Bucky F*cking Dent by David Duchovny Page A

hypothetical world minus his son. He curses himself and his avoidance of pain, the need for his mind to forecast the worst in order to save itself the future shock. How selfish, he thinks. But maybe natural, maybe human nature. The instinct for survival, self-preservation trumps all. He has read about animals in books, male lions eating their young. Maybe they do it out of love. They swallow their own pain and the child’s pain with the child, no more suffering. The cub is in a better place, a place without worry and pain. Inside the father. Dad will swallow all. Broad-shouldered Dad. Nature is a bastard.
    But maybe not. He is not a lion. He is a man. Maybe he’s unnatural and cold. His wife looks at him, into him. Is she seeing his world without the boy? Is she seeing that he has killed his son? Is she seeing that she is not in that world either? That there is now a world where he has killed her, too? Does she see me, he wonders, inside me, and that I have too many worlds to trust? He detaches from her, too. Is the marriage over just like that? Yes and no. He doesn’t know. What does he know? He’s sorry, sure, but goddamn her. He doesn’t need the accusations. He hasn’t done anything, he’s just thinking, doing his best. The boy coughs, weaker this time. Giving up? He can hear the demon exulting. Sadistic. Its claws well dug in. The mother grabs the infant from her new husband. The child is unresponsive. His head lolls on a slack neck. “Please,” she pleads like she’s asked before. “Please let’s get him to the hospital.”
    OCTOBER 15, 1946
    Pesky also hesitated and the Boston Red Sox lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games.

 
    12.

    Ted hadn’t been to Brooklyn since his mom died. He had never once made the drive from the Bronx to Brooklyn, had never traced backward the flow of his life till now—Brooklyn to the Bronx, the Bronx to Brooklyn. Didn’t matter to the Cololla, he meant Corolla. Bertha didn’t like to go anywhere. Ted slid the Dead into his car stereo. “Friend of the Devil,” the second track off American Beauty , released in 1970. He laughed at the thought that his car was a homebody. An old Japanese guy who had just had enough of this fucking country and wasn’t gonna come out of his small backyard garden.
    He had never been able to tell if the Dead were singing “Said, I’m runnin’ but I’m takin’ my time” or “Set out runnin’.” Wasn’t that big a difference, but he rewound the song to that part and listened closely. Still couldn’t tell. Rewound again. Nope. A tiny mystery that shall remain, he thought. He was okay with that. As a writer, he aspired to abide some ambiguity, live in the gray. Keats had famously staked out such negative capability for Shakespeare, and Ted wished to claim a morsel of that generous capacity for himself. But the problem was that while negative capability for an author was genius, for an actual person, it was more often than not the cause of Hamlet-like hesitation, Oblomovian laziness, Bartlebyesque paralysis. Could he make a trade-off? A compromise? Be both? A slate of negative capability at the typewriter leavened with a healthy dose of sprezzatura and derring-do in the field? Both proclivities and talents were still as yet unproven, however. Gray. The color of Ted’s eyes.
    He had no idea what he’d do once he got to his father’s house. He knew nothing about medicine, hated needles, didn’t like the sight of blood. What good could he be? What if something went wrong while he was there? He could drive his dad to the hospital. He could call 911. He could call that nurse. He popped in another cassette, Blues for Allah . The Dead sang “Franklin’s Tower”: “If you plant ice, you’re gonna harvest wind / Roll away the dew…”
    The old block, on Garfield Place, looked almost