T.K. Dalton

Maybe it’s true for any new father, but when I exit my apartment these days, I have to say it aloud: “I am locking the door.” Sleep-deprived, I trust language over muscle memory. I don’t tie my shoes without a mantra of prepositions: Over, over, through, down, around, under, out. This chant is a close cousin of the ones I murmur while working with cloth diapers, onesies, swaddle cloths, and the wrap in which I carry my son to the park, to the river, to the grocery store, to the library. He’s six weeks old, and sometimes, faced with this new constant presence, I feel like I am too. This morning, the first Friday in October, the boy stays with Mom to nurse. This morning, only my black lab hears my reminder about the closing door. Her ears stand at boot-camp attention, on the sweeter edge of nervous. Out with the dog and not my son, I adjust to the baby’s absence.

Since the baby came home, the dog has resisted transitions of all kinds. When it’s time for her morning walk, she stays so close I can feel her breath on my legs. When it’s time for her night walk, she plants her feet as I stand in the hallway, the two of us tethered by the leash in my hand. I keep my other hand under the doorknob, which tends to fall off during changes in weather. When it’s time for us to go somewhere she can’t follow, the dog uses her nose to block the closing door. She’s always been scared of unpredictability, of doors and noise and movements sensed but unseen. Now, it seems, she’s fighting back.

A breeze carrying equal parts summer and fall blows through the open window by the elevator. I wrap the sides of my ragged cardigan close, feeling the absence of that other wrap. The dog stops to sniff the breeze with a nose that can pick out one part in a million: hints of the Hudson, exhaust and cargo from the rigs on the highway, spices from carts of fried food on from St. Nicholas, late-season fruit from the tables on Broadway, the dogs already starting to congregate at the park beside Haven, the hands and feet of strangers waiting for the M4 bus on Fort Washington. I call the elevator and its gears grind. The doors open and I ask her, What do we do in an elevator?  She scurries into the far corner, sits, waits as we slowly descend. Who’s a good girl? You’s a good girl, a goo-gull. As we cross the lobby, I button the sweater as closed as it goes. The seam between the sweater’s two halves is a cascade of finicky keyholes, one clasp too loose to accommodate its button, another clasp sound but missing a latch.

This morning is bright as birth. The sun shines almost overhead, truncating my shadow not far from my heels. Walking, I feel a lightness in the absence of the wrap. The lightness is like forgetting, not the kind where something you wanted is left behind, but where something you didn’t want, a dark thing that follows you everywhere, is jettisoned. The lightness is like the kind of remembering people call deja vu. Imagine an ersatz dog—a puppet—as rendered at a children’s sleepover by a hand held between a wall and a flashlight. This separate, animate thing created partly by the body and partly through mystery was how I’d come to think about grown people and their newborns. The difference between these magics—the real human in our nursery now, the imagined dog on a wall long-since-razed or not-yet-built—is that shadows can come and go, and their absence goes unnoticed. Their presence is barely noticed, their origin just a cloud, or dusk, or the fact of being indoors.

In the absence of the wrap, I think about the wrap, about how once unfurled, its fabric could be a ribbon meant for the hair of an especially fanciful giant. Like the closing of doors, I often narrate the donning of the wrap: Up, around, under, towards, in, out, through. I narrate the way I place him in it: One leg, two legs, around the back, over the head. Now shimmy and settle in, bouncebouncebounce. I will narrate this like I narrate the closing of the door, and for a similar reason: to guard against forgetting, to protect his new skin from the changing weather, to keep him warm despite the inevitable holes in the clothes in which he’s wrapped.

In the absence of the baby, in the absence of the wrap, both become phantoms on my chest, shadow cargo. I can almost hear him coo into the fabric, the sound that signals his sudden dive into the most single-minded sleep I have ever witnessed. Right now, in our apartment and not on my chest, he is turning off like a light switch, curling onto the cotton crib sheet, curtains drawn and mobile slowly spinning.

Crossing the lobby, I peek down, looking for the muscles of his furrowed brow to soften as they remember the glow of recharge, as they recall what they narrate to themselves six floors and one block, two blocks, three blocks away from a new father and his old shadows: Pay attention, little one. Relax into this strange thing that wraps you, this sealed envelope called sleep.

T.K. Dalton’s essays appear in The Millions, Southeast Review, Radical Teacher,Tahoma Literary Review, and the forthcoming Pariahs Anthology (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2016). His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in the Best of the Net anthology. With John Maney, Jr., he co-edited the anthology What if Writing is Dreaming Together? (NY Writers Coalition Press, 2013). He works as a sign language interpreter and lives in New York City with his family.