Narrator Disorder

Even a blind man can see the fetters of stress that shackle Mom. Plum-colored bags make her look more raccoon than woman. Crows must’ve dug in their talons deep when they left their marks on the corners of her eyes. No descendant of Winston Churchill has possessed deeper ravines to make her cheeks look like the bulldog he’d been called by his contemporaries. Even a blind man can see how deeply my spoken thoughts bite. Every word widens her despondent grimace, deepening the creases of her laugh lines. Laughing. I haven’t heard her laugh in a very long time. Mom shakes her head.

“You see, Doctor? He’s been like this all summer, and he just won’t stop. And it’s—”

On the contrary, it isn’t a matter of won’t but can’t. From the moment I wake, vision fogged by the residual film of sleep, to the moment I cross the threshold between reality and dreams, my mouth is the flapping jaw of a sock puppet controlled by the invisible ventriloquist that was my ceaseless torrent of thoughts. Dr. Nguyen nods, studying me with clinical eyes.

“And when exactly did this start, Mrs. Carmichael?”

“Miss Carmichael now…”

She was still legally Missus Carmichael. Mom has wanted to make her pending divorce known to everyone who might serve as a shoulder to cry on—

“I don’t—!”

—but she still wanted to keep the last name of the man she grew to loathe. Monthly alimony checks and full custody of their only child were the next two things on a long list of other things she wanted out of her failed marriage. Sell now while the stock’s still worth something. Mom looks like she wants to make all my baby teeth fly out of my gums, but not in the presence of a professional child psychologist who might cite her actions as an ingredient to my condition.

“You see? It’s all day with that hurtful mouth of his. Eight-year-olds don’t talk like this. It’s too…adult.”

“Daniel’s certainly eloquent for his age. Have you always spoken with so many big words, young man?”

If by “big words,” as the doctor so condescendingly put it, he means an intimacy with synonyms on par with a thesaurus, then no; prior to this June, my lexiconic well was as deep as an Alabama family’s gene pool. Mom rubs the bridge of her nose at the uncouth simile. Comic books and manga are the closest things I’ve ever come to reading high-brow literature. If you were to present me with the options of either marathoning those substantially bankrupt Illumination animated films or reading any one of James Joyce’s borderline incomprehensible word salad tomes, I’d choose half a day watching little yellow midgets yapping like braindead mongoloids every time. Despite my diction, I’m not concerned with expanding my mental lexicon. What eight-year-old boy is? Even now, I surprise myself by the sheer leap in my vocabularic dexterity with which my condition has bestowed upon me. I wonder if Dr. Nguyen is hiding an amused grin behind the interlocked fingers he so authoritatively rests in front of his mouth.

“And you say you can’t control what you say?”

I am at the complete mercy of my thoughts; a fact I thought I had already made abundantly clear.

“Have you ever tried to control it?”

The most evident mark of my failed attempts at reestablishing autonomy over my vocal cords is my left hand which I show to the doctor. There are small pink scars where my teeth broke through the skin on my index finger and thumb. Somewhere along the line it was decided that embarrassing myself in public would be less painful than biting my fingers off trying to suppress my spoken thoughts.

The doctor looks displeased with Mom.

“Ms. Carmichael, did you know about this?”

“Of course I did! I pulled his fingers out of his mouth when I saw his hand covered in blood. I asked him why he was doing it, and he told me it was to make the thoughts stop—”

The exact words I used were “to put an end to the constant verbal discharge.” It was at that point Mom realized this wasn’t a silly infantile phase like when I pretended to be a dog for a week because I couldn’t have a puppy for Christmas. The memories of my four-year-old self drinking Sunny Delight out of a dog bowl for breakfast and sniffing my uncle’s posterior still make me cringe.

“Where there any other ways you tried to stop Daniel’s ‘verbal discharge,’ Ms. Carmichael?”

“Well, I thought maybe if he just whispered what he said, it would help, but that didn’t work either.”

Dr. Nguyen shifts his gaze to me.

“Why not, Daniel?”

I remember an afternoon where I decided to experiment on a method of keeping the volume of my verbal discharge to a minimum by, as Mom previously mentioned, whispering. But every time I tried, my larynx would put up brazen defiance and the spoken thoughts would force their way out of my mouth at a fixed decibel. Then I tried to keep them inside by pursing my lips as tight as I could, but the pain of containing the torrent grew by mere seconds. My throat felt like a party balloon whose rubber membrane grew closer and closer to popping with the growing volume of helium and had no choice but to let the thoughts out.

