Dad’s Maybe Book. Tim O’Brien

not being held. He hates light and he hates dark. He hates hot and he hates cold and he hates all temperatures in between. He is full of fury.

      I have fathered Jack the Ripper.

      At the moment, in these early-morning hours of August 28, 2003, I’m taking a break while my wife Meredith sits in the laundry room with our howling little hater. A pediatrician has suggested placing him in a basket atop the clothes dryer. The machine’s warmth and its humming motor have worked their magic, to be sure, but only on my exhausted wife, whom I last saw in a state of semiconsciousness.

      Timmy just keeps crying and crying.

      I hear him now, three rooms away, and it’s not baby-crying. It’s hate-the-world crying. It’s bloody-murder crying. Something is wrong. This cannot be normal.

      Meredith and I are first-timers at the whole baby thing, a pair of rookies, and we are not only incompetent but we’re getting scared. I’m scared, in fact, at this very instant. In a few minutes I’ll be shutting down my computer and returning to duty, except I have no clue as to what my duty actually is. Do I dump the boy in his crib and hope he howls himself to sleep? Do I try to silence him with coos? Do I sit with him in the laundry room for the next three hours? Right now it’s 1:10 a.m. and Timmy has been crying since … well, since he was born. Nothing stops him—not for long. We’ll pick him up and snuggle him and walk him around the house, and for a short while he may (or may not) settle down. But then he tightens up, fidgets, squirms, and eventually convulses in a deep, full-body shudder, as if electricity has just sizzled through his bones, and then his face goes wrinkly with hatred and he lets out a Frankenstein screech that wakes up the nomads in Libya. We’re afraid the police will come. We’re afraid neighbors will nail bomb threats to our door. We’re afraid, quite literally, that our little boy hates being alive.

      Our nerves are shot. We’re exhausted. We have no family nearby, no wise and experienced relatives, no one to spell us for even a few hours. Worse yet, the pediatricians and their nurses seem fed up with our panicky phone calls. Over and over, they use the word “colic,” or the word “fussy,” as if we’re too dumb to remember that these are the words they’ve been uttering for weeks on end. They murmur reassurances. They tell us to be patient. They tell us all babies are different. They tell us Timmy is going through a “phase.” Both Meredith and I get the impression that we’re overreacting, perhaps exaggerating, and that we should man up and shut up and take our medicine.

      We blame ourselves, of course. This morning, I’ve been sitting here at my desk, listening to the baby-din, wanting to cry, and only a few minutes ago I found myself suddenly horrified by the thought that my own hot temper and occasional rages may have been transmitted to my infant son. More horrifying yet, I worry that during Timmy’s womb time he’d somehow absorbed the knowledge that for years prior to his conception I hadn’t wanted children. Did his biology know that Meredith and I had nearly broken up over that issue during our courtship days? Did the cytosine in Timmy’s DNA, or the proteins of his brain stem, somehow program resentment and disgust and outright fury in a kind of organic reaction to his father’s selfishness? The blame game is far-fetched, at least in one sense, but it’s painfully real in another. Meredith and I feel responsible. More than responsible. We feel guilt. We are older than most greenhorn parents, and although neither of us says so, we’re both chewing on the possibility that our crusty, over-the-hill chromosomes combined to produce Timmy’s wretchedness. (Would Jack the Ripper have been Jack the Ripper if his parents had not crossed genetic paths?) On her part, more practically, Meredith worries aloud that her type 1 diabetes may have infected her breast milk, or may have poisoned Timmy’s pancreas, or may have otherwise caused our son all this unrelieved unhappiness. Also, because she’s a type 1 diabetic, Meredith underwent induced labor. “Maybe Timmy needed more time inside,” she speculated yesterday. “Being forced to wake up—wouldn’t that upset anyone?” (I call this her premature ejaculation theory.) In any event, the blaming goes on and on. We page backward in memory through our health histories; we look for seeds of distress in our family trees; we beat ourselves up over that tiny sip of wine eight months ago and that mushroom soufflé consumed during our college years. Meredith has sworn off animal products. She has excised from her diet all broccoli, asparagus, beans, popcorn, cauliflower, prunes, artificial sweeteners, soda pop, citrus fruits, spices, chocolate, strawberries, pineapples, and caffeine. And the crying gets louder.

      Last night, during my 2 a.m. baby duty, I hit on what appears to be a miracle. An imperfect miracle, a miracle in need of fine-tuning, but a gift from the gods all the same. It is the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Sing it in the dark, sing it in a rocking chair, sing it long enough—maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour—and Timmy stops crying. He sleeps. He sleeps without hatred on his face.

      When I mentioned my discovery to Meredith this morning, she looked at me skeptically. “So you put him in the crib?”

      “Well, no,” I said. “I tried, but he—”

      “He woke up crying, right?”

      “Right, and that’s where the fine-tuning comes in. But at least he settled down for a while. You could feel him unwind. You could feel all that tightness go out of him.”

      “So now what?” said Meredith.

      “Now I perfect it. Figure out how to get him into the crib.”

      “Lots of luck.”

      I nodded. She was right. Song or no song, his hatred for the crib was a problem, and there was also the fact that he continued to sleep for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. Moreover, there was an issue with the song itself. “It’ll drive me crazy,” I admitted to Meredith. “Last night it almost did. It’s short—only four lines—and it’s a goddamned round. Try singing ‘merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily’ for a whole hour.”

      She shrugged. “Why not try some other song?”

      “I did try other songs. He hates ‘Rock-a-bye Baby.’ He hates ‘Twinkle, Twinkle.’ He hates ‘Jingle Bells.’ God knows what we’ll do when Christmas comes.”

      Tears came to Meredith’s eyes.

      “Sorry,” I said.

      It’s taken a few days, but I’ve made progress. Partly deletion, partly rewriting.

      Among other things, I’ve tightened up the title. I now call the song “Row, Row.” I’ve deleted the merrily stuff. I’ve deleted the boat and the rowing. I’ve deleted the stream. In fact, I’ve deleted almost everything but the melody, and as Timmy and I sit in the dark, rocking in our rocking chair, father and son, I invent filthy lyrics to keep myself sane. True, I adore that final line, “Life is but a dream,” but it had to go. You don’t sing about a pair of horny pigeons and end with “life is but a dream.” It does not fit. Not with pigeons.

      Tonight, I’ll branch out.

      Buggering mice, maybe.

      Although I haven’t written much since Timmy was born, I now sit in the dark and produce some of my best work in years. No pressures to publish. So far no bad reviews. I’ve finally found my subject.

      Bleep, bleep, bleep like mice,

      Gently up the bleep,

      Verily, verily, verily, verily,

      Firmly bleep the bleep.

      As I mentioned earlier, Meredith and I had come within a whisker of calling it quits over our deadlock on the children question. She very much wanted kids. I very much did not. And so it happened that on a late night several years ago