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"  Read more of the Best and Brightest 2007 ***** My father and I stand in the kitchen, staring at the toaster and waiting for the waffles. Since my son became ill, we have been taking turns with the meals, so he handles breakfast and I do lunch and then we both take care of dinner. We have a waffle iron but the prospect of making the batter was somehow too much this morning, and though I believe that waffles from scratch would carry some premium of affection, I know once-frozen waffles won&amp;#039;t matter to Carl, and I recognize my father&amp;#039;s exhausted posture from the latter days of my mother&amp;#039;s illness and my divorce, and I know better than to suggest that frozen waffles will somehow work against us today. Our stretched and inverted images look back at us from within the toaster chrome. A spring is broken inside the toaster, so nothing jumps up like it should. The waffles rise slow and stately. Carl used to say that the toast looked like it was rising from out of a grave, and made jokes about zombie strudel and vampire Pop-Tarts. He wasn&amp;#039;t an entirely normal kid, even before he got sick. My father takes the waffles out, butters them up, and puts them on a plate, then puts that on a gigantic silver tray of the sort a butler would carry around, complete with a handled silver dome. &amp;quot;Get the syrup,&amp;quot; he tells me, and starts upstairs.  He pauses outside the door and knocks. He always knocks; I never do. He says it&amp;#039;s important to treat Carl with respect, and I agree, but the thing presently in his bed could care less if we are polite toward it. It asks of us a specific set of behaviors, and everything else is superfluous. &amp;quot;Who is it?&amp;quot; comes the reply. The voice sounds like dozens of voices speaking at once. Sometimes I convince myself that I can hear Carl&amp;#039;s voice in there, sounding very small and incredibly far away.  &amp;quot;Who else?&amp;quot; my father says as he opens the door.  &amp;quot;I was hoping for satisfaction,&amp;quot; Carl says from the bed. He is restrained there by soft straps that we took from the hospital. They are called Poseys and bring to mind the image of someone tied down with flowers, but they are not so benign as that. We only tie him down at night, and only because if we didn&amp;#039;t, he would wander into high places, the tops of bookshelves or the roof or a tall tree in the yard, to shout out requests for justice and vengeance and satisfaction. Aside from the restraints it is his same old bed, done up in baseball sheets, and his same old room, covered with pictures of historical personages and dams and bridges and other engineering marvels, except that we have had to take down every picture of an airplane, because these made him cower and cry out in fear.  &amp;quot;Behold!&amp;quot; my father says after I&amp;#039;ve undone the straps and shifted Carl up into a position he can eat from. My father takes away the silver dome with a flourish. He can manage the flourish even when he is dispirited and tired. &amp;quot;Waffles!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We are not satisfied with waffles,&amp;quot; Carl says, his face drawn up in a look of haughty disapproval, but despite that look and his words, his mouth snaps at the fork when my father brings it close, and chews and swallows eagerly. Though his words and his expressions seem to have passed into the possession of another, Carl&amp;#039;s appetite remains his own, and has become more childish as the weeks have passed. The mouth spews complex obscenities and harsh judgments but is partial to waffles and cheesy mac and Vienna sausages. &amp;quot;Waffles are not justice,&amp;quot; he says with his mouth full.  &amp;quot;But justice isn&amp;#039;t delicious,&amp;quot; says my father, though he is always telling me not to talk to &amp;quot;It,&amp;quot; especially when we are trying to get Carl to eat. &amp;quot;And justice will never be the most important meal of the day.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;We are the dead,&amp;quot; Carl says. &amp;quot;Where is our blood sacrifice? What have you done for us today?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Every good boy loves waffles,&amp;quot; my father says, and shovels them in. I dart in with the napkin between bites, and catch the bits and half-chewed pieces that fall out of Carl&amp;#039;s mouth. It&amp;#039;s always easier to keep him clean during a meal than it is to clean him up afterwards. He fought like a cat the one time we tried to get him in the tub, and even a sponge bath makes him wriggly and abusive. I keep my eyes down and try to tune out the noise Carl is making, bits of song in a dozen voices, and noises that are not words. But just as we are finishing up I look too long on my son&amp;#039;s face, and his eyes, which have been rolling every which way in his head, following the action in some waking dreamscape, suddenly lock on to mine. It is always very hard to look away when this happens.  &amp;quot;Do you love your son?&amp;quot; the voices ask me.  My father hisses at me in an unnecessary warning. I know I am being baited, but can never be silent in the face of that question.  &amp;quot;You know I do,&amp;quot; I say.  &amp;quot;Well what a way to show it, to abandon him. Abandonment is practiced in degrees and you have gone beyond the pale, it&amp;#039;s true. He is practically one of us now.&amp;quot;  My father is shaking his head. &amp;quot;Breakfast is over,&amp;quot; he says. He puts the lid on his Jeevesy platter and walks toward the door. &amp;quot;Come on,&amp;quot; he adds, because I am still sitting on the bed.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll be right there,&amp;quot; I say.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not going to help,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not . . .&amp;quot; He doesn&amp;#039;t finish, just shakes his head again. He looks terribly sad, and Carl is smiling quite fiendishly.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll be down in a second,&amp;quot; I say.  &amp;quot;God damn it,&amp;quot; my father says, and shuts the door.  &amp;quot;God damn it all,&amp;quot; says Carl. &amp;quot;God damn you for your faithlessness and your short memory and your tiny selfish heart and your . . . ah!&amp;quot; I interrupt the tirade by slamming my finger in the drawer to his nightstand. I watch his face as I do it: It opens up and becomes a child&amp;#039;s face again, even before it becomes particularly his own face again. There is awe and delight written upon it, and then it falls into an expression of sadness and confusion and Carl starts to cry in the ordinary sobbing of a nine-year-old, without any keening choir overtones or screeching old-lady echoes. Every time this happens he acts the same way, sleepy and confused and sad. He cries and looks around his room and recognizes me.  &amp;quot;Dad,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;what time is it? What time is it?&amp;quot; Which is exactly what he said when he woke up from his operation.  I say, &amp;quot;Nine o&amp;#039;clock, pal. It&amp;#039;s going to be a great day.&amp;quot; And I draw him over into my lap and hold him against me while he cries. From the way my finger is already bruising I figure we have at least an hour.  One night he went to bed as Carl, a not entirely regular nine-year-old who read too much and hated sports and had a somewhat morbid imagination; the next morning he awoke as something else: a vengeful spirit, thousands of angry strangers, a changeling. I knocked on his door to wake him like always, and didn&amp;#039;t actually go into his room until he failed to show himself downstairs with only twenty minutes left before the school bus would come. In his room I found him still in bed, a lump under the covers. This usually meant that he had been up reading until only a few hours before. My father and I always checked to make sure his light stayed off, but he kept a dozen little penlights here and there around his room, and we could never manage to take them all away.  &amp;quot;Pal,&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;are you awake?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We are awake,&amp;quot; came the reply, and I didn&amp;#039;t really notice the difference in his voice because it was muffled by the sheets and blankets.  &amp;quot;Well, Your Highness, the bus will be here in twenty minutes. So let&amp;#039;s get moving.&amp;quot; Lately he had been reading obsessively about Elizabeth I, and my father had even caught him dressed up in one of his mother&amp;#039;s old nightgowns with a lamp shade turned upside down around his neck, issuing decrees to his own reflection. I thought he was just using the royal we.  &amp;quot;We do not ride in buses,&amp;quot; he said, and then sat up, flexing straight from the waist, still covered in his blanket. Even before the blanket fell away and he turned toward me so I could see his face, I was afraid for him. &amp;quot;Or in automobiles or airplanes, but we drift on the original wind that rose up.&amp;quot; He stared at me with alien eyes, looking at me, not like he didn&amp;#039;t know me, but like he knew me very well and didn&amp;#039;t like me at all.  &amp;quot;Carl,&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;knock it off. This isn&amp;#039;t funny.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s gone away,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t worry too much, we&amp;#039;ll keep him perfectly safe.&amp;quot;  I opened my mouth to yell at him, and stepped forward towards the bed to give him a shake, to tell him to snap out of it. Knock it the fuck off, I was about to say, though I hadn&amp;#039;t cursed at him or around him since before his mother left. But somehow I knew he wasn&amp;#039;t trying to be funny, and that whatever was happening, he wasn&amp;#039;t doing it on purpose. There was something very different from every other time he had pretended to be someone he was not, dead kings and queens, Old Yeller, Miss Piggy . . . he had a long history of transient impersonations. Someone in a book or television show caught his fancy and he decided to be them, but no matter how hard he pretended, he never before managed to seem so not like himself as he did now. I didn&amp;#039;t yell at him. I didn&amp;#039;t even stay in the room. I went and got my father instead.  