Bad Animals Read Online Free PDF Page B

for her; the following May for me—we were engaged and booking a rabbi for early July.
    After Jonah was born, I watched him day and night—out of the usual new parent’s mix of worry and awe, but mostly out of unending interest. “The kid’s better than cable,” I repeatedly told friends and colleagues. Sometimes even complete strangers had to put up with my expositions on the unexpected and unending entertainment value of a newborn. I went on about the most insignificant, unseemly things: his boogers, his bowel movements.
    I had a weekly book column in the Montreal Gazette at the time, and, more often than not, I would manage to squeeze some anecdote about Jonah into a review or an author profile I happened to be writing. In fact, I chose books that would give me the opportunity to comment on my current state of fatherhood—like Toronto writer Dave Eddie’s Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad, And while I managed to keep my review free of any resentment I might have felt towards Eddie for pitching his book idea about the joys of fatherhood before I had time to think of something similar, I still squeezed in an anecdote about my efforts at teaching Jonah to do a spit take. (He was, at ten months, a natural, though it was, I realize, more of a drool take.) The editor of the book section was a friend, but eventually his journalistic instincts kicked in. “That’s it,” he finally said, announcing a moratorium on infant-related anecdotes. “The kid is off-limits for the next six months.” I towed the line for a few weeks, but after that I couldn’t help myself. Besides, I knew my editor was wrong. I couldn’t imagine anyone not being interested in my baby or, more to the point, what I might have to say about him.
    Now, it has become harder to remember what my life was really like back then. Was I that oblivious to everything? Was I really that happy all the time? I remember being tired, of course, and finding it difficult to get any work done. There’s a photograph Cynthia took of Jonah and me sitting next to each other on our living room couch. A review copy is open in my lap, but my eyes are closed. Jonah’s are closing. The truth is: once Jonah was born I couldn’t read more than a few pages of any book without nodding off. Literature seemed beside the point anyway. Compared with whatever it was my son might be up to.
    What I really don’t remember from that time is doubt. Can you imagine it? Ambivalence out of my life, gone like a fever—not so much vanished as broken, dissipated. No wonder books were losing their appeal. Besides, I was an exceptional father or fast on my way to becoming one; I knew this with a kind of certainty I’d never experienced before. This was going to be a snap. Now, I wonder: could all this be true? Now, it’s almost impossible to remember the way our lives were, to remember a time before autism.
    A FEW WEEKS BEFORE Jonah was born I began telling jokes directly to Cynthia’s belly. It was like being on the sidelines of a football game next to one of those oversized convex microphones the NFL Network uses to record the sounds of the game. I could imagine her belly picking up everything—not just my words but all my unexpressed hopes and fears as well. I’m aware, now, of how corny this sounds. But I wanted to give the kid a preview of how much fun we were going to have together. Some people play Mozart for their unborn children, read to them from Shakespeare, reel off math problems, or speak Italian, all on the off chance it will have an unquantifiable influence on the unpredictable future. I was giving my son the gift of shtick. Shtick is in my DNA, after all. Like the Yiddish I’ve never spoken but feel I could speak if forced to. Like my compulsion to make everything into a joke, everything palatable. Throw it all against the wall and whatever sticks—that’s