The nice doctor told me that writing my story out would help. I’m not supposed to be allowed to go on the internet, but he let me because I’ve been good lately. I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been here. Time has no meaning for me, I try and remember the important dates but they just get harder and harder to pin down.
I marked the passing of the hours with the pills they gave me. The green pill in the morning contained lightning and giggles. The white pill after lunch was full of pink clouds and flashing colours. The one at night tugged on my eyelids like a pair of leaden weights. But there was a short time in the afternoon when the fog thins. The memories bubbled up then, breaking the surface of my conscious mind like a bloated corpse floating to the surface of a still pool of water. When they did, I would wonder about the stranger’s voice that shrieked with my mouth. I welcomed the heavy footfalls of the large man in the white clothes with his needles full of forgetfulness.
Sometimes, I hit the sweet spot, between the clouds and the screams, between the false promises of heaven and the realities of the hell I live in. That’s when the doctor asked me to write. And to look for people that would believe me. People like you. This is my story.
There were other times though. Money was tight. Robert had to spend more and more time at work. I had to take care of baby Toby by myself. The moments of perfection grew fewer. It seemed that Facebook held nothing but the mocking updates of other young mothers. The flagellant sisterhood. You weren’t a good mother if you weren’t suffering enough. They bore their battle scars with such pride. Sore breasts. Sleepless nights. Back aches. Chirping at each other across cyberspace with as much meaning as a morning chorus of birds.
But heaven forbid that you didn’t compete, because if you didn’t, then you were BAD MOTHER. Like weaning your child too early. Or not playing him music at night. Or not taking walks with him in a pram. BAD MOTHER. Instead of nursing a strapping young lad, you’d be taking away his potential, one laziness at a time. You’d be left with a bonsai of a human being, a little shrunken caricature of what he could be.
I’d continued to work from home, but Toby’s crying puncturing my little cocoon of concentration like an air raid siren. Sometimes I couldn’t tune it out. He would just sit in his crib, his face red with exertion, tears streaming down his face. I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t work. There were times when I joined Toby and bawled my eyes out next to his crib. It didn’t help.
Robert thought technology could help. After all, he just needed to be kept busy while I worked. I needed the concentration. There were apps for babies after all. Not just any app, of course. It had to be good. Top rated. Educational. Robert did a search on iTunes. He found an app quickly enough, near the top of the list. Such a deceptively simple app. It was suppose to help jump start babies’ learning to speak. Fantastic. 4.5 out of 5 stars. It had to be good. It cost a bit but we could spare a few dollars surely. After all, it was for our son’s future. All the reviews seemed to be gushing.
I set the iPad up where Toby could see it. I’d been using it to play him some lullabies while I worked. He could sit up well enough with the support of some cushions. I fired up the app. Pale pastel colours and amorphous blobs filled the screen. A tiny voice began to hum out some tuneless lullaby in an accent that I couldn’t place. Maybe it wasn’t made for America? Strange. In any case, Toby was entranced with the display. His green eyes grew wide and he grinned with his emerging baby teeth. And just like that there was peace in my house. I got up and headed back to my desk for work, leaving baby Toby hunched around the iPad.
I was woken up by the dull hiss of white noise. I raised my head, a smear of drool on my cheek and on my forearm. I must have been more tired than I’d care to admit. My screen was a dull black mirror and the light from the window had gone a rich orange. I must have been more tired than I thought. Except it wasn’t white noise. There was a strange cadence to the noise. It wasn’t just a hiss of noise, no, the closer I got, the more distinct the sounds. The tuneless lullaby was still there, but it must have stalled or crashed or something. There was just a meaningless stream of syllables coming out, all hard glottal stops and ululating whines. It could have been just my imagination, but even then, I thought I could see Toby’s contented gurgling synchronizing with those strange noises. I shook my head and shut the iPad off.
Except it wasn’t really nonsense. It didn’t sound like any language I’d heard before. The rhythms and the intonations were too coarse, too alien. Words don’t just have meanings and sound. They have shape and texture. Think of the word ‘plump’. Doesn’t it just bounce off your tongue? What about that succulent purse of your lips in the middle of the word when you go ‘um’. The words coming from the app were different. They were sharp. Cold. Barbed. I could feel them catching on my mind, digging into my flesh like I was squeezing a fistful of fish hooks. My discomfort was the exact opposite of Toby’s reaction. It was the only time of the day he’d light up. He seemed drained and hollow the rest of the time.
