God Is Dead (6 page)

“You'd think,” I said.

“Fuck,” Rick said. “This hurts.”

By now you're thinking I must not have gone through with it. Here I am, telling you this story, using the past tense, so it follows that I must have slipped quietly away after Rick got woozy from blood loss, or else just finished him off myself and gone out to join Leo. I must have changed my mind, flaked, chickened out.

But that's not the case. I went through with it. I honored the agreement we'd made.

So how is it, then, that I'm still here, a man approaching late middle age in a world restored by the CAPA to a reasonable facsimile of its former self? A man with a nine-to-whenever in a design firm he co-founded, with a wife and a teenage daughter, a late-model Saab, and a three handicap? A man who sees less and less of the boy he once was when he contemplates his face in the bathroom mirror?

It's easy to understand when one considers that the pistols we used that night, a twin set of Desert Eagle XIX .50 calibers belonging to Rick's father, held clips of seven rounds each. And that one of the guns had been fired four more times than the other—once by Cole, and three times by Rick when he killed the cop and frightened off Leo. So that when Rick and I sat side by side on the floor in our friends' blood and he put a hand on the back of my neck and pressed our foreheads together and called me by a childhood nickname I'd nearly forgotten, one of the guns was empty, and the other, the one in my trembling hand, still held four rounds.

 

Mrs. DerSimonian sits across from me, wringing her hands so roughly that they've mounted a protest in the form of alternating red and white splotches. Mothers generally have a tougher time than fathers, but Mrs. DerSimonian has a worse time of it than most. This is due in part to her nervous disposition, and in part to the mothering philosophy of Armenian-Americans, which encourages doting and fussing. She sweats. Her hands flutter in her lap. She applies great gleaming swaths of lip balm, over and over, until the whole office smells like strawberries.

Today's exercise is Delusion Jettison. Pretty rudimentary stuff, it's true, but in the two years I've been seeing Mrs. DerSimonian the ratio of progression to setback has been poor. Mostly, I came to realize, because of inadequate reinforcement of lessons learned. So we go back over the easy stuff a lot.

“Mrs. DerSimonian,” I say. “Come on, now. Tell me how wonderful your son is.”

She won't meet my gaze. Like spooked squirrels her eyes dart to her boy, Levon. He sits in the cage by the window, warmed by the afternoon sun, content with a coloring book and a box of Crayolas.

“Levon is fine,” I tell her, my voice gentle but firm. “Granted, he's making a mess of that rabbit, giving it pastel green fur and coloring all outside the lines. But he's fine. Now tell me, what's so special about him?”

Her eyes come back in my direction but focus on the wall behind me. “You're just going to shoot me down,” she says. “Tell me how wrong I am.”

“That's the process,” I say. “It's for your benefit, Mrs. DerSimonian. For everyone's benefit, especially Levon's. You know that.”

She draws a deep, shuddering breath, closes her eyes, and puts a hand to her mouth. “I don't know if I can, today,” she says through her fingers. “We had a scare earlier, and I'm still quite upset.”

“Tell me about it,” I say.

She opens her eyes again. Her gaze falls on the sign hanging on the wall behind me, which bears, in embroidered calligraphic letters, the motto of the Child Adulation Prevention Agency:
Children Are Like Any Other Group of People—A Couple of Winners, a Whole Lot of Losers.

“I stopped at the store to buy a coffee,” she says. “I skipped breakfast because I didn't get up until quarter to eight and Levon has his swim class at eight-thirty on Monday mornings.”

“Now right there,” I say. “A swim class for three-year-olds? Three-year-olds don't need classes of any kind. He should be in the backyard, splashing around in a mud puddle.”

Now she looks directly at me. By her expression you'd think I suggested she give Levon a chain saw to play with.

“Do you realize how dangerous standing water is?” she asks. “Absolutely
teeming
with pathogens. Just last week, a boy died in Florida after swimming around in floodwaters. Leptospirosis.”

Like a lot of parents these days, Mrs. DerSimonian makes it her business to know all the things that could kill her son, by name and in detail.

But I wave this away. “Go on with what you were saying. This morning. Coffee.”

“Oh, God.” The hand flies to her mouth again. “I'm getting all shaky thinking about it.”

She falls silent once more. I wait. She looks at me, looks away, and continues.

“So I got out of the car and left it running with the air-conditioning on for Levon. Normally I would never,
ever
leave him in the car by himself, but I was only going inside for thirty seconds, and it just didn't seem worth it to open the hatch on his fireproof pod and undo all the straps on his car seat and take off his crash helmet. Especially the helmet. He hates it so much he goes into these screaming fits whenever he sees me coming at him with it. So I locked the car and left it running and went in for my coffee. But when I came out I realized I'd left my spare key at home.

“I started crying,” she says, and now her eyes blossom with fresh tears. “I called the operator to have her send a signal to the car to unlock the doors, but I was crying too hard and she couldn't understand me, and meanwhile there's Levon, trapped inside, so close and yet I couldn't touch him or hold him, and he saw how upset I was and
he
started crying. Eventually the operator got the gist of what I was saying and unlocked the doors, but by then she'd called the police and fire department and they all showed up, two cops, an ambulance, and a fire engine, and there I was feeling terrible, just terrible, for putting my son in danger and bothering these good people, all for a coffee I never drank because I dropped it on the sidewalk in a panic.”

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.