Excerpt from the novel Doom Town — Gabriel Blackwell

IN WHICH HE EXPLAINS ABOUT THE HAIR DRYER AND THEN GOES ON TO ATTEMPT TO CORRECT THE RECORD

It wasn't a surprise that we would—that we did—drag our feet about even going to the Macy's to look for a replacement decorative bowl in the first place, or that, once we found ourselves in the Macy's, we didn't immediately go to the HOME section to look for the replacement bowl we'd already seen online, the bowl I knew exactly where to find, since the website had informed me that that particular bowl was in stock at this particular Macy's, and was located in the HOME section on floor three. In theory, this was a trip—to the Macy's, I mean—that either my wife or I could have made alone (we might even have simply ordered the bowl online and had it delivered to us at home, though, because of the strikes (safety, it was said; drivers were routinely killed on their routes now), if we'd done so, it would have taken three to four weeks to arrive (the Macy's was two miles away, and we could pick it up that day if we chose that option)), but I think none of this occurred to us at the time because we were both, frankly, afraid to make the trip at all, much less alone. What I guess I'm trying to say is that we were both well aware that the bowl that had broken was the one our son had broken, the bowl he'd broken while playing in the front room, alone, while I worked in the bedroom, as I usually did on days when I watched him all day or in the mornings before I dropped him off at daycare, the bowl he'd broken while my wife was at work, and, because I was on my own, answering student emails while also trying to get through a draft of a paper on the language the Man of the Hole spoke that I planned to present at a conference the following week—it was office hours, at least technically, even though I wasn't on campus, and so I couldn't simply ignore the emails (one student was sick, another had been sick, one thought she was getting sick, several students were turning in papers that had been due weeks before because they had been sick, there were questions about the assignment due next week, my book order for the fall was overdue, did I want to teach this summer?), and so I made the decision to put my son in the bathtub with just enough water at the bottom that he couldn't drown; he had ceramic chips all over him, in his hair, even in his eyelashes, and I was worried he would be covered in tiny cuts if I tried to brush him off with my hands or the washrag we usually used when giving him a bath, and my plan, I remember, was to pour water over him with a plastic cup from the kitchen, which is what I'd seen my wife doing when he'd been an infant—while I went back into the front room to quickly clean up most of the mess he'd made and grab the cup from the kitchen, so that when the lights blinked off and I heard that horrible, loud thump coming, I thought, from the back of the house, I really had no idea what it could be, but I was very worried that it had been my son. 

