Windeye by Evenson Brian

Author:Evenson, Brian [Evenson, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781566893077
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2012-05-18T05:00:00+00:00

Baby or Doll

1

ONLY A FEW MONTHS LATER, SERVIN FOUND THAT HE COULD NO longer keep all the details straight. There were things he remembered: a blinding flash, a fall, the brief glimpses of a baby on the way down to the marble floor, a glimpse of a tooth, perhaps his own, on the floor, broken and bloody. And then, from above him, the sound of voices: two men conversing. What had they said? He either hadn’t heard them clearly or couldn’t recall.

And even some of the other details became less clear as time went on. Was he really certain the voices had come at the very end, after the blinding flash, the fall? And how could there have possibly been a baby? Mightn’t it have been, instead, a doll?

His therapist was little help. There were times, talking to her over the telephone, when he was certain that she had placed the receiver down and wandered out of the room. But he could not bring himself to address her directly about this, could only pose a question to her and then listen to her silence. But was it the silence of her not being there or only the silence of her not speaking, giving him a chance to answer the question for himself? Which, indeed, he always did, as if he were having a conversation within his head. He couldn’t help it.

A baby? he wondered. A doll? And even though there was so much else that remained uncertain, so much that remained unclear in his mind, all his anxiety quickly found itself adhering to this issue: was it a baby or was it a doll? Or had there even been anything at all? You may never know, claimed the therapist, in one of her rare, unhelpful moments of utterance. This, of course, he knew was true, but he knew it well before she stated it. Was this what he was really paying her for, to spend most of an hour saying nothing and then offer a brief statement that didn’t seem even to have the benefit of being gnomic or mysterious or deep, a statement that was merely obvious? I should just hang up the telephone, he thought, and figure things out on my own. And indeed he almost did, almost hung up, but then, well, he just didn’t.

It was not that session and not the next, but maybe the next after that when the therapist—if that was in fact what she was and not simply someone he had once mistakenly dialed and who continued, for reasons entirely her own, to humor him—asked What, for you, is the difference between a baby and a doll?

It was a statement that at first infuriated him. Everybody knows, he thought, disgusted, what the difference is.

But later, after the session ended and he hung up the telephone, he began to ask himself: What was the difference? And it was then that he realized he knew there was a difference, but that he wasn’t sure how to locate it.

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