Are People Out There

---

I decided to become my friend’s baby. My friend is someone I know from high school. We’ve been friends for years. Now she is married to a man, a CPA or MBA or CEO, and they have a baby. 

She is always posting pictures of the baby online. Pictures that are instantly liked, constantly fawned over in comments, and revered absolutely by friends and acquaintances. I see the baby’s face on my screen—it’s like the top of a cute, overfrosted cupcake. You just want to eat him up!  

If there were a Platonic ideal of baby, this baby would be it. 

The baby’s name is Samuel. 

He’s named after the dad.  

Sam Jr., they call him. Wittle Sammy, one aunt calls him. All I can think is that when the baby grows up, in the future, heit will be forced to fill in someone else’s name on important forms. It won’t ever truly be his name because even as it grows natural for him to think of himself as Sam or Samuel, there will always be a little room in the back of his brain, where his father, the original Sam, sits and stares out. He’ll have to add on the Jr., too, as a particular kind of torture. What a horrendous thing to do to a baby! 

It could be worse. I come from no name before me. Had to try and make something of my own. Failed miserably to let anything shine through.  

Samuel, as a baby, seems, for now, happy. He doesn’t seem to worry much about anything, least of all concepts like the future. Which makes him somehow less human to me. He is full of uncanny absences like that. He knows no poverty or regret yet. He doesn’t cycle endlessly through an embarrassing moment from earlier in the day, or from years earlier for that matter. To him, there is barely any concept of “day.” He sits and poses in almost all the pictures with the same content feebleness that borders on the regal. 

It’s too much sometimes to even look at. But I do and do and do and do…    

My favorite is the one where he’s caught mid-yawn. He’s just a little yawning blob that people want to give their attention to, forever. Look at him! Yawn-smiling as if the world, all of it, the whole thing, comes out of his mouth and can return just as easily—to be devoured, digested, and defecated back for us to praise! 

It wasn’t like I just woke up one morning and decided to become the baby. It was a slow, Sisyphean accumulation. There are beetles that purposefully push dung into balls over a long period of time. It’s beautiful. That was “me,” except without the purpose. A dung beetle knows what it is. It is a dung beetle. I only knew myself as “me”—and squandered much because of it.   

There was a division between my “real” self and my true self. “Me” was my “real” self—the façade everybody saw daily and reacted to. My true self was beneath it, deeper, unknowable to everybody else, even “me.”  

One night I came home from work. I had that common feeling of being encumbered…like my clothes were wearing clothes. As if my skin was also clothes. My heart even seemed to be styling itself in big, robey clothes. Shades of chartreuse and fuchsia. I came home from work to find Lucy getting men online again. She is always getting men. She is my sister. She was in a car crash years ago, cracked her skull open, left her with a chronic pain that is mysterious to me still because she doesn’t let on that it’s even there. She rarely moves from the futon in the living room, where she spends her days online. Online she moves like an undead shark. She is deadly to the lonely. Her favorite hunting ground is a casual polyamorous dating site called ScheduledBaes. She never uses her real name or picture. Instead, she uses an old photo of our mother—when she was young and beautiful and hadn’t had us yet and was still alive. In the photo, our mother looks like an actress in the grainy half-dark, thinking of rain and love, lips that have just been kissed. I miss her and the puppet shows she’d put on for us. Using our mother as bait, Lucy woos lonely men, old and young. She has created another life for our mother in death. And there are men who are attracted to this mother, who is really my sister. 

Lucy often likes to act out her online conversations as she types. Most nights I turn the TV off and listen to her. One night, she’ll say something like: “I have never seen it move like that!” The next night she’ll say: “I think Atheism was created by God himself, to subjugate us pitiful women into worshipping the cock.” 

Once, she said: “I’ll only be in Paris a week, let’s meet at the Eiffel Tower, wear the cowboy hat I like and the baguette plug.” I still think about a man in a cowboy hat waiting eternally at the top of the Eiffel Tower for my mother to float through the doors, his rectum spasming from a large, vibrating baguette. 

I don’t know why my sister does it. She absorbs something from the experience—an energy, a pulse, an adrenaline shot, a force of electric yet temporary confidence and power. When she’s happy and had her fill of it, she’ll hunker back down into the futon and ponder the endless quantity of “persuadable cocks” (her words) in the world. She is not interested in money or love or sex or companionship and yet she goes back, night after night, to do this thing. I wonder sometimes if she is, indeed, mother.   

