Nightmare Alley
My kids are learning about death one bad dream and dead animal at a time.
by Walter Kirn
December 10, 2006
For Maisie, who's a precocious seven now, the fears that loom largest are of vast catastrophes that threaten to transform human history. I discovered a drawing recently that she must have slipped into a book some time ago, since it isn't a book that we've read in ages: Goodnight Moon. The drawing showed a large blue rectangle with stick-figure bodies falling from its sides, and some of the bodies had little burps of dialogue attached to their round, howling mouths by dotted lines. "I'm burning! Help!" a couple of them said, and across the top of the page was written, in oversize, solemn, misplaced block letter: "Nwe Yrok 3000 ded Setembr."
"Is this yours?" I asked my daughter. "We should talk about it."
"It's Charlie's."
"It couldn't be. Charlie can't write like this."
"We did it together," she admitted.
"When?" I asked. "Why? Do you know what it means?" My kids were too young to remember 9-11, but maybe their Montessori teachers had mentioned it or they'd happened upon some photos in an old Time magazine.
"That we're glad you don't work in New York," my daughter said. "Mom says you have to take trips there sometimes, though."
Global warming scares her too, she says, and for this I could throttle her liberal-minded teachers, because her hysterical notion is that huge floods will soon inundate the coastal cities and summers will be too searing to go outside in. She literally fears that people will catch flame. Then there's something my father told her about the moon. He told her it was coming closer or something and that in a few hundred years the average day will be two weeks long. I'd never heard this crackpot theory until Maisie woke up crying late one night and explained it to me. She hugged my shoulders and wouldn't let me go for the longest time. "Grampa's all wrong on that," I said, but the prospect of Grampa being wrong on something only seemed to worry her further. "Is he going crazy?" she asked me. "Not at all, hon. He just doesn't understand science all that well."
Charlie's fears are plainer, more direct. A rattlesnake is nesting under his bed. A teacher at school has a gun that shoots 'green rockets.' When I explain to him that these fears aren't real (unlike Maisie's, which are inspired by the news or by ominous loose talk from tipsy grown-ups), he quickly and thoroughly calms down and doesn't seem haunted in the intervals. Maisie, though, can never be quite persuaded that earth and its people aren't headed for dire, dark changes that are beyond my capacity to reverse. I wish it were only monsters that made her nervous, and not, as she once confided in me, "that all the water is running out."
My memories of my own youth suggest to me that even such grand, elusive cataclysms may not be what are scaring her down deep. When I was a kid, the threat was nuclear war. I had a hard time picturing it. There would be loads of smoke and toppled buildings and something called radiation poisoning that would cause the skin to burn and blister, but the crucial destruction I feared was closer to home: being trapped in my school, unable to reach my parents. I might be surrounded by rubble and dead bodies, but if my folks could just wrap me in their arms everything would be okay somehow. Images of storms and monsters, ghosts and earthquakes, mountain lions and bears were all made tolerable by the way they drove you into a comforting embrace. But, if something made that embrace impossible — terror.
I have a theory about human development. The reason that adults love horror movies and indulge their taste for grisly news stories is that they're reminded at some level of how it felt to be reassured as kids. To be spoken to in confident low voices while being served hot cups of milk tea. To be tucked underneath their blankets with a forehead kiss. After a certain age, however, no one performs those essential favors for us. We miss them. Unconsciously we want them back. And maybe that's what really scares us when we're little: that a day is coming, inevitably, when there will be no one larger than ourselves to seek solace from when the monsters come. It's not the nightmares themselves that frighten kids, particularly as they grow older, but the prospect of losing that cozy parental bedroom where even the worst dreams dissolve in caring touch.
photo courtesy Eric Ogden
©2006 Walter Kirn and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Walter Kirn is the author of Thumbsucker, She Needed Me and Up in the Air. He lives in Montana. |
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