Little Baby Faulkner

21

I wake a few hours later—it's dawn. Charisma's head is in my lap. I'm in the same chair as before. A hotboxed cigarette falls from my fingers and I lean to pick it up and place it on the arm of the chair. Charisma's soft head, soft hair cascade on the chair seat.

I hear something at the end of the hallway. The sound of a tiny waterfall—or maybe it's just the sound of a waterfall, tiny because it's at the end of the hall.

I look back at the room where Wendy and Charisma's grammy are sleeping. Go past the door to the attic. The light 💡 in the bathroom is on. I push open the door and Brooklyn is there, kneeling by the tub holding Little Baby Faulkner underneath the water and Brooklyn's voice is slowly counting: "Eleven. Ten. You're almost there, boo. Nine. Eight. Seven. Good boy. Six. Five. You got this! Four—and!—three..and..two..and one! Good baby! Good job you stinky little thing." Brooklyn turns her head to acknowledge me. Then she goes back to dipping and washing her baby.

I think of events in my life or things I'd seen on TV where a human being had lost oxygen to its brain (during birth or attempted murder, the occasional drug accident) and the look and feel that overtook the person after the oxygen had been withheld. Did Brooklyn want this to happen to her baby? Was her intention to drown and kill just part of his brain?

"Babies are still amphibians," Brooklyn says.

"Looks like you're trying to keep that one..an amphibian," I say.

"Do you have kids?"

"No. I do not."

"Well. Keep it to yourself. I can feel you back there. I'm just washing my baby. If you want to stand here please keep quiet."

She shakes her baby 🐤, drying him with the air. He never cries—only makes an eghk sound periodically. Brooklyn dips him below the water 💧, holds her still baby stiller, and begins her countdown: "Thirty. Twenty-nine."

I'm coked out enough to let my eyes fully focus on Brooklyn's blue overalls, with nothing on underneath them. Coked out enough to watch the curve of her waist slip down down down into her crotch, which is only barely hidden by the pouch of her overalls. She looks like a kid to me—how I imagine myself as a child, or a sister grown up. Skinny from the coke diet: eating once or twice a week—two full meals, the rest would be a half a bowl of cereal here, half a bowl of cereal there. There was no milk in the refrig so I imagined her eating her cereal dry—or worse: with water. Brooklyn perched on the arm of the couch, downstairs, eating a mostly empty bowl of granola with her hands.

Brooklyn's still counting, and her baby makes only pleasant sounds as if he was being tickled. "Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen."

"Do you do this often?" I laugh.

And Brooklyn laughs back.

I see the soles of her feet, her toes, and I notice that she flexes her toes each time she counts a number. I picture her cunt constricting with every count, too. And it's hard for me to explain (my lust for her)—Charisma has the prettier face, the healthier breasts, and even overweight Charisma is far more attractive than Brooklyn, on an objective level. But Charisma's extra fat renders her unattractive to me—almost unfuckable—while something about the East Dayton beat-up face and too-skinny body of Charisma's friend Brooklyn makes me totally uninterested in Charisma and wholly interested in her friend.

As Brooklyn continues her deadly countdown ("Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven") my mind fills with nightmare images of Little Baby Faulkner, dead, on the bathroom floor, stuck underneath the tub, no blood, no breathing, Brooklyn gymnast-sprung, her face up, me stripping off her overalls and finding her half-haired pussy, deep brown follicles, my hand between the lips that birthed Little Baby Faulkner, pressing my fingers in—she reminds me of a red-haired East Dayton puss who was like the third girl I fucked and I made her cum with my mouth and part of my hand and after she had cum three times she said, "You clearly don't have any erectile dysfunction," and "Two is good, sir!" That was the first time we fucked and I imagined something like that with Brooklyn but this is my problem: How do I risk telling Brooklyn I like her? If she's gtg I'm no problem. But if I'm coming out of left field, if Brooklyn wasn't even thinking of getting with me, then I've got Brooklyn telling Charisma and Charisma getting hurt and then there's Brooklyn telling Rambuncto and Rambuncto coming over to kill me. I swore when I drove them home last night that I could hear Rambuncto and his friends seething for me to go faster, pussy—if you drive the speed limit the whole time I'm going to kick your ass, you upper-class film student! I could hear them again now, telling me they hoped I had liked fucking Brooklyn because that was going be the last time I fucked anyone.

Brooklyn's deleterious countdown echoes in my ear. "Two." An eternity. "One." She lifts Little Baby Faulkner up from the water.

He gasps.

He blinks.

I think of the tiny amount of awareness LBF has—or maybe it's huge, simply forgotten since he has no language tools. I wonder how big this slice is, how big is his feeling? He wouldn't know of a whole life of memories he'd soon be leaving behind. He wouldn't know of a catalog of people who would miss him when he was gone—he would only know his mother. He would only know that soft, sick head of Brooklyn, her tender voice washing waves of comfort over him. He would probably make no sound at all.

I remembered a time I had once drowned. I know, it seems unbelievable that I have such an experience, but I do. I had gotten to-go food and tried sailing a boat from California to Oregon to see my friend—out of a lake with no connection to the ocean—I was that drunk and that delusional. I got tangled in the ropes and tried to jump from the boat to the dock and I fell into the water and the first thing I thought of was the phone in my pocket—it was going to get wet—and the second thing I thought of was that I was going to drown. With that shock of adrenaline I said to myself: "This is the most important moment of your life. Do not die here." And with that little rush of intention I made it out of the water, onto the dock, and I lived to fight another day.

I think of that day from time to time. Picture what would have happened if things had gone the other way. I would never have written a second book. My parents and siblings would know that I died while drunk. My employer would have this picture of me that pretty much fit everything they knew about me so far: drunk, wild, and—before he killed himself—extremely talented. I walk around this world 15 years later always knowing that there are these doors, throughout the world, and if you're not careful (and eventually, whether you're careful or not) you'll walk through one and—as they say in The Ice Storm—you'll walk right out of your life.

Brooklyn dipped Little Baby Faulkner into the water and with his face underneath the surface, began her count again. She counted so solidly and in perfect interval that I forgot to worry about her Little Baby and found myself counting along with her. I wanted to ask: Are you trying to kill him? Are you trying to kill him by accident? Or do you just want to kill his brain 🧠 before it's begun to grow? Is that the life that's left for a Little Baby Faulkner? Born into this world to a psychopath I would give up a years-long relationship to fuck? Or what's worse: that I would stand in this room with this mother while she kills him and do nothing..but watch? That discovery would put me away for assisted murder or accomplice, accessory, or whatever.

This whole third countdown I remembered the baby Brooklyn had before and how he was found dead in the crib! I mean, obviously: Brooklyn suffocated him! Cut off his air, just covered his mouth with her hand and watched the life go out of him. She had killed that one and she would kill this one and I would now be a witness to Brooklyn killing Little Baby Faulkner but I could not move! And this wasn't due to any witching power of the girl. It was me! My own mess of a person who would stand by and watch another person kill their baby. I knew the infant at this stage would die so easily, with no protest, he would take it on like his mother's countdown, slow, methodical, accepting each shade—each sliver—of it, in stride, counting off the clock it would take less than a minute for Faulkner's lungs to stop accepting air, his tiny heart running forward faster and faster, then his brain would die, piece by piece, and his whole growth and his whole maintenance would stop, Brooklyn dropping him, him sinking to the bottom of the tub, arms no longer flapping, eyelids no longer blinking, bricked through the waves of his tiny ocean.