by Ben Marcus
* * *
—
The doctor wanted to see them alone first. He told them that it was his job to listen. So they talked, just dumped the thing out on the floor. It was ugly, Martin thought, but it was a rough picture of what was going down. The doctor scribbled away, stopping occasionally to look at them, to really deeply look at them, and nod. Since when had the act of listening turned into such a strange charade?
Then the doctor met with Jonah, to see for himself, pull evidence right from the culprit’s mouth. Martin and Rachel sat in the waiting room and stared at the door. What would the doctor see? Which kid would he get? Were they crazy and this was all just some preteen freak-out?
Finally, the whole gang of them—doctor, parents, and child—gathered to go over the plan, Jonah sitting polite and alert while the future of his brain was discussed. They told him the proposal: a slow ramp of antidepressants, along with weekly therapy, and then, depending, some group work, if that sounded good to Jonah.
Jonah didn’t respond.
“What do you think?” the doctor said. “So you can feel better? And things can maybe go back to normal?”
“I told you, I feel fine,” Jonah said.
“Yes, good! But sometimes when we’re sick we think we’re not. That can be a symptom of being sick—to think we are well.”
“So all the healthy people are just lying to themselves?”
“Well, no, of course not,” the doctor said.
“Right now I never think about hurting myself, but you want to give me a medicine that might make me think about hurting myself?”
The doctor seemed uneasy.
“It’s called suicidal ideation,” Jonah said.
“And how do you know about that?” the doctor asked.
“The Internet.”
The adults all looked at one another.
“How come people are so surprised when someone knows something?” Jonah asked. “Your generation had better get used to how completely unspecial it is that a kid can look up a medicine online and learn about the side effects. That’s not me being precocious. It’s just me using my stupid computer.”
“Okay, good. Well, you’re right, you should be informed, and I want to congratulate you on finding that out for yourself. That’s great work, Jonah.”
Martin watched Jonah. He found himself hoping that the real Jonah would appear, scathing and cold, to show the doctor what they were dealing with.
“Thank you,” Jonah said. “I’m really proud of myself. I didn’t think I could do it, but I just really stuck with it and I kept trying until I succeeded.”
Martin could not tell if the doctor caught the tone of this response.
“But you might have also read that that’s a very uncommon symptom. It hardly ever happens. We just have to warn you and your parents about it, to be on the lookout for it.”
“Maybe. But I have none of the symptoms of depression, either. So why would you risk making me feel like I want to kill myself if I’m not depressed and feel fine?”
“Okay, Jonah. You know what? I’m going to talk to your parents alone now. Does that sound all right? You can wait outside in the play area. There are books and games.”
“Okay,” Jonah said. “I’ll just run and play now.”
“There,” Martin said. “There,” after Jonah had closed the door. “That was it. That’s what he does.”
“Sarcasm? Maybe you don’t much like it, but we don’t treat sarcasm in young people. I think it’s too virulent a strain.” The doctor chuckled.
“No offense,” Martin said to the doctor, “and I’m sure you know your job and this is your specialty, but I think that way of speaking to him—”
“What way?”
“Just, you know, as if he were much younger. He’s just—I don’t think that works with him.”
“And how do you speak to him?”
“Excuse me?”
“How do you speak to him? I’m curious.”
Rachel coughed and seemed uncomfortable. They’d agreed to be open, to let each other have ideas and opinions without feeling mad or threatened.
“It’s true,” she said. “I mean, Martin, I think you have been surprised lately that Jonah is as mature as he is. That seems to have really almost upset you. You know, you really have yelled at him a lot. We can’t just pretend that hasn’t happened.” She looked at him apologetically. “Aside,” she added, “from the scary things that he’s been saying.”
“Is it maturity? I don’t think so. Have I been upset? Fucking hell, yes. And so have you, Rachel. And not because he thinks the Jews caused 9/11 or because he threatened to report us for sexual abuse for trying to hug him, which, for what it’s worth, I spared you from, Rachel. I spared you. Because I didn’t think you could bear it.”
Rachel just stared at him.
“What you’re seeing is a very, very bright boy,” the doctor said.
“Too smart to treat?” Martin asked.
“I think family therapy would be productive. Very challenging, but worthwhile, in my opinion. I could get you a referral. What you’re upset about, in relation to your son, may not fall under the purview of medicine, though.”
“The purview? Really?”
“To be honest, I was on the fence about medication. Whatever is going on with Jonah, it does not present as depression. In my opinion, Jonah does not have a medical condition.”
Martin stood up.
“He’s not sick, he’s just an asshole, is what you’re saying?”
“I think that’s a very dangerous way for a parent to feel,” the doctor said.
“Yeah?” Martin said, standing over the doctor now. “You’re right. You got that one right. Because all of a parent’s feelings are dangerous, you motherfucker.”
* * *
—
At home that night, Martin stuffed a chicken with lemon halves, drenched it in olive oil, scattered a handful of salt over it, and blasted it in the oven until it emerged deeply burnished, with skin as crisp as glass. Rachel poured drinks for the two of them, and they cooked in silence. To Martin, it was a harmless silence. He could trust it, and if he couldn’t, then to hell with it. He wasn’t going to chase down everything unsaid and shout it into their home, as if all important messages on the planet needed to be shared. He’d said enough, things he believed, things he didn’t. Quota achieved. Quota surpassed.