This happened on a rather unfortunate occasion: at Dad’s company family barbeque. Dad kept telling me to stop embarrassing him in front of his coworkers, but they mostly found the advanced diction that composed my ungovernable insults amusing. It wasn’t until Mr. Nunez, Dad’s boss, waddled on by that the proverbial shit—

“Language, Danny!”

 —hit the proverbial fan. He was a rotund lout with an annoying hiccup laugh who looked like a rotisserie chicken in a suit and a face with more blubber than a beached whale. I wondered, loudly, how much more time that trophy wife he flaunted around spent in other men’s beds than Nunez’s own. He was within earshot when I had to let that thought out. I thought the bossman was going to have a heart attack from how red his face turned. Dad and I left the barbeque shortly after that and I was sent back to Mom’s place that very night. I cost him a promotion he had been coveting for five years, from what I overheard him arguing with Mom about.

“Were there any other times these thoughts have gotten you in trouble in public?”

Too many memories of shocked abhorred faces haunt me like specters to the unhooded executioner. My stomach churns at the memory of how I unwillingly announced my bestial desire to see down the shirt of a woman with the largest milkiest boobs I had ever seen while shopping for clothes with Mom. The woman’s agape, all-eyed look of disgust remains tattooed in my mind along the titillating window frame of cotton that presented her freckled cleavage to the world. Mom refuses to ever step foot in that Target again. She refuses to take me out shopping ever again.

There was also the afternoon when the screeches of a crying baby echoed through the halls of the children’s hospital. Mom and I had the God-blessed luck of having sat right next to the shrill red-faced brat. Were my eardrums made of weaker stuff, I would have asked Mom for some hearing aids after we were done. I looked down at the squealing babe, then up at its mother who prioritized starting the next chapter of her 300-paged cowboy-themed masturbatory aid over shutting up her little cocksquirt and saving the other little kids there from early onset tinnitus. Then I looked back at the infant. How easy it would be to wrap my hands around the ugly chubby creature’s ugly chubby neck until its face went blue; to paint the wax-polished linoleum tiles with its brains and blood and bone; to grab the handles of its carrier and fling it out of the third-floor window. Mom pressed her palm hard against my mouth, but it was already too late. We didn’t even get to see the pediatrician. I can still feel the eyes of everyone in that waiting room on my back as Mom rushed us both out of the building. I still remember the bitter tears she tried to hide from me on that quiet drive home. Dr. Nguyen looks unfazed by my grotesque imagination. Mom looks like she wants to shrivel up and die under the doctor’s desk.

“Christ, these aren’t even the worst things I’ve heard him say. I mean, just thinking about what kinds of things’ll come out of his mouth at school…”

“Is that why you sent him on his first day back gagged with a stress ball and duct tape?”

Mom wants to cry; the quivering corners of her mouth are a dead giveaway—

“Danny, please...”

—to the tears on the cusp of brimming over. I’ve seen it too many times to be wrong about it. I saw it when she fought with her sisters over Grandpa’s inheritance; when she gave the eulogy at her best friend’s funeral; every time Dad tells her what a mistake it was marrying a nagging cow like—

“Just shut up already!”

“Ms. Carmichael, that’s hardly being productive.”

“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do? I have to deal with the divorce, working two jobs, and now I have to deal with…this?”

The dam cannot hold. The tears flow. A mask of fingers tries to stifle the sobs, but not even silencers can completely mute the cracks of gunshots.

“My ex-husband’s gonna use what I did as proof that I’m unfit to raise his child, did you know that? Well, I’d like to hear that sonofabitch tell me—tell the judge—what he’d do different, cuz I’m so sure it would’ve been so much better than what I did. Daniel wasn’t his child when he needed to go shopping for back-to-school supplies at the Walmart the next city over. He wasn’t his child when we went to Disneyland and a little girl’s parents threatened to sue his son for traumatizing their daughter. Wasn’t his child when he asked that he only get Daniel every other weekend. Or—”

Hearing Mom cry makes my stomach coil like a ball python in a jungle canopy. I empathize with her; watching the structure of a life built with someone once bonded in matrimony crumble under the weight of unmet expectations is something I hope to never experience. But we are not here for her. Does she think she’s the only one suffering? Does she know the pain of teeth digging into the insides of her cheek, her tongue, her fingers, until she tastes penny-flavored blood—just to stop herself from making a fool of herself in public, just like she’s doing now? How couldn’t she?

