Mrs. Linn nodded, but she reached toward her tubes of lotion and picked one up before sitting down beside the massage table.
The boy brought a puppet out onto the stage and the puppet opened its mouth, white and huge, and it trembled without closing it, as if it were screaming. He was only a few feet away, as alarmed as the puppet. But what happened next, what happened next was impossible to explain to Mrs. Linn. The boy hid the puppet behind the curtain and brought it out again, made it scream again, and hid it again. His son did that over and over, until he recognized the pain between the nape of his neck and his throat. The pain that stiffened him and terrified him in his dreams, the pain that tied him to his father and to his own image in the mirror, the yellow pain.
Mrs. Linn held her largest tube of lotion, and she accidentally squeezed it too hard. The almond perfume flooded the room.
“I felt,” he said, trying to understand himself, “my son’s boundless need for attention. An insatiable need, that’s what I felt. A need impossible to satisfy.”
Mrs. Linn put down the tube of lotion and nervously extended her fingers, as though stretching them.
“And then I couldn’t look at him, at my son. I looked away.” He tried to concentrate, but he felt a little dizzy.
Then the boy put down the puppet and he looked out from the stage himself. He hid behind the curtain for a few seconds and then appeared again. The pain he felt every time his son disappeared was something brutal. Every time the boy hid behind the curtain again, an invisible thread pulled at him violently.
Mrs. Linn brought the tube of lotion to her chest, and for a moment her elbows poked out behind her, more ready than ever to sink and compress.
“I understood that I could no longer live with him, or without him. It was a huge mistake, whatever it was that joined us. A tragedy in which we would both fail miserably.”
Mrs. Linn handed him the tube of lotion and he held it, and somehow the tube gave him the strength to go on.
He tried to explain himself: he couldn’t meet the boy’s gaze. He looked for a point among the toys in the room, a fixed point that would save him from the panic, and he latched on to a yellow puppet hanging near the window.
Mrs. Linn’s arms now hung straight down from her shoulders and her fingers were just barely moving, as if they were practicing in the air a new way to knead.
“So I went to get my father, and I made him get into the car. I got on the highway and drove in silence for about thirty miles.”
For a few seconds Mrs. Linn’s fingers stopped, as if they’d lost the thread or didn’t entirely understand what he had just said, but as soon as he went on, Mrs. Linn’s fingers followed him.
His father didn’t say anything as they drove, and when the city’s lights started to disappear, he stopped the car on the side of the road and asked his father to get out.
“I couldn’t leave home. I’m as weak as my father was. But there is something I could do, something that could change things in the long term.”
He could give his father the push that he’d needed his whole life in order to leave them. He could forgive him and give him permission. He could sacrifice himself and disrupt this tragic cycle: loosen a link in the chain to break the circle. Maybe that way he would free his own son from the pain of sons, and his son’s children from the same pain.
Mrs. Linn leaned over toward her shelf and quickly exchanged the tube of lotion.
He got out of the car and turned around to open his father’s door. What he felt at that moment was the complete opposite of fear—it was something close to madness, but with the absolute certainty he was taking the right step. The exciting anguish of recognizing that what one is doing will ultimately change something important. To free his father was to free them all. His father had always known he had to leave. Now his son was there to help him. But the father didn’t move.
“He didn’t move,” he said. “I told him to get out. I waited. I said it again, harshly. But he couldn’t even look me in the eyes.”
He’d only sunk into his seat, terrified.
“Where is your father?” asked Mrs. Linn. “Bring him in.” He looked at her, he looked at his Mrs. Linn. He hesitated a moment, trying to emerge from his story’s aura, and a gentle push on his shoulder set him in motion.
“Go on, get him.”