by Daniel Kraus
“Cheery little story. Dare I ask of its relevance?”
“The point is, you can call these people crazy all you want, but it doesn’t bear out. There’s a problem, they solve it, then they’re fine. Your friend Ry has his own problem. And you, Frank, you’ve got your own problem, too. What do I care if it’s real to Dr. Scrimm or Dr. Dobbin? What do I care if it’s real to me? My job is to help you solve it, end of sentence. And guess what? The sooner you solve it, the sooner you’re out of that jacket, out of a lock-down ward, and free to help Ry or whatever. All you gotta do, Frank, is say yes, Eric, I’ll let you try, and then, you know, we’ll give it a shot. What can it hurt?”
Eric looked quite pleased with himself, and for that I couldn’t fault him; his had been a most agile improvisation. What, indeed, was the drawback of allying myself with the only person at Bear Claw beyond Scrimm’s purview? Perhaps, given time, Eric Kwon might even assist in the bypassing of certain regulations so that I might reunite with Ry. It was a dangling carrot that I eyed leerily, though hungrily.
“You never said what you used to be,” said I.
“Didn’t I?”
“No.”
He toyed with his earring. “I was, uh, a pastor.”
“You don’t say. Did you have your own pulpit?”
Now his ponytail. “I sermoned. But it wasn’t for me.”
“Would you say you lost faith in Gød?”
“Again, Frank, I want to stress that it’s not about me or what—”
“Would you say you lost faith in Gød?”
“Really, I’d prefer not to talk about it. I wouldn’t want you to think that, if we have different belief systems, I couldn’t still help you—”
“Would you say you lost faith in Gød?”
He exhaled, chewed his lip, laced his fingers into a ball of knuckles.
“Yes,” said he. “I would say that.”
I smirked. “Right answer, shrink. You and I have a deal.”
IX.
NO PSYCHOTHERAPIST WORTH HIS SALT would enter freely into a quid pro quo pact, but Eric didn’t know that, and the back-and-forth sharing of personal information became the hallmark of our sessions. I recalled the OSS cellar where I’d first met Rigby, and how the pale stripe of his removed wedding band had cracked open the door just enough that I could wedge inside a foot. That foot had three fewer toes now, true enough, but Eric Kwon was no Allen Rigby when it came to buttressing a blockade. Over subsequent meetings, I learned of Eric’s schooling, dissertation, and job search, all of it so resoundingly tedious that I could find no knife to twist.
He was a trusting puppy, and also, by those very characteristics, Bear Claw’s death knell. The old guard’s provisos of punishment and prize had no place in the new guard’s policy of pampering rapport, and the asylum’s collapse snowballed into avalanche. Meds, left to overburdened nurses for months, were bungled, which led to psychotic relapses, which led to private investigations, which led to lawsuits, which led to settlements, which led to layoffs, and, finally, spates of outright quitting. Dust-bunnies procreated in dayrooms, and lawns grew knee-high. Civilization fell into chaos, and somewhere inside of it was Ry.
This gave me all the more reason to charm and flatter Eric, but ingratiation was so contrary to my nature that I rebelled in the opposite, disadvantageous direction, taking the first opening I saw to box Eric to the turnbuckles regarding his career move from theology to psychology—a shift one does not make, theorized I, without the cattle-prod of a crisis.
“Tell me, shrink, why you did it, and take care not to prevaricate.”
Eric sighed and zipped his coat against the February chill.
“Pastoring is, like, an art. Like being an English Lit professor or something. You read, you analyze, and your Sunday sermon is like your weekly essay. There’s a lot of latitude there, and I guess I enjoyed that. Writers, I think, want to help people. Why else do they write? That’s what drove me, anyway.”
“What drove you away is what I want to know. Was it religiosity’s charlatanism?”
“You’re putting words in my mouth. I think what I realized is, if you want to help people, writing is a super inefficient way to do it. The most direct way, probably, is the field of medicine. And psychology, psychiatry—if medicine has its own fine arts, those are it. You give the same patient to three psychologists, they’re going to treat her three different ways. It’s all up for interpretation.”
“Why can’t you admit that you realized Gød offers neither help nor comfort when it comes to the black terminus of our last stop?”