Carl sticks around for a while. Eventually he calms, like he always does, and we have the same conversation about what was happening to him, how he was sick, how he was asleep a lot. And he says, like he always does, that he is sure he has been dreaming, though he can&amp;#039;t remember even the briefest scene of them, or recall if they are good dreams or bad dreams. When I had him on these visitations I always wanted to just sit with him and talk about nothing, or listen to him tell me fascinating trivia about some dead president or king, something that had passed for normal in the old days. He always got bored with me though, and when I wouldn&amp;#039;t let him go to school or go for a bike ride or to a friend&amp;#039;s house or read by himself, he would get angry, and usually I would calm him by reading to him from some dull biography until he was gone again. But today I take him for a walk.  &amp;quot;Why do I have to sit in this stupid chair?&amp;quot; he asks me as I strap him into his fancy wheelchair. It was sort of a gift from the hospital. Not that we didn&amp;#039;t pay for it, but one of the puppyish residents wrangled it for him, insisting that there wasn&amp;#039;t any reason that he should have to stay inside all the time when he went home. It was one of the fancy chairs that cerebral-palsy kids get. &amp;quot;I look like a retard,&amp;quot; Carl says.  &amp;quot;You might fall asleep,&amp;quot; I tell him as I tighten his seat belt. He never fell asleep outside, but he might chase somebody, shouting fire on Babylon, if he could get out of the chair too easily. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what happens,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;One minute you&amp;#039;re playing tennis and the next you&amp;#039;re sound asleep.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s narcolepsy,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Do I have narcolepsy?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Not exactly,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;But you sleep a lot. You&amp;#039;re getting better, though.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I hate tennis. When was I playing tennis?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a figure of speech,&amp;quot; I say, and then my father comes stomping into the room. He usually hides when Carl is back, and when Carl asks after him I say he is out for a drive or buying new teeth or on a date with some lady who is 105. &amp;quot;Look who&amp;#039;s back,&amp;quot; I say to him.  &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re a fool,&amp;quot; he says, so quietly and so close to my ear I am probably the only one who can hear him. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not right. It&amp;#039;s not what they told us to do.&amp;quot; I shrug and turn the chair around, as if presenting him with his grandson. It&amp;#039;s the only answer I can give him, to say, Look, I don&amp;#039;t care what they told us in the hospital. They don&amp;#039;t have a fucking clue what&amp;#039;s happening, but here&amp;#039;s Carl back, for a little while.  &amp;quot;Look at me, Grandpa,&amp;quot; Carl said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a retard.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;The retard is standing behind you,&amp;quot; my father says, then bends down and clutches him in a death hug.  &amp;quot;Ouch,&amp;quot; Carl says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m coming back.&amp;quot; My father doesn&amp;#039;t say anything else to either of us, just turns and goes outside behind the house, where he starts chopping wood. It&amp;#039;s still too early in the autumn for a fire, but this is what he does when he&amp;#039;s very upset. We already have enough to last through the whole winter.  &amp;quot;Where do you want to go?&amp;quot; I ask Carl as I maneuver the wheelchair down the jury-rigged ramp that goes from the side door off the kitchen to the driveway.  &amp;quot;Where haven&amp;#039;t I been lately?&amp;quot; he asks cheerily, and I&amp;#039;m struck by how quickly he seems to recover from his time away, and how ordinary he seems. It&amp;#039;s hard to believe that there&amp;#039;s anything wrong.  &amp;quot;Everywhere,&amp;quot; I tell him, which is true, and we make a plan to walk all the way down to the river, but we only get as far as the park before he says he wants to stop and asks if he can go on the slide. &amp;quot;Better not,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s high up. What if you fell asleep?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Then I&amp;#039;d just slide down,&amp;quot; he says, and I have a hard time arguing with that, or else I am just being careless, and hoping without any evidence or precedent that he might just stay how he is. I&amp;#039;ve just unstrapped him from the chair when a plane flies a bit lower than usual overhead and he cowers away from it, trying to throw himself out of his chair. &amp;quot;Get down!&amp;quot; he shouts. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s in the sky . . . it&amp;#039;s coming!&amp;quot; We don&amp;#039;t live anywhere near an airport, and I shout at the plane as it flies over, because there&amp;#039;s no reason it should be here, or that it should fly so low, except to torture us. The mothers and nannies look away from their toddlers to watch us, and the whole playground seems to go silent as the jet noise fades away. And then Carl straightens up and says, &amp;quot;What was that?&amp;quot; and the regular playground sounds are back again.  &amp;quot;Just a plane,&amp;quot; I say, and strap him back in, then push the chair over to a bench and sit down next to him. He doesn&amp;#039;t mention the slide again. Already there is something accusatory in his eyes, though his voice is still his own. A boy across the playground is bouncing a red ball, and Carl tells me that Mars years are almost twice as long as Earth years before he falls entirely silent. I don&amp;#039;t want to go home yet. I don&amp;#039;t want him trapped again, in his sickroom in our sickhouse, and I don&amp;#039;t want to be trapped there with him. The voices come back but there is nobody around my bench.  &amp;quot;Guilty,&amp;quot; he says, pointing at the moms and the nannies. &amp;quot;Guilty, guilty, guilty.&amp;quot; The boy with the ball kicks it our way and runs after. I kick it back but he runs up to us anyway, ignoring the ball when it shoots past him, and he stands before us, three or four years old, smiling, not saying a thing. &amp;quot;Not guilty,&amp;quot; says the Spirit. &amp;quot;Yet.&amp;quot; In the E.R. they diagnosed Carl with altered mental status, after subjecting him to a gaggle of tests that were all normal. Eventually they let me understand that they didn&amp;#039;t know what was going on, but that something was going on, unless he was faking it all, which they put forth as a distinct possibility. I thought you&amp;#039;d have to be a pretty committed malingerer to submit to a spinal tap. During that procedure Carl lay absolutely still, not even squeezing my hand, though they didn&amp;#039;t give him anything but a little local anesthetic around his spine. When, halfway done, the doctor asked him how he was doing, he said, &amp;quot;We are the dead, and what is a needle compared to a four-hundred-thousand-pound airplane? Or two? Poke away, physician. You can&amp;#039;t hurt us like that.&amp;quot; They called in the psychiatrist, and the nature of our visit seemed to change. A police officer took a permanent seat outside our room, and everyone except a kindly clinical assistant named Rebecca treated us a little differently. I think they were afraid of Carl, of the terribly unusual things he was saying to them, and about them, and of the electric sound of his voice. I was still too afraid for him to be afraid of him.  Where the E.R. doctors poked and prodded and irradiated in search of an answer, the psychiatrist just talked and talked. She wanted to know everything -- everything -- that had ever happened to us. Though it was only the late afternoon, we got a resident with a middle-of-the-night quality about her -- she seemed exhausted and tired and not happy to meet any of us this late in her day. She talked to all of us together, then each of us alone, first me, then my father, and finally Carl. When she talked to me, her little yellow pencil would flutter madly in her notebook, and she made sympathetic noises when I told her about the divorce and then about my mother&amp;#039;s death, and she kept saying, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve been through a lot lately,&amp;quot; then, &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s been through a lot lately.&amp;quot; I wasn&amp;#039;t sure if she meant my father or Carl or even me.  Finally she talked to Carl, kicking my father and I out and shutting the door, waving the policeman down with a practiced gesture when he stood up. We paced outside, trying not to intrude on other people&amp;#039;s emergencies, until Rebecca showed us to a little waiting room down the hall, but it was too far away from Carl, and after five minutes in there we both stood up without discussing it and walked back to stand quietly outside the room. The resident came out crying a few minutes later. &amp;quot;What happened?&amp;quot; I asked.  &amp;quot;I just need to talk to my attending,&amp;quot; she said, and walked off down the hall. In the exam room Carl was lying flat on his stretcher, looking at a picture of Elmo waving benevolently from the ceiling.  &amp;quot;What did you say to her?&amp;quot; I asked him. &amp;quot;What I say to everyone,&amp;quot; the voices answered, though he didn&amp;#039;t look at me. &amp;quot;You will weep too at my message, and harder, since I bring it specifically for you, I am here because your faithlessness called me to you, and I will stay until you remedy it with sincerity and sacrifice.&amp;quot; He had pointed at me while he said this, though he still didn&amp;#039;t turn his head, and for the next ten minutes he pointed at me wherever I went in the room, and when my father tried to fold Carl&amp;#039;s arm back over his chest he couldn&amp;#039;t move it. In ten more minutes the resident came back and said brightly, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re going to keep him!&amp;quot; As if that were the best news in the world.  It&amp;#039;s macaroni and cheese for lunch. I am making it from scratch, more for my own sake than Carl&amp;#039;s. He prefers it from a box, even in his natural state, but I like the process of grating the cheese and boiling the pasta, and there is something soothing about the circular motion of stirring and stirring. Outside my father is still chopping, but he&amp;#039;s slowed down considerably, and though I can&amp;#039;t see him from the window I know he&amp;#039;s spending most of the time sitting on an upended log, with the ax head on the ground between his legs, his hands folded on top of the handle and his chin on his hands, staring out at the woods.  