Isaac

I was sad. I could tell as it was the fifth day in a row I’d been unable to get out of bed without crying so much I had to wash the pillowcases. That didn’t happen often so I knew something had to be up. Also I was wearing the same clothes I’d gone to bed in on Tuesday and that couldn’t be a good sign. Being sad and dirty on a Sunday is not a good place to be in let me promise you that. There were many possible causes. I could have been depressed about my impending thirtieth birthday. It could have been the fact that my tiny rented apartment was so unrelentingly bleak some days I would wake and wash and dress with my eyes closed so that I didn’t have to see it so much first thing in the morning. It could have been that Brad, the man I had been casually sleeping/in love with the previous two years had decided that I was Not The One For Him. Granted, he had decided this months ago and been very open and honest about it, it was just that I had only recently begun to accept this. When my dog OhNo! died my grief counselor (I know and before you say anything, just don’t) told me that Acceptance was the final stage in the grieving process and that this could apply to any kind of loss in life. The stage before Acceptance was Depression which didn’t make any sense because I had Accepted that I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life with Brad so why was I so Depressed? I might have called my grief counselor up to ask her this but she only dealt with dead pets so I couldn’t.

After throwing wet five-day-old-mascara streaked pillowcases into the machine along with the rest of the bedding and my clothes I pulled on a raggedy brown dressing gown, took a couple of baby aspirin (I picked up the wrong box at the pharmacy), flicked on the radio and after hearing the strains of…

“Darling I hope
That my dream never haunted you
My heart is tellin’ you
How much I wanted you”

…flicked it right back off again. I sat down in the battered armchair I got from my parents when I first moved in and which, even now, still threw up remnants of OhNo!’s fur, like he’d secreted deposits down the sides in case he ever went prematurely bald instead of prematurely dead. I picked up the book I had been reading on Tuesday night and began where I had left off:

“…It should not have been so painful, the whole thing had been so short lived, not nearly so bad as, say, the breakup of a long marriage, someone you’ve shared years and children with. That pain is about everything: your life, your childhood, death, your past. Mine was purely about the future…”*

I began to cry again and flung the book away. Eyes closed I heard it collide with something in the middle of the room that wasn’t previously there.

“Fuck! Oh shitting fuck that really hurt!”

I looked up, shocked. Through bleary wetness I thought I saw a midget standing in my front room, rubbing his head and blurting out curse words. I rubbed the tears away and refocused, realizing my mistake; what I actually saw was a small child standing in my front room rubbing his head and blurting out curse words.

“What did you throw a fucking book at me for?”

The sight of a child in my front room throwing ungrammatical obscenities at me where there never was before, was too much. I closed my eyes and began crying again. Of all the signs that I was sad, this had to be the worst.

“Oh now, come on! I didn’t mean to get so riled ’atcha. It just really hurt when you tossed that book at me, you know?”

Behind hands covering closed eyes I heard him tread softly across the floor, his chubby little arm patting mine gently as he said “There, there. It’ll be alright”. After that he was silent and waited patiently in front of the chair, arms down by his sides until I had stopped my hiccupping sobs.

I looked at him uncertainly and he beamed a gap-toothed grin. “It‘s ok. You can ask away - you probably have a lot of questions. After that‘s over we can get down to business.”

“What’s business?” I asked, somewhat apprehensively.

“The business of making you happy, silly!” he replied, as though this were the most obvious thing in the world to anyone.

“Where’s your mother?” I asked. “Won’t she be looking for you? Do you live in the street? And how did you get in anyway?”

“All very good questions! The answers to which are: One - at home; Two - No. And… I’m sorry, I’m still learning - what comes after two?”

“…ah…three?”

“Three! Of course - sorry. And three - I just appeared.”

“Why wouldn’t she be looking for you? Won’t sh- What do you mean you just appeared?”

“I mean I just appeared. I knew I needed to be here and so I just thought of this place and here I am.”

I was confused, I thought.

“I’m confused”, I said.

“Don’t worry, it’s very easy. You’re unhappy, right? So I’m here to make you happy. Once you’re happy I can get back to what I was doing before.”

“Which was?”

“Being dead.”

“I was still confused”, I said.

I’m still confused, I thought.

“I know. I can tell because you’re voicing your thoughts and thinking your speech. You’re in minor shock. It’s not unheard of.”

“You’re dead?”

“Yup.”

“You’re dead and you’re here, in my front room?”

“Yup.”

“So you’re a ghost?”

“Nope.”

“I’m-”

“Confused, I get it, right. Look if I give you the basics will you try to just accept everything?”

“I guess so. I’m pretty good at acceptance.”

“No you’re not - you suck ass at acceptance. Now-”

“Pardon me.”

“Yes?”

“Why do you curse so much?”

“What? You mean ‘ass’? ‘Ass’ isn’t a curse word.”

“It is kinda. For you I mean - how old are you? One? Two?”

“Three and three months. Does it bother you?”

“What - that you’re three and three months?”

“No, the cursing.”

“Oh. No. Maybe. A little, I guess.”

“Ok. Well I’ll try to cut it down - no promises though - sometimes it just slips out. Right?”

