Relativity, page 28
She lifted the baby from the bouncer and rested him on her hip. Ethan gurgled happily in her arms. “This’ll be hard for me too,” Claire said to Mark. “I’ve never been away from him for more than a few hours.”
“Stay home then.” His voice was at once jokey and serious.
All week, he’d been like that: saying one thing, meaning another; making sarcastic remarks with underlying intent. Perhaps Mark was right, maybe the timing was off; there’d be other auditions. But her bag was packed, her flight booked and she knew her choreography of the variation she’d dance inside out. Claire brushed the thought aside. Ethan and Mark would survive; so would she. In no time at all, she’d be back home.
She placed the baby back in the bouncer, distracting him with a rattle. The clothes he was wearing were already too small; the snap buttons were coming apart. Claire thought to herself how fast he’d grown. Ethan didn’t fit in any of the little suits he’d worn fresh out of the hospital.
Mark searched frantically through papers on his desk. He exhaled through his nose. “Great, I can’t find the bloody outline again. I can’t believe it; my filing system is all out of order. I don’t have time for this.”
Claire stood behind Mark’s chair and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine,” she said, resting her chin on his shoulder. “And you’ve been working so hard lately. You probably need a break.”
“Looking after the baby isn’t a break.”
Claire didn’t respond. She took out a handwritten list. “Okay, I’m pretty sure there’s more than enough milk in the freezer. You can give him some baby cereal once a day, but make sure it’s not too thick. He’s due for his nap in about half an hour. There’s clean laundry in the dryer and I bought new diapers and wipes yesterday. I’ll call before I take off and when I land.”
He gave her a perfunctory nod—she could tell he was tuning out her voice—and continued rummaging through his folders.
A horn outside beeped.
“That’s the taxi,” Claire said.
“Already? You really can’t reschedule? It’s almost Christmas; why are they even holding auditions this week?”
“Please don’t make this more difficult than it is already.” Claire picked the baby up again and held him close. Ethan nuzzled into her chest and gripped the sleeve of her shirt. “See you soon, pumpkin. Be good for Daddy.”
She handed Ethan over to Mark. Immediately, the baby started to scream.
“I know how you feel, buddy. I don’t want her to go either.”
“Love you,” she said, quickly giving them both a kiss. Then she grabbed her bag and exchanged a look with Mark. Worry tightened her chest. Ethan’s cries turned his face bright pink; his cheeks were covered in a slick of tears. The baby reached for his mother in desperation while Mark tried to hold him back. Claire feigned a reassuring smile and blew them another kiss. The taxi’s horn honked again.
She closed the front door. As Claire walked down the atrium stairs, she still heard Ethan screaming from the other side of the building. Hopefully, the neighbors weren’t too annoyed. Nobody had knocked on their door and complained yet.
Humidity leaped from the atmosphere; sweat crystallized on her skin. Mark hadn’t even wished her luck. She exhaled, deciding to forget about their silly fight, suppress her separation anxiety, and just focus on this audition. Clear her mind.
Claire crossed the street to where the taxi waited. What she didn’t realize at the time—walking under the scalding sun, wading through the tropical air—was that Mark’s pleas for her to stay and Ethan’s desperate cries would haunt her for years to come. That each heated word of their argument would become an obsession. That she’d always wonder if what happened next could have been prevented.
Ω
MARK STARED at the baby. It continued to holler at the top of its lungs. How could somebody so small produce so much noise? For someone who never stopped crying, Ethan sure had a lot of stamina. What did it want? Babies were such irrational little things. Mark couldn’t wait for his son to grow up, so he could finally reason with him. Communicate.
After Claire walked out the door, Ethan didn’t stop screaming for two hours. Mark tried to feed him, changed his diaper twice, and then attempted to rock him to sleep awkwardly. By the time it was noon and the baby still wouldn’t settle, Mark was already falling apart. He knew Ethan wanted his mother; the baby didn’t want him. These were the wrong arms, this was the wrong smell, that was the wrong voice. Holding Ethan as he wailed for Claire—kicking and struggling to escape his father’s disappointing embrace—felt like trying to save someone from suffocating inside an airless cell.