Noontime is always a little pensive for us. I get lost in complicating some very simple dish and my father takes a nap or plays his guitar, and the high sun always has a calming effect on the Spirit. Carl is quiet in his room now, unrestrained and sitting on the edge of his bed. He&amp;#039;ll stay that way for hours if we let him. I am thinking of Carl&amp;#039;s mother, wondering, as always, where she is, and wondering if it would make any difference if she were around and could have been called to her son&amp;#039;s sickbed. He hardly remembered her, and never asked about her, which they said was part of his problem in the hospital. When I think about it I usually decide that she would just make things worse if she were still around, because she had always been a deeply strange woman, and this was just the sort of illness that would have appealed to her. It&amp;#039;s occurred to me more than once that she probably would have been jealous that Carl had gotten it instead of her.  &amp;quot;This dumb shit has got to stop,&amp;quot; my father says behind me. Still stirring the mac, I turn to look at him, half expecting him to have the ax with him to enforce his demand, but he&amp;#039;s empty-handed. I turn back.  &amp;quot;He stays a little longer every time,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;Have you noticed?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You talk like he&amp;#039;s not always there. Like it&amp;#039;s ever anybody but him.&amp;quot; I shrug.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the worst thing for him, to play along with it. You know it is.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know anything lately, except what works.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What you&amp;#039;re doing isn&amp;#039;t working,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not progress. It&amp;#039;s hurting him.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You want to help me bring this up?&amp;quot; When he doesn&amp;#039;t answer I turn around to ask him again but he&amp;#039;s gone. I listen for the sound of the ax again but the house stays entirely silent. I stand there a little while, stirring aggressively, wondering how he can look at Carl and think that he could contain such a reserve of pathology to pull off this unwitting impersonation, this utter ruination, this scourge. I don&amp;#039;t know what&amp;#039;s worse, or harder, to believe, that a little boy could be fucked up enough to harbor the sort of sadness and rage that the entity presents us with every day, or that thousands of souls could be fused by a firebomb into a restless collection of spirits that hungers for a justice it can define only in terms of punishment. I don&amp;#039;t know how many times I&amp;#039;ve made macaroni and cheese in the same pot, on the same burner, at the same time of day over the past few weeks, but I seem to have noticed for the first time that the side of the pot is immensely hot, and I lay my forearm against it for as long as I can stand, and then as long as I can stand again, before I take the bowl upstairs. Not knowing where my father is in the house, I never make a sound except inside my head, but I don&amp;#039;t even have to show Carl my blistered skin before he is falling back into himself.  &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s Talk about that day again,&amp;quot; Dr. Sandman said to Carl. I was watching them from behind a piece of one-way glass, along with the rest of the &amp;quot;team&amp;quot; -- two residents and a nurse practitioner and a social worker and a ridiculous medical student who looked only a couple months older than Carl. We had been there for a week and a half already, and I had gotten to know their secret spy room quite intimately. They asked a lot of questions, and they watched Carl sitting by himself, refusing to play with the variety of toys they put in front of him, watched him reduce another resident to tears, watched him sitting there doing nothing at all. They watched me talking to him, and listened as the thing I was coming to know as the voices listed my sins, personal and paternal and civic, all the ways I had disappointed these thousands of strangers. I kept saying, &amp;quot;Carl, Carl, come out from in there,&amp;quot; though I wasn&amp;#039;t supposed to say that, I wasn&amp;#039;t supposed to do anything that would make Carl feel uncomfortable, or like he had to do something. They were always telling me what not to do with him, and always in the friendliest way. You might not want to raise your voice at him. You might not want to tell him that he&amp;#039;s making you angry. You might not want to tell him he is making you sad.  &amp;quot;My birthday,&amp;quot; Carl said, smiling.  &amp;quot;Is that what it was?&amp;quot; Dr. Sandman asked. He was a large man, three inches taller than me, with at least fifty pounds on me, and not fat. He looked more suited to fetching back bond-breaking criminals than ferreting out the secret pain of children.  &amp;quot;Of course. We were born in the fire even as we died from it.