The Spot: Stories

“It is perfectly possible that you didn’t loosen the collecting device when you grappled with your son. After all, the nurse came in and adjusted it, didn’t she? You can’t be blamed for that. I’m sure it happens all the time. In any case, let’s focus on the wider theatrics of your parenting actions: Do you think you’re the first father to cup his son around the mouth? You’re a good man with a clean heart, not perfectly clean but clear (yes, a clear heart), and you had good intentions, and you were just at the end of your rope, and so you naturally felt frustrated and fearful — above all fearful, because what the test meant, most certainly, one way or another, was the central element/key/crux in the parental drama (let’s call it a drama, not a play). You were fending off, or, rather, delaying for as long as possible, the end result of the test, perhaps subconsciously. You were biding your time with Gunner, trying to fend off, if I may use that phrase again, his anxiety, or what you imagined was his anxiety, by inducing play, a certain level of play, presumably, not just using up time or trying to keep him calm, as you claim, but trying to keep the scene itself stable and quiet on some level, maybe thinking, as you tried, that in doing so you’d also somehow, and perhaps this is a long shot”—he would admit, because Dr. Brackett, as a shrink, liked to counter and undercut his own statements as a way of enlivening them, making them seem like organic, natural formations in order to assure his patient that he was just as human as the next guy and didn’t subscribe to the old formalities of Freudian methodology—“but perhaps you were also under the belief that, somehow, if you kept Gunner quiet and calm, the outcome of the test might be positively affected. Because you believed, I believe, that there were, and are, deeper factors at play — quantum/God/mystical, take your pick — and that if the test went smoothly the results were more likely to be negative. You felt, at that moment, in the sweat chamber, after the toys gave out, a sense that in the heat of the room, and in the sweat that was being exuded from Gunner’s body, fate was at hand, so to speak.” (Here Brackett would draw a couple of deep breaths.) “Now that you know that the results of that particular test were inconclusive because the collection device came loose and, in the end, not enough sweat was collected, you blame yourself for the fact that you’ve got to go back next week and again reopen that door to the question of his health, and that in doing so you must once again face the possibility that he has cystic fibrosis, and that your life will change again,” Brackett would say.

“Now let’s backtrack a little. The nurse, who presumably has been through many of these moments with many other patients, most likely came into the so-called sweat chamber to offer assistance, to help you in one way or another, or to remove the electrodes, and in seeing your hand over Gunner’s mouth she understood your predicament and sympathized with it and with the boy’s predicament, too — perhaps your own more so than the boy’s — and at that moment she did not judge you as harshly as you’d like to think, but was actually waiting for you to speak, and in hearing your anger, when you did speak, and within it your deep, almost Jobian fear, felt her own helplessness before all the illness she has faced, as you were saying. Bald cancer heads, forlorn eyes, tears, kids suffering at the deepest level. Kids cheery and chipper against the saddest odds. Kids with that disjointed misunderstanding of their own place and status, not only healthwise but otherwise, too. Kids bucking themselves up heroically. Clearly, just going by the fact that you continue to mention what her Mona Lisa face seemed to be saying, almost obsessively, it seems to me, it becomes evident that you were turning to her as a soothsayer, and maybe that might mean, and here I propose this only as a theory, a useful one — perhaps, perhaps not — that she, too, felt herself to be unwillingly put into a shamanic position; no, let’s correct that and say an oracular mode. Let’s say she felt that her face might — from your point of view — be seen as an oracle, and let’s say that that might explain the strange expressions she presented, if they really were strange.”