Dante's Wood Read online

  “What time do you get to the center in the morning?” I asked.

  “After breakfast. When the bus drops me off.”

  “Do you have a watch?”

  “Here,” he said.

  “Where is the little hand pointing when the bus comes?”

  “Eight,” he said.

  “And the big hand?”

  “Twelve,” he said.

  “So what time is that?”

  “Eight o’clock!” he exclaimed proudly.

  With prompting, he could tell me that the bus brought him to the center’s door at 8:30. We moved on to favorite activities, what he liked to eat for lunch. Then I asked about his teachers. “Do you like them?”

  “Uh-huh. But not Mrs. Logan. She gives us food in the cafeteria. She’s mean. Her mouth goes like this.”

  I know exactly what he meant. “Cafeteria ladies always have mouths like that. What about the other teachers? What are they like?”

  A few answers later he mentioned Shannon.

  “Tell me about her,” I said.

  “She has long hair. She teaches art. She likes my paintings. She doesn’t shout when James spills his paints. James is my friend. He likes monster trucks, too.”

  I let him go on a few more minutes about James before steering him back to Shannon. “Is Shannon your favorite teacher?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Dean is my favorite, too. He’s my teacher at gym. But not Miss Best. Miss Best is not my favorite.” Miss Best, he explained to me, was his speech therapist.

  I returned to Shannon a few more times during the next fifteen minutes, but aside from Charlie’s observation that she smelled “like pretty soap,” I didn’t discern any preoccupation with her, much less anxiety. We’d now come to the tricky part. Truth is always a fluid issue with children, and, though technically an adult, Charlie would have the same difficulty separating imagined events from real ones, along with a strong desire to please me. I started by asking him whether he had been feeling sad about anything lately. He mentioned the death of the family cat.

  “Did your cat die at home?” I asked.

  “No. Mom took her away. In a special box. To the vet. She had to go to sleep then. She won’t wake up anymore. Mom says that’s what death is. You go to sleep and don’t wake up anymore.”

  He stated this matter-of-factly. Nonetheless, my antennae were up. “Never waking up again—is that something that worries you?”

  “No. We have a new kitten now. His name is Scooby Doo. I picked him out. He jumps like this.”

  “I meant Charlie, do you ever worry about not waking up?”

  He was quiet.

  I decided I had to be more direct. “Charlie, your mom says you’ve been waking up at night. Is that right? Remember, I can’t tell when you nod your head.”

  Charlie squirmed in his chair, which I took for a yes.

  “Do you know why you are waking up?”

  He remained quiet.

  “Charlie, is there something you’re afraid of at night? It’s all right to tell me. I’m a doctor, maybe I can help you.”

  “A doctor?” he said, hopefully. “Like at the hospital? They fixed my nose. I had an operation. After that it stopped hurting. I got to sleep in a special bed. And drink smoothies. I don’t like it when it hurts.”

  “Nobody does. That’s why it’s so important to tell adults when you are hurting. Is there something that’s been hurting you since your nose was fixed?”

  Another long silence.

  “What is it, son? What’s been hurting you?”

  Still no response. I waited.

  Finally he said in agitated rush, “My wee wee. I mean my penis. That’s what Mom says to call it. It’s not polite to call it a wee wee. It’s for going to the bathroom not for anything else. I’m not supposed to play with it.” I noticed Charlie was breathing more rapidly again and he was bouncing in his seat.

  “Charlie, are you telling me your penis hurts?”

  “Mmm.”

  “When?”

  “When I wait too long to pee and have to hold it in. And—” he stopped.

  “And other times too?”

  “When it gets big.”

  I asked him when this was happening.

  “At night. In bed. My pajamas stick up—like this. I don’t like it. It won’t go away.”

  “Charlie, do you understand why your penis gets big?”

  I got no answer.

  “Is that why you’ve been crying?”

  “It won’t go away,” he repeated, beginning to whine. “I want it to but it won’t.”

