the mighty backdrop of existence. It was filled with regret and revision. I read a line about soothing the blushing cheeks of the past, smoothing out rough edges. But most importantly, and the reason I kept the issue, was a poem written about me by an old friend called Lisa. The poem leveraged a modest and rhythmic meter to stoke my ego, making me sweat, reddening my face. Lisa’s phrasing in everyday speech was similar. In a whisper, she would describe the St. Louis Arch. That you could go up in it and rummage about. She wore an ever-present smile I’ve since learned was more for others than for herself. She has a family now: a husband and two girls who love to jump and scream. She met her husband at that same school, and I remember him fondly, from before they were married. What I mean is that she had a whole, formed life now. In college, we didn’t have a life. Does it take being 40 to get there? We’ve kept in touch. She’s just like she was then. Open to nonsense from every quarter. Shall I describe her shape and legs and other qualities you find of women in books? No, but it does make sense that people talk about legs so much because what are we but movement and our legs the instruments.
Closing the door on Penelope, I’d found the yearbook and was surprised by the volume of signatures, aphorisms and well-wishes on the inside cover. “Keep in touch,” they wrote. “Follow your dreams,” they wrote. It had been easy to ask people to sign my yearbook, even if I’d barely spoken to them during the year. I barely spoke to anyone. But people were happy to give the gift of their signature. And I found her. I remembered her face. This white girl with hoop earrings, dark lipstick. She looked happy in this photo. Ah yes, Jenny Smith was her name. And that member of my cohort, her baby daddy, was Garrett Cremini. Garrett was in the eighth-grade section of the yearbook with me, whereas Jenny was in the seventh-grade section. I first met Garrett in seventh grade physical education, basketball unit. He’d noticed that when unencumbered, despite my height, I had a 90% success rate while standing near the goal. Garrett realized this and suggested everyone send me the ball and I would stand at the net ready to succeed. The opposing team immediately encumbered me, destroying my success rate, and Garrett considered me no longer. We had no other interactions in our tenure. He liked to wear large basketball jerseys and oversized necklaces. His hair was always jelled back, separated into blonde quills diminishing as they receded toward the back of his head.
On a lark, and blessed by wet confidence, I performed a quick search and found Garrett’s current address. He lived at 3409 West Ralston Drive. FindAnyone.Net said the other people possibly living with him were an 80-year-old Gail Cremini and a 25-year-old Anthony Cremini. It was only several miles from my home.
I crawled to the northwest corner of the attic, where under the triangle of beams, I found rolls of carpet waiting. I placed my head on the shag, turned my body so it would fit between the two beams obstructing my body from full extension. I was tired, and I needed to close my eyes for just a minute, I swear.
I knocked and I heard someone mumble and shuffle toward me. The door opened and this must have been Gail Cremini. She wore a turquoise sweater with the faces of three cats on it. The cats were photorealistic, but also wore full faces of makeup. I asked Gail if Anthony were home. She asked me who I was, and I said I used to know her son in middle school. Her eyes narrowed and I heard footfalls grow louder behind her before Garrett burst forth, tackling me to the ground. He knelt over me, grabbed my shirt and shook his fist in my face. He turned me over and pinned my right arm behind me, his knee in the small of my back.
“I’m fuckin’ tired of you people coming here and bothering me. Leave me and my son alone.”
“What? No! Where’s Jenny? Anthony, are you back there? Help me.”
I heard him groan and shift his weight backward before stomping down upon my ass so hard that in the sand, you could see where my body had been, and how it had been displaced after he’d stomped my ass.
“Soothethose cheeks, voyeur!”
I lay on my stomach looking at the ground, hoping for the end. My phone buzzed and I removed it from my pants expecting Garrett to slap it out of my hands, but he was gone. There was an email. In it, Anthony Cremini, or Ant, as he wished to be addressed, described a difficult and unstable childhood bookended with the disappearance of his mother, Jenny Smith. Every few years or so, Ant received a new postcard from his mother, always postmarked from a city he’d never heard of and had to look up online each time. He had included an image of the latest card. On the front was an image of Milwaukee under block letters entreating us to “Visit Wisconsin!” It had been postmarked from the city of Tomah. Ant explained that on the backs of each of these postcards was the same question, now posed to me from within the attached snapshot: “Where do you live?”
“3409 West Ralston Drive. 3409 West Ralston Drive. 3409 West Ralston Drive.”
I emerged from reverie, packed the dead bulb, flashlight, and baby monitor back into my mantis pack. I folded Penelope in half and placed it in as well, zipping the pack closed as far as possible. I left the now empty, crushed beer cans behind. I was concerned they would leak onto everything else in the pack if I stowed them. I descended from the attic.
I didn’t want to wake Baby Henry. I looked at him. To babies, people must renew their assurances daily, or moment to moment. I’m not allowed to be a nudist in front of him, so I had strapped the now empty backpack around my waist. I filled a syringe with a pink, antibiotic payload. I was ready to give bubblegum flavor to the Baby Henry. I crawled beside his bed, knelt, and he stirred. “Baby Henry,” I said, “Baby Henry, here’s your medicine please eat it.” His eyes and lips remained closed, but he felt out the syringe with his mouth and opened just enough to draw it in, sucking the medicine right out, the plunger magically depressed by suction only. He pushed the tip out with his tongue (I saw the little pink guy!) and returned to his dream, as I did to mine.