Happy Doomsday: A Novel Read online

  “And why would you smile?” she asked, resisting the urge to hold his head still, as if a cure were as simple as a laying on of hands. “What does a prism make you feel?”

  She wondered if he’d remember her telling her husband how h-word the prism had made Dev. She watched as the connection clicked together like Legos in his head.

  “Happy,” he said, as her face did the same thing the face in the picture was doing.

  And so they practiced, and Dev seemed to get better, calling out “Happy” or “Sad” or “Angry” correctly seventy-five percent of the time, before she realized he’d just memorized the sequence. After rearranging the pages, she went back to coaxing his random guesses into the neighborhood of the right answers, the words “Close, but . . .” the most often heard combination issuing from her lips during these sessions.

  And even as she persisted, she knew the face book was a half step at best. In real life, people don’t hold their expressions until you call out an answer. In real life, people’s faces are constantly changing. Reading them can be like trying to read cards in the middle of a shuffle. And so it was on to phase III: the portable DVD player.

  Dev could now practice on fully animated faces—she thought—except he didn’t. Instead, she found him hitting pause repeatedly, playing the faces back, virtual frame by virtual frame, watching as the world’s slowest smiles blossomed or the world’s heaviest grief came crashing down. Released into the first grade with this new kind of practice under his belt, Dev did no better than before. A little worse, actually. He’d developed a twitch in his right hand from pressing an invisible remote, trying to make the faces go slower, so he could catch up.

  Dev hadn’t always been diagnostically shy. Freshly born to an older couple who’d thought—mistakenly—they were past their childbearing years, Dev seemed as normal as any other baby: playing catch with his feet; giggling when he broke wind; opening and closing his hands like starfish when it was time to nurse.

  “He’s perfect,” his mother declared back then, and his still-living father agreed—or so Dev had been told.

  He could still remember the last adult eyes he looked into, back when he was a toddler of two and his real dad was still alive to agree about Dev’s postnatal perfection. He’d been flying at the time, with an assist from his god, a.k.a. his real dad, while his other god, a.k.a. his mom, was off doing mom stuff. His belly was balanced on huge upturned palms as his own palms stretched out and down while he giggled so hard he nearly rolled off.

  “Careful there, Lucky Lindy,” his dad said. “Paris is in our sights. This is no time to get careless . . .”

  Dev looked down at his dad’s eyes. He liked looking at them when his father spoke, because his eyes spoke too. This time—that last time—they winked, and then crossed as his dad exaggerated how difficult it was holding him up.

  Giggling even harder, Dev started to roll, but didn’t fall. Instead, his father’s hands turned the roll into an excuse to flip him over so he faced the ceiling above the couch where his father lay, holding him aloft. With excruciating tenderness, his father then lowered him safely to his chest, where the little boy could feel the booming of his father’s heart knocking between his wing bones.

  “Whoa,” his father said, and Dev remembered how cool and damp his father’s hands felt. He tried ruffling the boy’s hair only to leave it wet and clinging to his forehead. “You are such a big boy,” his father said, an arm wrapped around Dev’s middle like a seat belt.

  His father stopped talking and just breathed after that. Heavy, hard breaths the boy’s body rode like a boat rising and falling with the waves rushing to shore. He looked at the ceiling. The cracks reminded him of the lightning his dad pointed out, rocking him after the thunder made him cry.

  “God’s fixing a crack in the sky,” he’d said. “That’s just the sound of his hammer . . .”

  Dev was still looking at the cracked ceiling when his father’s seat-belt arm grew heavy, and cold. And when his mother returned, she found the two of them, still on the couch, one of them trying not to move, the other not having to try.

  Before the funeral, Dev’s mom hadn’t spoken to her husband’s brother since her wedding. And though the boy never asked, the pair nevertheless went to the trouble of making light of the circumstances behind their becoming a couple.

