Amy Sterling Casil - Jonny Punkinhead

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AMY STERLING CASIL

JONNY PUNKINHEAD

Fiction writers often have a wide variety of jobs before they make a living

off

their fiction sales. Sometimes the writers already have writing careers --

nonfiction writing careers. Amy Sterling Casil is one such writer. Her

nonfiction has appeared in women's and literary publications. Lately she has

concentrated on her short fiction. She went to the Clarion Writers' Workshop,

and she was a finalist in the Writers of the Future contest in 1995.

To make ends meet, she works as the Executive Director of Family Service

Association & Home Again Project. She lives in Redlands, California with her

husband and daughter.

Outside my office, I hear the rubbery squeal of a wheelchair, followed by the

damp exhalation of a sick child's sigh. The shadow of the pump-kin-headed boy,

Jonny, crosses the wall like a dark hand slapped on a sheet.

"Come in," I call through the open door.

"Sure, Dr. Arian," Jonny says, lisping. It sounds like "Sssir, docker awrin,"

but I'm used to the way hc talks.

Jonny wheels into my office. He's very limber with the chair. In his hand is a

small, crooked paper Santa and something else that I can't quite fathom, made

festive paper. I finish the letter I'm composing and smile. It's not easy to

smile at Jonny.

He holds the paper Santa up. "I made this for Gramma," he says.

"That's a great St. Nick," I say. My mouth twists in a funny way, and I don't

like the feeling. His grandmother hasn't visited him for at least three years,

yet Jonny makes her something for every holiday. Her presents are all in a

shoebox, tucked neatly in his cubby in Dorm A., where the seriously ill

children

live.

"This is for you," he says, holding out the other bit of artwork. I see now

that

it's pieces of paper, cut and pasted to look like a Christmas present.

The little present has "I love you, Dr. Arlan" written on it in spidery

letters.

"That's a great job, Jonny."

In a fit of the unprofessionalism which seems to have become my habit of late,

push away from the desk and walk to Jonny's side, then kiss his patchy scalp.

Jonny giggles and kisses me back. If I look in his good left eye, which is

large, brown, and very pretty, I can pretend for a moment he's a normal child.

He tums toward me as he laughs, and it's impossible to pretend any longer.

Jonny's third eye stares vacantly. He can see only from his left eye, not the

one on the right or the one in the center of his large, flat forehead. I

gently

stroke his veined head, which is twice as large as the head of a child his age

should be, and I whisper that his grandmother will be very pleased with his

gift.

Someone has named the syndrome from which Jonny suffers Webern syndrome. it's

not a common birth defect, but it's one of the more unpleasant conditions

children have come to suffer from in this, our pestilent age.

I'm Hedrick Arian, forty-six years old, a doctor of education, not medicine.

I've been the administrator of Southern California Sherman Institute for

Differently Abled Children for six years. Jonny is nearly seven. He and I

arrived at this place on the same day. He is a part of the landscape, like our

chairs, molded in solid hunks of indestructible plastic, the mottled gray

composite floors, the nurses, the aides, the everpresent medication and the

constant stream of visitors who want to gawk at the children.

"Gramma is coming," he says, spraying my face with his spittle. "This year, I

know she'll come."

"Of course she will," I say. The lies fall so easily from my lips these days.

pat Jonny's twisted back and watch him wheel slowly from my office, waving

goodbye with one tiny six-fingered hand.

Jonny's family signed him over to the state and has forgotten he was ever

born.

Part of me understands their distress at bearing such a child into the world.

Another part of me knows the history. and I can't help but feel a nasty stab

fury in my gut, because Jonny's mother drank daily during her pregnancy, and

took every drug she could find in staggering quantities.

Was it the drugs that made Jonny what he is? I don't know. They say the virus

which altered Jonny's genes is both sly and opportunistic. The thing at work

inside of him found a dirty needle somewhere or came through a perforated

condom, that much we do know.

When I first came, my friends would ask, "How can you stand all those little

children, suffering?" They said this in a disbelieving tone that really meant,

"I can't believe you're taking care of those wretches."

Now, they ask less often.

Years ago, Sherman housed developmentally disabled children, the ones they

called "morons" and "imbeciles." But no longer. This disease Jonny has, the

DNA

thief, started a decade ago. The initial wave of the stricken didn't fall ill,

so most of them didn't realize that anything was happening, while the tiny bit

of protein that saw them as a universe of meat lodged in their gametes,

multiplied itself, changed things. Then, they bore children. Children with

something worse than missing limbs, or hydrocephaly or spina bifida or

muscular

dystrophy or cerebral palsy.

These children were born with bizarre defects, like Jonny's; a head sized and

shaped like a great jack-o-lantern covered with patchy hair, extra fingers,

extra toes, a spinal deformity that rendered him paraplegic and the ultimate

horror, a blind, filmy, goggling third eye.

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