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I ONCE WENT
to visit Roald Dahl at his home in the English countryside. The author of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach
, and other macabre tales for children had just publicly denounced
The Satanic Verses
as an irresponsible piece of self-promotion. He didn't exactly endorse the fatwa that had just been issued against Salman Rushdie, but he came close, and I used this as an excuse to go and talk to him. He wasn't well—he was more or less confined to an upholstered chair and wasn't long for this world—but he could not have been better company. I remember next to nothing of what he said about Rushdie. What I recall was lunch. Several Dahls gathered, and a plate of ham cold cuts arrived at the table. Dahl said something about how closely the cold cuts resembled human flesh, and how he once thought of writing a story about children who are served cold cuts from the corpse of a missing friend. I expected someone at the table to complain, but instead his daughter giggled and told a story about how she had witnessed, firsthand, a butcher slice off his palm while running a shank of ham over a meat slicer. She went on to describe, to the delight of the entire family, how the slice of butcher's flesh fit perfectly on top of the stack of ham. Exactly like the ham we were about to eat! Sixty seconds into the meal the Dahls were vying to outgross each other with tales of severed limbs and pulsing pink flesh, while happily munching ham sandwiches. With the possible exception of Mrs. Dahl, the entire family had preserved into adulthood a childlike delight in the grotesque.

Once you have a small child you can see the full appeal of the Dahlian imagination. To a small child the adult world
is
grotesque. For a start, it's all ridiculously out of proportion: To a child every grown-up is a monster. Then there are all these events that occur in the grown-up world that a child, in trying to get her mind around them, distorts wildly. I went out of town on business last week. “Are you going on an airplane?” Quinn asked, before I left. “Yes,” I said. “Are you going to an airport?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Are they going to put chickens in your luggage?” she asked. I had to think about that one. Then it struck me: check-in luggage/ chickens in the luggage. How strange the adult world must seem when filtered through the child's vocabulary. Even those aspects of the adult world designed explicitly to give innocent pleasure to a child are often, to a child, either weird or downright horrifying. Which brings me to Mickey Mouse.

I had taken Quinn to a birthday party around the corner from our house in Berkeley. The highlight of the birthday party was to be the appearance of Mickey Mouse. Mickey was meant to be kept a secret. The children would gather and play for a bit and then Mickey Mouse would burst through the doors and surprise everyone. But it's hard to keep a secret, especially a good one, from Quinn, as it is so tempting to use any prospective treat as a bribe. To coax her into her car seat I had told her that if she ceased to struggle she would get to meet Mickey Mouse. In the flesh. She seemed pleased by the idea.

We arrived at the birthday party. Quinn overcame the shyness she always experiences when she enters a crowded room and was soon playing with the other children. But there is no such thing as equilibrium in a room full of toddlers; something bad is always about to happen; and what happened was that the father of the birthday girl came over to say there was a problem with Mickey. The company that farmed out Mickey to children's birthday parties had just phoned: Mickey was ill. The company had called around looking for a substitute. They had found one, but he lived six hours away. He was on his way, but he'd be late.

You had to admire the commitment. In six hours you can get from our house in Berkeley to Reno, Nevada. Some poor guy who lived, in effect, in Reno had tossed his Mickey Mouse costume in the trunk of his car in the wee hours of that morning and was now hauling ass across the country to humor a room full of three-year-olds. And he wasn't even the real Mickey Mouse. He was an understudy.

An hour or so later Quinn was off on one side of a large deck playing with a dollhouse. The other kids and adults mingled on the other side. I was munching a raw carrot and glancing across the deck every four seconds to ensure Quinn hadn't fallen off. Suddenly, onto the deck, between Quinn and everyone else, burst Mickey Mouse. He wore all the official gear. But still there was something off about him. In the first place, he wasn't alone. Trailing him was a ghoulish assistant, clutching balloons and sweating so profusely that one of the children turned to his mother and said, “Mommy, the man went swimming!” Together the two of them looked as if they had jogged, not driven, from Reno.

But the real problem was Mickey himself. He wasn't the cute little Mickey you think of when you think of Mickey Mouse. He was a large man, stuffed into a small costume that didn't quite fit. His giant mouse head tilted this way then that, as if partially severed. His white gloves failed to disguise the thick black hair on the backs of his hands. Even his black mouse slacks looked to be loaners; bending over hurriedly to greet the first child he saw, he flashed a rear, vertical smile. The first child he saw was Quinn.