Rachel looked small and tired. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure. He was more aware than ever, as she set the table and put out Lester’s cup and Jonah’s big-kid glass, how impossibly unknowable she would always be—what she thought, what she felt—how what was most special about her was the careful way she guarded it all.
No matter their theories—about Jonah or each other or the larger world—their job was to watch over Jonah on his cold voyage. He had to come back. This kind of controlled solitude was unsustainable. No one could pull it off, especially not someone so young. Except that his reasoning on this, he knew, was wishful parental bullshit. Of course a child could do it. Who else but children to lead the species into darkness? Which meant what for the old-timers left behind?
Dinner was brief, destroyed by the savage appetite of Lester, who engulfed his meal before Rachel had even taken a bite, and begged, begged to be excused so that he could return to the platoon of small plastic men he’d deployed on the rug. According to Lester, his men were waiting to be told what to do. “I need to tell my guys who to attack!” he shouted. “I’m in charge!”
At the height of this tantrum, Jonah, silent since they’d returned from the doctor’s office, leaned over to Lester, put a hand on his shoulder, and calmly told him not to whine.
“Don’t use that tone of voice,” he said. “Mom and Dad will excuse you when they’re ready.”
“Okay,” Lester said, looking up at
his brother with a kind of awe, and for the rest of their wordless dinner he sat there waiting, as patiently as a boy his age ever could, his hands folded in his lap.
* * *
—
At bedtime, Rachel asked Martin if he wouldn’t mind letting her sleep alone. She was just very tired. She didn’t think she could manage otherwise. She gave him a sort of smile, and he saw the effort behind it. She dragged her pillow and a blanket into a corner of the TV room and made herself a little nest there. He had the bedroom to himself. He crawled onto Rachel’s side of the mattress, which was higher, softer, less abused, and fell asleep.
In the morning, Jonah did not say goodbye on his way to school, nor did he greet Martin upon his return home. When Martin asked after his day, Jonah, without looking up, said that it had been fine. Maybe that was all there was to say, and why, really, would you ever shit on such an answer?
Jonah took up his spot on the couch and opened a book, reading quietly until dinner, while Lester played at his feet. Martin watched Jonah. Was that a grin or a grimace on the boy’s face? he wondered. And what, finally, was the difference? Why have a face at all if what was inside you was so perfectly hidden? The book Jonah was reading was nothing, some silliness. Make-believe and colorful and harmless. It looked like it belonged to a series, along with that book The Short. On the cover a boy, arms outspread, was gripping wires in each hand, and his whole body was glowing.
Precious Precious
It was late in the wretched season, and there was a sweet chill in the halls at Thompson Systems, where the future was getting fondled by some of the most anxious and self-regarding minds of Ida Grieve’s generation.
Tonight a bunch of them were at drinks, because death was coming, and Foster, the wunderkind, whose official title at Thompson was Beekeeper, had ordered some nasty brew called Mud. It oozed up his glass and clumped in dark nuggets along the rim. When they asked the waiter what was in it, he seemed forlorn, as if he might soon bleed out on the carpet.
They watched him shuffle away, perhaps to go find out, or perhaps to throw himself from a cliff.
“Oh no. It’s like we just sent him to the principal’s office,” said Foster. “Hey,” he whispered toward the bar. “You’re not in trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong. We love you.”
“Do we really love him, though?” said Aniel, a little too loudly. “I mean, we don’t. In some ways we hardly think of him as human, or people like him, even though we know not to admit that.”
“Jesus, Aniel,” said Foster. “Apparently we don’t really know not to admit that.”
* * *
—
At the table were the brooding engineers—Mort and Bummer and Cerise—youngish and facially steamrolled from all-nighters at their terminals, and if they were rich they still dressed cheap and drank cheap and lived in cheap, bullshit apartments up in the hills. Maury Beryl was there because he was always there, sipping some cloudy fizz, sometimes swishing it in his mouth, as if he might spit it in someone’s face. Ida felt that she could be sad around him, not that she’d tried. One day, maybe. She’d spill her moods over Maury Beryl and see what happened.
Sitting next to Maury was Harriet, about whom nothing could be said, or thought, or felt. Except that Harriet pushed a certain button of Ida’s that very nearly seemed like the size of her entire body. Harriet had to be met with force, or else you just became her backup singer.
A mysterious young man named Donny Wohl sat at the end of the table. He was possibly still a teenager, despite his pretty mustache, so Ida was afraid of him, even though he was strangely beautiful and she thought about him sort of a lot when she was alone. And alongside Donny, or maybe just accidentally sitting nearly inside Donny’s pants, and accidentally soothing a terrible itch of his under the table, Ida guessed, was Royce, who cock-blocked ideas in the pitch room at Thompson. It was Royce’s job to pump discouragement into the Thompson intellectual climate, through the tiny pink valve in her face. Ida felt reliably like shit after every encounter with Royce. To drink with Royce, though, that was different. She was competitively bleak, and even though she seemed to be indifferently molesting Donny right now, taking her turn with the little love child, Ida was glad she was there.
