God Is Dead

by Ron Currie Jr.

  I pull cautiously off the interstate and follow the signs to the mental hospital. The streets are empty except for the big orange plow trucks, sweeping snow off to the side of the road and spitting sand in their wake. All the traffic lights are blinking yellow. I pass through them steadily, without touching the gas or the brake.

  The hospital is set back maybe two hundred yards from the road. I pull off to the side and get out of the car and look down on the grounds. I’m surprised to see there are no walls, or fences topped with razor wire. From this distance the hospital could easily be mistaken for a small college campus. There are six or seven large brick buildings, well lit by orange floodlights. Most of the windows are dark; only a few, here and there, have lights on behind them. A pickup truck is plowing the long narrow driveway that leads down from the main road to the hospital proper.

  I light a cigarette. The snow is coming harder now, driven by a gusting wind, and I have to squint to keep it out of my eyes. I smoke and look at the hospital and the river, black and frozen, behind it.

  I remember the sun, hot and fat over the field, and the face of the older boy drifting in and out of the sun, like an eclipse, as he flailed at me.

  With one finger I flick the cigarette away into the wind, then get back in the car. I check my watch. Visiting hours start in fifteen minutes. I put the car in drive and turn onto the hospital access road. I make my way slowly, tires crunching over the sand laid down by the pickup truck. The driver of the truck sees me coming and pulls over to let me pass.

  I follow the signs to the main entrance, park the car, and go inside through an automatic door. The door slides closed behind me with a hiss, shutting out the wind and snow. The entryway is still, quiet, and shockingly warm. A guard in a dark blue uniform sits at a desk behind a thick plate of glass, eyeing me without much interest.

  I approach the guard and tell him, through the speaker in the glass, that I am here to visit my brother.

  He’s a patient here? the guard asks.

  Yes, I say.

  Name?

  I tell him my brother’s name. He nods and places a clipboard and a pen in a sliding drawer on his side of the glass, then pushes the drawer through.

  Fill that out, he says. He looks at the clock behind him. You can’t come in for another ten minutes.

  I nod and sit in one of the chairs lined up against the wall. The paperwork on the clipboard asks for my personal information, relationship to the patient, and reason for visit. There is also a disclaimer freeing the hospital of any liability if I am injured or killed. I smile to myself as I sign this in triplicate.

  I bring the clipboard and the pen back to the desk and slide them through the drawer to the guard. He takes the clipboard out and sets it aside without looking at it. The pen he leaves in the drawer. I shove my hands into my pants pockets and cough a little.

  Two minutes, the guard says without looking up.

  I remember the high electric whine of a thousand grasshoppers. The taste of dirt and blood mingling in my mouth.

  I wait the two minutes. When they have passed, the guard reaches under his desk and presses a switch hidden from my view. A loud electric buzzing sounds in the door on my right. The guard motions for me to open the door, which I do. I stand on the threshold, holding the door to keep it from closing and locking again, while the guard tells me where to go. When he has finished, I pass through.

  Follow the corridor all the way down, he said. On this level the patients are allowed to move about freely. Some of them may talk to you, may even say something nasty or threatening. Just ignore them. Sure they smell bad and are strangely and sometimes only partially dressed. Some even look dangerous. Don’t be fooled; they’re harmless. All the same, keep walking. Don’t stop for any reason. On the other hand, do not—I repeat, do not—run. When you reach the end of the corridor you’ll find an elevator. Take this to the seventh floor. It will be dark in the elevator when the doors close, and it may seem rickety going up, but don’t worry. If you’re claustrophobic, keep it together; the ride to the seventh floor only lasts a few moments. When the elevator comes to a stop and the doors open, take a left and follow this corridor until you find the nurses’ station. Don’t worry about the patients here; on this level they’re all locked in their rooms and supervised around the clock.

  I follow the guard’s instructions. At the nurses’ station on the seventh floor a thin man in starched whites has me fill out more paperwork.