My wife left late for work that morning, I remember, partly in order to show me, contrary to what had been said during our argument the night before, that her schedule was at least flexible enough to give her the time to take our son to daycare twice a week, so it wasn't true that I had to drop him off every single day, even on those days I taught (which, because his daycare wasn't close by but was on the way to campus, in turn meant I dropped him off long past the usual drop-off time on such days so that I didn't spend my morning driving back and forth and could instead spend the morning getting ready for the rest of the day—the woman there had complained to me, several times, about this, and I wondered aloud to my wife whether this woman resented our son and treated him differently as a result, and I was sorry that we were putting him in such a difficult position—and that I would often be late for my office hours (unless I held them at home, from my laptop, on those days I wasn't teaching, although doing this inevitably meant that a student would then show up in person to my office on campus, a thing that never happened when I was on campus), which in turn led to my annual evaluations showing somewhat lower scores, which in turn led to my ranking at the end of the year making it difficult, so she said, for the chair to justify keeping me on—frankly, I'd always relied on the department's disorganization for my continued employment, I knew; had they been better organized, I was certain I would have been replaced much earlier, but as it was, they could barely keep up with replacing the departing tenure-track professors). At the real heart of this argument, I suspected, was my wife's belief that I didn't respect what she did, though I'd often tried to explain that this couldn't be further from the truth—that, despite the fact that it paid poorly, even worse than my own job, I had nothing but respect for what she did—and that it was only that my own work required a great deal of time not spent in class, i.e., research time, that, as I'd said over and over, I was nevertheless never paid for and that therefore seemed (even to me, on occasion) like something I did merely for fun or as a hobby, like, for example, the paper I was planning on presenting about the language the Man of the Hole spoke, but which research was in fact the sole reason I'd been hired in the first place, and would, besides, be my only chance to move up in the academic world. By all of which I simply mean that she saw my schedule, seemingly wide open, and had made her decisions about child care accordingly; I could do this, I could do that. Her job was eight to five, Monday through Friday, which meant that she really couldn't spare the time to pick up our son or drop him off. She could get up early; it was possible—because she couldn't always pick him up in the afternoon, we'd agreed, when starting daycare, that she would drop him off some mornings—but inevitably instead she'd get up late, complaining about her headache or of not sleeping well or both, and she would be in a rush, or else (and this was intensely frustrating) she would just act like she was in a rush, and she would get angry with me when I reminded her that this was one of the days when she was supposed to drop him off—I have to get to work, she'd say, implying that, because my classes didn't start for another hour and a half, I had nothing but time to drop him off, when the fact was I still hadn't finished the lecture I'd be giving that morning and I hadn't graded any of the essays that had been turned in the previous week (because of course we had to go to the zoo on the weekend, we couldn't possibly just stay home, and if I couldn't go with them, well, that was too bad, and I felt guilty and worried about missing something, and so I went, and then none of the work I'd needed to do was done), and, really, she rarely got up early anymore (she believed she wasn't a morning person, and would show me articles supposedly explaining that people who naturally woke up later were more creative and more empathetic and that so-called morning people who looked down on late risers as lazy (I'd never accused my wife of being lazy, though, on occasion, I did come just up to the edge of thinking it) couldn't be more wrong, as though there were some set of traits that everyone who naturally woke up after nine o'clock shared, traits all those who, like me, rose early (partly because there were these infuriating people who refused to wake up at reasonable times, and someone had to make breakfast, someone had to get our son ready for daycare, someone had to drop him off there, too) did not and, apparently constitutionally, could not possess). Anyway, although she'd woken up early—she set her alarm the night before, and I was convinced she'd waited until I'd finished brushing my teeth and had come to bed to set the alarm, so that I could watch her set her alarm—she'd then spent thirty minutes showing me how slowly she moved when she woke up too early, emphasizing, with each thing she did, how tired she still was, how bad she felt without sleep, until finally she had not only passed the time she should have left if she was going to drop our son off at daycare, she had even passed the time she normally left for work (and I knew later this would be used as part of her argument against waking up early, as though somehow giving herself extra time in the morning had actually caused her to have less time in the end; she would never see this as ridiculous, of course, and would become angry with me if I pointed out how silly it was as an argument), and then, in her haste to show that she was now in a rush to leave, she left her hair dryer plugged in on the vanity, with the cord dangling off the edge in a loop near the floor.

Later, much later, my wife would say that, had the ambulance only arrived earlier, meaning—in fact, coming almost to the point of saying—that, had 911 been called earlier, there might have been a chance, even though it was clear this was not the case. This was the thing that she said most often after the accident, that there might have been a chance. If the doctor hadn't argued with her about the things she told the doctor to do, there might have been a chance. If I hadn't argued with her that the doctor ought to know what to do in this situation—much better than we did, I mean, considering all of her training and her experience and our lack of those things—my wife might have gotten her way and there might have been a chance. And, thinking about it now, I can see that all of this was both a kind of wish fulfillment or fantasy and a way of trying to deal with the loss. I worry that the way I've explained it here makes it seem as though I take no responsibility for what happened, when, in fact, and at the time especially, I took all of the responsibility, which I realize now was a serious mistake, not only for me but also for my wife, who first reacted badly to this basically selfish act on my part and then, trying to take some agency back, finally accepted that version of events as the most accurate one and started blaming me for everything, not only for what the doctor told her was happening or what she'd seen happen, but even for things that simply hadn't occurred. 

That day, it was only a transformer that had blown, not even the first one that had blown that month, but I had, after I realized my son wasn't making any noise whatsoever, maybe fifteen steps from the door of the bathroom, had the horrifying thought that he'd pulled on the hair dryer's cord, it had tumbled off the counter and into the bathtub, and he'd been electrocuted. I of course rushed into the bathroom, but there was a part of me that wanted only to turn around, run out through the door into the yard, and not ever go back. I was the one who'd put him in the bathtub and left him unsupervised. I was the one who hadn't bothered to make sure the hair dryer was unplugged, that it was far enough away from the bathtub that our son wouldn't reach for it and pull it into the tub. I was, as usual, the one who should take the blame, because I was the one without the presence of mind to know what should have been done. My impulse, in the moment, was to blame my wife for what I thought had happened, to say that she shouldn't have left the thing plugged in and on the edge of the vanity, and this was, of course, true—these were things that she shouldn't have done, and they were self-evidently things she shouldn't have done. But I also knew that this way of thinking was stupid—ultimately, it was my fault that I'd put our son in the tub with water in it and left him there by himself, with the hair dryer still plugged in and still precariously situated on the vanity. So many things could have gone wrong, with my son in the bathtub by himself, and my impulse to blame my wife for what I thought had happened wouldn't have prevented anything from happening; ultimately, I think, it would only really contribute to the poisoning of our relationship.

