Stuck in Neutral Read online

  Cindy knew it too; in that exact second, her hand stopped stroking the bloody black fur, her lips stopped moving. Cindy let death alone, sliding away from the dog’s body, carefully easing his limp head down onto the wet gravel.

  There was nothing more to do.

  Cindy and Mom got back into the van. We turned around and began to drive back to our house. Cindy sat smeared in blood, mud, her white Pearl Jam T-shirt soaked, stained, and ruined.

  Mom said, “I’m so sorry you had to see this, sweetie.”

  “No,” Cindy answered.

  “I mean—” Mom began.

  Cindy cut her off. “No, it’s all right,” her voice low, emotionless. “It was just like I thought it would be.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean—death, you know, being so near it. It was just like in that novel Barabbas when Lazarus tells Barabbas about death. It was just like that.”

  Mom said, “A lot of people believe in life after—”

  Cindy cut her off again. “No. It’s like Lazarus says. Death is nothing, just a big, empty nothing.”

  Cindy began to cry again. So did Mom. We rode along in silence.

  Nothingness, I thought, emptiness. My body breathed evenly, my heart beat slowly. I felt the leather straps on my legs and across my stomach and chest. I remember the sound of the rain, of the tires over the wet pavement, and the feel of the damp air in my throat and nose—emptiness, nothingness.

  The thing is my life has always been just in my head. If you think about it, I haven’t really got a body. Because of my condition, I get confused about things sometimes. Hearing things, or hearing about things, is different from actually experiencing them. I can imagine what it’s like to walk, talk, or sigh, but I don’t really know. I’ve seen thousands of people “die” on TV, so I thought I understood what death looked like. But watching that dog lose his life, watching death take his life away, made my stomach weak, my skin tingle, and my heart pound harder in my chest. It made me feel sick.

  Death. That was the closest I’ve ever been to it. I could feel what it was like, which was just like Cindy said—nothing, a big fat nothing. It looked to me like when you die, you just, I don’t know, your life just disappears. That day death stared at me through bloody eyes, and it terrified me.

  Of course I didn’t know then what my dad might be planning. I didn’t know then what I know now. Thinking about death again, I get that same sick feeling inside.

  4

  I guess I should explain about my father, about why I think he’s planning to kill me. It’s not as though he’s stated it directly. It’s more an intuition—intuition and a thing that happened last week when my dad stopped by the house.

  It was a nice day, sunny and warm. Mom had me out on the deck that runs along the back of our place. I remember that the breeze was kind of tickling my nose and ears. Dad, who hardly ever comes by, showed up, walking through the family room and coming outside to where Mom and I were. He and Mom hugged, and for a moment he didn’t say anything to me. Then he walked over and kissed the top of my head. I felt his lips lift a few strands of my hair and the rough palm of his big hand beneath my chin. Dad and Mom began to chat and then the phone rang inside.

  Mom disappeared through the sliding glass door, and Dad and I were alone. I remember exactly how many times Dad and I have been all alone together, just the two of us, since he left ten years ago: six times. Exactly six times. This one was the sixth.

  Dad began small talk to cover the silence. “How’re you doing, big boy?” he asked. “Everything going okay for you? Any hot news for me?” He laughed at his joke, not a big or happy or mean laugh, but a quiet, sad one. Then he leaned over in front of me and brought his face down close to mine. With his brown eyes only inches away from my eyes, it felt as though he were trying to stare through me, straight through my eyes and into my brain. “You’re not getting any of this, are you, Shawn?” he asked softly. In fourteen years I’ve heard him say my name aloud in my presence a total of sixteen times.

  Suddenly a big, black crow landed on the telephone line that runs down the alley directly behind the house. It cawed so loudly that it startled both Dad and me. The bird’s beady eyes stared at us, its fat black body so huge and heavy that the wire, which held its weight, sagged under it. It cawed loudly once again, then twice more.

  Dad looked at the crow and put his hand on my shoulder, squeezing a little too hard.

  “You wanna get at this boy?” Dad said, his voice sounding like a stick breaking. Dad didn’t yell, but his voice was cold and hateful.