  “Less paperwork,” they’d say together and laugh, as if they hadn’t collaborated on this self-consciously offhand remark. What they meant was that mother and child didn’t need to change names, it being a lateral, Brinkman-to-Brinkman move. Plus, his dad and uncle looked like what they were—brothers—meaning Dev looked like both. Most people had no idea there’d been a bait and switch until the uncle was introduced with the step word, after which their eyes would wander to the awkward sets of wedding photos: the first with his mom, his dad, and his dad’s brother as best man, and the second shot in a government office somewhere, plus toddler Dev, minus his dad.

  Separately, and less glibly, his mother had tried explaining—again, not that Dev had asked. “He was such a help, after,” she said. “I fell apart and he stepped up. Met with the funeral people. Picked out the suit. I just had to show up and be the widow.”

  The adjective she was leaving out before widow was medicated. Her brother-in-law and future husband was a failed doctor who donned a pharmacist’s white coat as a consolation prize. As such, the consolation he offered his sister-in-law and future wife included 0.25 milligrams of Xanax, repeated as needed. Dev had seen the amber bottle with his mother’s name on it in the medicine cabinet. The pills inside were the same his fake dad would eventually use to manage Dev’s symptoms, postdiagnosis.

  “And after that,” his mother continued, “he just kept helping . . . and just stopped going back home.”

  They were in the boy’s room when she told him this, his mother sitting sideways in a chair next to his desk, Dev on the floor, dismantling a vacuum cleaner. Doomsday was still eight months in the future, Dev was a sophomore, and his mother worried sex would soon be an issue, if it wasn’t already. And so she tried explaining the complicated nature of her relationship to her latest husband. The boy didn’t look up once during her entire explanation, busying himself instead with the removal of screws and the setting down of parts, positioned exactly like the exploded diagram resting on the floor next to him.

  “And so that’s why,” his mother said finally, resting her hands on her knees.

  “Okay,” Dev said into the yawning pause that opened afterward.

  His mother waited for more, watching the top of her son’s head as he removed a cover plate and set it down carefully next to the screws that had once held it in place.

  “Okay,” she said, getting up to leave. “I’m glad we had this conversation,” she added, as if they’d actually had one.

  According to his mother, the change was like a switch. One day, he was a two-year-old bag of giggles whenever she tickled him, and the next, all the Tickle Monster got was a glare and a body like a fist. He stopped using the few words he’d been using, and his eyes began wandering away whenever she tried to catch them.

  Two things happened just before the change: her husband died, and Dev got his scheduled dose of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine. The coincidence didn’t turn his mother into an anti-vaxxer, per se; she just didn’t like how people made fun of that one anti-vaxxer who happened to be an ex–porn star. For Mrs. Brinkman, the ridicule wasn’t about the woman’s lack of a science degree so much as her having ovaries. The pro-vaxxers were just patriarchal supporters of Big Pharma—an ironic stance for a woman with a professional pill dispenser for a husband.

  “Love’s not logical” was all she’d say.

  Her son—who suspected emotions fell somewhere between Santa and the Easter Bunny on the logic scale—didn’t disagree.

  But after his stepfather’s diagnosis, Dev stopped going to “so-called doctors.” There was no search for support, no treatment options considered. As far as the b
oy’s symptoms went—like obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic attacks, the occasional trancelike state that may or may not be a seizure—lucky Dev had a pharmacist in the family.

  “Bottoms up,” he said, handing out Xanax like Flintstones vitamins from a supply he skimmed from his customers’ legitimate scripts.

  In retrospect, it was probably a convenient condition for a stepson to have, at least to the man who’d married his dead brother’s wife. After all, Dev stayed in his room, entertained himself, kept out of the way. He was like a puppy that happily trotted into its crate and pulled the door closed behind. Except Dev was even better than a puppy; he was potty-trained and, once he was older, could be given chores he completed with breathtaking single-mindedness.

  Aimed at the bathroom, not only did he scrub every speck of mold and mildew from the grout, but he buffed clean the individual sockets of the toothbrush holder and the gummy underside of the mounted soap dish before removing the aerating screen from the faucet and poking a toothpick through each clogged opening.