Foster took careful sips of his drink and tried to smile. A watery brown stain crested up his mouth.
“I will not even remark on the kind of grin you have right now,” said Aniel.
“Maybe the dirt is from somewhere and kind of, I don’t know, amazing for you,” said Harriet, pinging the glass with her finger. “The Dead Sea. Some legendary, healing mudflats.” She studied the menu.
“It doesn’t taste terrible,” he said. “I was expecting cream.”
Aniel got up and sniffed the drink. He struck a snobbish, wine-tasting face.
“It’s a superfood, dude,” he said. Aniel was older, which meant thirty-two or so, with all the shame that that entailed. He dressed young, but fancy young. Fifth Avenue Skate. He always seemed so well laundered.
“I was reading somewhere that certain regional soil samples have more protein than meat,” Aniel said. “Per cubic whatever.”
“Oh yeah. Read that too. In Scientific American, last August. That’s totally right.”
This was Bummer, a compulsive affirmer. Whenever Ida needed agreement at work, an ally or a second or a foil, a fall guy or a fool or a friend, or even just a live human being who bled on command, she sought out Bummer, but his inability to produce conversational friction had melted him into a puddle, contained, if barely, by a few odd bones.
“I don’t know,” said Harriet. “I could see that being true. If animals were buried in that soil, there’d be some protein in the sample. Vestigial.”
Ida laughed. “If? Isn’t that what soil is, ultimately? A compost of the dead? So, Foster, you’re really just drinking your grandfather.”
“No need to make it personal,” said Foster. “And my grandfather is still alive, so that’s gross.” He’d abandoned his drink and was glancing around. For help, maybe. For an escape.
Royce whispered something to Donny, and Donny’s face registered nothing. Donny was staring, it seemed, directly at Ida, and she squirmed in her seat. Activity seemed to accelerate under the table, as if Royce were solving a Rubik’s Cube without looking.
Ida wouldn’t have minded watching, without the table blocking their doings, but just in a casual way. Not sexual, exactly. Almost as you’d watch a short documentary at the museum. With others, on a bench, in a cool, dark room.
“I wish there was a more obvious way to make money off of that idea,” Maury said. “That the earth is simply compacted corpse material. A kind of condensed, spherical dead body.”
“Money!” shouted Bummer, and then a few of them repeated the word in different foreign accents, until they’d reduced it to a pirate’s growl. Ida wasn’t sure just how ironic they were being, and they probably weren’t either.
“Actually,” said Mort, and this set off a chorus of groans around the table.
“What? I was just going to say that that’s the plot of a science fiction novel. Really. I’m not kidding.”
“We know that, Mort,” said Harriet. “That’s what’s so depressing. That you are reminded of a book and now we have to hear about it.”
Cerise suggested that it wouldn’t hurt to hear the plot. That Mort deserved a chance.
Foster said that it might hurt. It had hurt before. “In the Middle Ages they described the plots of books to people as a form of torture.”
“Okay. Okay,” said Mort. “I’ll be fast and you will thank me. So the earth keeps swelling in circumference as people die and rot, adding to the mass of the planet. Right? Then it gets too big for its orbit and things go, uh, pretty wrong. I mean. There’s a company, called The Company, I’m not even kidding, that has to keep people from dying. They have this old, wet—”<
br />
“Shut up already,” said Harriet. “I didn’t come to a reading. Jesus.”
* * *
—
An obituary had just been written for their industry. And not just their industry—Thompson was a think tank that had turned into a make tank, which meant it was essentially just like any other company—but industry itself. Selling was old-school. Selling was done. The world may as well have worn black. The experts all signed off on it. The only thing left to fight about was the timing. Dead tomorrow, dead in a fortnight, dead before the solstice. A kind of rubbernecker’s thrill had resulted, even if Ida would be watching her own spectacular crash. They’d all be out of jobs. The whole idea of a job would be washed from memory. People would wander in the snow, which they couldn’t recall the name for, bleeding. Customers would no longer pay for anything. Customers had more power than ever. The word “customer” was, in fact, offensive. It was probably racist. You had to court these people personally, go to their houses and lather them in cream, rub their backs. That’s what they were all talking about now. What this would look like. Who would scrub in and chase the danger.
“Who volunteers?” asked Maury, cracking his knuckles.
No one spoke.
“I gave my last massage in ninth grade,” said Cerise. “Hit my quota early. I am pretty much done touching others. In that way.”
“We are too obsessed with people,” said Harriet.
Royce laughed. “Because they are the ones with the money?”
“And too obsessed with money. We are so obsessed with new products, new go-to-market strategies. What we need is to reinvent the customer. That’s where the next major disruption will take place.”
“The customer is always in flight,” mumbled Aniel.
“Oh dear god,” Royce said to Harriet. “Really? I truly hope that you are not getting paid for the things you say and do. I hope you are a secret intern, sent here to test us, to see how we respond to fatuous drool. Please, please tell me that you make no money for your ideas.”