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Yes, you&amp;#039;ve told me that. But what were you doing? What was happening in the house when you heard about the planes? It was a long time ago, but do you remember?&amp;quot; He had asked me the same question, in the same room, before I was brought to the other side of the glass. He asked if we let Carl watch the television footage of the planes crashing into the buildings and I said not we, but somebody did. His mother wanted him to see it. She thought that was important.  &amp;quot;Other people forget,&amp;quot; Carl said to Dr. Sandman. &amp;quot;We never will. We were doing . . . everything. You could never understand. You have always been just one, we are thousands.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Help me understand.&amp;quot; So his mother went away after the...disaster? he asked me, and I said, Yes, for the first time. And he sat there tapping his pencil against his teeth for something like a full minute.  &amp;quot;Help you? Help you? We are dead, you are alive. There is an arithmetic of obligation. Why don&amp;#039;t you help us?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m trying to help you. By talking with you.&amp;quot; Does he ever ask about his mother now? Dr. Sandman had asked me. Does he ever ask where she is? I said that we didn&amp;#039;t really talk about her much.  &amp;quot;Words are not sufficient. Words are not justice. You promised that everything would be different, that everything would be better, but everything is the same, or worse. Now we require satisfaction, and words do not satisfy us.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Talking is the best way to feel better,&amp;quot; Dr. Sandman said. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve got to trust me on that one, Carl.&amp;quot;  Then Carl wouldn&amp;#039;t say any more, but only glared furiously around the room, and every time Dr. Sandman spoke he only mocked him by raising his hand and moving it like a gibbering mouth. You may not want to tell him to trust you, I thought. You may not want to call him Carl.  Back in his room I sat with him, waiting for my father to come and take over. We split the days, and Carl was never alone, but it was harder than having him at home is, because we were always with him. He had a roommate, a bald six-year-old who seemed more peculiar than psychotic. A loose-lipped nurse told me that he pulled out all his hair and ate it. He always called my father and I sir, and otherwise did not speak much to us.  I fell asleep that afternoon in the chair next to Carl&amp;#039;s bed, because he was so quiet, still angry from Dr. Sandman&amp;#039;s questioning. It wasn&amp;#039;t for long. Carl woke me again talking, and before I was fully awake I realized there was something different about his voice. It still had that electric, many-voiced quality, but it was kind, or at least not accusatory, and not angry.  &amp;quot;Every promise is broken,&amp;quot; he was saying, &amp;quot;but we must take up the broken promises and bind them whole again with blood.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I like blood,&amp;quot; said a voice behind me, and I understood that Carl was talking to the weird bald kid. &amp;quot;It makes me happy when I drink it.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We are never happy,&amp;quot; Carl said. &amp;quot;For those who can get happiness from drinking blood, we say let them do it, but my blood bindings are not red. Blood is sacrifice. Everything else is irrelevant, or a worse mistake.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You are sad spirits,&amp;quot; said the boy. &amp;quot;I think you must be missing your brother, like me.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We miss everyone. We are a host but we are utterly alone. Yet it is the faithlessness of brothers that pains us, too.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Sad spirits! I knew so many, when I was younger. Do you speak the language of grief, then?&amp;quot; And the kid started to make barking, sobbing noises at Carl.  &amp;quot;We speak every language,&amp;quot; said Carl, and he started to bark and sob back at the bald kid. My father came through the door, thinking, I knew, that things could not possibly get any more fucked up than this.  &amp;quot;Time for me to go, pal,&amp;quot; I said, and stood up too quickly. I knocked my head hard against a heavy lamp suspended over Carl&amp;#039;s bed, and it hurt like hell. I shouted, &amp;quot;Fuck!&amp;quot; Carl&amp;#039;s eyes went wide, at the curse, I thought, and then his sobbing barks turned to ordinary sobbing, and for the first time in a week and a half he sounded like himself. In his own voice he asked me what time it was.  My father has a lifelong habit of never staying angry at me for long, even when he&amp;#039;s on the right side of the argument. We make spaghetti for dinner, because Carl is still back, despite the risk of a mess if he should go away again. &amp;quot;What did you do?&amp;quot; my father asked me, looking at my bruised face and hands for new marks, but my burn is covered by my sleeve.  &amp;quot;Nothing,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;Nothing at all. He&amp;#039;s just . . . back.&amp;quot; And then I say, though I know I shouldn&amp;#039;t, &amp;quot;Maybe it&amp;#039;s over. Maybe it&amp;#039;s just over.