“Right.”

“Ok then. Here it is. I’m dead. Have been for four months now but for the moment I have to stop being dead until you’re no longer unhappy. Capisce?”

“Capisce?”

“Sorry. My father was Italian. It means do you understand?”

“I know what it means.”

“Oh, right - was your father Italian too?”

“No, I’ve seen a lot of mob movies.”

“What’s a mob movie?”

“It’s a - Look, is it important?”

“No, not really. Ok, so as I was saying. Once you’re happy, I can go back to being dead.”

“Is that what you want? To be dead?”

“Well, what else is there? I can hardly go back to being alive now can I?”

“But what about… I meant that… Shouldn’t you be - you know - someplace else?”

“No, this is where I’m meant to be - I checked the schedule before I left.”

“What I mean is that… Isn’t there a place that, you know, dead children always go to?”

“What? Oh! You mean limbo or something don’t you?”

He rolled his eyes like this was the stupidest thing in the world.

“You know something, this has always bugged me and I shouldn’t really say anything, so keep it to yourself: there is no afterlife; you only get one shot - deal with it.”

“Oh.”

“Oh Jesus. I’m sorry. That was pretty blunt. Were you especially religious?”

“Well, not as such, no. It’s just that I’d always thought that…”

“What?”

“It‘s just a nice idea, that’s all”

“Yeah, well, so are a lot of things. The Easter Bunny isn’t real but I bet you dealt with that revelation just fine didn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“There you go-”

“Just like Santa Claus I suppose.”

“-What do you mean?”

“Santa Claus.”

“What about him?”

“Well. He’s not… You know.”

“Not what?”

For a second he was just a child instead of a freaky talking know-it-all… Well, I hadn’t quite decided exactly what he was, but his eyes were widening as though he was stood on the verge of an awesome abyss of truth and didn’t know whether or not he wanted to fall in. It was heart-breaking.

“He’s… Never mind about Santa. I was babbling. So what happens when you‘re done then?”

He gave me a curious look, possibly to see whether or not he wanted to dig a little deeper. It seemed not. I guess we all have truths that we don’t want to hear. I can get with that.

“When I’m done? I told you - I go back to being dead.”

“And what’s that like?”

“Always with the damn questions. Don’t you like a little mystery? This is death we’re talking about. Anyway, I’ve said too much - no more questions about being dead alright? It’s just morbid.”

“Ok. But I do have another question, one that’s not about being dead.”

“Shoot.”

“Why do you want to make me happy?”

“Because you’re unhappy.”

“Why me though? There must be thousands, maybe millions of unhappy people out there. Why have you come to me?”

“Do you know how many people are out there in this world right now this very second? I mean exactly how many?”

“…”

“Six billion, seven-hundred-and-four million, four-hundred-and-five-thousand, one-hundred-and-ninety-one. Although that figure has probably changed quite a bit in the last three seconds.”

“That’s a lot of people.”

“You think? Now. How many of those people do you think are happy?”

“…”

“None of them! They’re people! People are never truly happy, that’s what makes them so *peopley*. Sure they might *feel* happy, they might *feel* content, but nowhere in the history of time has there ever been a recorded instance of anyone being perfectly happy. We all have moments of course, but happiness as a permanent state simply does not exist. What keeps us going is our attempts at the attainment of happiness and those little patches that we hit, well they’re just a part of what makes life worth living.

“Things is, some people” - and here he looked at me significantly - “they need a little help, a little push; no shame in that, we all do - and that’s where we come in.”

“Who’s we?”

“Us! The dead children!”

“I’m sorry, you’re saying all dead kids come back to life to cheer people up before returning to the grave? And you’re also telling me that there’s no god? And this all just happens?”

“The universe is a fucked-up place. It’s just another example of the self-regulating biosphere. You ever read any Gaia theory?”

“No.”

“You should. It’s interesting. You ever see those commercials that have starving kids in some god-forsaken country somewhere looking all doe-eyed at the screen?”

“…”

“And then you get some freaky voiceover doing his best Don LaFontaine impersonation telling you that in the time it takes for you to watch this commercial X number of children will have died?”

“Ye-e-essss…” I didn’t like where he was going.

“Well that’s a lot of kids dontcha think - what do you think happens to them all?”

“I-”

“Forget it - you’ve only just become an atheist, you have no idea. Look, there’s a lot of kids in the world and when they’re not shitting in their pants or crying ‘cause they fell on their ass or because that bastard Jimmy Reese from next door stole my - uh, their - candy cup or cowering in fear or starving, they’re pretty happy. I mean, it doesn’t take much - I personally used to have a huge jones for a tiny plastic rabbit my mom kept on the TV. I would sit for hours just looking at the damn thing and I would be quiet as you like. It takes all sorts.”

“I used curl up next my dog and fall asleep when I was little.”

“See what I mean? That’s beautiful. It doesn’t take much. Our ability to experience happiness to such an extent decreases in direct proportion to our age, although there is sometimes a small increase in very old people. If we get a chance I’ll take you through the charts. That’s not to say people can’t be happy, just that they don’t experience joy as intensely as they do when they’re young. Now, if you can imagine all that happiness suddenly not being used because so many kids are dying every day; that’s a lot of potential energy going to waste. And it has to go somewhere, so it ends up reanimating us until we can transfer that happiness elsewhere to someone who needs it. It’s basic thermodynamics really.”