  If he hadn’t been so upset I could have laughed, it was so simple. Boys Charlie’s age and younger get erections all the time, often from something as minor as a stray thought. By the time they’re in their midteens, they’ve learned how to control these episodes, either by directing their attention elsewhere or by masturbating in private. But Charlie had been trained by Judith never to fondle his genitals and had no idea what was happening to him. It was no wonder he was crying himself back to sleep. At first he seemed anxious to be discussing the matter with me, but after I’d assured him that all boys, and even grown men like me, shared his problem, he seemed to relax and became voluble again.

  We talked a bit about body parts and reproduction so I could gauge how much he knew. He understood penises were for making babies as well as urinating, but couldn’t explain how the “seed” got from the father to the mother. We covered “good” touching and “bad” touching but he seemed utterly ignorant of both, informing me with some indignation that he needed no help going to the bathroom. Once he had seen pictures of naked women in a magazine under Nate’s bed, but they reminded him of Lisa, one of his classmates, who was always pulling down her panties and saying “nasty” things like “lick my cunt!” There were other female classmates at the center whom he liked better, but none of them was pretty enough to ask out. He was waiting to get married before he kissed a girl.

  Later, I would replay our conversation over and over, trying to see what I’d missed. But at the time all the answers I was getting to my questions seemed to point toward a single, innocent explanation.

  When I was finally satisfied there was nothing else I could learn from Charlie, I thanked him and told him I hoped we would meet again. He was as sweet-tempered as his mother had said, one of the sweetest human beings I’d ever met, and when he left me that afternoon a part of me I thought I had safely buried envied the Dickersons and their son.

  When Charlie’s parents returned, Nate immediately said, “Well?”

  Judith piped in right away, “It’s that girl, isn’t it?”

  “Wait, wait,” I said, holding up my hand like a traffic cop. “Let’s sit down again.”

  I started by asking them if Charlie had received any sex education during his schooling.

  “It was available,” Judith said, “but I asked that he be removed from the class. I didn’t want him getting any ideas.”

  It was the only time I felt anger toward her. The risk of abuse for someone like Charlie comes as much from being kept in the dark as from being easily influenced, and I was astonished at Judith’s excuse, which fell right into the myth that the intellectually disabled are sexually promiscuous. It recalled the attitudes that had led to the forced sterilization of retarded adults during the early part of the century, a practice condoned by Oliver Wendell Holmes’s infamous dictum “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” Even Charlie’s mother, it seemed, wasn’t immune to this type of ugly thinking.

  I let it go and explained what I thought was going on. A few minutes later, Nate was chuckling.

  “I think I understand what’s needed,” he said. He sounded almost gleeful.

  “You don’t mean—” Judith said.

  “There are other options,” I said quickly, to forestall another round of bickering, “including doing nothing at all. Charlie’s weeping apparently hastens the end of the erections. We could just leave it at tha
t, though he’ll continue to experience discomfort. A frank discussion of what’s happening to him, along with some fatherly modeling, would relieve the stress he’s feeling and lessen the possibility he’ll seek advice in the wrong places. I’d also recommend taking him to an urologist, to rule out a physiological disorder. I can give you a few names.”

  “No need for that,” Nate said. “I know a good one. Well, Judith, I think we have our answer. Turns out it wasn’t such a big deal after all.”

  Judith didn’t sound convinced. “Well, if you’re sure . . .” she said to me.

  “Based on an hour of talking to him I’m as sure as I can be that he’s sexually innocent. But that doesn’t mean he’ll stay that way, which is why I’d also urge you to get him enrolled in a class. One lesson from his father isn’t going to be enough. He’ll need simple, sustained guidance on what’s safe and appropriate for him. Like it or not, Charlie has a mature man’s body. Right now, he’s only showing signs of curiosity, but I wouldn’t bet on that being all as he gets older and comes under more outside influences.”

  “I’m sure I can control that,” Judith huffed.

