Chapter Five #2
King Damij had first appeared in their lives shortly after Wesley’s fifth birthday.
As with the night terrors, they had no clear explanation.
Olive had recently fallen while the two were playing, and though no one blamed her brother, she had split her lip—a “highly vascularized region,” according to the surgeon, which meant, in English, that the child looked as if she’d been gorging on a carcass.
Surely, this must have frightened Wesley?
And Kate’s medical insurance had decided abruptly to stop covering the infusions that had brought her MS into remission, so in addition to teaching, to caring for two children, she was spending evenings deciphering denial letters written in prose more labyrinthine than Milton.
And Miles was in a particularly grim spot with his dissertation; his chair had changed to someone less accommodating, and even the usual Milesian optimism had begun to dim.
But there are always explanations. There are always split lips, greedy corporations, parents off their A-game.
Unlike the night terrors, King Damij had neither a discrete beginning nor an ending.
Indeed, for a long time, it was hard to say that there was something wrong.
Simply put, things around them started breaking: a toy, two toys, a plate, the railing of the crib.
In the beginning, they hadn’t even suspected Wesley.
But soon the casualties included objects—a book, the television remote, the Wi-Fi router—that little Olive couldn’t reach.
Each time, the boy denied it; each time, he had an alibi, hastily assembled, clearly bogus.
The only suggestion of some kind of responsibility was a single drawing he had made at school, which showed a child, unmistakably himself—as unmistakably as possible with a five-year-old artist—over whom was written, in the manner of a superhero playing card, the words “King Damij.”
Ah, said Miles, etymologist: Damij. Damage.
Did this bring clarity? Or did it just deepen the mystery?
Was this some perverse avatar? Already, Wesley had begun to devour comic-strip “novels” starring anthropomorphic animals who wreaked cartoon havoc with their hijinks.
Or was there some darker current at work, spurred by his sister’s spill, his mother’s worries?
This, fortunately, had lasted only two weeks, but things were bad enough that Miles and Kate had to watch him at all hours, and the toll had run into hundreds of dollars.
No reasoning would work; King Damij simply denied it.
In the end, they’d settled on a variation of a kind of copycat hypothesis, offered first by Wesley’s teacher.
There was something about him slightly more suggestible than other children, a thinness between the world he lived in and the world of stories.
Not entirely unexpected of a child of two people devoted to books.
Which, when it came to the Humbaba, should have been considered a forewarning.
—
As Miles and Kate later explained to Dr. Barnaby, in case he was wondering, the Humbaba in question was not the famous Humbaba of Gilgamesh, which Miles had all but forgotten when he’d chosen the name one night for his storytelling.
Who knew where it had come from? In the beginning, he’d just been one of many.
Okiroshi was a two-headed bird with the feet of a dainty woman.
Burowak lived only on hair clippings. Keshlamina the Seven-Mustached fed on little boys who didn’t go to sleep.
Hooptidoo and Calamates and Gingerstein: Miles required the kids to keep them straight.
Most of the hopeful monsters that materialized each night upon his lips bore the longevity of mayflies, destined to flutter about his children’s minds for but a single night.
Transient is the stuff of stories; don’t believe the boosters who claim that literature lives on forever.
Who could recall Jiro the talking eraser, Papel the sleeping robot, or Scaramak or Puckertoot or Scaramank or Scalamoot?
Indeed, Miles had every reason to believe that the Humbaba would follow the 384 other characters that populated his nighttime stories only oh so briefly. It was hardly promising: a little shrewlike creature who liked to…wait for it…hum.
That was it. And he had thick blue eyebrows, and armored lizard eyes. Destined for extinction as soon as he’d stepped off Miles’s tongue.
But they said the same thing about the kiwi, the platypus, the three-toed sloth.
Instead, the Humbaba began to change.
It descended from the streetlamps from which it once had serenaded the people with its cicadal singing.
Arms appeared beneath its wings, once plumed, now beetled, fairy-fluttering about before they vanished the following week into vestigial lumps.
After a period of hibernation, the Humbaba re-emerged one night in the menagerie of Miles’s “Martian Zoo,” and late that month in “The Tale of Olive and the Olive,” entwined in the high branches of a tree.
Did the children care that it was then less shrew, more snake?
Directors are often granted liberties with the ensemble; like Theseus’s ship, it still retained its ineffable Humbabian essence.
When the creature appeared as a sullen taxi driver in “Wesley in New York” it curled itself around the steering wheel and chattered on its phone.