Ten Little Indians

Do Not Go Gentle

MY WIFE AND I didn’t know Mr. Grief in person until our baby boy got his face stuck between his mattress and crib and suffocated himself blue. He died three times that day, Mr. Grief squeezing his lungs tight, but the muscular doctors and nurses battled that suffocating monster man and brought our boy back to life three times. He was our little blue baby Jesus.

I’m lying. Our baby wasn’t Jesus. Our baby was alive only a little bit. Mostly he was dead and slept his way through a coma. In Children’s Hospital, our baby was hooked up to a million dollars’ worth of machines that breathed, pissed, and pooped for him. I bet you could line up all of my wife’s and my grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and first, second, and third cousins, and rob their wallets and purses, and maybe you’d collect about $512.

Mr. Grief was a billionaire. He could afford to check on our baby every six hours, but every six hours, my wife and I cussed him out and sent him running. My wife is beautiful and powerful and only twenty-five years old, but she is magic like a grandmother, and Indian grandmothers aren’t afraid of a little man like Mr. Grief.

One night, while I guarded over our baby, my wife wrapped her braids in a purple bandana, shoved her hands into thick work clothes, sneaked up on Mr. Grief in the hallway, and beat him severely about the head and shoulders like she was Muhammad Ali.

When you’re hurting, it feels good to hurt somebody else. But you have to be careful. If you get addicted to the pain-causing, then you start hurting people who don’t need hurting. If you turn into a pain-delivering robot, then you start thinking everybody looks like Mr. Grief and everybody deserves a beating.

One day when my wife was crying, I swear I saw Mr. Grief hiding behind her eyes. So I yelled and screamed at her and called her all of the bad names. But I got really close to her to yell, because it’s more effective to yell when you’re closer to your enemy, and I smelled her true scent. I knew it was only my wife inside my wife, because she smelled like tenderness, and Mr. Grief smells like a porcupine rotting dead on the side of the road.

My wife and I didn’t even name our baby. We were Indians and didn’t want to carry around too much hope. Hope eats your flesh like a spider bite. But my wife and I loved our little Baby X and took turns sitting beside his bed and singing to him. The nurses and doctors let us bring in our hand drums, so we sang powwow songs to our baby. I’m a pretty good singer, and my wife is the best there is, and crowds always gathered to listen to us, and that made us feel good.

It was great to feel good about something, because my wife and I were all the way grieving. We took turns singing honor songs and falling asleep. Mr. Grief is a wizard who puts sleep spells on you. My wife spent more time sleeping than I did. I figure she was sadder because she had carried our baby inside her womb and had memorized the way he moved.

One day about a week after our baby fell into his coma, it was me who fell into a waking sleep in a hospital bathroom. Sitting on the bowl, pants wrapped around my ankles, I couldn’t move. I was awake and paralyzed by the deadly venom of the grief snake. I wondered if I was going to die right there in that terrible and shameful and hilarious way. I don’t want to die like Elvis, I kept saying to myself like it was a prayer.

But right then, when I was ready to roll onto the floor and crawl my way to safety like a grief soldier under grief fire, I heard two other sad men come walking into the bathroom. Those men didn’t know I was trapped on the toilet, so they spoke freely and honestly about some sad woman.

“Did you see that woman?” asked man #1.

“You mean the fat one in sweatpants?” asked man #2.

“Yeah, can you believe how terrible she looked? I know our kids are sick, but that doesn’t mean we have to let ourselves go like that.”

“If you let yourself get ugly on the outside, you’re gonna feel even worse on the inside.”

“Yeah, what are your kids gonna think when they see you looking so bad?”

“They’re gonna be sad.”

“And things are sad enough without having to look at your fat mom wearing ugly sweatpants.”

“The worst part is, that woman’s kid, he isn’t even that sick. He isn’t terminal. He’s only on the third floor.”

“Yeah, put her kid on the fourth floor with our kids, and let’s see how ugly she gets then.”

Listening to their awfulness, I found the strength to stand and walk out of the stall. They were shocked to see me, and they went all quiet and silent and still and frozen. They were ashamed of themselves, I guess, for building a secret clubhouse out of the two-by-four boards and ten-penny nails of their pain. I could be deadly serious and deadly funny at the same time, so I washed my hands really slow, making sure each finger was cleaner than the finger before. I dried them even slower, using one towel for each hand. And then I looked at those two men. I studied the angles and shapes of them like I was taking a geometry test.

