It’s just as well that E.S. works in a psychiatric ward in a hospital, because he is actually mentally ill himself. Specifically, he has a fixed delusion that he and I are going to raise a child one day. I have done everything short of electroconvulsive therapy to convince him that this is never, ever, ever going to happen, but still he persists in talking about getting an apartment with space enough for a baby, what we might name a child, and so forth.
Last night’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition–it may in fact have been televised on another day but last night was when we watched it–was about a family whose six-year-old daughter was abducted years ago. They have never given up hope that she might one day return to them, and the new house that the Extreme Makeover crew built for them had a bedroom in it for her. I found it disturbing and beautiful at the same time but quickly went back to what I had been writing before the episode started; E.S., on the other hand, was lost in thought for long minutes after the final credits rolled, his eyes hooded and his expression inscrutable.
Then he turned to me and said, “Do you think if we adopted a child and then made it disappear mysteriously, we could get an extreme makeover?”
I laughed really hard for five minutes and then I told him that was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard him say.
I really am rubbing off on him.
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