What Things Are Made Of

The Sound That Wakes Me at Night, Thinking of It

34 The Sound That Wakes Me at Night, Thinking of It Not the victim’s wife, sobbing, refusing to get out of bed. Not his kids, kept home from preschool, snuffling or wailing, “I want Daddy,” when they’re not poking each other or whining, “She hit me!” Not his brother, jarred awake at 2 a.m., phlegmthroating , “Fuckers,” thinking it took more than one, fury his finger-in-the-dike that stops a flood. Not his mother, rocking, wrapped in her own arms, her face in the bathroom mirror so twisted and old it stops her cold, the way she might have stopped him, if she hadn’t popped pills to sleep and wake and feel better about her life that always was, she sees now, fabulously good. No, it’s his father, in court, his speech prepared: the “impact statement” meant to heap years of hot-coal suffering on the bastard’s head, since judge and jury—those pukes, those heartless bleeding ulcers—lacked the stones to squash a stinkbug. It’s Dad, hearing the killer parrot, “a drug deal gone bad”—that junkie, that syphilitic gob of tapeworm pus casually adding, as part of the deal that saved his life, “I popped the kid.” It’s Dad, flying over chairs and tables, past bailiffs and lawyers to reach, somehow, the killer’s throat, his own releasing a sound between a train grinding to a panic-stop, and a jet fighter screeching off to bomb Iraq— sound of a gut-stuck bear before it mauled 35 Neanderthal—berserker-sound trapped in suburbia, the one act that could comfort him choked off by Law, but not the sound that, even when he’s dragged away on national TV—thrashing, head thrown back, mouth gaped wide as a bear’s—I know he won’t stop making, hour after hour, year after year. ...