Brooklyn’s baby disappeared. It didn’t say it was going. It didn’t ask for the keys to the car. It just up and vanished like a fart in the wind—apparently right from underneath Brooklyn’s loving arm—(she had probably been carrying him under her arm like a football, unaware that civilized people had long since stopped playing that game). Brooklyn’s kid was hardly a baller—I mean with that name? Imagine a kid named Little Baby Faulkner who quarterbacked the team, his docile upper limbs coming alive at the snap, killing it for the papers and the fans, slicing through statistical records like a knife through warm butter.
Charisma and I learned this fact when Brooklyn leaned in the room and said: “Baby Faulkner is missing.”
Charisma said, “Are you sure?”
Brooklyn said, “Yes, I’m sure. How do you think I misplaced an entire baby. It wasn’t no accident. He was here one minute and the next he’d gone missing.”
“Missing,” Charisma said. “You mean lost? Or missing.”
“I am trying to find my baby!” Brooklyn shouted. “I don’t know if he’s lost or missing or just plain “misplaced”—ok? He’s fucking gone—right? I was in his room with him and he was in the cradle and I was doing lines off my Vacation School Bible and I was like: Up, baby. Down, lines off my VBS Bible. Up: baby. And then one time I was doing up and there was no more Little Baby Faulkner! The fucker is gone—I’m telling you.”
Charisma stands—she gets off the bed.
“Well,” I say. There’s a difference between gone and missing and invisible—which one is this?”
Brooklyn looked at me like she was the queen and I had broken the rules. I got the idea she wouldn’t mind if I was lost or missing. (Or it could be that she wanted to fuck me and I was misreading her look—I’m crazy in this way, I can’t tell the difference.) She said: “Come look. You. Follow her. You. Come with me. I’ll show you the scene of the crime.”
Brooklyn left the room, followed by Charisma, followed by me.
We all entered the crib room. I immediately bent at the knees and checked under the crib. I don’t know what I expected to see: an infant Baby Faulkner clinging to the steel cords on the underside of the crib? An infant Baby Faulkner chilling on his back reading graffiti his older brother had left for him? What would it say? Here lies Little Baby Joyce, snuffed to death with his mother’s hand, taken away by paramedics, incinerated in the morgue at Miami Valley, converted into a coffee cup of ashes, returned to his mother, placed on the mantle of this very house, forgotten by everyone until just this moment. But I didn’t find any of that. There was just dust and long brown hair from Brooklyn’s head and stickers: lots and lots of stickers representing the movies and comics Brooklyn (and Charisma and I) all grew up with: the Wicked Witch, Dorothy sitting cross legged on a fence whistling, the notes coming from between her lips in black quarters and eighths, Yoda whispering his last words to Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones swiping tarantulas off the back of his duplicitous raid partner. I ducked my head out from underneath Faulkner’s crib and told Brooklyn I didn’t see anything under there.
“Is this a joke to you?” she said.
“It’s not a joke to me” I said. “But I do think that following the footsteps from the last time this happened would be smart.”
Charisma pulls me out of the room. Her hands are on my chest, smoothing. She says: “We want your opinions. Your theories. But not right now, ok? Stay here and if you think of anything, save it.” She taps on my left temple and goes back in the crib room.
I hear Charisma say: “Brooklyn. Honey. What are we talking about, here—‘cause this is making me sick.”
“Charis..you want to sit down?”
“I don’t want that, no. Do you know where the hell your baby is?”
“No!”
“It’s just hard to believe that. How long has it been since Little Baby Joyce was back there? This is just too similar to not raise questions you know, I’m not accusing you of anything, just—wow—I mean, should we call the cops? I mean: We should call the cops. Right? We should call the cops!”
“Cool your jets there, Mav. Last time my Little Baby Joyce was found right here..in the bed. Cause of death unknown. And this time my Little Baby Faulkner has left us in a sea of words—descriptions, dialogue—and none of it will get us to the bottom of the mess that is created by him just up and vanishing. When did I last see Faulkner? I don’t know. What did he last say to me? I don’t know! This is the mystery created by this little bitch. He’s a master of the compound statement—understatement—he revels in running a flyby bleeding 🩸 suffocant harms in the thrill of my dreams—Charisma!” I hear Brooklyn step to my girl and I imagine she grabs Charisma’s shoulders. “My old friend! Help me!” And Brooklyn is shaking her friend by the shoulders. “I’ve checked downstairs. I don’t remember if he was here the last time I saw him. I don’t recall the last time he was fed. I don’t hear his cries for help—!”
“Brooklyn. Chill. Are you saying you don’t know where your baby is??”
“I don’t know!!”
“Are you fucking me?” Charisma says.
“I AM NOT FUCKING YOU!!”
“You’re saying your baby disappeared?”
“What the fuck are we talking about? My baby disappeared! My Little Baby Faulkner!! He’s gone! He’s either split into the ether or he’s invisible or something.”
“How much coke did you do today?”
“Some more lines from the end of our eight ball.”
“That’s all? There wasn’t much to our last eight ball. Did you sleep last night?”
“I didn’t really sleep, no. I came in here to sleep but then I don’t remember. I’m sure I laid the Little Baby on my chest and we were sleeping together. Maybe he rolled down the stairs!”
“Have you checked downstairs?”
“Everywhere. I checked everywhere.”
“Ok. Can we go back to the beginning?” Charisma suggests.
“How far do you want to go back?” Brooklyn says. “Back to the very beginning? When I was impregnated by Rambuncto underneath a prayer laid forth in lace and flowers, asking the baby gods to give us a boy, a writer, someone who lived the way he died, an artistic genius—a criminal mastermind—a god in his own right—someone who got rid of every doubt ever cast upon him. Do you know anyone like that, Charisma? Maybe who never came out of my puss but a boy you might have created out of your mind!? Do you know anyone like that?”
It occurred they were talking about me and I couldn’t let that continue—it was so obviously false that I couldn’t even listen to another word. I stepped into the room and stepped between Charisma and her friend and I said:
“Listen up. Charisma did not create me in her mind. This is not some surrealist poem where one line is written, then after a month another line. Cocaine is powerful but the worst part about it is the sleep you lose. Unless you’re shooting it you’re not losing too many brain cells—certainly not the kind which do not regenerate as you grow and those lost cells don’t need to be affecting any of us right now. We’ve had three eight balls split between six people. That’s not a problem. Little Baby Faulkner (or whatever you call him) is most prob downstairs underneath a couch. Let’s go downstairs, look under couches, ask Wendy and Charisma’s grammy, check outside if he’s not found inside. I heard that baby crying earlier today when Charisma and I were chilling on the bed in there and that wasn’t that long ago so he can’t have gone far.”
“That makes sense,” Charisma said. “That makes sense!”
Brooklyn looks like her face just got done by a waffle iron. “Let’s go,” she says—her voice like the voice of the dead ☠️.
Brooklyn pops down the stairs three at a time. Charisma goes next. Then me. Charisma’s grammy rocks rapidly in her chair, eyes locked on the television, watching Wheel of Fortune like it’s saving her life. Wendy is curled up on the couch texting with her flip phone and I see one thing: that’s where the next baby will come from. A post-pubescent 11 year old. She’s working on it now: sowing the seeds, waiting for the wind 💨 and the sun ☀️ and the rain 🌧 to do their part.
The trio of us, Brooklyn, Charisma, and me are looking under and on top of everything, looking outside the doors but not too far on Wendy’s advice that no one has been in or out. We’re in the kitchen now. Wendy can see us from where she’s sitting on the couch. Brooklyn creaks the door to the basement all the way open and I’m hoping he’s not down there. Charisma—comically—opens the under-sink cabinets which contain bleach and other cleaners. And I see Wendy, her phone at her side, looking into the kitchen at me—no—at the dishwasher whose door is closed and she catches me looking at her and she looks away instantly and I say to myself: No..no. This cannot be true.
I unlatch it and open the door and look inside and what I see there makes me involuntarily wretch. I pull back my hand and the dishwasher door closes. Charisma stands, seeing me—she stops searching. Brooklyn is halfway into the basement, whistling and pretending to look, but I feel certain that I have found what she is really not looking for in any serious sense.