Chapter Five #3
Such change was natural. Among Miles’s other characters, Okiroshi’s feet had long outgrown her silver slippers, and Burowak’s tastes had turned to peanut shells and furballs.
But some force deep in his psyche was slowly transforming this incidental creature, this bit player, this trifle, into something more and more human.
At the New Year, the Humbaba was appearing with a cane and top hat.
By then, his metamorphosing had become the essence of his identity: a quick-change artist, appearing in one story as a dinosaur, another as Eugene Onegin’s brother, another as a golden, talking duck.
Olive never really took to the character; six years old, she wanted certainty.
But Wesley was ensorceled. What was more seductive than a chameleon who could take the form of anybody, anything?
The boy pushed out the stories further: Could the Humbaba be the president?
Could it masquerade as Grandma? Daddy? Mommy? And that’s when the problems had begun.
What Miles should have said, then and there, decisively, was that, no, Mommy and Daddy were immune to the Humbaba’s wiles.
There were ample ways to justify this fiction—they knew a secret spell, they drank a secret potion—but he didn’t even need one.
No, he should have said: Mommy and Daddy are not the Humbaba.
No explanation needed. He was the storyteller; the world was his caprice.
Keshlamina had seven mustaches? Calamates had gotten chicken pox?
There was no disputation. It was because he said so.
Perhaps, Miles wondered later, it wouldn’t have made a difference, and he couldn’t have headed off the troubles that came next. But he’d never know. Because, when Wesley asked, “Could you and Mommy be a Humbaba?,” he’d answered with just a hint of playful teasing, “Perhaps. But how would you know?”
And so fear descended upon little Wesley Krzelewski-Petrosian.
All his childhood, he’d used a watertight logic to arm himself against the classic boogeymen.
There were no dragons, no goblins, no evil trolls; he knew because he’d never seen one.
But this was different. For how could you know?
How could Miles know that Ms. Masatani, Wesley’s third-grade teacher, was not in fact some sinister shape-shifter who’d replaced the real Ms. Masatani? What if Olive wasn’t Olive?
The first psychologist assured them that one couldn’t diagnose delusions in a child.
By then it had gone on three weeks, and Wesley had taken to barricading his door at bedtime.
It was interesting, the man said, a kind of body-snatcher variation; in adults they called it Capgras syndrome: my wife is not my wife, my son has been replaced.
But a child’s world was, by its very nature, make-believe.
No, to answer Kate’s reasonable question, it wasn’t schizophrenia, vanishingly rare in such a young child, far more debilitating, assailed by hallucinations.
Sometimes children’s imaginations simply ran away with them. But he’d come back.
He’d hoped this reassured the parents.
“Interesting” was also a word Kate’s doctor had used to describe her second MS relapse to a medical student. Neither Miles nor Kate, both of whom found many things about the world “interesting,” found anything “interesting” about what was happening to their son.
Wesley quit his soccer team, and begged to do the same for swimming. They’d catch him watching them suspiciously, as if to spot the counterfeit in some wrong move, some tone of voice.
At night, in hushed voices, Miles and Kate sifted through evidence as to the ferocity of his convictions.
He ate with them, right? If he really believed that they were Humbabas, wouldn’t he distrust them?
And he didn’t run away—which would be the natural thing for someone to do if their parents had been replaced by evil simulacra.
Or was it? Was he, in fact, quite logical?
Had he just weighed the risks of his parental forgeries against the dangers of the world outside, surely populated by the same insidious force?
Unspoken in these first discussions was that, of the two parents, one bore the blame.
To Kate’s credit, she didn’t openly accuse Miles at first; who could begrudge a father for telling tales of humming shrews with thick blue eyebrows?
But the more they talked about it, the more she began to wonder aloud how much of the bedtime stories had been for the children’s benefit, and how much for Miles’s.
Was that much fantasy so harmless? Wasn’t part of a parent’s job to be stolid and dependable, someone a boy could come back to when his imagination roamed?
Unlike the sudden cessation of the night terrors, or King Damij’s unannounced departure, the Humbaba lingered with them for three long months.
What cured him in the end? Kate and Miles never knew.
Dr. Barnaby perhaps, or maybe growing older simply loosened up the logic in which the boy had tied himself.
In the end, the Humbaba survived only in the shared code belonging to Kate and Miles, a shorthand for the dangers of suggestion, a call for caution, the absorption to which the paternal line was prone.
Which Kate reminded Miles of, again.
Whiskey quietly became Whiskers. Whiskers cleaned her den because it was more fun to play in, not because it gave her parasites. The dingoes nipped, but didn’t actually bite each other. And the tasty Magic Mushroom became a tasteless, if equally Magic, Fern.