Father of Lies

by Brian Evenson

  In this Fochs seems to have accepted to the fullest degree the patriarchal order that often becomes confused with the Church’s gospel. Men for him are real, while the value of women seems to come in their subsidiary relationship to men—women for men like Fochs are not people: they are wives, mothers, daughters.

  The Thoughts on Children

  Having Fochs fully acknowledge and discuss his “thoughts on children” was critical to effective analysis and treatment, but it took some time before he would speak about these thoughts in anything but vague metaphors. As I had suspected, they involved abuse of children. The thoughts, he claimed, he couldn’t stop or control, though once he had thought one he’d be “left alone” for a little while.

  I can be just walking down the street and see a young child, you know, eleven or twelve, walking home from school carrying schoolbooks. I won’t think anything about it. But in a block the child is still in my head and without clothing now, and in another block I am doing things to the child’s body, and in another block . . . [a long silence]. It’s hard for me to talk about this. In another block the child is battered and beaten and dead.

  Then another block and it’s over. I’m fine again. Just like normal. I go on with my day.

  Such thoughts, Fochs claimed, were always threatening to assert themselves not as thoughts but as reality. It was wrong for him to think them, he felt, but he could not stop. And if Fochs imagined himself engaged in an act of sexual violence, he would remember it vividly and suffer guilt over it as if he had actually committed it.

  Fochs’s thoughts about children seemed related to his sleep disorders and to his difficulties with his church position. They were a means of reasserting himself in the face of doubt, allowing him to imagine himself in a position of power. During the thoughts themselves and for a short period thereafter, he felt above and beyond guilt. Yet, soon, because he doubted his worthiness to be a church leader and because he felt that the thoughts were wrong, he was nearly incapacitated by guilt. His life thus became inscribed into a vicious circle, in which the tension of guilt would lead to thoughts of a deviant nature and momentary release, followed by a period of rest and the subsequent return of guilt, the cycle moving more and more rapidly. His sleep behavior (parasomnia) can be seen as providing a similar sort of release.

  Sex

  I asked Fochs if as a child he had ever been approached for sex by another child or by an adult.

  “I don’t remember,” he said. Later, he stated that had he been approached or even accepted (which, he insisted, he would never have done), it wouldn’t have mattered. He had been washed clean when he had been baptized at age twelve and anything that came before that had never happened.

  “Anyway,” he said, “nothing like that ever really happened to me. And even if it had happened, God would have washed it away.”

  A Dream of Boys

  From the first, Fochs attempted to be a model provost. He conducted worthiness examinations every six months with each of the youth of his congregation, as recommended by the official Bloodite Provost’s Handbook of Private Instructions. He asked me in his early sessions if it was a good idea for him to meet with the youth, considering the thoughts he was having about children. Wasn’t it possible, he asked, that such thoughts might translate into action? At the time I felt that to work productively to help the youth might force Fochs to see them as people, and thus give him encouragement to face his thoughts on children and learn to control them. I encouraged him to continue meeting with the youth as usual, but we agreed that if at any moment he became too uncomfortable, he should suspend the interview and telephone me.

  The interviews seemed to move forward without problems. Soon after beginning them, however, Fochs admitted that he had begun to have dreams about some of the specific youth in his congregation. These dreams felt so real he wasn’t always immediately certain they were dreams—on first awakening, they felt more like harrowing memories. He said that his fear that the dream might somehow be real (or if it wasn’t real, his fear that it might become real) had made him reluctant to meet with the youth.

  In the dream there was a boy, about twelve years old. Fochs called him into his office to speak of initiating him into the priesthood. In interviewing him, he asked the boy if there was anything he had done that would make him “unworthy to accept the gift of the priesthood.” The boy shuffled his feet and mumbled no, but Fochs said that he could tell from the way the boy rested his hands one over the other that he wasn’t telling the truth. Fochs felt a peculiar sense of disquiet, and this disquiet he felt literalized in his own breath, which gathered into a figure beside him. The dream went through a phase shift and the shaped breath configured into human form.

  This man made of breath insisted that Fochs continue to prod the boy until he confessed. It would be better for the boy to get it off his mind, the man told him. If it hadn’t been for this man, Fochs claimed, he would have let the boy alone.

  I asked him to describe what the man made of breath looked like once he had solidified. He said the man was wearing tattered clothing and had a “shaved, razor-knicked head.” I asked him what the man’s name was. He said that he did not know but he did not think he had a name.

  Fochs asked the boy again if there was anything he wanted to confess. The boy shook his head emphatically.

  Fochs came out of his chair, feeling a little more urgent and distraught, and took a chair next to the boy. He took the boy’s hand in his own hand, though the boy resisted slightly. When the man of breath began to prod him again, Fochs repeated the question, staring without blinking into the boy’s face. The boy seemed frightened, and this, Fochs believed in the dream, was fear because of his guilt rather than fear of the sudden shift in Fochs’s behavior.

  The room grew darker and smaller. The other man dissolved into breath and was “drawn back in.” Fochs and the boy were left alone.

  “Why are you lying?” he asked the boy.

  The boy glanced toward where the door had been. The door was not there anymore. Fochs said he could feel the boy’s panic, and in the dream he liked the way it felt. The boy pulled his legs up into the chair and hid behind his knees.

  “The boy insisted he wasn’t lying,” but Fochs said God told him that the boy was lying.

  He grabbed the boy’s mouth, opened it and tried to look in, stretching the jaws apart until the boy began to cry, his tonsils throbbing. Fochs saw his crying as an admission of guilt. He let go and told the boy that God loved him and that he loved him as well. All he wanted, he said, was to help.