I pondered this when I was giving Toby his last feed for the night. Robert was already snoring next door. He hadn’t said two words sideways to me from the time he finished his dinner until the time he went to sleep. I sighed as I stroked Toby’s head and held him in the crook of my other arm. There was a closeness in feeding a baby that fathers will never understand. After all, fathers didn’t carry their children around for nine months. Damn near shared a circulatory system. I was lost in the feeling of the gentle suck of Toby’s mouth. A sharp pain in my breast snapped me out of my fugue. I winced and pulled Toby away from me. I gasped at the swirl of pinkish foam on my body. Blood. I rushed to the toilet and dabbed at the damage with a wadded piece of tissue. Had he bitten me? I examined myself. I didn’t find tooth marks. I kneaded my flesh and watched as pinpricks of blood oozed out of a dozen or more tiny puncture wounds, circumnavigating my nipple. Not tooth marks at all. More like a needle? Unbidden, the nightmarish image of a leech’s mouth came to my mind, no teeth at all, but rows upon rows of quivering needles. I shook as I imagined that I hadn’t been carrying my son at all, but some kind of monstrous worm, swaddled in a blanket, sucking the life from me.
Out in the room, I picked up the sounds of that foreign, unnatural lullaby and its idiot words. I was certain that I hadn’t left the iPad on. I winced as I pulled my t-shirt back down. I headed back to the study. The iPad was off, its screen dull and lifeless. The words were coming out of my boy’s mouth. Alien, twisting syllables. I wish I could reproduce them here, but there are no squares on our keyboards that can do any justice to what I heard. Toby kept his eyes trained on me as he spat out wave after wave of babble. I rushed over to pick him up. The gibberish turned to little hiccupping coughs as I bounced him gently in my arms. I recognized the warning signs. I hadn’t burped him. I didn’t have time to turn away before he gave me a quizzical look and vomited on me.
But it wasn’t off-white milky baby puke covering my shirt. Not the sour smell of regurgitated milk. The metallic tang of blood rasped at my sinuses like a band saw. The entire front of my shirt was soaked with blood. My boy had thrown up a bellyful of blood onto me. I did the only thing I could. I shrieked until my lungs felt fit to explode.
Robert burst into the room and grabbed me by the shoulders.
"What’s wrong?" he asked, breathing hard and blinking the sleep from his eyes.
"Toby… he spoke. He said something. It wasn’t natural. Then he… there was blood. So much blood." I was blabbering.
"Where’s the blood?" Robert asked.
I paused, looking back down at the yellowish mess on my shirt. I could see irritation in the quiver in the corner of Robert’s eye, the slight reddening of his cheeks.
“It’s the teething,” I stammered out. “There was a little blood. It was just shock.” The blood was gone, off my t-shirt.
Robert’s expression softened. “Did I miss his first word? What was it?”
"Just baby gurgles. The app that you downloaded, but it doesn’t seem to be working right…"
Robert picked up the iPad and stabbed at the screen with his long fingers. The room filled with the lilting sounds of that lullaby, the strange accented woman starting up on cue. “Seems alright to me. Look, Toby really digs it.” Our child had propped himself back up, swaying gently to the tune. “Why don’t you go and wash up. I’ll clean up the mess here.”
I tried swapping him to the bottle. I hadn’t meant to wean him so early. Bad mother, a small voice croaked at the back of my head, rattling off the list of articles I had read about the benefits of breastfeeding up to the first year. It didn’t help, Toby wouldn’t take to the rubber teat. I shuddered when I raised him back up to my breast, thinking of the concentric circle of wounds from that night, thinking that it wasn’t my son that was spouting some new and alien tongue, but some giant squirming thing swathed in blankets.
Robert was no help. If anything, he grew more and more distant. Physical contact became a distant memory. He was barely at home, always said he was busy at work. When he was at home, he took pains to avoid me, stealing away after dinner to hunch over his laptop, furtively swapping windows when he heard me approaching. I even missed looking at his sleeping face at night, consigned to watching his broad back heave with deep breaths. Some nights I wanted so much just to drag him over to Toby’s room and yell at his face that we were losing our son. I wanted to, but I didn’t.