  “You guys peck the eyes out of babies, don’t you?” Dad asked. I’d never heard him sound so mad. “You would love a shot at this boy’s eyes, wouldn’t you?”

  The crow cawed again, as though answering Dad’s questions. To my dad I’m sure that caw sounded like “Yeah, that’s right, what’re you gonna do about it?”

  “Assholes,” Dad muttered, although only one crow sat there staring at him. “Black rainbow, my ass,” Dad said, his words low but filled with that same hard anger.

  Mom had been drinking a glass of iced tea. The glass sat on a small table on the deck. Dad noticed it there, still half full of melting ice cubes and reddish-brown liquid. Suddenly Dad grabbed the glass and in one frantic, violent motion threw it hard at the crow. “Asshole,” Dad grunted again as ice cubes and tea soared out, arcing into the air, and the glass, as if shot from a cannon, flew toward the crow.

  The throw had such force that Dad nearly lost his balance. The glass hit the wire, exploding, no more than a foot or two from where the crow perched. Glass showered down onto the pavement below, and the crow quickly unfolded itself; with more of a screech than a caw, it disappeared over the neighbors’ rooftops.

  Dad watched the crow fly away, looked at the broken glass on the pavement, and breathed deeply and slowly, as if trying to quiet and steady himself.

  He turned to me and spoke, the rage in his tone gone, replaced by a sad, slow, tired voice. “What if I hadn’t been here?” I could hear his fear. “What if your mom ran in to grab that phone, planning to only be gone a minute or two, and that devil had taken your eyes while she was gone?” He paused again, breathing deeply. “You can’t protect yourself at all! How can your mother or I or anybody ever keep you safe? My God, Shawn, you’ll never be safe. How can we protect you? You’re helpless.” He turned away and spoke. “Hopeless.” Then he added, so softly I could barely hear, “Maybe you’d be better off if I ended your pain?”

  We sat there quietly, and I thought about what my dad had said. I had no idea what he meant, but it made me feel strange and a little nervous, so I tried to put it in the back of my mind.

  Mom finally came back onto the deck after she was through on the phone.

  “That was for Paul,” she said to Dad; then, looking at him, she asked, “Are you all right?”

  “No,” Dad said quietly, “not exactly. No, I’m not all right at all.”

  Mom and Dad kept talking. Mom never asked about her iced tea; Dad never mentioned the crow.

  But as I listened to them visiting, I knew that my dad does love me. It’s just my condition that freaks him out, that and my seizure thing.

  Did I mention that I have grand mal seizures, anywhere from half a dozen to about a dozen every day? Ever since I was born I’ve had them. When my dad said that thing about ending my pain, he must have meant my seizures. When I was little, they were painful and hard to live with. A big seizure just kind of grabs the inside of your skull and squeezes. It feels as if it’s twisting and turning your brain all up and down and inside out. Have you ever heard a washing machine suddenly flip into that bang-bang-bang sound when it gets out of balance, or a chain saw when the chain breaks and gets caught up in the gears, or an animal, like a cat, screeching in pain? Those are what seizures felt like when I was little. When I first started having them, I felt like a machine breaking or an animal with my guts spilling out. When I was young, my seizures were really
terrible.

  And it was back then, when I was little and the seizures were so bad, that my dad was still around. He used to see me having seizures, hold me while I spazzed out, twisted up, jerked all around, and screamed. I remember when I was about four years old, in the month or so before he left our family, I’d see his face after I’d come back from a seizure and he’d be holding me and his eyes would be so sad-looking. He couldn’t stand to see me go through pain. He couldn’t bear it. He still can’t. But I think it’s getting worse. It’s like he’s going to explode just like that glass did. This incident last week with the crow is the first time I’ve ever seen Dad act like that. It’s so out of character for him, for how I see him and for how the world sees him.

  In ways Dad is nothing like he appears to be on all those TV talk shows, and in other ways he’s exactly like he seems on them, sincere and smart and compassionate. The truth is that my dad is a complete jerk and a great guy: He is ugly and handsome, charming and cruel, funny and angry. My dad is your basic, slightly smarter than most, human being. He comes fully equipped with a lot of the best and worst stuff available on most models.

