Summer Vacation

On the first day of summer vacation, my nine-year-old son discovered he could stop time. He finished his pancakes and asked for ice cream. I said, “No.” He grinned in his chair. And then, blink—his shirt shifted. Chocolate smeared the edges of his mouth. I didn’t fully process it, wrote it off, until his sister cried a week later. I ran into the playroom. She clutched her eye, pointing at my son. I snatched the Nerf gun from his hands and stuck it on the refrigerator. He swung at my belly, then remembered: blink. A step stool appeared by the fridge. Beaming, he sat cross-legged on the couch, his sister wailing, foam bullets radiating around her feet, my surprise solidifying into terror.

Time stopped for us, but not for him. A dozen times before mid-June, his mom sat crying in the passenger seat as we drove to new hairdressers, hiding his alarming ability. As they cut his hair—growing like play dough squeezed through a strainer—his sister hid in my lap, fearing it would happen to her. My nine-year-old son with preteen peach fuzz laughed from the barber’s chair, saying he was the special one.

By the end of the week, standing as tall as me, he eyed a woman in snug jeans checking out in front of us in the grocery store. Blink. The woman jumped, adjusted her bra strap, and looked around. I spotted my son’s dangling wet hands. His mom cornered him in the car. But after the screaming stopped, we knew: the world was his now.

Following a string of unsolved car thefts and pillaged malls, mementos from his adventures materialized in our house: baseball caps with hot-rod stickers; toy car traffic navigating the roads of a plastic metropolis; a bonobo who quickly found the kitchen knives, until—blink—my son sent her back to the state zoo.

Near the end of June, my son branched out, and the world began to notice—especially the rich. Invading their estates, he peed in walk-in closets and arranged cat, dog, and human turds on marble balustrades overlooking topiaries. One family from generational money, he painted in rainbow acrylics from toenails to folds to bald spots. After yachts disappeared from NYC harbors and reappeared near Galway Bay like chess pieces on a board, many of the monied hunkered deep in bunkers. Others donated their estates and began churches, praying to my son, their anonymous Grandmaster.

Soon, testaments emerged from the newly converted. They were sitting on park benches, swimming in pools, and, all of a sudden, they were blinked into fur-collared parkas and tailored tweed, surrounded by bare light bulbs in a 100th-story Manhattan penthouse. Some never recovered. Others felt touched by the divine. But I knew.

I knew my son’s password. Brushing aside the articles his mom snipped and laid on his looted laptop—detailing his probable felonies, on which he scrawled ha, ha, ha—I logged in and found his photo albums. They began with strangers posed in leather jackets, pointing pistols at each other in LA lofts, the sun a red half-orb on the Pacific horizon. Then came bustling restaurants, where unclothed patrons devoured tuxedoed pigs and sipped martinis dressed in mini-skirts. Bored with his hijinks, my son turned to scenes from saccharine sitcoms. Blinked onto inner city stoops, tweens found an empty spot where the Grandmaster must have sat. Men, women, and girls resembling us, his family, blinked in front of the kitchen table board games with a lonely chair where he must have pretended. The last album was too much: crying loved ones gathered around wrinkled bodies at their agonizing climax.

In mid-July, our bedroom ceiling creaked. My son returned with a middle-aged body, lingering in the attic until he descended the stairs for breakfast and tried to tell us about his adventures. But he still spoke with the words of a nine-year-old, unable to describe the world he arrested and curated.

We were glad he was back—and that he tried to be back. But we had to be careful. His sister cried after age wore holes in her favorite stuffed elephant. Blink. Her bedroom filled with hundreds of wild-eyed plush pachyderms. His mom kicked the buzzing fridge. Blink. Ten models fished from showrooms and filled with groceries crowded our lawn. I scoffed at the candidates in a televised debate. Blink. They tumbled on stage and were rushed to the hospital. Severe internal bleeding. They withdrew from the race the next day, citing the Grandmaster. Across the dark living room, my son and his tangled beard stared at me, searching my eyes. I told him he couldn’t do those things. He trembled, unable to reconcile his frozen world—no teachers, no friends, no way to abate his own power—with us, his family. Blink. He was gone.

He returned with gray hair in August. Giving up on words, he watched us like we were ghosts haunting his childhood home. As his mom held his prickly, stooped body, and his sister gathered her dolls to teach him how to make childhood stories, I showed him photos of his burlap-clad ancestors and talked about how they lived without air conditioning. He said, “Stuck in time,” tears falling.

We went to his bedroom on the first day of school. Liver spots on his temples, he cradled his baby book. Inside, he glued the pictures that stood in for the life he wanted: sand caressing sunbathers in Jelly Bean-colored swimsuits; a halted pair of girls dropping into radiating splashes on Lake Norman; a bird’s-eye view of our house, a pebble amongst hundreds, with us unseen inside.

Under race car posters and celestial stickers, his mom and sister sobbed on his carpeted floor.

“Son?” I asked from the edge of his bed.

His eyes fluttered. “Yes, daddy.”

“Excited about the first day of school?”

He laughed.

We buried him beside his grandparents. Aged nine. We didn’t inscribe the years he was invisible to us, rewiring our worlds.