I take a tissue from the box on my desk and hand it to Mrs. DerSimonian.
“I still feel terrible,” she sniffles, dabbing at her eyes.
I consider pointing out to her that Levon was in no danger at all, that emergency services are there for the sole purpose of being bothered by people in distress, that leaving her son alone for thirty seconds is hardly an unpardonable crime.
Instead I say, “Mrs. DerSimonian. Tell me how wonderful your son is.”
She makes a strangled, frustrated sound in her throat, drops the tissue to her lap, and says, “He’s very, very bright. Okay?”
“Wrong!” I say, slamming my fist on the desktop. “He scored a 92 on his latest Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence test, which places him firmly in the median range among American children. In seven previous tests, he’s never scored higher than a 98. Like most of us, Levon will have to rely on the gifted few to drive human intellectual progress in his lifetime. He will be a passenger, not a participant.”
Mrs. DerSimonian gives me an evil look. “How about you,” she says, “go fuck yourself.”
I sit back and straighten my hair. “I’m just trying to help,” I say.
As the Child Adulation Prevention Psychiatrist for Watertown and surrounding communities, I am both the most vital and most hated man in Kennebec County. Vital, because without me my zone of responsibility would soon descend back into the child-worshipping anarchy from which I rescued it only two years ago. Hated, because I force people to see their children for what they really are: flawed, mortal, and essentially useless creatures.
Before becoming the regional CAPP I ran a small private practice. I had a wife, a baby on the way, and a med school debt of insurmountable proportions. Things were good. Optimism ruled the day. I helped people in a manner that made them happy and grateful. They came to me with phobias and sexual dysfunctions and suicidal ideations, and I cared for them. Cared is the word. This was not a job. It was my life. I took on patients with no insurance, worked sixteen-hour days, paid out-of-pocket to install and maintain a crisis line in my home, so people could always call if they needed to. My wife Laura, glowingly pregnant, loved me. She believed in what I did. We were ready to start a family.
But these were hard times, the tail end of a decade of economic depression and its attendant social ills: mammoth unemployment, rising rates of drug abuse, domestic violence, and property crime, race and labor riots, and in the now-famous takeover of the Cleveland VA Medical Center by angry Gulf War veterans, organized and violent insurrection.
Then the world learned God had been found dead in Sudan. As far as anyone could determine, he’d taken mortal form to observe firsthand the armed conflict between Sudan’s Islamic government and the Christian Nuer tribe in the south. Fleeing to Kenya with Nuer refugees, he’d gotten snagged in a razor wire fence bordering a minefield. Others in his group tried to free him, but were forced to leave him behind when bombs from government attack planes rained down. He died, stripped naked by thieves and scorched by the equatorial sun, near the border town of Kapoeta.
One small death among thousands, his passing would have gone unnoticed if the feral dogs who fed on his corpse hadn’t suddenly begun speaking a mishmash of Greek and Hebrew, and walking along the surface of the White Nile as if it were made of glass.
Naturally, the news of God’s death hit the world like a sledgehammer. An initial wave of panic, civil unrest, and general bad behavior swept the globe. Martial law was declared, and the National Guard took up residence in every American city. Suicide among nuns and clergy reached epidemic proportions, as did the looting of stores for comfort foods such as Little Debbie snack cakes. Most, myself included, believed the end was nigh, and for a while we hid in our homes, hunched over and wincing, convinced that at any moment we would explode, or simply blip out of existence.
And then a strange thing happened: nothing. Gradually we came to realize that the sun still rose in the morning and set at night, the tide still came in and went out on schedule, and we and everyone we knew (for the most part) were still alive and breathing. Talking heads and self-declared experts offered any number of theories, but the gist of it, intuited by most people, was this: God had created the universe and set it spinning, but it would continue chugging along despite the fact that he was no longer around to keep things tidy.