“You really want me to say that, don’t you? You must be the most passionate atheist I’ve ever met.”
“Atheist? Hah! You’ve got it topsy-turvy. Never has there existed a being surer of Gød’s existence than I.”
“Then explain the hostility. I don’t get it.”
“You’re the one who fled the church. You know of Gød’s tentacles, long and sundry enough to tickle our bellies with glories while simultaneously retracting to shut the window shades of Heavens. ‘Gød is good,’ we chant in church basements. ‘Gød is love,’ we stitch into needlepoints. I know what Gød is. Gød is fear. What will Gød take from you next? Your loved ones? Your home? Your country? Your body? Fear is what puts butts into pews, what knocks us kneebound as if by the baton of a slavedriver.”
Eric paused, taken back by my vehemence.
“And Jesus?” hazarded he. “Gød doesn’t get points for him?”
“Yes, yes, both Jesus and I were resurrected. Your traps are telegraphed, shrink.”
“I’m just saying, the New Testament goes out of its way to show us how Jesus was flesh and blood, all his tortures, the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Doesn’t that suggest Gød has an appreciation for suffering? Even yours?”
“If I am one of Gød’s whelps, then I am Cain, not Abel.”
“That’s an interesting way to put it. Cain was the first son, you know, not the second. Cain was the first human ever born. Do you feel like that? The first of a new age?”
“Cain was a murderer, is all I mean. Come, come, shrink. You don’t believe any of this. Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve—these are fables.”
“No, you’re right. If I believe in an Eve, it’s Mitochondrial Eve. That’s the theory that all human DNA can be traced back to a single female in East Africa maybe a couple hundred thousand years ago. Now, that’s believable. That’s science. The Bible—look, Frank, they’re fables, I’m not debating that. The fact remains that these fables were written by some of the greatest intellects who ever lived. Remember that Gød, first and foremost, is a character in a book. In a sense, these writers created Gød; they were Gød’s god. They had lessons to teach, and they still do.”
“Try living as long as I have, then tell me what ‘lessons’ they can teach.”
Eric gave a half-grin that, in time, would become my bane. He scrambled from his chair, pulled off his mittens, and with slender hands plucked from his shelf a book that, by its stippled cover texture and pink-edged pages, I knew was a Holy Bible. He tossed it onto the table in front of me. Ry was out there suffering, and this was the shrink’s watery cure-all?
“Genesis,” said he. “Easy to find. First book.”
“Sorry, chap. Not my sort of leisure reading.”
“No? What do you like? Maybe I can get some of that, too.”
What leapt to the fore was Junior’s treasury of comic books inherited from a dead father, those cardboard boxes handled with uncharacteristic mindfulness, the page-flip rainbow of cheaply printed varicolored dots, the stink of crumbled paper and hand sweat, all of it fantasy scenarios from an improbable American dream.
“Superman,” said I. “Long ago, under a cape of self-deception, I fancied myself a bit like good old Kal-El.”
“That’s kind of remarkable. You know what ‘Kal-El’ means in Hebrew?”
“It’s Hebrew?”
“It means ‘Of God.’”
That half-grin again; I
cursed. If there was an abacus keeping score, slide one bead to the shrink. I grumbled at the presumptuous tome, the booby prize for having yielded the point.
“Shall I flip the pages with my tongue?”
“Right. The straitjacket. Let me see what I can do.”
The agency that employed Eric Kwon held the drawstrings of Bear Claw’s funding. It was the only explanation for the startling swiftness. A single dawn passed before Sikes and Glover removed the restraint. The Bible crouched on my bed, as black as a sewer rat. Should I wait until it plodded away, or should I pounce? Eric, though it rankled me to admit it, had earned the latter. After all, if Gød was my enemy, it might serve me well to learn his playbook. I cracked it open and read the opening skit, something I’d never considered during my hundreds of church trips with Abigail Finch.
When my next session arrived, I had feedback, all right.
“Floundering, maladroit, inerudite incompetence! Mawkishly ignorant of proper dramatic beats, thronged with directionless characters, padded with tedious columns of immaterial names, and recklessly overambitious in scope! It is difficult to believe this found one reader, much less billions!”