Why do you need to use a picture of Mom to do that? I asked her the night I decided to become the baby. 

She looked at me, made a face, and said, Why not? She is beautiful. Also, what’s for dinner? 

I mulled the abstract idea of beauty over for a few seconds in my head, then said: My day was good by the way. 

Ha, she said. No it wasn’t. 

I limped to the sad kitchen and began putting things into pots, in the microwave, wherever. I didn’t even bother putting the kitchen light on. 

Lucy hooted from the living room, then said: Bro, I hope you’re not as dumb as some of these guys out there! I really don’t want you to be. Please don’t be. 

I kept making dinner as she went on. This guy just offered to massage me until, quote, my body disappeared from sexual nirvana, unquote, she said. That’s just moronic.  

I pondered the idea of “sexual nirvana.”  

Yahtzee! she yelled. He just sent me his cock. Eh, it’s just okay. 

I didn’t answer her. I heard the scattered erotic raindrops of clicking on her keyboard. I breathed in. I looked at my reflection between the dotted water stains on the pot I was holding. I wasn’t a baby. I had somehow ridiculously plodded my way into adulthood…   

I went and scrolled through the photos of the baby online. The happy baby. Little hands. Tiny shoes. Even the photo where he’s crying was adorable and happy. 

Yes, I thought, it doesn’t have to be this way. I can get back there! The night before I had almost done it but chickened out. The night before that, too, and the night before that, and the night before… 

My life could be measured in nights before…  

I wasn’t right but couldn’t seem to make my body do what it needed. I went to bed each of those nights feeling embarrassed. In the darkness of my bedroom, I could feel eyes on me. All of them my own. 

That night was the night I thought: Tonight will be different. Then I thought of Lucy, her exuberance and joy in acting out a life that didn’t exist, and in some ways, never would. She herself was already a baby. A great big one. She let the world swaddle her in the way she wanted. She was happy with any nipple she popped into her avid mouth. She was both Mother and Baby.  

How does one do that?  

Later in the night, our skinhead neighbor’s animatronic eagle, which for some reason hooted, did its hooting in the listening dark. It was past bedtime for babies everywhere, certainly for Samuel, and the night had drifted into that land of dreaming for most well-adjusted and stable people.

I stayed awake because I didn’t want to dream. 

I felt un-wishy-washy for once, brave, tectonically calm. I blocked out Lucy’s narrating from downstairs. And it was in that dreaming darkness that I began my silent transition in the glow of my screen. I went to all my social media profiles online and took down everything of “me.” Every photo that signaled the person known as “me” was deleted from record. In its place, I replaced them with new me. The me I was meant to have stayed long ago.   

The effect was immediate! I felt more at home, less confused, truer of heart. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! I wanted to raise my arms in victory. There were pockets of space attached to me where I could grow into. I looked at myself online. There I was! That was me!   

Quickly I decided, as the baby, I would never, at least without good cause or gun to my head, fill out important forms again! 

That night I dreamt the dreams of someone who was not futilely striving, had no problems, and needed no explanations. 

What is it like being the baby?

Being the baby—specifically being Samuel Jr.—is better than being whoever it was I was being when I was “me.” 

That wasn’t me. It was a fraud. A shadow. A sad shape of person who bumbled themself into vexations and never-ending aberrations. Who subsisted on fantasias and delusions. Who thought only to excess, who moved only a centimeter.   

The baby is both joyful and delicate, which makes him very powerful. Which, in turn, makes me feel powerful.  

These days I sometimes just stare at how happy I look now in pictures. I am so out of my mind with happiness it is astonishing!  

And it’s astonishing how much my happiness has an effect on others!

Daily I am graced with accusations from my online friends of being “too cute” and “adorable” and having “my mother’s eyes and my father’s dimples.” Usually accompanied by an “LOL” or “wth.” It has translated to the physical world as well. My body feels more like mine, instead of being controlled by a tiny person in the crystal silo of my head. I strut down the hallways of my workplace, the streets of my neighborhood, the aisles of my grocery store with my chest puffed out so grand it is amazing to me I haven’t contaminated the world with this soft confidence, with this oozing music of self-creation. 