People emerged from their hiding places and got back to their lives. The National Guard stood down. Laura and I breathed a sigh of relief and resumed planning for the baby’s arrival, compiling lists of names, pricing nursery wallpaper, buying mobiles and jumpers. For a while the only noticeable change was the absolute lack of anything to do on Sundays.
Then the real trouble began. I saw it in my patients: a spiritual void left in the wake of God’s demise. People everywhere were casting about for something to place their recently orphaned faith in. Agnostics joined the atheists and put their money on science, but they were, as always, hopelessly outnumbered. Many people, including most of the population of Africa, built temples dedicated to the dogs who had feasted on God’s flesh, churches where the hymnals consisted entirely of barks and whines transcribed phonetically onto the page. And here, out of the swamps of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya basin and into this burgeoning chaos came a sort of secular evangelist known as The Child. The Child was just that—a boy of three or so, serene and flawless, with cocoa skin and a vocabulary so rich it seemed he must have swallowed an Oxford English Dictionary. His message, delivered first in town halls and opera houses, and later, as his popularity grew, in arenas and baseball stadiums, was simple: God has abandoned us. The way to salvation is through the child.
By which he meant, of course, every child.
And America, already teetering on the verge of child worship, was only too eager to hear him. Soon a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of psychiatry arose: Adults, buffeted by socioeconomic insecurities, with the nuclear canopy still overhead and no God to protect them from it, turned to their children for comfort and guidance.
As a psychiatrist, I began to see examples of this strange behavior well before it started to make headlines. Ricky Mascis, an out-of-work single father who I treated free of charge, was troubling over which bills to pay, as he didn’t have enough to cover all of them.
“So it’s really just, you know, you gotta prioritize,” he told me. “Which isn’t too hard at first. Obviously, if it’s between buying a new TV or paying the power bill, you pay the bill. No brainer. But now I’ve got to decide things like, should I buy food this week, or should I put that hundred dollars into fixing the car so I can get out and look for a job?”
“It’s a tough choice,” I agreed. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I asked Boo where he thought I should put the money.” Boo was Ricky’s four-year-old son, Ricky Jr. “He said I should buy ten sets of Hungry Hungry Hippos.”
“Cute,” I said. “That’s the luxury of being a child, of course. You don’t have to make hard decisions.”
“I don’t know, Doc,” Ricky said. “Boo’s a really smart kid. I mean, supersmart, and I’ve had it with worrying about all this crap. I’m thinkin’ the hippos might be the way to go.”
It got worse in a hurry. God, hamstrung by a spotty track record, and dead besides, was out; kids, tangible, blameless, and cute as all hell, were in. Soon the phenomenon blossomed into a two-tiered crisis. In the majority of adults, who comprised the less acute tier, the behavior was not all that dissimilar to the ways in which parents had indulged children before God died. Tantrums were permitted, even smiled at. Landfills bulged with excised bread crusts and untouched vegetable portions. Toys “R” Us shares rose 90 percent in three weeks. The worst upshot of this was a moderate loss in productivity, as time normally spent in the cubicle and behind the checkout counter was instead squandered at Chuck E. Cheese’s or the local petting zoo. This problem would have been manageable without radical intervention, though, if it hadn’t been for the smaller
but more acute tier.
These parents were found in the country’s traditional bastions of religious piety—the Deep South, the rural Northeast, Utah. In these places the transition to child worship was brisk and absolute, and Laura and I witnessed it firsthand. Seventy percent of the adult population stopped going to work, choosing instead to watch the same animated feature for weeks on end, play Game Boy, and partake of grilled cheese sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly, and chocolate chip cookies. Basic infrastructure dissolved. People were dying in the streets because there were no paramedics to take them to the hospital, and no doctors there when they arrived.
The National Guard was mobilized yet again, but when they arrived they found there wasn’t much to be done, other than keeping people from entering or leaving the affected areas. The functions for which they were trained and equipped—policing duties, riot control—were not indicated, and it wasn’t as if they could force people at gunpoint to stop spending time with their children. Another, more sublime solution needed to be found.