  I remember my shirt tearing at the shoulder. A rock, half-exposed in the ground beneath me, jammed against the small of my back.

  That’s your brother? the man asks when I hand him the completed form.

  Yes, I say.

  Boy, has he been a handful, the man tells me. We’ve got only one orderly who can handle him. And he’s out of work for at least a week.

  Where is he? I ask, though I’m not really interested.

  Yesterday we were taking your brother for a bath, the man says. We passed by the breakfast cart, and your brother took hold of one of those heavy plastic coffeepots and smacked Little John right in the chops with it. Broke his nose in two places.

  The man laughs and shakes his head. I don’t know what to say. So I say nothing.

  I remember the tears coming, flowing. How I cried, afraid and ashamed, with a mouth full of blood and dirt, in the field under the hot sun, while a thousand grasshoppers buzzed in unison and the thin broken reeds and exposed rock pricked and stabbed.

  Anyway, the man says, motioning for me to follow him, that’s why we’re keeping your brother down here, in the isolation room. Danger to himself and others. We’ve had to dope him up pretty damn good, so don’t expect him to carry on much of a conversation.

  The man stops in front of the last door at the end of the hallway. The door is solid and windowless except for a small sliding partition at eye level. The man raps on the door three times with his knuckles, then calls to my brother and announces that he has a visitor. He slides a key into the keyhole and gives it two full turns. The tumblers roll inside the lock with a heavy metallic crack that resonates in the corridor, and then the door is open.

  Go on, the man says to me. Don’t worry. He’s in restraints, and I’ll be watching. The man slides the partition open to let me know what he means.

  I think to tell him that I’m not worried. That despite the things my brother has done, despite the obvious fact that he’s gone horribly and irretrievably insane, he is still, after all, my brother. But I realize that like everyone else, this man would not understand, and so I only nod and step through the door and listen as it closes behind me.

  I remember my brother’s silhouette rising behind the boy, blotting out the sun, huge and furious, like some vengeful god come to save me. I remember, suddenly, the words he repeated, over and over, as he beat the boy: I am the one who kills and gives life! No one delivers from my power!

  But now, in here with my brother, somehow it doesn’t matter to me anymore whether this is real memory or only imagined. I am suddenly hot and exhausted, and none of it matters a bit.

  Then there is the other thing I came here for, and it seems best that I get it over with, before I lose what’s left of my energy and resolve.

  I put a hand in my jacket pocket, feel the hard weight there.

  I’ve brought something for you, I say to my brother. I do not smile when I say this.

  I pull my hand out, and the blackjack along with it. I hear the nurse behind me, on the other side of the locked door. He makes a sound like someone has punched him in the stomach. He bangs on the door, but I pay him no attention. I hear frantic muttering, and the jangle of keys in hands clumsy with panic, but by then he is much too late.

  Retreat

  Thus will I make mount Seir most desolate, and cut off from it him that passeth out and him that returneth. And I will fill his mountains with his slain men: in thy hills, and in thy valleys, and in all thy rivers, shall they fall that are slain with the sword. I will make thee p
erpetual desolations, and thy cities shall not return: and ye shall know that I am the Lord.

  —Ezekiel 35:7–9

  Arnold was not discharged from the Marines, honorably or otherwise; there was no time for anything so official, no time for paperwork or ceremony, with incessant artillery bombardments and people, military and civilian alike, turning on one another in their desperation to escape. His departure from the Marines could most accurately be described as an expulsion. He simply dropped his rifle, ditched his uniform, and fled Mexico City, scrabbling over crumbled brick and broken glass on a night lit bright as day by fire. He had no thought of the penalties for desertion, because there clearly would be none. In the face of the final, overwhelming Evolutionary Psychologist assault, all pretense of cohesion and command had been abandoned. Arnold had witnessed a lieutenant general strip naked in the middle of the street and don bloodstained clothes stolen from a corpse, his furtive, frightened expression decidedly unbecoming an officer, and soon after Arnold removed his own field utilities and headed north, toward a home he hadn’t seen in eight years.