Mom hunches herself in her seat, her face hidden behind her hands. Dr. Nguyen gets up from his seat and walks over to her. He gently lays a hand on her shoulder.

“Ms. Carmichael, why don’t you wait outside while Daniel and I talk?”

Mom gets up without saying a word. Her eyes look like she washed them out with chlorine. Without a word to the doctor or me, she leaves, her shoulders hunched. Dr. Nguyen walks back around to his desk and takes his seat.

“I’m sorry you had to hear all that. You must have it pretty rough at home, huh? I just want you to know that no matter what your mom says, none of this is—”

I don’t need a doctor’s diagnosis to know that neither my megaphoned thoughts nor my parents’ failed marriage is my fault…though it would be the first time hearing it. The doctor’s mask of professionalism cracks with the furrowing of his brow.

“Now, Daniel, can you tell me a little bit more about the violent and naughty things you’ve been…thinking out loud?”

Thinking out loud. Literally. I feel almost angry that I couldn’t have thought of it myself. The doctor grins.

To answer Dr. Nguyen’s question, I recall a mortifying incident at the dog park with my cousin Lara and her pet Schnauzer, Fiona. It was Mom who suggested I go with her to get out of the house for a bit. To get me away from her, I’m sure she meant, though I doubt she’d admit it. Lara was made aware of my condition beforehand and took it in strides, as queer as she found it. I watched the pup chase old tennis balls across the dirt field, do tricks like spinning and speaking, and mingle with the other canines that ran around the pooch play place. Mostly I sat on a bench near a doggy drinking fountain thought-speaking by myself while Lara mingled with her dog owner friends. I didn’t complain.

But I wouldn’t be remembering this if that was all to the story.

The most insignificant coincidences can often feel like the prophetic aligning of planets when hindsight is afforded. My eyes followed the erratic flight of a ladybug whizzing around my head until, with sudden insectile unpredictability, it landed on the tail of Fiona as she lapped at the doggy drinking fountain that she alone had the mental capacity to operate. And there below her fuzzy stub tail was a pink puckered eye that winked at me. I wondered what would happen if I shoved my finger inside it. How deep was it? To my knuckle? My wrist? My elbow? My shoulder? Would my hand reach out from Fiona’s mouth? Could I work her like a puppet like Jim Henson operating Kermit the Frog? Of course, I voiced all of this for the entire dog park to hear, out loud, unfiltered, with horror besmeared on Lara’s face. She didn’t talk to me the whole way home.

I overheard her and Mom fighting about it later. Lara was adamant that she never wanted to babysit a “little perv” like me again.

“Did you want to do any of the things you said?”

The doctor asked the question like he already knew the answer, and so did I. Only those of tottering fortitude or diseased sentiments let themselves give in to the id, that cackling libertine beast slavering sensuously, greedily down in the deepest recesses of my consciousness, goading me on through visceral caverns of gray matter. Children don’t form a basic moral compass until they turn five; even an eight-year-old can block out the perverted calls of his id.

Dr. Nguyen takes notes on his computer while I give him my answer. A more succinct one, I’m sure.

“And before your condition started, have you ever acted on or thought about acting on any other violent or inappropriate thoughts?”

The doctor’s question makes me think of a wooden stock shedding sunbaked lacquer like skin after a day at the beach without sunscreen; it got me thinking of a cheap plastic rear sight and off-centered bead; got me thinking of the rattle of copper ball bearings in a rusty receiver; got me thinking of a sparrow perched on a telephone line tweeting a simple little avian ditty in its simple little avian way. If Dr. Nguyen is impressed by my allusion to Irish folksongs, he doesn’t show it.

The sparrow tumbled soundlessly into the back lawn. It hopped and flapped piteously in the tall grass. In that moment, I felt the judgment of God pressing me into the earth, the weight of my sin making my eyes bulge out from their sockets. No hydrochloric acid burned hotter than the tears that welled in my eyes. I dug a grave for the little sparrow shortly after. Even made a little cross for it out of twigs. What right did I have to take that bird’s life? What right do I have to take any life? My superego’s questions reverberated in my skull as I placed the sparrow into its shallow earthen tomb.

There was no one with me to hear my vow: that I will never harm any living creature ever again. The doctor smiles. He then gets up from his desk and walks around me to the office door.

“Ms. Carmichael, if you’re ready, I’d like you to join Daniel and I.”

Daniel and me. You don’t ask someone to join I for lunch or walk with I to the liquor store. I wonder how a man with a PhD could make such a basic grammatical mistake. Dr. Nguyen pretends not to hear me, something we both know is impossible. Mom sits down next to me, mellowed out but with new red bags under her runny eyes.