“Daddy has to work,” he said, placing the baby back in the bouncer.
At last, Ethan had run out of steam, exhausted from his screaming session. He bobbed in the bouncer, calmly sucking on his fist. Saliva collected between his fingers and the baby went cross-eyed as he tried to examine his wet hand. Ethan’s eyes were dark violet when he was born, but recently they’d changed color. Now they were Claire’s eyes: iridescent blue with fractures of yellow.
Mark skimmed over his research but his mind was elsewhere. Claire had deserted him; she needed to stop acting like she was the center of the universe. Since Ethan was born she’d become deranged, getting cross with Mark for the smallest things and picking fights several times a day. He couldn’t understand her frustration. She wasn’t writing a thesis; she didn’t have a supervisor telling her she wasn’t working hard enough or the weight of a deadline hanging over her head.
He’d struggled in the last few months, and Mark couldn’t entirely blame it on the baby or Claire. Nothing was clear in his mind—as though it were made out of antimatter itself. His antibrain only had antithoughts. Days were spent at the desk idly pretending to work. Instead of writing, he hesitated, distracting himself with computer games and porn.
All Mark wanted was a single innovative thought, a real idea, but that was like finding a subatomic needle in a quantum haystack. The more he thought about how unattainable that was, the more it clogged his brain—his pursuit of originality was an impossible Möbius strip.
He reread the paragraph he’d written and rewritten this morning. Lucky he’d completed a whole paragraph at all. The blinking cursor taunted him—demanded another word to follow the last—like it knew Mark had nothing to say. He checked his emails, checked the news, and checked to see that all of his software was up to date. Then, as always, he came back to the white space of the document. The cursor continued to blink.
Afternoon sun burst through the window and onto his laptop; the glare made it impossible to read the screen. Mark stood up to close the blinds. Squinting, he stared briefly at the sun—it seemed to flicker, like solar flares were erupting on its surface—before it irritated his eyes. Mark blinked and looked away. Bright light had left a gray blotch floating across his field of vision. Like an optical illusion, sunlight in reverse: a negative afterimage.
“Negative afterimage,” he whispered to himself. Mark pictured a solar flare. How the sun ejected energy: radiation streaming out, particles accelerating near the speed of light. Particles of antimatter.
He quickly took out a pen and scribbled some notes. Huge amounts of energy with a small mass, traveling at the speed of light—E=mc2. Relativity would apply. Mark drew a diagram of a solar flare releasing magnetic energy. As the particles accelerated, they’d become more and more massive but the nucleus would shrink. They’d melt into their quarks, creating smaller particles. Antiparticles.
Suddenly, he felt a rush of adrenaline, his thoughts beginning to click and align. Mark tapped his feet and wrote more quickly. Something was interfering with the oscillating particles, making fewer of them decay as antimatter. But what? He tilted backward in his chair. Maybe it had something to do with quarks. An original idea felt within his grasp.
The baby screamed.
Mark’s thoughts scattered; now he couldn’t hear himself think. Great, his concentration was broken. It’d take him ages to get back into the flow again. He put his pen down and lifted the crying baby into his arms.
Ω
CLAIRE LAY IN BED, thinking she’d relish her first night in months of uninterrupted sleep. But the sheets were rough and she was restless. She ached for her baby; she could physically feel his absence. Like a phantom limb, Claire kept sensing Ethan—reaching for him, expecting to find him there beside her body—but he’d been briefly amputated. She clutched a pillow tightly to her chest and tried to fall asleep.
Her audition played on her mind. This morning, she’d been uncharacteristically jittery. Claire usually never had butterflies. Now her muscles ached, and she had a severe cramp in one foot. Uncertainty about the audition’s outcome—and whether it was worth the trip—troubled Claire. Before entering the mirrored studio, she’d strapped down her breasts in the bathroom, just in case they started swelling or leaking milk.