I almost yelled at them. I wanted to scream at them for being as shallow and dirty as a dog dish. But hell, their kids were dying. What else were they going to do but punish the world for it? A father with a sick child is an angry god. I know I would have earthquaked Los Angeles, Paris, and Rome, and killed a million innocent people, if it guaranteed my baby boy would rise back to his full life.

But that whole bathroom crazy-scene gave me some energy. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. I felt like a good woman and I wanted to be a good mother-man. So I left the hospital and went out shopping for baby toys. The hospital was on Fifteenth and John, and over the past few days, on my journey between home and hospital, I’d been driving past a toy store over on Pike and Seventh. It was called Toys in Babeland, and that was a cute name, so I figured I’d buy some stuffed teddy bears and a rattle and maybe some of those black-and-white toys the experts say are good for babies’ eyes. Those seemed like good toy ideas, but I wasn’t sure. What kind of toys do you buy, exactly, for a coma baby? I walked over to the store and strolled in, feeling religious about my mission, and shocked myself to discover Toys in Babeland was a sex-toy store.

“Honey,” I said to my wife later, “those women were selling vibrators and dildos and edible underwear and butt plugs and lubricants and some stuff I had no idea what the hell you were supposed to do with it. Sweetheart,” I said to her, “some of those sex toys looked like a genius and a crazy scientist made them.” Now, I was surely embarrassed, but I’m not a prude, so I browsed around, not expecting to buy anything but not wanting to run out of the store like a frightened Christian. Then I turned the corner and saw it, the vibrator they call Chocolate Thunder.

“Darling,” I said to my wife later, “I heard that big old music from that 2001: Space Odyssey movie when I saw that miracle vibrator.”

Chocolate Thunder was dark brown and fifteen inches long and needed a nine-volt battery. I like to think my indigenous penis is powerful. But it would take a whole war party of Indian men to equal up to one Chocolate Thunder. I was shy but quick to buy the thing and ran back to the hospital with it. I ran into the fourth-floor ICU, pulled Chocolate Thunder out of its box, held it up in the air like a magic wand, and switched it on.

Of course, all the doctors and nurses and mothers and fathers were half stunned by that vibrator. And it was a strange and difficult thing. It was sex that made our dying babies, and here was a huge old piece of buzzing sex I was trying to cast spells with. I waved it over our baby and ran around the room waving it over the other sick babies. I was laughing and hooting, and other folks were laughing and hooting, and a few others didn’t know what the hell to do. But pretty soon everybody was taking their turn casting spells with Chocolate Thunder. Maybe it was blasphemous, and maybe it was stupid and useless, but we all were sick and tired of waiting for our babies to die. We wanted our babies to live, and we were ready to try anything to help them live. Maybe some people can get by with quiet prayers, but I wanted to shout and scream and vibrate. So did plenty of other fathers and mothers in that sickroom.

It was my wife who grabbed Chocolate Thunder and used it like a drumstick to pound her hand drum. She sang a brand-new song that echoed up and down the hallways of Children’s Hospital. Every sick and dying and alive and dead kid heard it, and they were happy and good in their hearts. My wife sang the most beautiful song anybody ever heard in that place. She sang like ten thousand Indian grandmothers rolled into one mother. All the while, Chocolate Thunder sang with her and turned the whole thing into a healing duet.

We humans are too simpleminded. We all like to think each person, place, or thing is only itself. A vibrator is a vibrator is a vibrator, right? But that’s not true at all. Everything is stuffed to the brim with ideas and love and hope and magic and dreams. I brought Chocolate Thunder back to the hospital, but it was my magical and faithful wife who truly believed it was going to bring our baby back to us. She wanted it to bring every baby back to life. Over the next week, my wife sat beside our baby’s bed and held that vibrator in her two hands and sang and prayed along with its buzzing. She used up the energy of two batteries, and maybe our baby would have woken up anyway, and a few other babies never did wake up at all, but my wife still believes our son heard the magic call of Chocolate Thunder and couldn’t resist it. Our beautiful, beautiful boy opened his eyes and smiled, even if he was too young to smile, but I think sick kids get old and wise and funny very fast.

And so my wife and I named him Abraham and carried him home and lay him in his crib and hung Chocolate Thunder from the ceiling above him like a crazy mobile and laughed and laughed with the joy of it. We deported Mr. Grief back to his awful country. Our baby boy was going to live a long and good life. We wondered aloud what we would tell our Abraham about the wondrous world when he was old enough to wonder about it.