  My dad is Sydney E. McDaniel. You’ve probably heard of him, and if you haven’t, you’ve been neglecting your basic daily requirement of TV yap-crap. You know, talk shows. Sydney E. McDaniel: Does Pulitzer Prize ring a bell? Yeah, that Sydney E. McDaniel—the one who wrote the poem about him and me that won him a Pulitzer.

  5

  Lindy felt the early tugs,

  Her womb becoming tidal and loud,

  the fetus, turning, crying out—

  a tiny beast, a braying sigh.

  He calls to her. He calls to her …

  I dream hard the dream of knowing him,

  this baby boy coming to us....

  A single bird, small, leaps inside my chest,

  turning to pure spirit, to pure joy as we watch, crying.

  Shawn, he becomes Shawn now,

  and that bird inside me wings free too,

  wings, wings its way inside me.

  I love the beginning of Dad’s poem. What’s not to love? Who wouldn’t enjoy being a witness at his own birth? I love the sound of his words. And I love, most of all, how happy and excited my dad was, how grateful and full of hope at the moment when I arrived. Of course, that’s just the start of the poem. Everything soon changed.

  Basically, the poem tells about how Dad was never able to deal with my condition; with the “pain” he thinks I experience during my seizures. That’s probably one of the reasons he thinks it’s all right, even necessary, to kill me. Another is that he thinks I’m a veg.

  God, I’ve always loved that “veg” thing. You’ve all said it; you know you have. So-and-So is “just a vegetable.” The first couple times I heard people saying that, I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about. Humans turning into vegetables? It sounded like a horror movie. I wondered, Exactly what kind of vegetables were the people becoming? If it was a redheaded guy, did he turn into a carrot? If it was a cranky Republican lady, did she become a turnip? A gay person into a pink grapefruit? And what kind of people became avocados? Zucchini? Summer squash?

  In my father’s eyes if I’m a vegetable, a human vegetable, I’ll never be able to “enjoy life” or “be productive.” I’ll never be able to win a Pulitzer Prize, go on talk shows, meet the pope, or have lunch at the White House. I’ll never be in People magazine, with a three-page story about my life. I’ll never attend the Academy Awards, or have dinner with Clint Eastwood, or be hired to write and narrate a documentary on the tragic plight of orphaned children in Romania. I’ll never be able to do any of the stuff that Sydney E. McDaniel has gotten to do. So what’s the point of my being here if I can’t be like him?

  This makes it sound like the only reasons my dad would kill me are selfish ones. Honestly, I don’t believe that. Dad wants to kill me to save me from suffering. He’s afraid I’m trapped and in pain. He wants to kill me because he loves me.

  He’s enjoyed the success he’s had, but it hasn’t helped him forget that he’s my dad and, therefore, responsible for me. “Shawn,” the story-poem, has done just the opposite of helping him “get over” me. Think about it: Dad’s fame has made him a professional victim of our relationship; his “pain” over me is the foundation of his career.

  If you could hear my dad read the poem aloud, like I have, you’d understand.

  I attended the premier reading two years ago at the Kendell mansion. The building used to be a kind of power station back in the old days when Seattle had electric trolley cars. The Kendells bought the place from the city years ago, pumped a couple hundred grand into it, and voilà! They had a mansion with 60-foot ceilings and 14,800 square feet of space. I overheard Mom telling Cindy and Paul that Mary Kendell had long been a supporter of the Seattle arts scene, and that as a friend of Dad’s publisher, she offered her home for Dad’s reading.

  I’m sure my mom didn’t want to go, but I guess she felt she had to. Dad had already read the poem to her in our kitchen earlier in the week. I had been in my bedroom, two rooms away, and able to hear only parts of it and then the sounds of them crying afterward. Maybe Mom thought she owed it to Dad to be there at that first public reading. She dressed up that night in a classy, pretty black dress and pearls. She looked beautiful. Unfortunately, she dressed me in dark slacks, running shoes (I can’t even walk), a white shirt, a blue blazer and a god-awful, ridiculous red bow tie. Geez! I looked like Bing-Bong the Idiot Puppet-Boy.