I am cute now. 

I have my whole life ahead of me. The real me. The one dashing in a diaper, amused at the banter of ketchup bottles and car keys. 

I get to cry and cry and cry and cry and cry and cry. I get to let people love me without doubt. 

You are a sad mope still, Lucy says to me one day. She says she notices something in me. That there’s a tugging there occasionally, like the tiny invisible hands of some unhappy baby left behind while the rest of the family has moved on. 

Just small enough to be insignificant, but just big enough to be…something bigger. 

I’m only a little surprised by this: I still feel the warm bubble bath of something new inside me, but also can’t help but feel she’s right.

You know what the Bible says, she says to me, clicking away on her computer. She is courting a foot fetishist named Jace online with a slightly pixelated photo of a foot. After a long silence in which I can’t summon a single thought, she says: Know thyself. 

How did you find a picture of mom’s foot like that? I say. 

I know all the family pictures we have, she says. You should look at them some time. It’s nice to remember life. 

Says the person who pimps our mom’s photos out, I say. 

Lucy laughs. I know who I am, she says with a big shrug. I don’t know, man. You aren’t being real. All I’m saying is you look like you’re waiting for another shoe to drop. 

The other shoe, I say. 

Another shoe, she says.   

She clicks away at her keyboard, occasionally inputting a handful of chips into her mouth. What makes you so real and happy? I say.  

She shrugs again, looks away from her computer finally, and burps. Who even actually says they’re happy? she says. Then she carefully places another handful of chips into her mouth and looks out the window—the only one she ever looks out: a semi-view of the street and sky, or perhaps just spaces in performance of street and sky.  

It finally happened the other day. I knew it would. Another shoe. People don’t want you to be happy. Or maybe they just want to try to find happiness, even at the expense of your own. In any case, my friend—the one with the baby—has been messaging me recently online and asking what is wrong with me. I never answer. 

What is wrong with you using all those pictures? she says. 

Of my baby? That’s my baby, she says. 

What is wrong with you? I couldn’t believe it when Stephanie told me. She said did you see and I said no. I said there’s no way. What the hell, man? 

What is wrong with you??? 

It’s just creepy.

Please tell me it’s some kind of weird joke??? 

What the fuck man??? 

Then her husband messages me and he asks what is wrong with me and if I were there he’d beat me to a pulp, then he writes his name to make sure I know it’s him that’s writing through her account. 

Are you retarded, you fuckhead? Stay away from my family or I will have you killed. —Samuel Sr. 

They keep taking turns messaging me and asking what is wrong with me, threatening me with legal action (they know a great lawyer), with violence (Samuel Sr. is great with a nine iron), with loss of friendship (like I ever was a good friend, she writes), with more questions I can’t seem to answer (what happened to you?). Then their friends begin commenting on my photos, asking me just what the hell I think I’m doing. Their collective tone changes wildly, from confused to angry to hostile to pleading to interrogating to threatening and so on. I never say anything. What can a baby say to people who think they understand everything? I’m their baby, and they don’t even understand me… 

It all reminds me of the big story in town a couple years ago about the girl at the high school, Trisha Appel, who killed herself by drinking a bottle of cough syrup and drowning herself in frozen Lake Wiccxip one night. She was bullied and harassed. For who knows what. Everyone was devastated when she did it but couldn’t seem to see they’d had some hand in it. We never let people be people. I teach at that high school when I’m not being the baby and I only remember her in passing, as if I’m recalling somebody else’s memories, just floating through them, not responsible for what I leave out of place. In them, she only hovers down the hallways, never speaks, blends in, could be anybody. In the dream, I have the overwhelming instinct to wake up and go back as I am now and show her “me”: ridiculous and sad, confused thumping always happening inside my chest, head pudgy with past mistakes and wild embarrassments. And then I would show her the picture, one of a dozen I keep now in my wallet, of myself, of what I would consider my true self: a blue-bundled blob of out-of-control joy. Samuel Jr.’s first day of being alive. 

And I would say, Isn’t he a beautiful baby? 

I would say, Isn’t it crazy how there are people out there, all over, like this beautiful, baby boy?