  “Maybe we should rent you out to the neighbors,” his stepfather said before insisting to his wife that he was only joking.

  At school, Dev’s eccentricities were less . . . appreciated.

  “Ass burgers? Is that, like, what homos eat for lunch?”

  Each year, at least one of Dev’s classmates imagined this anal malapropism was the height of wit. And each year, he corrected the would-be comedian’s pronunciation—Az-per-gers—inadvertently adding comedic fuel. Occasionally, a jokester might double down, insisting that Dev answer the question. “Which homos did you mean?” he’d ask before listing the evolutionary possibilities in ascending order. The crowd invariably lost it when he got to Homo erectus, though Dev never saw what was so funny. Instead, he dismissed the reaction as some neurotypical thing he’d never understand and frankly didn’t care to.

  As for those things Dev did care about—he averaged about one per year, a single, all-consuming fascination he dubbed his topique du annum à la soup du jour, using a precocious combination of faux French and faux Latin. Each new school year came with a new topique, and his teachers knew what to expect the rest of the year after he’d raised his hand with such urgency that not calling on him could be considered child abuse. After ten seconds of not being recognized, he’d start waving. Twenty seconds of un-responded-to waving would then be followed by adding his free hand to prop up the already-raised one, which went limp with fatigue at the wrist—a dramatic fatigue that slumped through his skeleton until he was halfway to cracking his skull on the floor. Fortunately, a simple “Yes, Mr. Brinkman?” was all it took to avoid a liability suit.

  Called on, Dev snapped back into an upright and locked position as his piping voice delivered whatever urgent proclamation weighed on his poor bones. “Did you know . . . ?” was then followed by some piece of trivia about his latest, special subject, thus introducing it to one and all.

  One year it was optics, thanks to the gift of a prism, so the boy on the spectrum could cast his own. From optics to microscopes, then telescopes, from microbiology to astronomy. One year, out of the blue, World War I aircraft fascinated him, followed by World War II paratroopers and the stuff they carried with them. This, in turn, became an obsession with camping gear and camping-gear catalogs, though, predictably for a budding agoraphobic, not camping itself. Next: survivalist websites. Next: disasters of all kinds, in history and fiction, including the biblical and/or zombie apocalyptical kind. And lastly, just before he got distracted by the actual apocalypse, another giant leap for Dev-kind: vacuum cleaners.

  That other kids considered him weird didn’t bother Dev; being weird was just synonymous with being smarter than they were, a point of pride purchased at the cost of one measly diagnosis. And so he sailed on through grades and topiques, blissfully clueless about his social cluelessness, thanks to a fortunate absence of friends to make him feel stupid by pointing it out.

  But then came fifth grade—astronomy—and a boy named Leonard Slovitz, whose father got a promotion and was transferred to Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. Their friendship began on the playground one recess, where Dev had kept to himself for the first four years of grade school—an arrangement reached by mutual agreement between Dev and everybody else. Leo, as the new kid, didn’t know any better—something he proved by walking right up, a hand out, a greeting on his lips.

  Dev was into spitting back then—a dangerous but effective way of maximizing his personal space. So as Leo approached, Dev began hoarding saliva, which he let fly once a line he was waiting to be crossed was. The gob hit the newcomer right between stunned eyes before sliding down the bridge of his nose. Dev turned his back then, mission—he assumed—accomplished.

  “D-d-do you know how many g-g-germs are in human saliva?” Leo stammered.

  “Yes,” Dev said, turning back around and proceeding to list them, starting with his favorites from the annum of microbiology: the ones ending in -occus.

  “You left out E. coli,” Leo said, once the spitting boy had finished.

  Dev flinched as if he’d been slapped. The new kid was right. He’d forgotten perhaps the most ubiquitous germ of all. “You’re correct,” he said, a phrase, in retrospect, he could not recall ever using with a so-called peer.

  “Leonard Slovitz,” Leo said, reextending his hand.

  “Dev Brinkman,” the other admitted, his own hands remaining clasped behind his back.

