Self-Esteem (42 page)

Crawford was a moment away from shooting into the abyss when a spotlight appeared in front of him. It was 20 yards away, but Crawford could still see that it shone down upon an old TV in front of an easy chair, the kind they used to make in the sixties. It reminded Crawford of where Uncle Jerry had spent his last days smoking and drinking and complaining about the world. There was even a small table and a lamp — also very Uncle Jerry. Before Crawford could fully make out everything in front of him, he was diverted by the broadcast snow that popped up on the TV screen. It was like someone had just plugged in the old contraption.

“This game again, huh?” Crawford said while slowly walking toward the light. “Answer me!” As Crawford got closer to the makeshift living room, he could see the TV was supporting an ancient VCR as big as a suitcase.

Crawford stood behind the chair and tried to think of what his Uncle Jerry would do in this situation.

He’d probably sit down and blow his brains out.

Not a bad idea, Crawford thought.

Crawford looked closer at the VCR and could see an index card folded in half resting just over the control board. In a child’s handwriting, “PUSH HERE” was written with an arrow pointing to the play button, the U adorned with two eyes forming a smiley face.

Shit
.

Crawford pressed play and sat down, feeling more like his Uncle Jerry than himself. “Happy?” he yelled into the air.

The voice replied, “Yes, Doctor. I’m here.”

Crawford gripped the gun as if it were the remote control to the VCR.

“No. I mean
are you happy now
?”

“I’m Happy Pappy,” the voice said.

Just wait, fucker.

The snow disappeared, replaced by a close up of Happy Pappy leaning into the camera. Crawford moved back slightly, resisting the urge to shoot the screen. “Thank you for coming. We have some special guests today,” he says with his head bouncing to the side. “It’s a special occasion. Stage three.” Crawford expected the opening song. Apparently Stage Three is beyond that.

Crawford could barely make out Cal and Dorothy strapped to two chairs a few feet apart — each with a spotlight on them — each with their hands behind them and duct tape covering their mouths. There was no backdrop, no puppets.

Crawford took a deep breath as if to prepare himself for what he thought he was about to see. He had one comforting thought: someone was going to die when the screening was over.

“Here we have our two guests,” Happy says, coming back into the frame. “They were really pretty good to you, weren’t they?” The artifice of the child entertainer was nearly gone. Happy was now a resolute master of ceremonies. “They really didn’t deserve…” he said, before looking down, as if to a cue card, “…an absent husband and father. The drinking, the whore fucking. They didn’t deserve that, did they?” he asks, leaning into the camera.

“What do you want?” Crawford mumbled as if the TV could hear him.

Mr. Pappy took one step to his right revealing a colossal axe that was standing on its head behind him, the largest Crawford had ever seen. It was childishly simple, not only in size but in design, something a comic strip gladiator might use. Crawford could see a tear fall down Dorothy’s cheek. Cal looked dreadfully expressionless.

Then the jingle. That itchy little tune. That clinking and clanking children’s song with the sing-song singing.

Be kind to yourself.

Be fond of yourself.

If you’re not a chum you’re a bum to yourself.

Be a friend to yourself.

Without end to yourself.

Remember it’s the best you can do for your health.

“Please,” Crawford said, or thought he said.
Stop.

“Come on!” Happy screamed while doing a teasing dance with the large blade. “I like being playful.” Happy walked between the chairs that held his captives. His Happy Pappy attire was perfect — the hat, the pipe, the face — but somehow he still looked different than before.

Standing just behind Dorothy and Cal, he slid the axe, handle-first, across their chests.

“Okay! What do you want?” Crawford screamed. “What is it?”

“I want what you have,” Happy said, his right shoulder now pointing toward the camera, the head of the axe pointing away behind him and the rest of his upper body looking as if it were ready to pull the weapon across their throats. “That’s stage three. You can have what anyone else has, right?”

“No, that’s not right!”

“Especially if they don’t deserve what they have.”

“I…”

“Anything else to say?”

“Please don’t!” Crawford pleaded.

Happy Pappy whipped sideways in an action that suggested he had just swung the axe through their exposed necks. For a split second blood squirted on the camera lens before the screen went back to snow.