“Ms. Carmichael, given that Daniel’s medical records show he has never exhibited any signs of ASD—”

Mom stiffens hearing the sequence of letters in that order. Autism spectrum disorder was the boogeyman of Andrew Wakefield’s big book of ghost stories that made mothers across the land of the free look upon the syringe needle with anxiety. The doctor nods in agreement.

“As I was saying, we can obviously rule out autism as the cause of Daniel’s condition. However, there is a chance that it is caused by a condition of the nervous system.”

“What do you mean, Doctor?”

“Do you know what Tourette’s syndrome is, Ms. Carmichael?”

Mom looks like someone smashed the head of a kitten right in front of her face.

“You’re not telling me—”

“No, he doesn’t.”

Instead of sharing Mom’s obvious relief, I can’t help but feel that a label to attach to my condition would make things easier for us in the long run, something to keep in our wallets next to our credit cards and give to people on the bus to explain why I act the way I do, something to keep them quiet and uncomfortable and not scream in our faces out of outrage. Mom keeps looking at Dr. Nguyen like she can’t hear me.

“What I was going to say was Tourette’s syndrome is a disorder characterized by sudden involuntary movements or vocalizations, or tics, in the sufferer. They can be anything from the repeated blinking of the eyes, a jerk of the shoulder, a shout and the like. Given the involuntary nature of your son’s outbursts, it may be, at least to some degree, related to some of the factors that cause Tourette’s.”

“What kinds of factors?”

“Factors like inherited genetics, environmental influences, or a chemical imbalance in the brain. Unfortunately, we simply don’t have any definitive answers as to what causes tics in children. I myself am not a specialist.”

Sullen defeat makes the loose flesh on Mom’s face seem to sag more. Droopy Dog comes to mind. Uncertainty makes for a harder pill to swallow than a definitive “no” to any cure for my unceasing torrent of thoughts.

“There’s also the way Daniel speaks. Normally, people diagnosed with tic disorders who have vocalized tics are often inarticulate noises, like screams or shouts, or words without any contextual meaning. But Daniel’s outbursts are too articulate, too eloquent, with a vocabulary I don’t even see in college-educated peoples’ everyday speech. It’s almost like—”

—An omnipotence of cosmic scale is strumming my vocal cords like a harpist at her stringed, vaguely heart-shaped melodic instrument out of a Bourbon courtroom, my lips and tongue the bell of the flesh-and-bone saxophone it blasts to the offense of everyone who hears it play. Dr. Nguyen has an expression on his face that says, “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“But there is one thing I’m certain of, it’s that there is no danger of Daniel acting on the thoughts he thinks out loud.”

Mom says nothing. She looks hungry for clarification.

“The truth is, Ms. Carmichael, we all have intrusive thoughts like these every now and then. Back when I was learning how to drive, sometimes I’d think about how easy it would be to steer my car onto the sidewalk and run over every person in front of me. Obviously, I wouldn’t be here if I acted on it. I’m sure you’ve had these little dark fantasies in the past, right?”

“Sure, I guess. Maybe.”

“And have you ever acted on them?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go! Just because these thoughts come to our mind every now and then doesn’t mean we want to do any of the things they contain or that we’re bad people for thinking them. Think of them as little brain farts: they don’t mean anything besides that sometimes we make them.”

But of course, voicing these intrusive thoughts—or any thoughts—takes the commonality out of them. The doctor nods in what seems like reluctant concurrence. He then pulls a gel pen from his overcoat pocket and scribbles something down on top of a stack of American cheese-colored sticky notes. He hands it to Mom.

“I’d like you to contact Dr. Malcolm Strong. He’s one of the leading experts in neuropsychiatric disorders at Stanford University. He may have a better chance of coming up with a diagnosis than I can.”

Mom takes the number in hand, her eyes searching for a take-twice-a-day-for-a-month cure somewhere between the black letters. Dr. Nguyen extends his hand out to Mom. She takes it and shakes.

“I wish Daniel and you all the best, Ms. Carmichael.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

That “thank you” sounded hollower than a dried-out gourd. The doctor extends his hand out to me. I take it and shake.

“You have a good day now, Daniel.”

