When Alex left for weekend camp this time, we were coming off overnights of him waking me at four to use the iPad. I wouldn’t have minded that – I had an aunt who got up at four, and Marines get up at five – except for the bolting. When he gets up pre-dawn, I would gladly hand him the iPad and say good-night except the sometimes when we’ve all been asleep in the past Alex has opened the front door and left and barged in on neighbors’ apartments.
Even then, he was a 4-foot-tall kid with no dark upper lip, a child who didn’t need to shave. He’s not anymore. I’m “not sure where this Alex comes from,” I write a follower on Twitter. “Maybe he was there all along?”
As I walked toward the bus to pick up Alex from weekend camp at about five on Sunday afternoon, for the first time in his life I feared Alex coming home. First time ever. Did he bite himself at camp? Did he bite anyone else? Will he bite anyone in his home tonight?
Looked more composed when he came off the bus than when he went on. “Ready to go home, Alex?”
“Cab? Bus?”
“If one comes, Alex. It’s such a nice day. Maybe we should just walk.”
Bus! Aww, bus! He refuses to budge from the bus stop, though there’s no bus coming. I want to him to walk to tire him out. I pull his arm; he pulls away. “Alex, there’s no bus coming!” Couldn’t anyone in the fucking world see there’s no bus coming? Why can’t my son?
“So we’re going to have a quiet night tonight, right, Alex? Not like the last few nights before camp?”
“iPad!”
It’s home charging for you, Alex. He’s been popping up for a long time around five, then four, then 3:30, each time demanding the iPad. In the Bolting Time I started plugging the iPad in near my bedside to make sure I heard him coming to get it – which I was sure he’d do before bolting into some neighbor’s apartment. It works. It works for a while at five, at four, at 3:30.
Then Alex shows up, the night he comes home from camp, at when the green numerals of our bedroom alarm clock show just “12:30.”
“Ah ah ah. No no! No!” No to everything I, dad, say and do. No to everything. He charges me and curls on the floor in what seem to the neighbors downstairs like one hell of a noisy ball at quarter to one.
A few nights and episodes before, Jill taught me to speak softly to him, in short sentences, to never say his name. I don’t. I don’t. I turn off the lights and don’t say his name when he curls up outside the bathroom door and slashes at my touch.
I have to have Jill. “I don’t care if you get fired tomorrow,” I say to her, “but I need your help now.”
“What do you want me to do?” Wish I knew. He’s come to see the iPad as his only friend, and though I know it’s our fault I know at the same time that we couldn’t have done a thing about it. But what have I done in life to deserve a son who sees the iPad as his given right in the middle of the night?
“Alex, back to bed. No, back to bed!”
He shoves me. He pushes in the dark. I turn the light on. He turns it off. When he was a child I could take him into the bathroom in the middle of the night and turn on the light and say, “We’re staying here, Alex, until you decide it’s time to go back to bed!”
Nooooo! This is a new creature. He has whiskers in the daylight; in the dark, he suddenly almost knocks me over. “Alex, back to bed. Back to bed. It’s time for bed – it’s a schoolday tomorrow…” What does that even mean to him anymore? I wonder as I arrange the pillow and the spare mattress at the side of his bed. He can’t bolt over me if I’m here. Even if I’m asleep.
Posted by Jeff Stimpson
at 8:49 PM EDT
Updated: Sunday, 12 May 2013 5:41 PM EDT