  The going was tough. The roads were clogged with stalled and burned-out vehicles, belongings sacrificed for the sake of speed, rural Mexicans driving hogs and trailing children, and the ubiquitous dead and dying. Arnold limped along the shoulder, a chunk of shrapnel lodged deep in the meat of his thigh, spurred on through pain and thirst and despair not by fear of dying, but by fear of dying without seeing his mother again. Selia, his mother, who had cursed him when she’d learned of his plans to join the Postmodern Anthropologist Marines. Who had spit on her own kitchen floor as Arnold hugged his father and hoisted his bags to leave. And who, Arnold had learned from his father’s letters, now was suffering from the same dementia that had killed her own mother.

  Losing people should be sudden, Arnie, his father’s most recent letter had read. It’s never easy no matter what the circumstances, but having it drag on and on is just unreasonable. Thereshould be a moment, and when that moment’s gone, the person should be, too. Then those left behind should be allowed to go through whatever they need to go through. Grief is hard enough without being harassed by living ghosts. But I’m losing your mother in bits and pieces, one memory at a time.

  This news had been particularly troubling to Arnold, not just because his mother was unwell, but because during the eight years he’d been in Mexico his own memory, previously near photographic, had slowly begun to flag. First he’d found himself unable to conjure up the faces of people from home. He would sit with his eyes closed and think of his mother, for example, would concentrate on the sweet chamomile scent of the natural perfume she wore, or the timbre of her ready laugh, but any image of her refused to rise. He tried other people—his father, friends, former teachers—and at best was able to produce only a murky, indistinct portrait in his mind, like something viewed underwater with the naked eye.

  What made this all the more distressing was that, because he was a Marine interrogator, memory—both his and that of the Evo-Psych POWs he interviewed—was Arnold’s stock-in-trade. For him to succeed in his job he needed to remember not just clearly but quickly, to be able to access a mental transcript of interviews with a particular subject and compare answers to similar questions from days and sometimes weeks earlier, to adjust his line of questioning on the fly and ferret out the truth. But as time went by and his memories of the distant past faded—how old had he been when his family had moved to the island? and what was the name of that girl he’d been so obsessed with in high school?—whatever was ailing him began to devour the information stored in his short-term banks, and despite the fact that he began recording interviews as a hedge against his suddenly spotty recall, he became useless as an interrogator.

  Not that it mattered much; by this time the Evo-Psych blockade had strangled and finally snuffed out the Marines’ ability to fight. No food, no fuel, no ammo, no chance. The war was lost; this was as plain and inevitable as death, and no amount of reliable, timely intel was going to change the fact. So Arnold fled, along with everyone else, and he imagined he had the same thing in mind as the other refugees: to reach home before the Evo-Psych troops poured north out of Mexico and laid waste to everything like a swarm of locusts.

  As he limped further from Mexico City the number of those actively fleeing diminished, and with the sunrise the ranks of the dead swelled until the road was made nearly impassable by corpses. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, but animals too, dogs and goats and chickens and even an armadillo, squashed flat and crisping at its edges under the desert sun. For a while he was forced to the road’s shoulder, but even there the bodies began piling up, and eventually he had no choice but to climb over them, grasping at feet, arms, and necks as though they were handholds on a steep mountain trail.

  It was exhausting work, scaling corpses. To distract himself from the fatigue, the thirst and hunger, the sharp flare of pain that occurred each time he moved his leg, Arnold thought of his mother. First he tried, with the usual lack of success, to picture her in his mind’s eye. Then he concentrated on willing her lucid, so that when he arrived home she would be who she always had been, not some bewildered stranger who merely looked like his mother, and she would hear what he had to say.

  Because it was not a joyous and tearful reunion he had planned. Arnold still loved her, but time and distance had transformed that love into something remote and abstract, whereas the anger he had for her was real and immediate and had only grown in the years since he’d joined the Marines. He was no longer a sensitive teenager who bit his tongue to avoid incurring her wrath, but a man who could fall into a profound and untroubled sleep twenty minutes after tearing out a subject’s fingernails or forcing him to eat hooks of broken glass. A man, in short, who expected to be on equal terms with the people in his life.