  “Are you? What happens when you and your husband aren’t around to watch over him every second of the day? And are you really being fair to Charlie? I’m not saying you should encourage intercourse, but pretending he’s never going to experiment seems . . . unrealistic.” I held back from saying I thought it would be courting disaster.

  Nate said, “He’s right of course, Judith. Last thing we need is for Charlie to knock some girl up.” That wasn’t the message I was trying to deliver, but I held my tongue, satisfied that Nate had enough good sense to keep his son out of harm’s way.

  Five

  Six months went by. Fall gave way to winter: the usual Chicago affair with a series of days so short, dark, and cold that by March the sun seemed like a distant relative who visited rarely and only out of a fleeting sense of obligation. The war in the Middle East continued with equally numbing predictability. Candidates for political office scrambled for position in the polls. Another nurse was fatally stabbed by the DePaul-area serial killer the press was now calling “the Surgeon.”

  I busied myself with my practice, falling easily back into old habits of skipping meals and not getting enough sleep. Patients were by and large forgiving of my inability to look them in the eye—some with more interesting pathologies even preferred it—and my colleagues dealt with any unease they felt by joking with me. At times this became too much. My nemesis, Jonathan, seemed to have the web address for the most tasteless Helen Keller fare linked to his desktop. But quipping back was preferable to everyone tiptoeing around the subject, and I usually gave as good as I got.

  Keeping up with journals was more of a chore than before. Even with the fancy scanner I ordered, it took three times as long as it once did to plow through the stack of dead trees that arrived in my mailbox each month. And I discovered an interesting twist to my memory: it seemed to have faded along with my sight. In my former days I had only to glance at a chart or a page in a book and it stayed in my head forever. But my eidetic prowess appeared to be tied to visual images: auditory and haptic input didn’t make the same indelible impression. Though one half of my mind could still “see,” often with great clarity, the things I had laid eyes on during my first forty-six years on earth, the other was now filling up with murkier data that was harder to retrieve. I think I regretted this loss more than anything else.

  Still, I counted myself lucky, since my preblind memory allowed me to move around at work with relative ease. So long as someone hadn’t rearranged the furniture, I could largely dispense with my cane and get by on a combination of recall and informed guesses about what the gauzy shapes around me meant. If I haven’t made this clear before, I wasn’t completely in the dark, though what I could see from one moment to the next varied a great deal depending on lighting conditions and how fatigued I was. In blind circles, I would have been called a “low partial.” It’s nothing to crow about, but to my coworkers my ability to cross a room unaided seemed well nigh miraculous and further proof of my remarkably good adjustment.

  To outward appearances, then, I was making a splendid comeback.

  But beneath the surface, I was falling apart. Whereas before I would have raced through a problem, reached what seemed like the best solution, and never looked back, I now dithered, procrastinated, and did everything I could to put off making a decision. I couldn’t let go of the feeling I was missing something, that my judgment was off. It was the real reason for all the long hours I was putting in on little more than half the workload I used to carry. Some of my coworkers, who were experts at this sort of avoidance, praised my new cautiousness. I even overheard one of them saying it was a good thing I’d finally learned some humility. Sep, however, wasn’t fooled, and toward the end of March summoned me to his office for a heart to heart.

  “I’m worried about you,” he said. “Maybe I did the wrong thing in forcing you back so soon.”

  I shrugged dismissively.

  “You know,” he said, “there’s nothing terrible about acknowledging the heavy psychological toll of what you’ve been through. Relinquishing some of your former self-conceptions can’t be easy.”

  “I’m fine with who I am, both present and past,” I said. “Besides, there’s no real difference between the two.”

  “Not from where I’m sitting. You seem altered. More wary.”

  “Maybe it’s what people are saying about me—that I’ve finally bumped up against my limitations. Along with plenty of walls and doors. Is that such a bad thing?”

  “Yes,” Sep said. “If you let them define you. I admire what you’ve accomplished. Most people would have been shattered by such a setback. But I miss the old Mark. Did you notice you haven’t made a single wisecrack since you walked in here today?”