“How come I’ve never heard of this then? How come no-one’s mentioned this before?”

“Let’s have a think about that shall we? Hey! Jenny - you’re looking much happier these days - what’s your secret? Oh nothing - just my dead baby - he makes me smile.”

“Point taken. But don’t you get noticed?”

“Nope - invisible to all but you.”

“How does that work?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Beats me - I only just grasp the basic physics. Seriously. Mystery - try it sometime.”

“What happens now then?”

“I like it! Down to work! We’re going to make you happy. What do you want to do?”

“I was going to sit in my robe and mope all day.”

“That’s no good. I like your robe though. Does it have a hood?”

“Yes.”

“Brilliant. Have you got a towel - preferably black?”

“In the closet. It belongs to my boyf - It belongs to a guy I know.”

“Brad’s huh? Well, that’ll do. Go grab it. And while you’re up, do you have anything we could use that‘s like a sword or something, like, oh I don’t know, like cardboard tubing?”

“I have some art supplies upstairs - I have some sketch paper I could roll up.”

“Perfect! When you come back with that lot we’re going to play-act. Now. Have you ever seen Star Wars?…”

************

His name was Isaac. He stayed with me for about six months; turns out I was much more unhappy than even he thought. We did lots of things together. We play fought, we went on day trips to places like the zoo, we learned how to say the alphabet in four different languages (including Italian because his father would have wanted that). We watched a lot of TV - Isaac really had a thing for straight to video movies that featured people who used to be somewhat famous, facing trauma and upheaval in a small town. There was also a lot of coloring in which got a bit messy when he discovered my art supplies; even now there are patches of blue paint all over the kitchen wall that just will not come off. He was there over Christmas; I never did tell him about Santa Claus although when he opened his gift - a plastic lightsaber, because what else do you get a dead kid that likes Star Wars? - he asked a whole bunch of question like how did Santa know what he wanted when he hadn’t wrote him a letter or how did Santa know where to send his gift? I asked him if he didn’t want a bit of mystery in his life and he seemed to find that funny and hugged me.

I’m sure you’re probably thinking, ‘Jeez, how messed up is this chick - hallucinating babies and all?’ You probably think that I’m some neurotic lawyer with ‘issues’. You probably think that Isaac was a manifestation of a combination of my latent desire to have a child with Brad and the tick-tock of my biological clock. Well fuck you, as a certain dead three-and-a-bit-year old I once knew would have said. If you think that then all that means is that you’ve never been so unhappy as to need help to remember how to be happy and you should count yourself damn lucky for that.

One night as I was putting him to bed, instead of his usual story I asked Isaac if he wouldn’t mind telling me something. He said “sure”, so I asked him.

“How did you die?”

“Some basket case spinster threw a book at me and I developed a brain tumor.”

“Shut up!” I said, giggling. “I apologized for that loads of times. Tell me.”

“I don’t know really. I just went to sleep one night and never woke up.”

“That’s terrible - I’m so sorry. But… What about your mom? Why couldn’t you go back and see her?”

“Oh no, far too many complications. Conflict of interest for a start. Anyway, if you’re grieving the death of your son you’re entitled to be a little bit down, don’t you think? We can’t all be happy all the time - everything needs balance; everything has an equal and opposite reaction. Isaac Newton said that. That‘s who I‘m named after; my mother is a physicist.”

“Still. It can’t be easy for her. How long did you say you’d been dead for?”

“Almost nine months now I think. But for me it was pretty much since just before that book hit my head.”

“It happens that fast? You don’t get much time to adjust do you?”

“Time means nothing when you’re dead. Things just happen; you learn to accept things when they do. What happened with you and Brad?”

“Brad? Nothing really. It just. We were together. Then we weren’t. It - we – it just stopped between us I guess.”

“That was a while ago though, huh? Did you love him?”

“I did. But it wasn’t that I was in love with him that was the problem so much as that I didn’t want to stop being in love with him. Do you see the difference?”

“I think so.”

“I guess that if things just happen then things can just stop happening too.”

He mouthed a word to me: “acc-cep-tance.”

I smiled and tucked him in. “Do you want a story tonight then?”

He shook his head. “No, I’m ready to go to sleep now. Night-night.”

“Night-night Isaac.”

I kissed his forehead and brushed away a curl that hadn’t been there a few weeks before. I turned out the lamp in the room but left the door ajar and switched on the light in the hall.

The next morning was Sunday and Isaac was gone. The bed he slept in was made up and smelled of freshly laundered linen. The coloring books I had bought had vanished and the black towel he had wrapped around his neck that first afternoon was folded and lay upon the shelf in the cupboard upstairs. I lay on my bed and wept a little, only this time I stopped before my sheets needed washing. I rose, washed my face, sat down on the armchair that was still coughing up remnants of OhNo!, opened the book I had started many months ago and picked up where I had left off.

*(Excerpt from Rubber Life, Francine Prose)