Little Baby Faulkner

24

Brooklyn's baby disappeared. It didn't say it was going. It didn't ask for the keys to the car. It just up and vanished like a fart in the wind—apparently right from underneath Brooklyn's loving arm—(she had probably been carrying him under her arm like a football, unaware that civilized people had long since stopped playing that game). Brooklyn's kid was hardly a baller—I mean with that name? Imagine a kid named Little Baby Faulkner who quarterbacked the team, his docile upper limbs coming alive at the snap, killing it for the papers and the fans, slicing through statistical records like a knife through warm butter.

Charisma and I learned this fact when Brooklyn leaned in the room and said: "Baby Faulkner is missing."

Charisma said, "Are you sure?"

Brooklyn said, "Yes, I'm sure. How do you think I misplaced an entire baby. It wasn't no accident. He was here one minute and the next he'd gone missing."

"Missing," Charisma said. "You mean lost? Or missing."

"I am trying to find my baby!" Brooklyn shouted. "I don't know if he's lost or missing or just plain "misplaced"—ok? He's fucking gone—right? I was in his room with him and he was in the cradle and I was doing lines off my Vacation School Bible and I was like: Up, baby. Down, lines off my VBS Bible. Up: baby. And then one time I was doing up and there was no more Little Baby Faulkner! The fucker is gone—I'm telling you."

Charisma stands—she gets off the bed.

"Well," I say. There's a difference between gone and missing and invisible—which one is this?"

Brooklyn looked at me like she was the queen and I had broken the rules. I got the idea she wouldn't mind if I was lost or missing. (Or it could be that she wanted to fuck me and I was misreading her look—I'm crazy in this way, I can't tell the difference.) She said: "Come look. You. Follow her. You. Come with me. I'll show you the scene of the crime."

Brooklyn left the room, followed by Charisma, followed by me.

We all entered the crib room. I immediately bent at the knees and checked under the crib. I don't know what I expected to see: an infant Baby Faulkner clinging to the steel cords on the underside of the crib? An infant Baby Faulkner chilling on his back reading graffiti his older brother had left for him? What would it say? Here lies Little Baby Joyce, snuffed to death with his mother's hand, taken away by paramedics, incinerated in the morgue at Miami Valley, converted into a coffee cup of ashes, returned to his mother, placed on the mantle of this very house, forgotten by everyone until just this moment. But I didn't find any of that. There was just dust and long brown hair from Brooklyn's head and stickers: lots and lots of stickers representing the movies and comics Brooklyn (and Charisma and I) all grew up with: the Wicked Witch, Dorothy sitting cross legged on a fence whistling, the notes coming from between her lips in black quarters and eighths, Yoda whispering his last words to Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones swiping tarantulas off the back of his duplicitous raid partner. I ducked my head out from underneath Faulkner's crib and told Brooklyn I didn't see anything under there.

"Is this a joke to you?" she said.

"It's not a joke to me" I said. "But I do think that following the footsteps from the last time this happened would be smart."

Charisma pulls me out of the room. Her hands are on my chest, smoothing. She says: "We want your opinions. Your theories. But not right now, ok? Stay here and if you think of anything, save it." She taps on my left temple and goes back in the crib room.

I hear Charisma say: "Brooklyn. Honey. What are we talking about, here—'cause this is making me sick."

"Charis..you want to sit down?"