  And so they became friends—the weird kid and the slightly less weird kid—spending their days trying to out-nerd each other. For example: “Galileo didn’t invent the telescope,” Dev announced one recess.

  “Well, certainly not the Newtonian reflector,” Leo said back. “That was invented by Sir Isaac Newton.” Pause. “Of course.”

  “Yes, yes,” Dev said, the tone in his voice sounding a little irritated, which he frequently was during these nerd-offs, but a good kind of irritated—like he’d met his match and had to fight for what once came easy. “I mean the refracting telescope that most people think Galileo invented, but didn’t. It was a Dutch optometrist named Hans Lippershey.”

  “Hmmm,” Leo mused, “don’t you mean Sacharias Jansen or perhaps Jacob Metius?”

  Leo liked to argue like a pool shark playing a mark, flailing about right up until he sank three balls with one impossible shot.

  But then puberty came, Leo changed, and Dev didn’t. Oh, the latter’s voice cracked, and hair started growing where it hadn’t before, but he remained steadfastly immune to fashion while Leo got contacts and started caring about hair products and what was and wasn’t in. And spoiler alert: Dev was not and never had been “in.” But according to Leo, Dev wasn’t just not in; he was so out there it was like he was from outer space, yo.

  Yes, Leo, once articulate, had suffered a lobotomy by hormones that left him saying things like, “Yo.” And apparently convinced that outer space was a bad thing—a sad reversal for a once-promising astronomer.

  And it wasn’t just Leo. Everything seemed to be changing. Take the teachers. They’d stopped letting him bend their assignments to incorporate his latest topique. “You need to stretch, Dev,” they said. “Get outside your comfort zone.”

  And what did stretching to the point of discomfort suggest, outside medieval torture? Group projects, the very thought of which made him physically ill. Why should he have to water down his grade with the inferior contributions of others? The first few times he just had the others sign his work between texting their friends and playing rounds of Candy Crush. But then the teachers got wise and started talking about stretching and comfort zones again. Dev complained to Leo, and what happened? He sided with the comfort stretchers!

  “Just take a breath, already,” Leo advised, sounding worn-out by his onetime friend.

  “Okay,” Dev said, sucking in a quick one before blowing it out and resuming his litany of injustices until Leo threw up a hand and said, “Stop.

  “You want to know a c
omfort zone you can stretch out of?”

  Dev prepared to say no, but was cut off.

  “Your mom’s car,” Leo said. “We’re in high school and your mom still drives you to school. Why don’t you walk the last block, at least?”

  “Why?” Dev asked. “The car’s warmed up by then. The additional air pollution created by driving an extra block once the catalyst lights off is negligible at best. And that’s assuming my mom just turned right around and drove back home, as opposed to doing errands that take her past the front of the school anyway.”

  Leo responded with a face-palm.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” Dev asked.

  “Not as much as this conversation,” Leo replied.

  The reason his mom drove was simple: the bus took the freeway at freeway speeds. Dev wasn’t good with either of those. Riding along on residential roads already meant lying on his stomach in the back seat. Try that on the school bus and see how fast Leo changed his mind about Dev’s riding with his mom . . .

  The problem was data. Hurtling through the world at highway speeds involved too much processing. Even standing still, new surroundings had Dev flirting with overload as he tried to mentally map every square inch of the given space. To the lizard inside his Aspergerian brain, newness meant danger. He didn’t know what was important, and so everything was and needed to be mapped like so:

  Number of doors, windows, and objects in the way;

  Ceiling height, flooring type, the distance between him and each wall in steps;

  Objects that could kill him; and

  Objects he could defend himself with.

  If he could touch things—walls, other surfaces—that sometimes helped, but it was also what made being outside even worse. There were no walls to touch outside, and the catalog of things out there was as good as infinite. That’s why Dramamine didn’t help. The problem wasn’t motion sickness; it was insufficient bandwidth. The medication he needed was Adderall, which was contraindicated because of his anxiety issues, hence the Xanax. It was a classic pharmaceutical catch-22: the pill to increase his bandwidth would crank his anxiety up to eleven.