“God, no!” Crawford screamed. “Please, no!” he yelled into the air before raising his gun with an unyielding pose. “I’m going to kill you, motherfucker! I’m going to kill you! You hear me!”

This was it. This was the bottom. This was weeping and gnashing of teeth. This was…

Wait
, he thought wiping the tears away.

“Hold on.”

Wait.

“Wait a minute.”

It’s fake. It’s all fake.

“What are you saying?” Crawford asked himself.

You’ve been trying to tell yourself all along this has been a sham. You haven’t been following your own advice. Trust yourself.

“But Dorothy, Cal. Jenny?”

It’s fake.

Crawford took a deep breath and listened to the silence. “Excuse me,” he said into the air. “This bullshit is not real. You didn’t kill anyone. Why don’t you come on out and let’s talk?” He waited a moment. “Mr. Pappy?”

“Look down at the floor,” an unfamiliar voice said.

Crawford looked down and saw a red stain that stretched to the parameter of where the light stopped. He moved his right foot and
gosh, this floor is so sticky.

“Oh, God. No!” he screamed. “How could you do this? No, please!” This cry was more heartfelt than the first. It had been years since Crawford had realized how much he loved his wife and son. Now he wasn’t concerned with the self-important guilt of the past. This was immediate. This was here.

Crawford raised the gun and put it in his mouth. Blowing his brains out was going to feel good. And it was all going to finally come out the way it wanted to with that magical life all its own. His mind was free from his body.
Little boy used to hit me insecurity caused drinking momma was angry tried to be something anything couldn’t be Hemingway Conrad Faulkner couldn’t be husband father Uranus the Pope for all the bad things I’ve done thoughts of self-help too strong no help wanted to be everything rich famous wanted needed loved admired Sinatra Elvis Gandhi Jesus Washington New York London Rome Italian French Chinese Farsi BA MA PhD too macho too gay run away stay play don’t delay
“Fuck it! Should have done this a long time ago.”

I pulled the trigger and blew my brains out, and boy did it feel good. My head snapped back gracefully. My cerebellum and parts of my brain stem seeped out of the hole at the top of my skull, perhaps with a dash of occipital lobe, but it still looked cool. And it felt really good too.
Told ya!
I’m glad I blew my brains out. Everybody cried. Everyone was devastated. Why didn’t I think of this before?
he asked himself.

“Things take time,” he said. “Didn’t your mother tell you that?”

Wait, wait, wait. It’s all simulated. The floor is as sticky as… a cookie factory. And Cal. Cal didn’t look afraid. And Berry acted like he knew what was happening here. And the gun didn’t go off. And I didn’t blow my brains out.

Trust yourself! You’re one of the best friends you have!

Crawford took the gun from his mouth. “Hello?” he said softly. “Hello?”

“Hello,” a voice answered back. A new voice, a different voice, not amplified. “Dr. Crawford.”

“Who? Who are you? What is this?”

“It’s something we had to do.”

“We?”

“As scientists,” an old man said, pushing himself into the light on his wheelchair. He looked haggard, but still had the same Darwinian face he had twenty years before.

“Dr. Watkins?” Crawford let the gun slip to the floor.

“Good day to you,” the old man said with a nod and a smile. The suit and the haircut were the same.

“You’re behind all of this?”

“No, James, I’m in front. At the beginning.” The old man looked down at his lap where a yellowed, dog-eared document rested between his trembling hands. The expression on his face was warm, genial. “Remember your first thesis?”

Crawford stared at the old man’s nose, mouth, and eyes, which now looked more like Happy Pappy than Charles Darwin.

“Do you remember?” he asked again.

“My thesis? Not really.”

“You wrote a thesis you had to abandon because you’d been told it was plagiarism. Remember?”

Crawford wasn’t sure any sound was coming out of his mouth as he spoke. “What?”

“When you were in college, you used to know a young fellow who lived in the dormitory who listened to self-help tapes all the time. A time when the first self-help tapes were becoming popular. Do you remember?”

“Oh, yes. Libby? Dibby?”

“Gibby. Gilbert Sebastian.”