I worry that, in mentioning the hair dryer at all, I may have been trying to deflect blame for what really ended up happening, and, while it is true that my wife often left her hair dryer plugged in, next to the sink, even after getting so mad at me for putting the hair dryer in the sink that one time (which, as far as I can remember, I'd done only because the hair dryer, when I'd discovered it, had been laying on the floor, on the messy bathroom floor, and because, unlike my wife, I tended to use things and then put them away—my wife only did this when it suited her (which was rarely, and usually only ever in the run-up to an argument with me about putting things away so that she could say that she put things away and that my claims otherwise were exaggerated or simply wrong), and only tended to notice that things weren't put away if those things were in her way or else not where she'd put them, as with the hair dryer, in the sink rather than on the floor, where anyone could see it didn't belong, but for which placement she had some impossibly strained reason that of course involved some shortcoming for which I was ultimately to blame; it was my fault we hadn't rented a place with a vanity that was a reasonable size), it was also true that I'd told her that, if she was worried about electrocution—she claimed, later, to be worried about my electrocution, and our son's electrocution, though she'd begun criticizing me by saying that, if the hair dryer had gotten wet, she would have been electrocuted the next time she turned it on—if she was worried about electrocution, that maybe, instead of leaving the thing on the floor, plugged in, she could easily just unplug it and put it away (and this was an unwise thing to say, and, besides that, probably also an unnecessary thing to say, though at the time I'd thought, at least as I remember it, that it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say, maybe because I thought it would convince her I was right and my opinion wasn't, I said, even all that unusual (most people put their hair dryers away after they'd used them, because they knew the risks of leaving them out, still plugged in)), and that she'd then left the house without saying a word to me and hadn't come back until much later that evening, long after I'd realized how stupid I'd been and had called and left messages in her voicemail asking what she wanted to do for dinner (a transparent way to effect reconciliation, I thought, to show her I was contrite and would be willing to have a longer and more civil conversation if only she would please come home (meanwhile, our son was crying and wouldn't stop because I'd stepped on one of his toys and broken it and I didn't know what he usually did in the evenings because they were typically my only time to do real work, and so he was also off schedule, more or less completely, and probably needed to be fed and then put down, and I was desperate to have some kind of help, any kind of help)), anyway, while it is true that she left the hair dryer plugged in and in this precarious position, what really ended up happening is that our son hadn't fallen in the bathtub and the lights hadn't gone out because the hair dryer had fallen in the bathtub and our son hadn't been electrocuted. At the time of our argument about her leaving the hair dryer plugged in—which long predated the day our son broke the bowl—I remember thinking that she was probably just embarrassed to have been caught doing something irresponsible and even ultimately dangerous to people she professed to love, but still she continued to leave the hair dryer out, plugged in, long after we'd had this argument, including, as I've already said, the day our son broke the bowl and I'd had to leave him alone in the bathroom (in fact, she left the hair dryer plugged in and out on the counter or on the floor, or even, on more than a few occasions, on the back of the toilet (I didn't say anything about this after that one time, though I remember thinking, each time I noticed it, that this was a perfect example of her unreasonableness and her frankly hypocritical attitude to everything regarding our son and his safety—if she did it, or if it was her idea, it was the best way to do something; if I did it, or if it was in any way an idea that I had come up with, it was wrong and foolish, and possibly even dangerous, and this was an attitude that extended beyond our raising of our son and into other parts of our lives, too, and which attitude infuriated me)). 

But on that day, I'd left our son in the bathtub and I'd started to clean up the bits of ceramic—I would later, much later, almost a year later, in fact, find still more of them in the carpet, deep in the fibers, when I shook the thing out, and this may have been part of what prompted me to say we ought to replace the bowl rather than find some other way to keep the sideboard clean (which suggestion of course then led to our trip to the Macy's)—and then, telling myself not to forget to get the cup from the kitchen, my phone buzzed, and I'd answered it even though I didn't recognize the number, probably only because I was flustered, and didn't think before swiping up on the phone's lockscreen, and, on the other end, it had been someone whispering hoarsely, I couldn't tell about what—maybe it was a foreign language?—but I remember hearing what I thought was a television playing Law & Order in the background, and for some reason this reminded me that I thought I'd seen my wife's hair dryer plugged in and on the counter in the bathroom earlier that morning (I mean, I guess, that I hadn't seen it when I'd brought my son to the bathtub; I'd been too preoccupied with his eyes—there was this dust in his hair and his eyelashes and I didn't want his eyes to get scratched or cut by the little bits of ceramic, especially since his hands kept going up to his face to clear away what was there) and then there was the thump and the lights went out and I'm sure I panicked.

Not that this was something the neighborhood had suffered from since we'd moved in—we'd had two or three years of living in the house with no problems whatsoever, other than tropical storms or hurricanes that came close but were never a direct hit—but the power outages had gotten so bad by then that both of our next-door neighbors had had very large (and very loud, really nearly deafening) generators installed and I feel like I must have heard those generators start up while sprint-walking through the house in just the light from the windows—there were, I remember, huge clouds blocking out the sun, and the day was very dark—over the sound of my son crying in the bathtub. The bathroom is an inside room (it was where we went when there were tornado warnings; we'd had several that year already) and it didn't have any windows, and I could hear our son going from crying, which he'd been doing since I'd set him down in the tub and left the bathroom, to gasping and screaming, although, in the circumstances, and given what, just a moment before, I'd been so terrified about, this sound was, frankly, a relief. It would be completely dark in there with no power and no lights, I realized, and so I put down the cup and grabbed the camping lantern we'd left out on the counter from the last tornado warning, clicked it on, cupped my shaking hands and poured water over his head a few times, and, trying to seem calm, took him out of the tub, dried him off, and put him in his bedroom while I finished cleaning up in the front room as best I could with only the lantern to help me find the glinting bits of the bowl on the floor.

When she got home, I remember, and because I'd spent that whole morning dealing with the broken bowl and the power outage, I complained to my wife that I hadn't had time to work on the lecture I gave that day, which, in turn, meant that the class had been mostly recycled material from previous lectures that semester, and that it had ended forty-five minutes early, at which point everyone, including me, had been thoroughly confused, and I even thought, I told her, that I'd apologized to one or two students who'd stayed behind to ask about things I'd said that day. My wife, who, not unreasonably, probably didn't much care to hear my complaints the moment she walked in the door from a long day at work, said, So, you want me to take him to daycare tomorrow, is that what you're saying? Why can't you just ask? Why is it so hard for you to just say: I want you to take him to daycare tomorrow? In retrospect, I realize this was a perfectly appropriate response, given the long history of these complaints and the circumstances we, by then, were in, but at the time, I remember only that I reacted poorly, and wound up sleeping on the couch that night. My wife and I, if we spoke at all that night, spoke very little. 

My wife, though, woke up late the next day—not unusual for her—and so she was in a hurry, because now, as she made a point of stopping what she was doing to tell me even though, as I'd pointed out before, stopping what she was doing meant she would be in even more of a hurry than if she had just gone on getting ready and getting our son ready (which I helped with, even though my wife took every opportunity to tell me what I was doing in order to help was wrong: That shirt is dirty; he needs his other shoes; he doesn't like that kind of cheese; you know he's allergic to that), now she had to drop off our son before getting to work, and she had a bunch of meetings today, the first was in just thirty minutes, and so she really couldn't afford to be late, all of which, her tone seemed to imply, were somehow my fault. In any case, because of the way she was acting—she would say because of my selfishness—neither one of us got to say much to our son that morning, and I worry now that we probably both treated him roughly in our haste to be rid of each other, so that when, barely an hour later, the sound of the bomb going off made me turn on the television to see if they were reporting anything about what had sounded like a very loud explosion and the footage they were showing was of the street where our son's daycare was—you could see the playground in the background of one shot, I remember—there was, for me, nothing but an intense anxiety and a hard, bitter regret.

***

Gabriel Blackwell is the author of, most recently, CORRECTION (Rescue Press, 2021) and Babel (Splice, 2020). Doom Town, the novel from which this excerpt was taken, is forthcoming from Zerogram Press in 2022. More: gabrielblackwell.com