I tried to imagine this scene from Quinn's point of view. The fact is that while she had pretended to be delighted that she was going to meet Mickey Mouse, she had never actually heard of the creature. God knows what she thought she was getting into, but it wasn't a six-foot rodent with a greaseball sidekick. Instantly—so quickly that Mickey didn't have a chance to lay his hairy mitts on her—her face dissolved in terror and she began to scream. Not a playful scream. A Janet Leigh in the shower in
Psycho
scream. I raced across the deck, clutched her in my arms, and spent the next five minutes consoling her. When she'd calmed down she squirmed away from me and ran into the house.

“Where are you going?” I hollered after her.

“To find Mickey Mouse!” she said.

For the next hour or so she enjoyed Mickey Mouse in a way that was new to me and I assume also to Mickey. Mickey Mouse, to Quinn, was not an endearing character. He was a serial killer. This was Disney with a twist of lime. She'd sneak right up to him and then, when he noticed her, dash away screaming bloody murder. It was strange to see. Her mother and father can't bear scary movies, and I'll bet money that when she grows up she won't like them, either. But in her current state of mind she likes nothing more than the toddler equivalent of a horror flick. If she weren't so much like every other small child, she'd be considered insane.

ONE OF THE
many surprising things to me about fatherhood is how it has perverted my attitude toward risk. It is true that there are many kinds of risk—emotional, social, financial, physical. But I can't think of any I enjoy taking more than I did before I had children—unless you count the mere fact of having children as a kind of celebration of emotional risk. Otherwise, I'm rapidly becoming a wimp. There are little risk-averse things I do now that I never did before and little risk-averse feelings that I have now that I never had before. To wit:

Item: The other night Tabitha and I went to see
Minority Report.
It's the sort of movie that just a few years ago I would have cheered and Tabitha would have at least tolerated. But in the middle of the film a small child is abducted from a public swimming pool. That was enough to ruin it for Tabitha and to make me feel we ought to just skip dinner afterward and go home and make sure nothing terrible had happened to
our
children. This is obviously neurotic. I don't know a single case of a small child being kidnapped at a public swimming pool in Berkeley, California, while her father holds his breath underwater, much less from her bed at night while being guarded by babysitters. But I am no longer rational on this subject. My emotions are easily manipulated by cheap dramatic tricks involving the suffering of small children, and by the current media hysteria about what is in fact an ordinary rate of child murders. I think I could still sit through the scene in
Richard III
when the villain has the two little princes smothered in their beds. Anything closer to twenty-first-century American life ruins my day.

Item: I no longer enjoy rolling the dice in the stock market. I never enjoyed it all that much, but what pleasure I took in it vanished with Quinn's arrival—well before the stock market collapsed. With her arrival, for the first time in my life, I began to worry a bit about money. I have no reason to worry about money, but that doesn't stop me from doing it. When people talk about the mood in the financial markets they tend to assume that the market drives that mood. But of course it doesn't, not entirely. A few years ago a piece in the
Michigan Medical Journal
argued that the reason the Internet bubble reached such ridiculous heights was that huge numbers of investors were now taking drugs that lowered their inhibitions. With a third of the U.S. investing population on Prozac or some other mood-enhancing drug, the paper concluded, it was no wonder that so many people believed the market would simply keep rising.

Small children are also a mood-altering substance with financial consequences. Their effect on the human mind is the opposite of Prozac. At any rate, my own current financial taste for cash and bonds seems to be at least partly a response to parenthood.

Item: I am no longer as open as I once was to helping out people I don't know, especially when those people need a bath. Several times a week I have a vaguely hostile response to a stranger that I would not have had if I didn't have children—for instance, when I see a bum loitering in the park near our house. I find it less amusing than I once did when people knock on my front door to ask me to join some religion or sign some petition. I used to pick up hitchhikers every now and again, but I wouldn't think of doing it today. In general, the probability that I will extend myself to a stranger in need, always slight, is now zero.