Watkins lifted the document with respect, as the mad Happy had done with
Self-Esteem
. “He was your inspiration, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, I suppose he was.”

“You didn’t authenticate his name in the manuscript, but we found out who he was.”

“We?”

“He used to listen to tapes that promised to help him stop procrastinating. Do you remember now?”

“Yes, I do.” Crawford said, now feeling sound coming from his mouth.

“You would go by his room and he would sit there all day listening to things like ‘Do it now. Do it now.’ Whatever ‘it’ was, he didn’t do it. He became addicted to these tapes, putting off the rest of his life to listen to them over and over again.”

“But someone else wrote that thesis. I was just drunk. I copied it from some Polish guy. Ugo… Ugel…”

“Ugelowski. Alexander Ugelowski.”

“Yes. Yes. How did you know?” Crawford said.

“Because I am Alexander Ugelowski,” the old man said.

Crawford couldn’t put it all together, perhaps because he didn’t want to. “You are…”

“I’m a lot of people and a lot things you know nothing about, James. But please, continue to call me Dr. Watkins.”

“You’re insane.”

The old man scratched his chin then raised his eyes and continued. “The poor chap that couldn’t stop procrastinating needed to be scared out of his wits, you concluded. He needed to be terrified back into living.”

“I wrote that?”

“Your thesis was entitled
Terror Inducement Therapy
. And it’s brilliant. Just brilliant.”

“But we’ve changed the title,” another voice said. “The acronym is unfortunate.” A figure stepped into the light looking more like a military attache than his former self.

“Phil?”

Peters walked into the light and stood next to Watkins with his hand resting respectfully on the old man’s shoulder. “You are so much more brilliant than you know, Jim.
Terror Inducement Therapy
is a milestone. We just needed to change the name. We call it
Fear Incentive Therapy
. We feel ‘Incentive’ is much more elegant than ‘Inducement.’ And the acronym, like I said, is an improvement. ‘Fit’ is very positive. The other is a bit too,” he paused, “oedipal.”

“I think I like the first one better,” Crawford said.

Watkins continued. “We realized that you were really on to something, but it was something that couldn’t be applied under ordinary circumstances. So Berry and Scott meticulously copied the article, changing a few things, and had it professionally printed to convince you that you had read it before. They even planted that copy in your bathroom. Since you bought the whole thing, it just confirmed that you were right. And that you needed help. We also couldn’t have tested it on anyone but you, Jim.”

“I’m going to kill you, Doctor,” Crawford said expressionless.

“And if so, it would be worth it,” he said with a thumbs up. “The first implementation of F.I.T. saved my granddaughter. It’s a good thing, a wonderful thing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She had gotten into trouble, my granddaughter.” He stammered a moment. “She had met this fellow, a Puerto Rican, I think, or, uh, a Puerto Rican-American. I don’t know. Some pimp of some kind,” he said. “She got into drugs and, well, other things that were worse.” The old man’s face grew heavy. “She had fallen into prostitution through an addiction to one of the newest and strongest forms of methamphetamine. I tried a lot of things to get her rehabilitated, but nothing worked. I remembered your remarkable thesis, that people must be scared out of their destruction. Then I made a plan. I called my grandnephew to do a job for me — a performance rather. He would become one of my granddaughter’s clientele and try to kill her, but fail. And just as she believed she was escaping, I would be there to take her in and emphasize the errors of her ways, offer her hope of change.” Watkins face grew lighter. “And it worked. I want you to meet my grandnephew, also named Anthony Watkins. The Third, actually.”

The image of the Happy Pappy mask emerged from the shadows. His yellow-gloved hand pulled the mask down. It was a young man with an unfamiliar face.

“Hello, Doctor,” he said, stroking the mask in front of him. “My name is Darrin. I’m Cal’s friend.”

“You’re Darrin?”

“Yes, sir,” he said coming closer. “That’s my stage name. I really don’t know much about psychology. I’m just interested in acting. You know, the real stuff.”

“The real stuff?” Crawford said, thinking the boy looked like an old man.

“The real stuff, yeah, making it real,” he said. “I thought I was going crazy for a while, but I realized I was just pushing the envelope.”