The Spot: Stories

“And that was the end of Weird Willy, the end of the toys, and the end of my Christmas morning scheme, as I think of it now,” Cavanaugh muttered to himself as he started home from the hospital, barely moving his lips over the words, imagining what he might say to his shrink, Dr. Brackett, at his next appointment. In the rearview mirror, Gunner, strapped into his safety seat, gave him a suspicious frown. Cavanaugh closed his lips and imagined saying, “When I’m with him, I’m always aware of the value timewise. I mean, in terms of using up time, of entertainment value, so to speak, of whatever catches his attention. Even when I’m not with him. For example, just a few months ago I was on location in California, working on Draconian, and I was driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, trying to solve a design problem. President Gleason, after his big defeat, goes off on his own for a few weeks to a cabin near Big Sur to ponder his past and begin writing his memoirs, because he sees himself — according to the script — as part of a great lineage of memoir writers stretching back to Ulysses S. Grant and, strangely, up to Jack Kerouac.

“Anyway, I envisioned the scene as a biblical moment that mirrored Jesus’ desert solitude. Something had to point away from the stereotypical writer gestures (Gleason leaning morosely over his laptop keyboard; Gleason flipping his pencil between his fingers, biting his lip, pacing the room; Gleason pouring himself a huge glass of Scotch and swirling it gently before he takes a drink) and direct the audience subtly to the deeper perplexities of his crestfallen state. So I designed chinks in the cabin’s mortar that, when lit from behind, shot small beams — or maybe you’d call them shafts — of light through the walls and the dust motes, forming crosses through which he might walk during one of his pacing-for-inspiration scenes.

“In any case, I was driving up the coast, thinking about this problem, when I became acutely aware of the vista — the hard, purging waves roiling in, the whitecaps foaming far out, and the milky blue of the water — and it suddenly occurred to me that I could, with great precision, calculate the exact amount of time that Gunner would, if prompted (Hey, Gunner, take a look at that), examine each scene before turning away. I could decipher — is that the word? — the exact amount of entertainment value specific scenes on the coast would offer my boy. Waves slamming around hard, bountiful rocks, breaking in a dramatic foam, no matter how fantastically beautiful, would distract him for twenty-eight seconds. Sea lions — if we walked down to get a close look — would tap out at three minutes of distraction value. A frigate, viewed through a pair of field glasses? Five minutes and thirty seconds. A supertanker, not too far from shore, but in heavy surf on the edge of trouble? Six good, solid minutes. (The field glasses would have to be new and never used before.) A frigate on fire? Seven, or possibly eight, minutes of attention. A supertanker engulfed in a raging inferno, belching a thick plume of fire? Nine. A sinking ship (with attendant oil spill and terror-stricken passengers waving frantically, some of them dashing across the deck, on fire)? Ten minutes. Albeit none of these calculations, no matter how accurate they might have felt, were really precise, because one had to go plus or minus twenty seconds on one side or the other to account for various other distractions (fiddling, scratching, eye rubbing, and snot blowing) that might cut into his attention span.

“So you see, to get to the point, when I handed him Weird Willy I had the toy figured at less than a minute. What does any of it matter, his crying, so long as he sweats enough to fill the fucking testing device, I should’ve thought. I should’ve thought, I’m lucky that my son is just crying and not spazzing out, or giving me a much harder time. I’m lucky that he’s only being tested for this disease and hasn’t been handed a diagnosis: terminally ill, with only a few weeks, or a day, or even less, to live, for sure, and that this is still a wide-open thing,” he would tell Dr. Brackett, at his office in White Plains.

Outside, down in the street, the traffic signals would be cheeping, making a sound meant to guide the blind, if there were any. In the four years that he’d been going over the bridge to visit Dr. Brackett, he had never seen a single blind soul using the audible signals to cross the street. The streets in White Plains were always dusty and forlorn, and somehow reminded him of a Western town just before a shootout; folks were hidden away, peeking out in anticipation of violence. Even up in the office he’d feel this — while hearing the cheeping sounds — and it would form a backdrop as Dr. Brackett, a small, lean, sharpchinned man, placed his palms on his knees and leaned forward to say something like: