And So a Terror [ Michael Thériault ]

Marc was not a runner whippetfine and swift. Four hours marking a better marathon for him, his predawn footfalls on asphalt resounded off housewall and fence not in preparation to compete, but for the pulse of his blood and its aid to his thoughts.

These were commonly for work. Work stood him, mediator or arbitrator, in the thick of clashes between janitor and night boss, clerk and office manager, driver and dispatcher, teacher and principal. Through brambles of contracts and grievance forms and disciplinary letters, through angers, hurts, truths, falsehoods he sought and usually found a path. He felt useful, but he needed often this still dark time alone with the shock of his shoes on pavement to traverse the human tangle that gripped him daily, to see sky beyond bramble.

As this morning’s longlegged strides took him in and out of streetlight, his thoughts were not for work, but went to Janet, asleep still, and who would be awake and upright for his kiss when he came panting through the front and kitchen doors. At dinner the night before they’d agreed it was time. “You can take the raincoat off tonight,” she’d said and laughed at their usual euphemism. His caseload was full and lucrative enough and their savings adequate for even an extended maternity leave, and afterward, when she returned to teaching, they could easily afford daycare. The thought of her brought memory of the musks from her soft dark folds against herself under the sheets he had left not half an hour before. He took in joy one of the steepest blocks on his course as close to a sprint as legs and lungs allowed.

Turning the corner onto an easier slope and regaining his wind, he did slow into a regret. His parents and sister in Maine, just across the St. John from New Brunswick, were as far from San Francisco as could be within the contiguous states. Janet wanted no part of her family, most of it in the City or around the Bay. “I can’t stand any of them,” she said and declined explanation. Marc had seen that a grandchild could reconcile grandparents and parent. The smug superiority of his sister Lizette’s tête-carrée husband had kept her parents from her house and precluded invitations to theirs, but after little Jack had come dark-eyed into a snow-bright day his cooing had unbarred doors. Maybe a grandchild assisted by some version of Marc’s daily work as mediator might reconcile Janet and her family.

Marc ran never on sidewalks but in the street. Asphalt seemed to have infinitesimally more give than concrete, and its tiny gentlenesses must, he believed, become multiplicatively consequential over the roughly one thousand loud strikes of his feet against more than six daily miles of pavement.

He thought of the coffee-brown waves of his wife that might be rising just now from their dark splay across her pillow, and thought, A multiplication of tiny gentlenesses, a way forward between daughter and parents. His stride quickened again.

The run’s early burn had left his lungs. The usual seafog had retreated already to the saddle between the hills west and cleared his view of the streets he ran. Watching for driver’s-side heads that might signal a door about to open, he ran close to the cars parked curbside. The one runner he saw every morning, a gray-bearded man Marc guessed to be at least twenty years his senior, came with short strides the other way on the street, and he and Marc exchanged their habitual single wordless wave. A very few early commuters descended afoot the short downhill blocks to Mission Street and the Fourteen bus. Marc knew them all now, but just enough for a nameless “Morning.” An infrequent drop of sweat crept down his cheek or his arm below the short sleeve and left behind it an instant’s tickle. He wore no earphones. He wanted to hear at the top of Vienna Street the mockingbird that sang in the night. Elsewhere he wanted the quiet, or rather the constant nocturnal hiss of the City and the room it gave his thought. It allowed him also to hear at distance the rare approach of a car and be ready to avoid it.

Up a short sloping block of Russia Street he turned north above the Excelsior Playground. He ran not on the playground side of the street but on the east, lined with two-story houses one hard up against the next. Just after the turn he glimpsed ahead on the sidewalk by the houses some creature movement. It was not the low shamble of racoon or skunk and seemed in its quick moment of angular dart to be of something larger. Coyotes came down sometimes from McLaren Park at the hilltop, maybe to hunt rats or cats or to scavenge. He had no conscious fear of them, but some little shiver that did not reach his skin slowed him as he neared the spot where he had glimpsed it, and he glanced past parked cars toward the sidewalk.

So it was that he saw the small boy crouched between two cars. Marc stopped. At this, the boy sprang back and ran down the sidewalk. Marc sprinted on the street parallel to him and when his longer strides had carried him ahead stepped between parked cars and across the boy’s path.

“Where do you think you’re going, Tiger?” Marc said.

The boy stared. Marc put him at four years old. His short black hair was sleep-matted into uneven spikes. He shivered barefoot in pale flannel pajamas. Marc thought he saw on them giraffes, lions, zebras. The crotch of the pants was darker than the legs; the boy had pissed himself. “Can you tell me where you live, Tiger?” Marc said.

The boy stiffened. He shook his head. He turned and ran.

Something told Marc he should not seem to chase the boy. He returned to the street and sprinted again parallel to him until he could again step across his path. “Whoa, whoa,” Marc said. “Hold up, Tiger. Let’s get you home where you belong.”

The boy turned and ran.

Following him up the sidewalk, Marc rang doorbells. When once the boy paused his running several doors ahead Marc went to the street, ran past him, stepped back onto the sidewalk, and came back the other way ringing doorbells. The boy fled before him.

Marc repeated the doorbell-ringing in the two directions, the boy running from him one way, then the other.

Doors began to open. On one end of the span of rung bells a man stepped out in what appeared at Marc’s distance to be a dark terry bathrobe, flannel pajama bottoms, and unlaced work boots. Near the other appeared a man in gray sweatsuit, his feet in backless slippers a pale color indeterminate in the streetlights, ends of dark hair showing from under a dark knit cap pulled over his ears.

The boy ran from one man until he saw the other, then ran from him.

Fearing the boy would flee to the street, which the commute would soon start to fill, Marc went to it to keep him to the sidewalk. Close to one man at first, Marc said to him across a car roof, “You know whose he is?”

Maybe only half-awake to what he heard and saw or to an English not fully his, the man looked back and forth between Marc and the boy, and his darkly unshaven jaw said nothing.

Marc ran to the other and repeated his question. “I think his name is Wilson,” he said but didn’t move.

Other doors opened, others stepped through them. Marc went back and forth, calling questions from the street. Seeing his field of flight constricting, the boy stopped and bawled.

One man slight, gray, his eyes almond-shaped like the boy’s, in an athletic undershirt that bared arms and shoulders to the morning chill and unshod beneath dark sweatpants, did not reply to the questions but went to a gray wrought-iron gate before a door that hadn’t yet opened and, alternately banging it with the side of a fist and pressing the doorbell button beside it, shouted “Ngin Ngin! Ngin Ngin!”

A plump brown woman in quilted bathrobe almost to her ankles approached the boy from the house next to the gate, and he did not flee. “Wilson, niñito, she said, “what you think you’re doing?” She bent to put arms around him. He wept against her.

At last the door behind the gate and then the gate itself opened. Through them in tiny steps in tattered silken slippers came a grayheaded woman, small but made even smaller by an osteoporotic stoop. The unbuttoned front panels of a dark cardigan hung from the stoop.

“Grandma, here’s Wilson,” the woman holding him said to her.

“Aiya!” said the tiny gray woman. Her short footsteps took her with astonishing quickness to the boy. Still in the street, Marc watched the reunion over a car hood. The words that the woman pattered to the boy now half-wrapped in her cardigan were too soft for Marc to distinguish, but he heard in them the melody of Cantonese.

“Grandma, there is the man who found him,” said the plump brown woman, indicating Marc with her chin.

The stooped woman straightened a little to follow the gesture. “Mhgòi,” she said to Marc. “Mhgòi.” She guided the boy by sweater panels inside the gate and door, with a pause and another “Mhgòi” for the man whose shouting and banging and ringing had brought her out.

The watchers up and down the sidewalk left it. Doors closed behind them.

Marc resumed his run. He glanced at the GPS device on his wrist. He calculated that after this delay he would have to shorten the six miles to about three if he was to catch his usual BART train to the office.

The abbreviation left time for a horror to grown in him. Each block, each stride did nothing to show sky beyond it, but left it more clotted, denser with thorns.

When he returned, Janet sat at the kitchen table, coffee before her, in a more composed array of bathrobe, nightgown, and slippers than he had seen on the sidewalk watchers. His coffee awaited in an insulated carafe on the counter, mug beside it, and three slices of multigrain in the toaster oven and on the table jam and knife and foil-topped tub of yoghurt and spoon and napkin. From within shoulder-length hair not at all composed she met him with a slight smile in her eyes still puffy and heavy-lidded from the night and on her lips, until these pursed to answer his kiss.

He straightened from it and stood panting still and wordless.

“What,” she said, “is with you?”

He knew she did not ask about his usual sweat and breathlessness. “I found a boy.”

“A boy?”

Marc recounted the glimpse of the darting creature, the boy’s flight from his attempts to help, the ringing of doorbells, the unkempt crowd that emerged, the boy’s delivery into his grandmother’s arms. “At first I thought,” he said, “he might not be understanding my questions. When he shook his head I knew he had. Then I thought, Maybe it’s that I’m not Asian, and this makes me more a stranger. But then he let the Latina woman hold him. Then I knew: It was because I am a man, and so a terror. Janet,” he said.

Her eyes raised to him had shed the night and were wide. Her parted lips waited.

“Where have we arrived that this can be true, that I am immediately a terror?” Marc said. “What kind of a world is this to bring a kid into?”

The lips closed and tightened. The eyes – Marc saw fear now in them.

He said, “How can we bring a kid into it?”

She looked away from him. Her head shook. It stopped. It resumed, more quickly. When it stopped again, she said, “You think this is new.”

He heard that this was not a question. Its accuracy unbalanced him. He said, “This wasn’t my experience when I was little.” He spoke to roiled waves of hair and not to the face, which remained averted.

“Then you were lucky,” it said, “and your family was different.”

Three years as lovers, five then as husband and wife, and he did not truly know the woman in the kitchen with him now, and might never. His skills were not for this task. He felt an ache for her and her world, which had just become his, and for the child whom he now understood they would try to give to it, and who would never know its nearest grandparents.