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s harder getting the medication into Carl when he&amp;#039;s back, but he&amp;#039;s supposed to take it at dinnertime. There are tears before he&amp;#039;ll take it, but that doesn&amp;#039;t make the slightest difference to my or my father&amp;#039;s good moods, and we rub off on him.  &amp;quot;It tastes like feet!&amp;quot; he says, but he&amp;#039;s smiling. We eat downstairs, for once, and my father sets the table as if for a holiday, with fancy plates and candles. Carl twirls his pasta expertly and pretends that he&amp;#039;s been in a coma for ten years.  &amp;quot;Do we have a lady president yet?&amp;quot; he asks.  &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; says my father. &amp;quot;A black lady.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;All right! Are people living on the moon?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;And Mars,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;Terraforming is underway.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Cool,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Cancer?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Defeated,&amp;quot; my father says.  &amp;quot;Finally,&amp;quot; Carl says. &amp;quot;But who&amp;#039;s at war?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Nobody,&amp;quot; I say.  &amp;quot;Peace everywhere,&amp;quot; my father says.  &amp;quot;And nobody is starving except the teenagers who kind of want to,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;A perfect world,&amp;quot; my father says, leaning back and laughing as he raises his wineglass to us, and I smile too, but uneasily, because I realize all of a sudden that we are all pretending, and maybe that&amp;#039;s not the best thing for us to be doing as a family. And as if on cue, Carl&amp;#039;s smile vanishes, and he sneers, and in the electric voice he shouts, &amp;quot;Liar!&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s just a spasm, but the rest of dinner is somber. We don&amp;#039;t play any more games, and limit our conversation. Carl tells us about the way a dynamo works.  I use up the last minutes of his presence with a quick bath; by the time he&amp;#039;s back in bed, he&amp;#039;s gone. &amp;quot;What did you do for us today?&amp;quot; he asks me as we strap him into his restraints for tonight. &amp;quot;Have you made the change I asked you for?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Nighty night,&amp;quot; my father says, and kisses Carl on the head. Carl turns his head and spits, not much volume but he makes a loud noise, &amp;quot;Ptui.&amp;quot; My father goes to the door and waits for me, glaring, waiting for me to hurt myself again. I lean down close to Carl. &amp;quot;You are breaking my heart,&amp;quot; I say.  &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; say the voices. &amp;quot;Into two thousand, seven hundred and forty-nine pieces.&amp;quot;  I wasn&amp;#039;t the only one to leave work. Dozens of us disappeared, going home to be with our families as the world ended. I came home early that day. Carl&amp;#039;s mother had already picked him up. His teacher had called in a panic, as if the preschools were going to be the next target.  I expected to find them doing something ordinary -- making cookies, playing a board game, reading a story in the yard. I don&amp;#039;t know why I expected his mother to manufacture a sense of peace around him, or to prepare one for me. As I said, she was a strange woman even before she became intolerably strange and selfishly crazy, before she went off on the journey that Carl and I were not allowed to accompany her on. This was the sort of thing she had been waiting for all her life, confirmation that the world outside was just as fucked up as the one inside her.  I walked in the door and saw them standing hand in hand in front of the television, watching the replay footage of the towers falling.  &amp;quot;Do you see?&amp;quot; she said to him. &amp;quot;This is just what I mean. It&amp;#039;s kairos, breaking through time to make history. Do you feel it?&amp;quot; she asked him, and she shivered all over.  &amp;quot;Dad!&amp;quot; Carl said when he saw me. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s people in there!&amp;quot;  He was three years old.  The house is old but not very big. My father will sleep through anything short of screams of bloody murder, and I have earplugs, but I&amp;#039;m afraid to put them in because I want to hear if Carl should happen to become himself in the middle of the night. I am thinking as I lie there, listening to him mutter, that that will never happen. I press on the burn on my wrist and regret the lie I told my father, that Carl had just gotten better, that whatever was in him had just tired of us and gone away, without anyone having paid some departure price. I wonder if things would be different if we had spent that day making cookies and playing games and pretending that the world had not just changed, or if it would be different if his mother had never left, if the chaos she radiated would have been better for him than the dull peace that my father and I have provided. I wonder if it would have helped to have asked him every day if he missed his mother, if he thought I drove her away, if he worried that she was dead.  