During the interview the artistic director, James Mitchell, asked lots of questions about her new baby. There were already plans to share the lead role of the Swan Queen between two soloists; one of the principals was retiring and the company needed to consider her replacement. But James was concerned that, even with role-sharing, Claire wouldn’t be able to handle the demanding rehearsal and touring schedule. That perhaps having a baby was incompatible with dancing a lead. She had to suppress an urge to stamp her foot and scream—why did everyone think motherhood suddenly made her incompetent? Claire quickly assured him of her dedication and promised family wouldn’t ever get in the way of work.
Then Claire danced her variation from Swan Lake. Her mind had gone blank when the music began, so she couldn’t actually recall dancing, whether or not she’d danced well. It was a fluid memory. All she remembered was how she’d felt in the moment: weightless, calm, exhilarated, an ecstatic release of pressure. Like coming home. Normally, Claire had a sharp instinct for gauging an audition’s success, but she wasn’t sure this time. Based on the company’s lack of confidence in her ability to juggle ballet with a baby, she suspected she’d screwed up. Part of her craved consolation from Mark, but after how hard she’d fought to get here, how could she tell him auditioning was a mistake? Claire lay in the darkness nursing her disappointment—in the audition, in herself—in lieu of nursing her son.
Ω
WHEN SHE LANDED in Sydney the following morning, Claire rushed off the plane and out into the terminal. Mark had promised to pick her up and bring Ethan to the airport. But they weren’t there among the crowd; she couldn’t find them anywhere. She collected her bag and searched the arrival hall for their faces.
Claire dialed Mark’s number but nobody answered. She tried the house phone; it kept ringing too. Perhaps they’d gone out. She tried his cell again.
“Hey,” he said wearily.
“Hi, it’s me. I’m at the airport. Remember you said you’d pick me up?”
Mark exhaled. “Sorry, I totally lost track of time. Ethan’s being really fussy. Nothing makes him happy, he doesn’t want to sleep, eat, be touched or left alone. I don’t know what to do. He’s impossible.”
“Maybe he’s overheating,” Claire offered. She heard the baby howl in the background; the sound made her long for him. Ethan’s cries were like cryptic signals Claire needed to decode. “It’s boiling today. Give him a bath; it might calm him down. Does he still have that rash under his arms?”
Mark replied but she couldn’t hear him over Ethan’s loud shrieks.
“I’m coming straight home. See you soon.”
Her right breast had started to leak, and below its curve, she could feel warm milk seep into the creased skin. As if the constant ache of being away from Ethan wasn’t enough, her body gave her visceral reminders. Time to get back to him. She waited in the line for a taxi, the smell of breastmilk sweetening the humid air.
Ω
MARK FOUND THE RASH under the baby’s arms. May as well give Ethan that bath; maybe the rash was what had been bothering him. Maybe he’d finally calm down. All night, Ethan had been inconsolable. The baby wailed as if he were being tortured, loud and urgent, like the wail of a siren warning of emergency. Mark’s sleep deprivation veered toward madness. He kept trying to return to his thesis—he was so close to grasping antimatter’s riddle—but his son kept howling and he couldn’t think.
Problem solving didn’t work with babies; Mark couldn’t find a solution to Ethan’s problems. He consulted the manuals again, every parenting book in the apartment, looking for answers, but nothing fixed the crying. Ethan wailed and screamed, squirmed and writhed. Mark considered calling his father and brother for advice, but knew they’d just laugh at him. Call him out for being pathetic, for asking for help, for allowing Claire to leave him alone with the baby. Overnight, his frustration had made him punch the wall.
Mark picked the baby up and walked to the bathroom. It was the most beautiful room in their apartment, almost bigger than their bedroom, with a large picture window that looked out onto the courtyard. Sun spilled onto the white tiles and reflected off the mirror. He turned on the tap.
With its four legs on wheels, the yellow baby bath looked like a headless giraffe. It didn’t take long to fill—it was no bigger than a sink. Claire had bought lots of neutral-colored items for the baby—mint greens and lemon yellows—as she’d had some idealist notion that their child wasn’t going to grow up conforming to gender stereotypes.
