Continental Drift

He watched the TV screen inattentively, as if instead it were watching him, until the National Anthem was played at two-thirty and programming ceased. A half hour later, he realized that the blue eye in front of him was dead, and he reached over and flicked it off. With the lights on, he lay back on the sofa and tried to sleep. He squirmed and bent and unbent himself, but his body felt like a sack of nails to him, painful in any position, until finally he gave up trying, sat and smoked cigarettes, finished all the beer in the refrigerator and read People magazine twice, until it disgusted him, and he threw it on the floor. All those happy, pretty, successful people — he hated them because he knew they didn’t really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in that way made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren’t people, he fumed, they’re photographs.

At six, he heard the baby wake, burble and yap to himself a few minutes and then cry to have his diapers changed. Bob rose slowly from the couch, got the bottle of apple juice from the refrigerator and headed down the hallway toward the children’s room. Elaine appeared at the door, crossed the hallway silently, as if alone there, and went into the bathroom, closing the door tightly behind her. As he entered the bedroom, softly gray in the predawn light, he heard the splash of the shower behind him. Ruthie and Emma, accustomed to their brother’s morning howl and the sounds of a parent tending to him, slept on, grabbing at the last, fat hour of sleep before they themselves had to get up.

Ruthie lay curled away from Bob, facing the wall, her thumb jammed into her mouth; Emma, in the other bed, slept on her belly, arms and legs splayed, as if swimming underwater. In the crib, which was squeezed between the dresser and the back wall of the small, crowded room, Robbie lay flat on his back, scowling and red with discomfort, until suddenly he saw Bob towering over the crib and ceased to cry.

Bob handed him the bottle, and while the baby noisily sucked at it, proceeded to strip away the sopped, plastic-lined paper diaper. When he had the baby’s bottom naked, he stopped for a moment and thought, almost amazed, as if seeing it for the first time, My God, he has a penis. Just like me. An ordinary, circumcised penis. A doctored tube coming out of his digestive tract, that’s all. It was contracted and short, shrunken to little more than thimble-sized from the cold and sudden exposure to the air. Below it swelled the testicles in their tight pouch, like the breast of a tiny, pink bird. There was no mystery, no power, no sin, no guilt. Just biology. It was terrifying for that, and for an instant, wonderful.

“Oh, Robbie,” Bob whispered.

The baby, large blue eyes peering over the cloudy bottle, looked up at his father, and though his lips and cheeks yanked furiously at the rubber nipple, the baby seemed to be smiling. Bob returned his son’s gaze for a moment, then began to examine his own hands, huge against the infant’s tiny, smooth torso, legs and feet. They were coarse hands, scratched and hairy across the tops, with thick veins zigzagging over the surface like blue bolts of lightning, and suddenly his hands looked like weapons to Bob, weapons with wills of their own, like stones that could hurl themselves, and he hauled them out of the crib and jammed them into his pockets.

Once again, his left hand felt the money, but this time, instead of pulling away from it, the hand grabbed onto the packet and held it for a long moment. “Robbie,” Bob whispered. “Robbie, your father is a terrible man. Look what he’s ended up doing,” he said, and his voice sounded like a cold wind raiding a shutter. “Just look at it.”

The baby gurgled and smiled, kicked his bare feet in the air. Across the room, Ruthie twisted in her sleep, while Emma, blinking open one eye, saw her father and instantly dove back into sleep as if into deep, warm waters.

With his hands still stuffed into his pockets, Bob slouched from the room, peering back over his shoulder as he went out. He passed down the hallway, the bathroom door still closed, and left the trailer. Outside, the air was cool and almost still, as a thin, low fog drifted off the sea and caught against the Keys, shrouding the islands in a soft, silvery mist. He could hear the water lap against the shore, as if speaking to it, but he couldn’t see the water at all.

He got into his car, and with the headlights on, drove slowly, not much faster than if he’d walked, over to Islamorada, where once again he bought newspapers. In the parking lot, inside the car, he unfolded the Miami Herald and spread it over his lap and read, for the first time, the article about the drowning of the fifteen Haitians.

15 HAITIANS DROWN OFF SUNNY ISLES