Item: Not long after our first child was born, but well before September 11, 2001, I began to experience a mild fear of flying. There was a time in my life when I could, fairly blithely, hop out of an airplane with a parachute on my back; now I can't get onto an airplane without melodramatic feelings of doom. When I travel, I carry pictures of my children for the sole purpose of having one long look at them the moment after the engine dissolves into flames and the plane enters its final dive. These occasional spasms of terror are as pathetic as they are undeniable. The only explanation I can come up with—other than that I've become a pussy—is that I can now imagine an elaborate narrative triggered by my tragic death. Before I had children I had no particular reason to fear dying, because I had no particular notion of the consequences of my death. If I had died in some absurd accident it wouldn't have mattered all that much. Now, because of the children who would be left without a father and the wife who would be left alone to care for them, my life seems more important, even though, in some respects, it is actually much less important (having, as I do, fewer years to lose).

I am aware that all these feelings are more or less nuts. But they are also more or less true. I know for a fact that my children are insane. Or, at any rate, I know that if an adult behaved as my children do, he would be institutionalized. Is it possible that they are contagious?

WHEN I CAME
to, the first thing I noticed was that wherever I was, I had never been there before. Flat on my back, an oxygen mask on my face, I looked up and saw a silver wall, some flashing lights, and a man in a dark blue jumpsuit, his back to me. The mask made it hard to call out. I tried to raise my arm but couldn't. My arms and my legs were strapped down. My head, too. My gaze was directed straight down at my bare chest and the several wires taped to it. My stomach, I could see, was caked with blood. My khakis, too, were a dull dry red. On the left side of my face I felt the warm pleasant drip-drip-drip of even more blood. Apparently, I'd been in some sort of accident: What sort? I had no idea. But I knew what I was meant to do, from TV shows. I wiggled my fingers, then my toes.

The man in the blue suit turned around and removed my oxygen mask. I now realized, again from TV shows, that I was in the back of an emergency rescue unit.

“I can feel my toes and fingers,” I reported knowingly.

“What's your name?” he asked.

I told him. But my voice sounded strange and manufactured, not my natural own.

“That's good, Michael,” he said, and smiled with a terrifying condescension. This man knew something I didn't: What?

“Do you know what day it is?” he asked.

“I never know what day it is,” I said.

“He says he never knows what day it is,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye I now spotted a second man in a dark blue emergency rescue uniform. And I remembered something: Quinn on an ice rink. I remembered skating over to her awkwardly, like a man pumping a Razor scooter up a steep hill, and then skating back to my own beginner's ice-skating lesson. I also remembered that they had lumped the beginners together with the intermediates. I remembered a short, squat Irishman showing me how to spin. I recalled thinking:
If I try to spin I'll kill myself
. But what I couldn't remember was why I was ice-skating in the first place.

“Do you know your address?”

I did, just.

“Michael, you've been a little funny for some time.”

I now recalled why I was ice-skating. I was ice-skating because Quinn's mother had conceived that the three of us should do something meaningful together. Just one thing, to remind Quinn that she was still special. We cast about for one meaningful thing and landed upon ice-skating. Tabitha knew how to ice-skate, Quinn and I did not. Quinn and I would learn together, side by side. In that briefly harmonious spirit we had set off, presumably not long before, for the local ice rink. What I couldn't remember was why we needed to remind Quinn she was special.

“Where are my wife and daughter?” I asked.

“They're outside in your car,” he said. “Do you remember what kind of car you have?”

I did, a bit more clearly. “How long have I been unconscious?” I asked. He didn't answer.

“What year is it?” he asked. A wave of irritation crashed over me. My head pounded. I didn't care what year it was, or what car I owned, or what I had eaten for dinner. I had bigger problems. Such as: Who was I? Or rather: Was I the same me as I had been before whatever had happened to me happened to me? I needed for the man to sit down and listen to my life story, from the beginning, to see if it all felt familiar. Then I remembered something else: the book! Before I fell on my head, I was writing a book.

“Can you remember what year it is?” asked the emergency rescue worker.

I told him what year it was. This time the answer came to me easily.

“Do you remember falling?”

“No.”

“What do you remember?”

“I remember that if I don't hand in my book in six weeks, I'm fucked.”

He looked at me a little strangely. “Okay,” he said. “That's a start.”