Mark lay Ethan down on the changing mat. Claire had taught him to check the water temperature and he pulled up his sleeves and dipped his elbow in the bath. Too hot. He cooed absentmindedly at his son then abruptly stopped. Mark hated baby talk, all that inane babbling and senseless noise. Perhaps it was just the way he was genetically wired to love his child, but there was something about that baby that made Mark forget that he was acting like a fool.
The bathwater had cooled now and Mark undressed his son. As his cold hands braced Ethan’s body, the baby screamed again. He kicked and fought and wriggled as Mark struggled to lift him up into the tub.
Later, this yellow bath ended up in court. Evidence from the scene of the crime in a criminal trial, standing out of place in the middle of the courtroom, inspected by lawyers and a jury. The tub was probably still kept somewhere with other left-behind evidence, in a room of forgotten things at the storage facility of the courthouse. Nobody ever went back to collect it.
Ω
WITH ONE HAND, Mark held the baby’s shoulder to support his head, and tried to wash Ethan’s body with the other. But the baby wasn’t cooperating. His limbs thrashed, he splashed and shrieked, forcing his own face underwater. Mark breathed out and tried to compose himself. He washed the baby’s hair. Ethan pushed his legs against the edge of the tub, spilling water over the floor. The baby’s strength was surprising. Claire was wrong; this bath was not calming him down.
Mark lifted Ethan out of the bath and wrapped him in a towel, lemon yellow with an embroidered duck. The baby kept crying. Roaring. Piercing decibels that climbed each time he opened his toothless mouth, rising octave after brutal octave. Mark’s eardrums hurt—it felt like they were bleeding—and the pressure inside his head escalated to a crushing throb.
What was wrong with it? Nothing calmed this baby down. Where was Claire? Why wasn’t she back yet? He was furious at her for leaving; it was unfair. He felt racked by a dark impulse to settle the score. The baby howled and arched its back. What did it want? Why wouldn’t it shut up?
Mark noticed urine running down Ethan’s leg. Great, it was everywhere. He’d only just been cleaned. Mark would need to run the bath again, start all over. Fuck.
The baby kicked and yelled. His cries boiled the marrow inside Mark’s bones. His unbroken scream was grating and shrill, like a deafening alarm; it set Mark’s nerves close to breaking point. The baby screamed louder. Stop crying. Stop.
Mark grasped Ethan, his hands tightly gripping the baby’s ribs.
He shook him hard.
The screaming stopped.
Ω
MARK COULDN’T PINPOINT the moment he’d lost control; he didn’t understand how it happened. It was like standing on a train platform and doing what we all imagine: that universal morbid urge. The train approaches. You look down at the tracks. You think to yourself, I could easily throw myself down there, I could die.
Or you could be standing at the edge of a cliff, looking over the edge. You imagine yourself falling down, your body tumbling toward the earth and breaking against the rocks below. Everyone thinks about it, feels that flickering impulsion. It’s like a cognitive itch you shouldn’t scratch, the way the brain assesses risk. So you stop yourself. You make a choice. You choose to live.
When Mark was a teenager, he went on a family holiday to Airlie Beach on the Whitsunday Coast. He befriended one of the local boys—Mark had long forgotten his name—who was about his age. One morning, they took the boy’s speedboat around the shoreline. In the backwoods, by the freshwater cascades, was a line of rugged quartz cliffs.
Mark craned his head up, staring at the tallest cliff. “Can we go all the way up there?”
“Yeah, sure,” the boy said.
The cliff was about fifty feet high. Although the climb wasn’t hard, Mark grazed his knee against the rocky edge. He wiped the blood off with his palm.
“Do you wanna jump?” the boy asked when they had both reached the top.
“Is it safe?”
“Reckon you’ll be all right.” The boy ran off the edge of the cliff and jumped into the water.
Mark felt sick to his stomach looking at the drop. He counted backward. Ten. Nine. He looked down at the water, a slick of black on its surface. Eight. Seven. He took a step backward. Six. Five. Four. Then a step forward. Three. You only live once, Mark thought to himself. If he did this now, he’d never have to do it again. Two. One. Zero.
Zero.
There’s nothing to lose at zero.