  When the reading started, I got parked in the kitchen in my wheelchair, out of eyeshot of an audience of two hundred of Seattle’s artsy-fartsiest folks.

  When Dad finished reading, an explosion of applause filled the room. All through the poem I’d heard people crying and blowing their noses, but the volume of applause at the end felt amazingly loud. I jerked in my chair (brain-stem reflex) so sharply that the young waiter who’d been serving hors d’oeuvres and wine before the reading flinched in his chair next to mine. He glanced at me, and my eyes focused on his face. He was handsome and kind-looking, with dark skin and black eyes. I could tell he knew that I was the kid in the poem and that he felt sorry for me.

  I remember wishing at that time that I could be him, anonymous and quiet, in charge of my own life. But no sooner had the applause begun to quiet down than here came my mom, her eyes and nose all red. She walked to the back of my wheelchair and rolled me into the living room. Everyone applauded again. Then all these strangers began to come up to me and pat my shoulders and head and back. They all smiled at me, Bing-Bong in my drool-encrusted red bow tie.

  The whole scene felt terrible. Being celebrated for something you are not, being completely misunderstood by people who think they’re being understanding, is awful. The people who approached me that evening may have meant well, but they were annoying. The only part of it I liked was the one lady with huge breasts, wearing a low-cut red dress. She leaned over me, her boobs almost falling out, her hands touching my face and her voice cooing. I wanted her to stay right there—my eyes even cooperated for a change—but soon she stood up and went on her way. Most of the rest of the strangers surrounded me and talked about me as though I weren’t there, and for them I actually wasn’t. The me they talked about, the Shawn in the poem, is not the real me, not even the me my family knows. The kid in the poem is just some cute little redheaded retard named Shawn from my dad’s imagination. The Shawn in the poem, my father’s version of me, is a paper-thin, imaginary Shawn, a two-dimensional version of Dad’s worst fears. It’s one thing not to be known for who I actually am, but to be known for who I’ve never been by a roomful of strangers was the worst.

  For all my irritation at the “world premier,” I liked, and still like, my dad’s poem. I think it is an honest report of what happened to us. I hate to admit it, but I actually like my dad’s descriptions of me as a little boy; I sound pretty cute in a gimped-out, C.P. way. I also like seeing my mom and dad together again, even though it’
s just words in the air from a time long ago. I like a lot of other things about the poem, too. If I’m being honest, and even though I don’t like people staring at me, I do like everybody saying my name. I guess I have to admit it, I kind of enjoy being famous.

  When the Pulitzer came, I got a kick out of seeing my picture from the book’s cover on TV all the time. My dad appeared on twenty-three TV talk shows, news reports, and other programs in the eighteen months following the announcement of the award. It’s pretty weird being the country’s most famous retard when, with my memory, I bet I’m actually one of the smartest kids anywhere.

  My dad, after writing “Shawn,” became pretty famous. But the fact is that the poem just made him a professional—what? Victim? Whiner? Abandoning deadbeat dad? Dad left our family because he couldn’t stand watching my seizures. Shows what he knows! Did I mention that I love my seizures? That they’re doorways to a place at least as real and far better than “reality”? Did I mention that I love my seizures? So much for the Pulitzer Prize—just because you win it doesn’t mean you know everything.

  6

  As days become a week

  and the week draws into a fortnight,

  Lindy’s mother is holding Shawn

  when she sees a movement in his eyes....

  I take him into my arms,

  stare into his face.

  In his eyes there is a quivering,

  a strange crackling.

  I hold him close....

  Everything that was ever going to be,

  everything that was going to become,

  begins a slow unraveling.

  If you saw me having a seizure, you’d swear I was in pain. Maybe part of me is. But the truth is that as much as I love my mom and sister, my brother and father, I’d trade their lives in a heartbeat if it meant keeping my seizures. That sounds terrible, but I can’t imagine my life without the wonders of having seizures.