Soon word came through that FEMA, in conjunction with an unnamed intelligence agency, was convening an emergency meeting of mental health professionals in Washington. I had to go, if our baby was to have a future. I dusted off my hiking boots and filled a backpack with canned soup and turkey jerky from the abandoned 7-Eleven. Laura and I shared a cry.
“You’re doing the right thing,” she said.
I held her close, pressing her belly to me. “I’d curse God for forcing me to make such a choice,” I said. “But, you know.”
“Go,” she said, and gently pushed me away. She laced her fingers together over the globe of her abdomen and smiled. “We’ll be waiting.”
She spoke the truth. When I returned from D.C. three months later, accompanied by an Army recon platoon and armed with a Ryder truck of antipsychotic medication and the government’s brutal but effective therapy plan, I found Laura and the son she’d died giving birth to, curled together on the kitchen floor, waiting for me to bury them.
Mrs. DerSimonian is the last patient of the day, so when she’s gone I make a few idle notes in her file, lock up the office, and head outside. I find Jeff Pauquette sitting on the trunk of my Celica. The sleeves of his signature flannel work shirt are rolled up, revealing hairy, muscular forearms. He’s glowering at me from under the bill of a Teague Tractor Supply baseball cap.
“Looks like they did a real number on her this time, them,” he calls to me across the parking lot.
This is a little game we play. Every day, while I’m in the office, Jeff vandalizes my car. Then he pretends someone else did it, and I pretend I don’t know it was him. The damage is usually worse on Wednesdays, after our mandatory weekly appointment, but today he’s really outdone himself. The right rear tire is gutted, slashed all the way around the rim. Jeff’s also gone to the trouble of uprooting a traffic sign and breaking the driver’s side window with it. The sign juts from the window as I approach, instructing me to STOP.
I set my briefcase on the pavement and pull the sign out. “They must have been particularly angry today,” I say to Jeff.
“Must have been, them,” he agrees.
“I wonder why,” I say. “I wonder what I did today to make them so angry. Would you mind? I need to get the spare out of the trunk.”
Jeff takes his time getting up. “I might have some theories about that,” he says. “I might be able to shed a little light for you, me. ’Cept I spent all day thinking about what crappy kids my two boys are, like you told me.”
I remove the jack, tire iron, and spare from the trunk. “They’re not crappy kids, Jeff. Just normal. Average.”
This is not strictly true. His younger son Abe has a fastball he could probably ride to the pros. Abe is also preternaturally compassionate. He cries at television commercials and displays none of the ruthless tendencies toward frogs and bugs usually seen in adolescent boys. But he has a harelip, so I focus on that during sessions with his father.
Jeff watches me work. “You know,” he says after a while, “this problem with your car is getting epidemic. You ought to call the police about it, you.”
I tighten the last lug nut on the spare and look up at him. “We both know the police won’t do anything about it, Jeff. They hate me as much as everyone else. They hate me as much as you do.”
For the first time, Jeff smiles. “No,” he says. “Nobody around here hates you as much as I do, me.”
“Don’t know about that,” I say. “I had Reggie Boucher jailed last week for missing two consecutive sessions. He’s probably got you beat in the hating me department.” I put the stuff back in the trunk and slam the lid shut. “Is there anything else, Jeff? Anything you want to talk about?”
“No, that’ll be all,” he says. “I gotta get back home, me. Gotta feed those ungrateful parasite sons.”
“Good night, then,” I say. But I know he won’t leave just yet, and he doesn’t. He gets into his truck and waits while I brush the broken glass from inside my car and start it up. Then he follows me all the way home, tailgating and blaring his horn. When I reach my driveway and pull in through the gate, he jams the accelerator, speeding past with a roar.
