[The full title of this story is "Keynote Speech: Fourth Annual Symposium on Information Toxicity, Inaugural Section on Reverie Syndrome". —MJW]

I blame my wife for Kieran.

I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m sure I’d find my own excuses if it’d been my womb he’d grown in, and God only knows the Internet has said some uncharacteristically accurate things about my own role in the whole nightmare. I’m not saying you should blame her. But I do.

I’ve done this enough, I should be better at it. Here we go: Thank you, Dr. Desai, for your gracious introduction. And for such a distinguished physician-scientist to say such things about a humble carpenter, well, the heart just swells.

I am here behind this lectern because I famously sued several flagships of the insurance industry to medicalize reverie syndrome, an act of ham-fisted legal terrorism that Dr. Desai has elegantly edited to suggest that I was trying to set something right in the world. This, naturally, is arrant bullshit. Dr. Desai seeks to elevate both our fortunes by representing that we are in some alliance to improve your lives, him through medicine and me through stumbling around drunk on stage and telling you horrible things about my son. But I am impoverished by this ordeal, and I wish only to get paid—a disposition, incidentally, not entirely alien to Dr. Desai, who makes a fuck of a lot more from insurance payouts at his glittery new practice than he ever did running his cute little patient studies at the National Institutes of Mental Health.

So perhaps you now have some idea where I stand.

I see from my program that my talk is titled “Reverie Syndrome from the Parent’s Perspective.” Are there any parents of dreamers in the audience? You and you and—hi, Lila, how are you—and you and you and—

Oh, Jesus, there are a lot of you. 

That’s... [inaudible] 

I wasn’t expecting so many.

[several seconds’ pause]

Well. I didn’t prepare any remarks for today because I was too busy reading to my son, which is my excuse for not doing pretty much anything I don’t feel like doing, these days. Now, as the parents present may know, Kieran hates it when I read to him. Which is crazy, am I right, physician-scientists? How is it that I can’t catch a break from my junkie son even when I hold the very needle? Well, here’s the problem: I don’t go fast enough. I stumble over words, and I waste both of his ears on just one voice. One story. But here’s the beautiful part: At this stage of the disease, he can’t actually stop me. They have these machines, you know—of any part of your body, your tactile resolution is highest on your fingertips, and so he has these machines that scratch words on his fingertips, ten of them, one each. Dreamer’s Braille. That’s called vibrotactile streaming. So Kieran can’t move his hands to stop me taking out his earbuds because it garbles the words coming in on his fingers. He doesn’t even scream at me when I start in, because then he can’t hear what’s coming in his ears. Better a fix from Dad than no fix at all, you know?

Did that ever happen with real drugs, when kids took real drugs? Has anyone ever cradled their kid and injected methadone into his arm as an act of mercy, and gotten nothing but a hiss of hate back because it wasn’t the real thing? I should know these stories, I suppose. I should seek them out. But I don’t have time for that. This is a full-time job, physician-scientists. They buy the ticket, you take the ride. That is the kernel of the “parent’s perspective.” You can go now if you want.

Can I get a glass of water?

Buy the ticket, take the ride. God, there’s a book I hate. Do your kids like stories about drugs as much as mine does? Does it interest you that stories about drugs are themselves the best drugs? Because I derive zero utility from that fact. But the guy who discovered it at p less than point oh five got fast-tracked tenure at Ohio State, honorary degrees from five Ivies plus Swarthmore and Caltech, and trusteeships on the boards of at least five drug companies, each of which carries an annual salary in the low-to-middle five figures for about ten hours a year—

—oh, there you are, Stan! Dr. O’Donnell, physician-scientists, your judge and god. Abase yourselves lest ye be stricken down, your funding denied, your hearts spitted on the cruel barb of peer review. 

Anyway, Stan has established at what we all pretend is ninety-five percent probability that stories about drugs are more addictive than stories not involving drugs—thanks in part to my son Kieran, one of the 14 subjects in his original paper, who spends at least a day a week doing Burroughs on the retinas and Thompson on the carpals. I have an associate’s degree in business management from a university that advertises on TV, but I can give a whole other lecture on the disproportionate impact of outlying data points in parametric statistics. Two of the less-far-gone subjects were twins who read nothing but Jane Austen. I tried to publish a rebuttal, but JAMA wouldn’t waive the page charges.

I think one of them died last month, about a week after her tolerance exceeded her bandwidth. That’s the math they only teach you in palliative care, but today, physician-scientists, you get to be the honors class. Bandwidth is information per unit time; your perceptual sensitivity and executive function cap it, and it caps the amount of story you can absorb in a day. When your tolerance exceeds your bandwidth, you’re done. It’s quiet enough, as long as they stay on the inky tit. Minimizing sensory interference is a survival strategy for maximal story-absorption, so all you’ll see as your kid dies in agony is a stream of tears from the corners of their eyes and a gradually increasing tetanus as they try to control the shaking. I’m actually saving Kier’s life by reading to him instead of letting the machines do it. I’m slowing down the increase in his tolerance. You can see on my face how good that makes me feel.

There’s no smoking in this building, right? [laughs] Just kidding, I don’t care.

Ah, that’s good. A lot of us are smokers, you know. Us parents. I read that in JAMA. Our fucked-up dopamine systems got us into this—our fucked-up dopamine systems and the high verbal and executive traits our parents probably spliced into our genomes without telling us. In Kentucky, they think high verbals come from fluoride in the water, did you know that? 

No, it’s a lie, but I’ve heard it a few times from very reputable researchers since I started saying it on the speaking circuit. I like to think I’m paying a few salaries at snopes dot com. You’ve got to enjoy life, you know? 