So I dragged out the space between Toby’s feeds, reluctant to be close to him. Was it still my son looking back at me from those pale green eyes? There was a wry curiosity there that I hadn’t seen before. A focus that didn’t have any place on a baby’s face. And when he opened his mouth! Sometimes to scream, to complain. Other times to unleash a stream of gibberish. I started to be able to make out the individual words, but still they made no sense. But each new word dredged up a cold fear in me. The only thing way to get him to stay still or to shut up was to bring out the iPad and lay it in front of him. Tears or babbling would cease as soon as the strange lullaby started up.
I struggled to make sense of the thing that was effecting this change in my son. There was no fixed point at which it segued from lilting, broken English to that foreign tongue. The more I tried to understand it, the further it seemed from comprehension. There was cadence, a rhythm underpinning the cadence, verse and stanza but I couldn’t find a pattern there. What if (and I felt my stomach lurch at the thought) it wasn’t a song at all, but a message, or a lesson? Something that kept evolving the more my son learnt? The more he changed?
Sometimes I listened to the blabbering infant in the room next door and wondered how much time I had left before it was too late. I could no longer bear to be in the same room as him without Robert around or if I had to feed him. The soft sounds of the iPad and Toby leaked out of the room. Point and counterpoint. Stab and riposte. Were they talking? Communicating? Robert wouldn’t help. He couldn’t see what was going on. There was something wrong. I had to fix it. I had to fix our son.
The iPad went silent when I stepped into the room. Toby stared up from his crib. Silent. Defiant. There was no love left in those eyes. Was there anything remotely human left there? I looked over at the hated little rectangle. First Toby. And then the iPad. The iPad started up again, on its own. Music blared out. The words were different this time. Still in English. I could understand the woman with the unidentifiable accent. Do not harm the vessel, it said, over and over again. The vessel? The iPad. No. Toby. If he was a vessel, what was he being filled up with?
I like it here. It’s mostly quiet, just the way I like it. I get to be alone most of the time. It’s hard to tell how long I’ve been here. I tried counting the days, but sometimes they give me two pills instead of one and it goes a little fluffy.
It’s been a while since Robert came to visit. We weren’t allowed to be in the same room at the time. There was a window between us, thicker than any that we had in our house. So thick that we spoke through a pair of plastic telephone handsets. We exchanged pleasantries, but my attention was drawn to the lady waiting at the back of the room behind the glass. I half recognized her from one of Robert’s office parties. Maybe Christmas. A little too touchy feely in her slutty little dress, I had to yank Robert away that night. We had an argument about it later. There she was, sulking as though she’d been forced to suck on a plateful of lemons. I recognized the blonde hair on the infant that she was carrying though. Robert’s hair. She was carrying our baby.
Baby Toby turned to look at me. He’d grown a little since I’d been in here. How long had it actually been? He gave me a grin with his little baby teeth. His eyes were wrong. He had his father’s hair, his father’s face. But he’d always had my eyes. Green eyes. They were supposed to be green, not brown. They’d done something to him. Robert and that woman. And his mouth. Still moving, but I recognized each tiny motion. He was still making those sounds. I had failed. It had to be Robert. He was the one that downloaded the app in the first place. I smashed the handset against the glass, heedless of the little shards of hard plastic that were driven into my palm. Robert’s plaintive pleas died along with the handset.
I pounded my fists against the glass window, screaming at Robert, screaming at the woman with my child. Most of all, I screamed at the wild haired ghost of a woman that pounded her fists back at me. I told them that they had stolen the eyes from my boy. I called him a cheating bastard. I called the woman with my baby a slut and a whore. The glass bounced my screams back at me. The three on the other side of the glass gaped. They were speaking silently, I could almost hear the mocking strains of the lullaby again, the stream of unnatural words. Robert held the door open. The woman hitched Toby up to her shoulder and left. The last thing I saw, before the orderlies dragged me away, was Toby. Toby peering over the woman’s shoulder, his lips mocking me with their silent chanting.
More than anything, I want to fix my baby once and for all. I can’t believe I failed so miserably the first time around. I’m haunted by the last time I saw him through the glass. I won’t let it win. I have to be strong for my boy. I could be a perfect mother. If only I tried harder.
—
Credits to: straydog1980
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