I park in the circular driveway and walk into the garage. With a ten-foot wall surrounding the place, no one could get in, not even Jeff, but still I lift the dustcover from the Jaguar and inspect it for the smallest hints of malice. Finding none, I take a new tire from the stack against the back wall and bring it out to the Celica, placing it in the trunk with the other three.
Then I go inside, punch the code into the security keypad, triple-lock the door, and run to the basement before the motion sensors reset themselves.
Selia’s on the couch in the rumpus room, watching people on television eat cow eyeballs for money. There are five people in town with no relationship whatsoever to any children. Fortunately for me, Selia’s one of them.
“Hey,” she says. “What’s the damage today?”
“One tire, gutted,” I say. “Driver’s-side window, smashed.”
“Ouch.”
“Jeff’s getting more ruthless every day.”
“The man is without ruth,” Selia says. “Completely sans ruth.”
“How’s your mom?”
“The same. Today she thought I was a burglar when I came out of the bathroom. And she’s still calling me Betty.”
“Any mail?” I ask.
“Just the usual. Coupons. A dozen hate letters.”
I kick off my shoes and sidle next to her. “You sure you still want to be the girlfriend of the most loathed man in town?”
“It’s not so bad, other than the sneaking around,” she says. “Let’s do this, buckaroo. I have to get back before she starts mixing herself toilet-water martinis again.”
We take each other’s clothes off. Selia puts in her diaphragm and a triple dose of spermicidal foam. I double up on the condoms. We dim the lights. It’s nice.
Afterward she kisses my forehead, then my hand, and asks if I need her to get some dinner. When Selia’s not around I have to drive sixty miles to the Shop ’n Save just across the county line in Dover, because no one here will sell me food. But tonight there’s half a bag of spanakopita in the freezer, along with some Tater Tots. I tell her I’m fine.
“You’d better hit the servants’ exit,” I say, meaning the underground tunnel that runs from my basement to an alley two blocks away behind the Malibu Tanning Salon, where Selia parks her car.
“I wish you’d quit,” she says. She puts on her jacket. “Then maybe, after six months or so when everyone didn’t hate you so much anymore, we could just spend time together like a normal couple. Go to dinner at Primo’s. Maybe take in a movie without having to drive to New Hampshire.”
“Hon, I can’t quit,” I say. “No more than you can quit taking care of your mother. These people need me.”
“Eff them,” she says. “They need someone. Not you specifically. There’re other CAPPs.”
&n
bsp; I laugh. “It’s not the sort of job that people are scrambling to fill.”
“Fine, fine,” she says, grabbing her handbag from the coffee table. She gives me a last peck on the lips. “Bye. Remember, you’re my favorite little martyr.”
I watch her disappear into the tunnel entrance and think, I could say the same about you, hon, with your mother hanging around your neck like a leaden life preserver. But that’s not fair, really. Because like I said to her before, the sum total of adulthood is squelching the desire to run, screaming bloody goddamn murder, from the unpleasant things you’re obliged to do. Selia’s got her mom. I’ve got this town and the people in it.
But to keep moving forward, to remain faithful to those unpleasant things, everyone’s got to reward themselves once in a while. I’m no exception. So I wait until I’m certain Selia’s gone, then go to the safe in the bedroom and take out my vintage (not to mention illicit) collection of children’s-clothing catalogs. There are forty-eight of them, everything from flimsy newspaper inserts to the collection’s centerpiece, a glossy 700-page tome from BestDressedKids dating back to the Christmas before the adult population went gaga over children. Now, of course, children’s-clothing catalogs—and the manufacture, distribution, or possession of them—are strictly forbidden, but with the money I make as CAPP I’ve been able to easily (if cautiously) acquire nearly fifty individual catalogs over the past year. Most come from Scandinavia, where there are few laws governing images of children, so the models have a noticeable blond-and-blue uniformity, but this is not a problem for me. Kids are kids.
God Is Dead Page 6