The answer to those questions is always that I don&amp;#039;t know, and usually I drift off to sleep to the mumbling voices in an agony of not-knowing, not knowing what I did wrong or what I am currently doing wrong or what I am going to do wrong tomorrow to perpetuate my son&amp;#039;s suffering and my own. I never sleep very well.  But tonight I just lie there, in unrelieved paralysis, until very suddenly the not-knowing breaks apart into a very clear certainty, and it&amp;#039;s like I always just fell asleep too soon for certainty, and a certain comfort, to come settling on me in my bed. I get up and go back to Carl&amp;#039;s room, undo his restraints, and sit him up.  &amp;quot;What do you want?&amp;quot; I ask him. &amp;quot;You know it,&amp;quot; the voices say. &amp;quot;Every day we tell you. Justice. Satisfaction. Vengeance.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What do you want?&amp;quot; I ask again, and this time I poke him in the chest.  &amp;quot;You know!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Tell me!&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You said it would be different, but everything is the same. You were supposed to become your better self, and where is he now? Pay us our blood price. Bring him back!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Him? My son?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Fool! Your self!&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I just want my son back,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;Just give me back my son.&amp;quot; I push him again, harder, so he falls back against the headboard we&amp;#039;ve padded with blankets, and the voices laugh. &amp;quot;Prove to us that you deserve him. Prove to us that you will be different.&amp;quot; They laugh and laugh and laugh at me. I grab Carl by the front of his pajamas and haul him out of bed and drag him with me, still laughing, downstairs to the kitchen, and I hold him dangling next to me while I look around frantically at the butcher knives, the oven, the microwave, the vacuum cleaner, trying to think . . . what can I do that will be enough, a final proof, enough to get him back forever? I take him through the door and down the steps, around to the back of the house.  It&amp;#039;s a little rainy but warm. Low clouds reflect the streetlights back at us and the whole yard is bathed in a soft orange light. I push Carl down too roughly against the neat wall of wood my father has made with his agitated chopping, enough for two long winters. I kneel down beside him and take up my father&amp;#039;s ax. Carl has stopped laughing and smiling. His gaze is fixed on me.  &amp;quot;Coward,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Fool. Promise breaker.&amp;quot; But the voices are speaking very softly. I put my hand down against the top of the stack of wood, looking at the bruises and the burns, and it occurs to me that I have always kept one hand whole and untouched, and that the vast majority of my body is unbruised and untouched by Carl&amp;#039;s ordeal.  I switch the ax to my injured hand and cut the other one off. It&amp;#039;s not easy, not, like one might hope, a matter of a single stroke. I don&amp;#039;t know how many it is -- three or four, I think, but it feels like I am chopping away in an eternity of effort at something much more durable than flesh and bone. I only look at my wrist for the first stroke; afterwards I find my mark without looking at it. I am staring at Carl, at the thing that is in him, asking them both with every stroke, &amp;quot;Is it enough?&amp;quot; And I think I mean is it enough to prove to them I love my son, or that I deserve to have him back, that I mean it when I say I promise to take better care of him, that I promise to be a better father, to unroot whatever fault in me threw him into the company of these angry souls who died to make us all citizens of the world, and that I&amp;#039;ll be better to them, too, and never step out of the shadow of the day they died, if that&amp;#039;s what it means now to be good. &amp;quot;You fuckers!&amp;quot; I shout. &amp;quot;Is it enough?&amp;quot; Carl&amp;#039;s face changes: He looks proud, then curious, then he seems to be gorging on the blood and anger and pain in the air. His face gets ruddy and full and more and more pleased, and then all of a sudden it is entirely blank, and then he is wearing an opposite face. His grinning mouth contracts to an O of sorrow and distress, and he waves his arms around so it looks like he is falling through the air, like he is falling back into himself. He gives a start in his whole body and his face is changed so fundamentally, I feel sure there can&amp;#039;t be anything foreign left in him. I am listening so hard to him cry, trying to hear a trace of the other, that I forget to breathe and forget to cry myself and I would not be surprised if I forgot to bleed. Then I fall over next to him, my wrist jammed against my side, and I can&amp;#039;t get the words out to tell him what time it is, or to answer when my father comes out with a flashlight to curse me to hell, and ask me what I&amp;#039;ve done.  The author, Chris Adrian,is a 2007 Best and Brightest honoree. For moreabout Adrian and his work,turn to page 207. 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<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a3915/chris-adrian-promise-breaker-1207/>