I paced the coffin contours of Eric’s suite, waving the Good Book about as if a brisk shaking might empty it of some of its flaws, never noticing how my critiques could be applied to another epic, one which you, Dearest Reader, are even now close to finishing. Eric looked pleased by my reaction.
“What did you object to most of all, Frank?”
“For starters? The start! Genesis 1:26: Gød, having kneaded the world from dough, creates man in His own image. O-ho, but your idolized fabulists cannot even agree upon what that image is! Gød creates both male and female humans—a differentiation, you might notice, that He does not bother with when creating animals. Those ‘cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth’ have no gender? That’s careless writing, shrink.”
“Unless, of course, the split between female and male is crucial to humans in a way it isn’t to animals. What if that’s Gød’s image? What if He’s both genders—or even genderless? Your file, I notice, says you consider yourself genderless. Is that right?”
I pushed aside the question.
“And what of the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Life? I am not uninformed of this leafy rascal. It is known by some as Yggdrasil, but is, by any name, sucker-bait for the Foolish, a tribe which prostrates itself before Gød every time they hear the swish of Death’s robes down the hall. But Death comes not for me, shrink; I shall not climb this tree.”
“What Gød offers in Genesis, I think, is a trade-off,” said Eric. “The Tree of Life versus Tree of Knowledge—that’s the one with the snake and the apple. You can’t have both.”
“Why not? Another of Gød’s arbitrary tests?”
“This is just, you know, one interpretation, but Gød is offering Adam and Eve a chance to shape their own destiny and choose a brutal world of hardship and death instead of a perfect life gift-wrapped just for them. Did you notice how the Tree of Knowledge is placed in easy reach? How simple it is for Eve to pluck the fruit? What does that tell you?”
“I already knew that Gød is a sadist!”
“Or maybe Gød wanted us to choose the Tree of Knowledge all along, and that to be ‘doomed to die,’ like the Bible says, is really to be allowed to live. Maybe Adam and Eve’s banishment isn’t a ‘fall’ at all but rather a rise to a challenge. I mean, we all make that choice, right? We can lie about all glassy-eyed or we can take on the horrible exhilaration of life, what Gød called the ‘thorns and thistles.’ ”
My frustrated pacing paused at the coffin’s foot, too far from Eric to evaluate his shrewdness. It was hard not to associate “glassy-eyed” with every Bear Claw patient who’d surrendered to the creamy delirium of his individual psychopharmaceutical Eden. Just as difficult to resist was perceiving my own century as having confronted, with some fortitude and spunk, the “horrible exhilaration of life.” Mine was a history of lousy decisions, yes, but weren’t they decisions nonetheless?
“Even if you’re right,” said I, “it is a cruel choice.”
Eric shrugged. “That’s Genesis for you. My mentor at seminary said it wasn’t even a book; it was a series of Divine Experiments, like Gød playing with a kid’s laboratory kit. Here’s the Garden of Eden—whoops, bad idea, too easy, and now it’s gone. Here’s a world for humans without the prohibition of laws—whoops, bad idea, men are wicked and the earth is corrupt, so here’s a flood to wash it away.”
“Speak clearly, sir. Are you suggesting I’m one of these experiments?”
Another shrug of maddening ambiguity.
“I’m just saying, if you are, you’re not working against Gød. You’re working with Him, like a lab assistant, shaking things up on Earth, trying to break stuff, working as hard as you can to find all the flaws in His plan. ‘Failure’ isn’t a bad word in a lab; it’s how you get anything accomplished. You fail, fail again, and keep failing, until finally, one day, you don’t fail and it’s, like, eureka.”
This pissant did not need to tell Zebulon Finch about laboratories, meat etiquette, and Revelation Almanacs! Partner to Gød? Abhorrent idea, and as long as Ry was in danger, I would militate against it! I cut short that morning’s session, took the Bible with me, skulked behind the Locke cafeteria, opened a garbage receptacle, and irked one million flies by tossing it into a slop of scrambled eggs, oatmeal, and coffee grounds.
