God Is Dead (7 page)

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.”

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.

I sit on the floor and spread out the collection in front of me. For a while I savor the cover photos, the little arms and legs, the crisp new parkas and snappy denim overalls, the milk-tooth smiles. Then I gather the catalogs together in a stack and flip through each one. All my favorite pages I've marked with Post-it tabs. Each of my favorite children is a boy, each has a name and a story, and all their stories are happy ones. I smile and share the happiness as they revel in the satisfaction of normal lives and natural fibers. At times I'm so moved I cry a little.

But these are the only fantasies I allow myself. Though sometimes tempted, I never pretend that Laura is still alive, or that our son survived his birth and is now an adorable toddling gape-mouthed two-year-old, quick to giggle, with red hair like his mother's and a predilection for Mack truck worship. Never do I lie dozing on the sofa and imagine I hear his bare feet slapping across the kitchen floor in pursuit of a dust bunny or a Matchbox car. Nor do I fantasize about taking Selia, leaving this town to its miserable fate, and starting a family of our own in a warm, sane place.

Never, ever do I allow myself these luxuries.

No. After a while I gather up the catalogs, put them back in the safe, give the combination dial a spin, and go upstairs to put my dinner in the oven.

The next morning I need to go to the bank, so I leave home half an hour early. Lester Hicks, the president of Kennebec Federal Savings, has a six-year-old daughter and doesn't like me any more than any other parent, grandparent, godparent, aunt, uncle, big brother, or sister in town, but he grudgingly accepts my business on account of the fact that I'm worth more than the GNPs of Sierra Leone and Gambia combined.

This, of course, doesn't mean that they're pleasant or even polite to me there. When I reach the front of the line all three tellers simultaneously hang their
NEXT WINDOW PLEASE
signs and disappear. I wait. There's much grumbling in the line, not about the tellers, but about me. Someone calls into question my parentage, suggesting not so subtly that I am the product of bestiality. Another says I might be more sympathetic if I were a parent myself, but of course that would presuppose certain sexual functions of which I clearly am not capable. This goes on for fifteen minutes, until the tellers reappear, prodded from the break room by Lester. They argue with him in hushed, vicious tones. Finally Lester initiates several rounds of rock-paper-scissors, after which they return to their windows, the loser with her head hanging.

When I'm finished I head to the door and literally run into Selia walking in off the street.

“Hi,” I say, knowing what's coming.

“Hi,” she says quietly, then, louder: “Out of my way, jackass!” She screws up her face, hawks mightily, and spits a glob of phlegm onto my sports coat.

Everyone in the bank cheers. Selia gives me a look somewhere between amusement and apology. Though I know she'll deny it, I wonder if these “chance” meetings are something other than coincidence, as they seem to occur more frequently after we've had a disagreement. Selia being Selia, I wouldn't put it past her to manufacture a public encounter just so she'd have an excuse to abuse me a bit.

That night the only damage to the Celica is a gallon of red paint poured over the hood, so I get home from work a little early. Selia isn't there, and she doesn't show up until almost ten o'clock.

“Everything okay?” I ask when she comes in through the tunnel.

“Sorry,” she says, throwing down her handbag. “I've been at the hospital all day. Mom got hold of a bag of potting soil from the shed and ate a heaping helping while I was at the bank. I found her in front of the TV, munching away, watching
The Price Is Right.
”

“Well, gross, but what's the big deal? It's just dirt.”

“No, it's that fortified stuff. Got all kinds of fertilizers and chemicals in it. They emptied her stomach and pumped her full of charcoal. Good news is, they're keeping her overnight, so I can stay here.”

“Hey, great,” I say, though I'm instantly disappointed, and a bit panicked, that I won't be able to go through my nightly routine with the catalogs.