  “Well, I was going to disparage your tie, but I wasn’t sure whether it was the one with the little ducks or the Chick Evans motif.”

  Sep entertained a chuckle.

  “Seriously, Sep,” I said. “There’s nothing for you to worry about. Winter was harder this year, maybe because of the added nuisance of getting around in snow and ice. And yeah, it’s been making me feel my age, but it’s nothing I can’t work through.”

  “Nuisance is how you’d describe it then?”

  “OK. It’s a major pain in the ass. But I’m coping. There are worse things.”

  Sep didn’t pursue this, and after a few inquiries about routine office stuff let me go.

  During this time, I hadn’t forgotten about Charlie. I’d let a few weeks go by with no word from the Dickersons before e-mailing Nate to follow up. He’d responded with a tongue-in-cheek message saying that my “prescription” had been right on the mark, no pun intended. Charlie’s nighttime waking had ceased; his parents had just enrolled him in an adult sexuality program offered by the Arc. I reminded Nate about the urologist and he e-mailed back that an appointment had been scheduled. There seemed to be nothing else to do but wish Charlie well. I had my own problems, as well as a slew of new patients, to occupy center stage. Nonetheless, I continued to think of him.

  Two weeks into April on a Thursday afternoon, I was halfway through a tedious article on 5-HTT binding in suicidal patients when my phone rang. I waited for Yelena to pick it up, having given her firm instructions I was not to be disturbed, but she was apparently off on one of her frolics. The CID announced an outside number I didn’t recognize, and I was just about to hit the Make Busy button when I decided I could use a break. When I got on the line it was Nate.

  “Mark,” he said. “Thank God you’re there. It’s Nate Dickerson.” His voice cracked on the last syllable.

  “What’s the matter?” I said, picking up his tone. “Is it something to do with Charlie?”

  “I’ll say. He’s been arrested.”

  “Arrested? For what?”

  “They’re saying he murdered a woman. Outside the New Horizons
Center. With a knife.”

  I suppose I’d been primed for indecent exposure.

  “Killed a woman? That can’t be right,” I said. “I can’t see Charlie harming, much less murdering, anyone. There has to be a mistake.”

  “I know, I know,” Nate said. “But they’re saying it all the same. We were told he was found next to the victim early this morning. And . . . he had blood all over him.” Nate’s voice faded in and out, as if he were having trouble holding the handset steady.

  “Where is he now?”

  “In a police station on the near north side. We only found out an hour ago.”

  “No one from the center phoned you?”

  “They did, but Judith was at our weekend place without her cell and I was in surgery all morning. Can you come?”

  “Where?”

  “To our attorney’s office on Wacker. She’s over in the lockup with Charlie now and said she’d like to see you when she returned.”

  I told Nate I’d get there as fast as I could.

  When I hit the street, I could tell from all the honking and idling buses that a road stalemate was in progress. I tried hailing a cab, but there were either none available or willing to pull over for my kind of fare, and with the traffic delays walking would be faster anyway. I set off at a near jog, caning up the Mag Mile’s packed sidewalks with none of my usual solicitude for other pedestrians’ ankles. If they thought I looked rudderless and scurried to get out of my way, so much the better.

  The day was warm for early April, and by the time I’d gone three blocks my shirt was lathered to my back and my sunglasses were sliding down my nose. I didn’t wear them that often, and then mostly to shield my eyes from the sun, but that afternoon I was glad to have them for a different reason. Still, some of my worry must have showed because at the next red light a fellow stopped beside me said, “You all right, buddy? Can I help you get somewhere?” I snapped, “Do I look like I need help?” and sped into the crosswalk the minute it sounded clear, nearly getting clipped by a car making a last-minute left. “Get a dog, four eyes!” the driver shouted as he roared off. “Run over a grandmother while you’re at it,” I yelled back, flipping him a birdie for good measure.