As far as I can see, good days will be as alien to me as the taste of durian fruit. I trail behind Mom like a shadow. She doesn’t take my hand. There’s a piteous look on Dr. Nguyen’s face. Whether it’s meant for me or Mom, I cannot say. I look up at her as I try to match her walking speed. She wants out of this place, out of these white halls, off these white linoleum tiles, out of the light of white fluorescent bulbs, away from where a life of normalcy is blemished by the diagnoses of learned men and women in white lab coats. But that’s all she can get away from.

I look up at her and tell her I love her and tell her I’m sorry. She says nothing. She looks so tired. People stare at me as I talk/think. They should all look for a burning car or a dead body if they want something to rubberneck at. They stare at Mom, too, and whisper. She walks as fast as her long adult legs can take her. I pick up my pace, but my little legs can’t keep up. I yell for her to wait. Tears begin to well in my eyes and I continue to call out to her through the growing lump in my throat. She ignores me. Mom becomes a silhouette of colors through the film of tears. I beg her to please don’t blame me, to please don’t hate me, to please don’t stop loving me. The exit’s fogged glass doors close behind her and she becomes a vaguely human-shaped colored blur in a blurred world.

The glass doors open and Mom and the world becomes clear again. An ugly Mexican kid with a unibrow walks past me—

“Ayo, what the fuck you say?”

—and I see Mom bump into a tall old white woman. She’s shouting at Mom and pointing at a spilled transparent Starbucks cup that was once full of what I assume to be a mocha frappuccino now spilled on the black parking lot asphalt. Mom puts her hand to her chest and rubs her wrist, looking like she wants to scrunch up and hide from the world as the old hag berates her for not looking where she’s going.

I walk up and get between the towering pillar of wrinkles and Mom—

“What in—who are you? What are you doing?”

—and wonder if her old man was dancing with the Angels in Heaven for being free of his loudmouth bovine wife.

“What did you call me, you little—?”

Was she even married? How many years had it been since the saggy witch was touched by a man? Were there none who had the will to tame this wrathful shrew? Were there not enough marital aids in the world that could mellow this nagging cunt out? Mom picks me up and hurries to the car. The old woman looks like her lower jaw’s about to fall off from its hinges. She looks ridiculous standing there, looking after us in shock and disbelief in the middle of the sidewalk next to her spilled overpriced coffee slushie.

Mom sits me down in the back seat of her Honda Accord and buckles my seatbelt and speedwalks to the driver’s side. But she doesn’t pull out of the parking space. I can see a beige Saturn with its blinkers flicking on and off, the driver waiting impatiently for us to pull out. I look back at Mom. She stares out the windshield looking at nothing.

“Daniel, what you said to the woman was unacceptable. It was rude, uncalled for, and…and, oh my God, did you see the look on her face?”

Mom bursts with laughter. Not the soft silent snicker kids make when they hear a teacher fart in class, but a laugh: loud, uproarious, an unapologetic joyous guffaw. The kind of laugh where you begin to wheeze, and your core feels like you just finished a set of 20 crunches. The best kind of laugh.

“I thought she was gonna have a heart attack!”

I can feel my smile press my cheeks up to the bottom of my eyes and I think I might just wake up with a six-pack in the morning. I inhale too quickly and coughing mixes with the laughter and we probably took ten years off the old bitch’s life and Mom and I are howling with euphoric cough-laughter. The Saturn begins to honk and the crone starts knocking on the driver’s side window, demanding an apology from us. We don’t stop. We don’t care. Mom looks over at her window and flips the old bat the bird. She backs out of the parking space and almost hits the Saturn behind us. He honks his horn and is one foot out the door. Mom floors it out of the parking lot, and we’re laughing like we just heisted Fort Knox out of the entire U.S.’s gold reserve.

We laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and chuckled and chuckle and chuckle and giggle and giggle and giggle and sigh, all the laughter laughed out. The endorphins released from our laugh attack make me feel delicious. Mom nods, concurring.

We stop at a red light. The soft rumble of the car’s engine feels therapeutic, purring like a large metal cat. I can see a mother and daughter walking hand-in-hand into the Cold Stone on the street corner. They look happy. I catch Mom looking at me through the rearview mirror. She looks so tired.

“I love you, Danny. Don’t ever forget it.” Her smile is warm and motherly.

I tell her I love her, too. Though however long that love will endure as she will have to endure me and my disorder remains to be seen. I know not whenever or if ever treatment will be discovered or if I am doomed to be the harbinger of a new incurable disease named after me. Carmichael’s disease didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, neither did Lou Gehrig’s, Parkinson’s, nor Alzheimer’s. Mom’s smile shortens, but it’s still there. She reaches behind her seat and takes my hand. I squeeze tightly.