Especially when you’re a genetic time bomb like my wife. No fucked-up dopamine system there, just a little cunning-linguist juice on the chromosome.

Yeah, I got that little nugget out of the in-laws before the science hit the blogs. They’ve publicly denied it now. I only knew to ask because the Huang lab showed me the preprint over coffee. I mock and revile you, physician-scientists, but I am sincerely grateful for your willingness to supply me with the cutting-edge shit. For all the good it does me. I’m a reward-seeker and my wife’s a logoholic and our son is doomed to die in agony, but thanks to you stand-up citizens, at least we know it’s our own fault for having parents who wanted us to read good.

I’m serious. If you don’t think that’s consolation, try not having someone you can blame for it.

No ashtray? [inaudible] I guess I’m not shocked. You can bill my legal defense fund for the lectern.

Well, folks, it’s not going to get much better than this, because the fact is I am no more use to you. In fact, I daresay I have fucked us all. I sued for medical recognition of reverie syndrome because I thought medicine could help my boy kick his addiction. Well, my son’s still mainlining stories dawn to midnight, but instead of shooting himself like they did back when we didn’t have a support group and a PAC, now he can live into his mid-twenties at the bargain price of spending all day in bed getting lies pumped into him on every line, as fast as he can comprehend them. This is like treating withdrawal from alcoholism with an all-you-can-drink membership in the whiskey-of-the-month club. Someone’s laughing all the way to the bank, but it’s not me.

Those vibrotactile things were prototyped on Kier for a one-time fee of $5000. Now VTSystems is making money hand over fist, did you know that? Not from hospitals, from bulk orders to a small number of private customers. They have booths of these things, in the backs of bars and Internet cafes and crack houses. Ten dollars a minute for ten lines of fiction straight into your central nervous system. Some of you may have found your kids slumped over one of those, with your maxed-out credit card in their pocket and their collapsed sphincters ringed with some ex-con’s syphilis-infested mansnack. You’re welcome.

I could really use some more water.

[several seconds’ pause]

My recollection of the the last minute or two isn’t great, but I think I may have implied that I wish my son was dead. 

Let me clarify my position.

I wish my son was dead.

Bear with me, physician-scientists, and let me express to you how debasing it is to love a thing like my son Kieran, incapable of doing anything except eating, shitting, hurting, and desiring. Imagine some sort of grossly swollen anemone, only one that can’t even contribute to the circle of life by killing its own meals and must be fed bare-handed. Or imagine one of those little electronic pets in an egg that would whine at you for attention until it died. Or maybe it didn’t die; maybe it learned to feed itself and got its little pet-in-an-egg bachelor’s degree like everyone else’s pet in an egg. But not mine.

The doctors have said he’s reached max bandwidth, for your information. I should have mentioned that before. So at least it won’t be long.

Thanks, Lila, I appreciate it. 

The man with the stopwatch has been making these hilarious slashing motions at his neck for, like, minutes now, and I see someone’s called security. About time. So, before they shoot me behind the chemical sheds, let me leave you with a moment:

My wife. And my son. She was the loveliest writer, Kelly was. Is. She writes children’s books, the most beautiful stories. She hasn’t sold any, not except the one; she just revises them and puts them away, revises and puts them away. Every year was going to be the year. The year of final edits. But nothing was ever quite good enough, and then there was Kieran. 

Why am I talking about this? 

Ah, right. Kelly and Kieran, Madonna and child, that voice like coffee with cream poured into those words like tiny perfect cups. She always hated her writing, but for once she could forget it was hers, just giving him that voice, those words, that slight simple story built up from symbols so old and commonplace you wouldn’t think anyone could do anything with them any more. Apples, trees, a dog, a girl, a boy. But balanced, like calligraphy, flowing in this stately dance out of a spiral notebook that looked like an elephant’s bung-wipe. Light mother and dark boy, a book, a couch, a lap, the sun before naptime. All mine. Can you imagine that?

Those high-verbal genes, that midbrain dopamine, those words. And me, looking in from the porch where I always took that cigarette like a good dad, imagining the child of my blood reading on his own one day.

—relax, officers, I’m cooperating, don’t tase me, but I’ll continue to speak until I leave the vicinity of the audience, if that’s OK—

Every day since Kier was eight cells big, two by two by two, she wrote that book. Jack and the Apples. Yeah, I thought you might have heard of it. She finished it in the hospital, before we brought him home. She never showed me a word, not until I heard her read it to him that one time. I stole that elephant-shit notebook and typed up every word she hadn’t crossed out. I got an agent, and the agent got an offer, and then I told Kelly. I don’t think she ever forgave me for it.

Then again, I never forgave her for bathing my baby boy in poison lies since he was no bigger than a pinpoint. So you could say we’re even. 

—ease off, chief, I still have a thing or two to say—no, fuck you, these good people paid for the parent’s perspective, and I am Parent Zero—

It doesn’t end well for Jack, you know. I know you know.

It’s such a wise book. So kind. But it’s that bitter little whimper of animal terror at the core that makes it beautiful. 

I suppose she thinks she’s done her share. What with pregnancy, what with rehab, what with the fights and the bills and the waiting up and the phone calls from the police, always the phone calls from the police, and the husband who wasn’t man enough to forgive his wife for something that he knows wasn’t her fault, maybe she has done. Christ knows her credit’s shot, and the collection agencies are circling like hyenas at the firelight’s edge. But I’m the one here, now, at the end. And she…

I’d burn every word of that book if I could. I’d burn it out of time.

—you Schutzstaffel fuck, get that cattle prod away from me—[inaudible]