  But he was beginning to doubt he’d have a chance to settle scores with his mother. As midday approached and the sun climbed high and hot, his legs gave out and he collapsed near the crest of a hill of bodies. It took a solid minute of effort for him to roll onto his back. Panting, he rested his head on the mangepocked haunch of a dead goat and threw one arm over his eyes to block the sun. He fought to summon the mental strength to power his failing muscles. A few years earlier, when he’d still believed in the primacy of will and other tenets of Postmodern Anthropology, he would have been able to struggle to his feet on faith alone. Now his belief was as broken and scattered as Mexico City’s defenses. No food, no water, no faith, no chance.

  Arnold had moved far enough from the fighting that he no longer could hear the thunder of bombs and mortars, and the desert morning had been silent except for the occasional celebratory screech of vultures. But after he’d been lying atop the corpses long enough to develop aches from all the sharp angles beneath him, the knees and elbows and claws and hooves, he became aware of a distant rumbling, so faint at first that he couldn’t be sure he was hearing it, then growing louder by increments as whatever was causing the sound slowly approached. Eventually he made out the whistling clatter of tank tracks, and he opened his eyes and saw an armored combat earthmover, which was really just a Schwarzkopf battle tank with a plow mounted on the front, moving toward him down the middle of the road. Bodies rode up the face of the plow and spilled off to the side, tumbling over one another like clothes in a dryer, stiff limbs flailing. Arnold raised an arm and waved weakly, and the tank stopped twenty feet from him, its turbine engine idling.

  Under other circumstances, Arnold might have been more surprised than he was to see Crispy emerge from the turret. If he’d been in sharper mental condition, for example, or if Crispy hadn’t had a well-deserved reputation as the sort of batshit lunatic who would steal a Schwarzkopf for a getaway vehicle without ever having driven one before. As it was, though, Arnold registered only a mild, fleeting incredulity as Crispy climbed down the front of the tank and scrambled over the mass of corpses to where he lay.

  “Arnie,” Crispy said, slinging one of Arnold’s
arms over his shoulders and lifting him, “I want you to know I’m making a noteworthy exception, here, to my current policy of running over everyone I see.”

  It took a moment for Arnold to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “I’m honored,” he said finally. “Though if you don’t have any water, I’d rather you just ran me over, too.”

  “Not to worry, not to worry,” Crispy said. He heaved Arnold half onto the tank, then crouched and pushed with his hands on Arnold’s behind. “Get on up there,” he said, and Arnold, with some reluctance, kicked his feet until they found purchase. With the help of Crispy’s boost, he flung himself up onto the turret. He found himself staring down the open hatch. Half a dozen sets of eyes stared back. Somehow Crispy had managed to cram three dogs, a pig, a goat, and his own pet, a thick-billed parrot he called Pepe, into the tank’s interior.

  “What’s with the animals?” he said as Crispy clamored up beside him.

  “You know me,” Crispy said. “Not much for people, but I love me some critters.”

  Arnold did know him, well enough to have given him his nickname, which was a reference to Crispy’s exclusive reliance on matches, cigarettes, and in extreme cases, hot irons and lighter fluid to extract information from subjects.

  “Should I ask how you got the tank?” Arnold said.

  “Probably not,” Crispy said.

  “How about the water?”

  Crispy shook his head. “You don’t wanna know. It just gets more gruesome.”

  “I meant, can I have some water?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.” Crispy disappeared into the hatch, emerging a moment later with a plastic gallon jug, still sealed. “You’ll have to ride up here,” he said. “Not a whole lotta room down below.”

  Arnold opened the jug and drank fast, gulping, the water spilling over his chin and down his neck, soaking his shirt.

  “Hey,” Crispy called from inside the tank. “Don’t waste it. I like you, Arnie, but don’t waste my water.”