Bear Claw had become, as I’ve said, vastly understaffed, and the hygiene assistants still on patrol were high-strung and ill-tempered. I’d seen residents struck down for no reason, patients have seizures while nurses chatted about hair-care products, a supply shed used for sex with a madwoman who hadn’t the slightest idea what was happening. So when the Bible’s unsolved riddles had me deranged enough to require another copy, I needed to perfect a groveling lope to make it to the library unmolested.
I hoped that I might discover Ry right where he belonged, shoulder-deep in the Bear Claw archives and eager to share the latest bombshells. Find Ry I did not, but find a Bible I did, a whole bookcase, in fact, each copy more abused than an issue of Penthouse. The choice of King James, New International, Revised Standard, New Living Translation, Common English, or Oxford Annotated did not matter; each Holy Bible fell open to the Book of Job. The pages therein were thumbed to translucence, every sentence deemed worthy of underline by one Bear Clawer or another, each of whom could but hope her or his oblique torments had a divine design. I disfavored tossing myself in with these neurotics, but gave the first sentence a shot.
There was a man in the land of Ūz, whose named was Jōb; and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared Gød, and turned away from evil.
Could I possibly share less with this prudish stickler? Before about-facing back to Kant, I pictured Eric Kwon’s sly eyes and slyer smile, and how much of both I’d have to tolerate should he believe he held an intellectual upper hand. Thus I ate my pride, zipped the Bible into my jumpsuit, and pirated it back to Kant. There, in room 17, assailed by the silence of Ry’s vacancy, I read all thirty-one pages, and then, disbelieving the evidence, read them again. Two sun-ups later, I’d read Job a dozen times, dismantling each sentence as I’d done the engine of my Tin Lizzie between hooch runs, so that each isolated gear could be inspected. Eric had been right: there was gold to be mined from these tales if one drilled deep enough.
I charged down to his coffin office, the Bible gnarling in my grip.
“Job,” swore I.
Eric had the nerve to lean back and crack his half-grin into a full one.
“All these decades you’ve supposedly lived, all these things you’ve supposedly suffered, and you’ve never read Job? Really? It’s the perfect story for any teenager who thinks the world is crapping on him.”
“Table your judgments and tell me if I have this right. Satan posits to Gød that Job is pious because it is gainful to be pious, and Gød says no, Dear Satan, my Job is pious b
ecause piety is itself worthwhile.”
“Yeah, you’ve got it.”
“Whereupon Gød, like a child sharing his kitten with the neighborhood sociopath, permits Satan to test Job. So Job loses, and I quote, ‘seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she-asses.’ A sharecropper I am not, but that sounds like a tidy sum. Next, Satan whips up a wind and collapses a house, killing all ten of Job’s children. Finally, a flourish: he smites Job with leprosy.”
This last detail in particular nettled me. Arizona patrolmen had loved calling Savage Ranch a leper colony, and I’d become leprous in all outward aspects. What if these were clues that I was in the midst of a Job-like trial? What if my rescuing of Ry was but the concluding exam?
“So far,” said Eric, “so good.”
“Well, then, there is but one question raised by this bewildering text. What does sin have to do with suffering? Job was the truest of hearts and yet he suffered, while his friends, the wretched, danced about in gay little jigs.”
Eric had started taking notes.
“I know why you’re asking this,” said he. “Because when you were still alive or whatever, you didn’t suffer hardly at all.”
“Exactly, shrink. I could read the rest of this Bible and there would be no mystery that matters more. What is Gød’s afterlife admissions policy? Who gets to pass ’twixt those pearly gates? Do Job and I both get to stroll by Saint Peter in matching tuxedoes, cocktails in our left hands, bosomy women on our right, even though Job was righteous and I was villainous?”
Even over a crappy com-link patch-in from Albuquerque, Rig had said it better: Why you and not them? How come a no-good bastard like you keeps coming back and sweet Florence just lies there on the mud?
Eric held up his left hand, still writing with his right.
“Okay, fair question. But isn’t the whole point of Job that we don’t even get to ask? I mean, you read it. Gød goes on, page after page after page—it’s unprecedented in the whole Bible—basically shaming Job for daring to question Gød’s justice. ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?’, all that stuff.”