And so I told him about my literary problems. How thrilling it had been to be handed material so rich that I was limited only by my ability to handle it. How for months I'd been haunted by the sense that something would interfere with my finishing it. How, a few months earlier, with about a third of the book done, the manuscript had been stolen, along with everything I had ever written and not published, including fifteen years of private journals and biographies I had kept of my two daughters. How a fancy truck with darkened windows—it was spotted by a neighbor—had rolled up alongside my office in broad daylight. How its occupants had picked the lock to my office, stolen my computer, all my backup files (from a separate room), and…nothing else. How they'd left no fingerprints, only a mystery.

Then, by some miracle of brain chemistry, I realized I sounded like a lunatic. “I know this sounds nuts,” I said.

“This all happened?”

“This all happened,” I said.

I explained to the man—who continued to stare calmly at me; how, I do not know—how my wife had understood, or pretended to, that to compensate for the loss of my manuscript I needed to abandon most of my responsibilities as a father. How I had spent several months redefining what is meant by “the bare minimum”—how little a husband and father can do and still not trigger screams of terror when he walks in the front door. How I had a genius for it—and an excuse. A deadline. How Dixie didn't seem to mind—a father doesn't add much to the life of a six-month-old child—but that Quinn was different. The moment I put some space between me and her, she set about trying to drive her mother insane. She'd eat nothing but sugar, do nothing but watch cartoons. Denied sugar and cartoons, she took to calling her mother “you stupid lady.” Told not to talk to her mother that way, she'd spit, absurdly, “Jack-n-ass!” Somewhere in there she got her first bad report card: Her teacher said that the normally ebullient Quinn was now, occasionally, “morose.” On my brief visits home I saw more truculence than moroseness, but that was as alarming, in its way. On Christmas morning, the moment she realized that she'd ripped open her last present she looked up and said, “Oh, shit.”
Fucking hell
, I thought,
where did that come from?

When I spoke that last line the ambulance man laughed. “He's okay,” he shouted out to his colleague. They changed their plan to drive me to the trauma center to determine if I'd suffered brain damage. Instead, they would drive me to the emergency room to have my head sewn up. Before they did, they invited Tabitha into the truck to tell me that she and Quinn would be right behind me, in the aforementioned car. My wife is at her best in such moments; she's as good in a crisis as ice on a burn. After making it clear to me that I was a wimp to be concerned about the state of my brain, she said that I didn't need to worry about Quinn: She had hustled her off the ice before she could see her father lying in a lake of blood. It's astonishing how much trouble we take to prevent our children from seeing the world as it is. It's even more astonishing how, even when we might think we have earned a right to forget about our children for a moment, we haven't.

The ambulance started, the siren wailed. I remembered another thing: Quinn needed to feel special because I had spent too much time working on my book. I was learning how to ice-skate because someone had broken into my office and stolen my book. The theft of my computer memory had led to this assault on my own.

The emergency rescue worker was back to fiddling with one of the machines hooked up to me. He seemed to think we were done talking. We weren't. My mind wasn't right, and I knew it wasn't right. I thought:
When you hit your head and you are never again the same, how do you know? If you have that thought does that mean you are the same?
I didn't know; and I was certain the only way I would know was to talk and talk and talk. “I've got to finish this book soon,” I said, a little desperately.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“No,” I said, “I still have a problem.”

“Yeah?”

“I can't remember what the book's about.”

“Give me a moment,” he said. He didn't even try to hide it: I was boring him. I was boring the emergency rescue worker! I must have fallen asleep, as the next thing I knew I was looking up not at an emergency rescue worker but a lady doctor. “I hear you're a writer,” she said, making conversation. “What do you write about?”

She was soon sorry she had asked. For it was then I remembered: Baseball! I was writing a book about baseball. As she stitched me back together I offered her, free of charge, my literary autobiography. Every last detail, including the occasional journal I'd been keeping of my family life. I told her, for instance, I'd written about the birth of my child, which had occurred in this very hospital. I told her I'd lived in Paris, and published some accounts of the experience. It was then that she perked up.

“I read those!” she said.

Inexplicably, I felt better.

“I loved those descriptions of you with your son in the Luxembourg Gardens.”

“That was Adam Gopnik,” I said. For the first time I felt something I knew I had always felt. The surge of irritation, the choking back of indignation—oh, the horror, oh, the smallness of existence—was so breathtakingly familiar that I couldn't deny it: I was still me.