  He forcibly took the boy’s hand again and asked for the truth. He told the boy he needed to know what happened. He needed to know the details. The boy was sobbing now, rubbing his arms, but still insisted there was nothing to tell.

  “I don’t think you even know what truth is,” Fochs remembered saying. “I think you need me to force the truth out of you.”

  “No,” said the boy. “I told the truth.”

  “I know what you need,” Fochs said. “Don’t tell me I don’t know.”

  He said he told the boy to turn to face the wall. At that point he was inspired by God “to know the boy’s sin and to understand it thoroughly.” The “sin” was that the boy had been sexually abused by an uncle and that he had sinned by not resisting the abuse sufficiently.** The boy, frantic, terrified, denied everything.

  Blaming the victim is common practice among Bloodite clergy.

  God told me that where evil had made its mark, good must follow, burning evil out and purifying the body. I told the boy to remove his pants and he eventually shucked them. I told the boy to remove his underwear and when he would not I stripped those down myself. I could feel God endowing me with holy power. I reminded the boy that I was his spiritual leader and that obedience was the law upon which all other laws were predicated. If he didn’t listen to what I said and obey me, he would go to hell. Not to hell, I said, but to the nothingness beyond hell, which would make hell look like a pic
nic. Then I told him to reach down and grab his ankles but to keep his legs as straight as he could. But he wouldn’t do it, so I had to do it for him. I came up behind him and held my hand over his mouth, wrapping the other around his chest. Then where evil had been before I forced good in until he bled.

  I told him I was going to have to keep cleansing him until all the evil was worn out and until he would admit his uncle had violated him. He said he didn’t have an uncle. But everybody has an uncle. Everybody has an uncle, don’t they?

  He kept falling down. I kept it up for awhile until I thought the evil was probably gone and then asked him, “Do you admit it?” and he said, crying, “Yes, I admit it!”

  So I had been right all along. God had not misled me. I told him I was proud of him for telling the truth and then helped him to dress.

  Fochs spoke seriously with the boy. He told the boy that the Lord God commanded him to be silent about this. “Not that what we did here was secret,” Fochs said, “but sacred.” He told the boy that all Bloodites did the same. He told the boy that if he told anyone, God would pluck out his tongue and “it would never return, not even in the afterlife.”

  Each time he had the dream, Fochs said, he woke up highly disturbed and wrote down all he could remember. By the time he told me about the dream, he had formalized it, made it into a coherent narrative which, he admitted, was actually several versions of the dream pasted together.

  There was also, sometimes, and with more and more frequency, a second sequence to the dream.

  He was alone in his office, the first boy having left, when suddenly he felt he should open the door. He found a second boy in the hall, confused, nervous, reluctant to enter. Fochs brought him in and without the preliminaries of an interview told the boy he had to force the evil out and summarily raped him.

  “But I should have waited for God’s holy blessing,” he said. “I should have waited.”

  He was alone in the dark, the boy gone, a voice telling him what he had done had been wrong, that the evil must be confessed before it can be expelled. Now, the voice said, Fochs had done evil, and he must be punished.

  He could not identify the voice.

  He could hear a sound, which he knew was of a man unbuckling his belt.

  He awoke in a state of extreme anxiety.

  Dream of the Murdered Girl

  As with his other recurring dream, Fochs expressed fear, because of the vividness of the dream, that it was either based on a memory of an actual event or was something he could conceivably do in the future.

  As we discussed the dream, it became clear that the girl described in the dream was based on a real girl, a member of his congregation who actually had been found murdered a few months prior, not long before our first meeting.

  Fochs claimed to have been influenced by the same person as in the other dream, the figure of breath become flesh, but in this case the person was not separate from him but was grafted onto Fochs himself as a second head that only he could see. The head had claimed that the only way to save the girl was to kill her. Fochs, against his will, found his body compelled to do so.

  The figure of breath was again without name. In the dream’s first manifestations, Fochs strangled the girl with his own hands and then subsequently dismembered her. In its later occurrences, the dream shifted away from the act of murder and toward discovery of the dead girl. Fochs was no longer the killer, but rather the person who stumbled onto the body:

  Fochs: I had a dream about the girl last night. I was out looking for her. It was as if I were awake and seeing it as it actually happened.

  Fesh: What girl do you mean?

  Fochs: The dead one. She was in the woods, kneeling at a stone altar, praying. The crown of her head was shiny. When I came closer I could see she was not moving. I reached out and touched her head and felt that the shine was oil. As soon as I touched her, I knew she was dead.

  Fesh: What did you do then?

  Fochs: I looked at her and looked away. When I looked again I could no longer see her head.

  Fesh: Her head was gone?

  Fochs: I couldn’t see her head. I was worried for her.

  Fesh: Why were you worried for her?

  Fochs: Wouldn’t you be worried for somebody if their head came up missing?

  Fesh: But she was already dead, wasn’t she?

  Fochs: Yes, but not having a head seems worse. I mean, if you don’t have it, somebody else must have it, right? And who knows how they’re planning to use it?

  That’s what I thought in the dream anyway. The next thing I knew I was down on my hands and knees crawling around. After a while I realized I was looking for the head.

  Fesh: Did you find it?

  Fochs: She was still wearing it but she had twisted it backward and was hiding it behind her, between her shoulder blades. That way she could look backwards.

  Fesh: Why would she want to look backwards?

  Fochs: Maybe she was afraid someone was going to try to sneak up behind her. She was right to be afraid of that. I remember telling myself that she should have had two heads, one to watch in front of her as well.

  Fesh: Did you have two heads?

  Fochs: In the dream I did.

  In actuality, the murdered girl’s head had been twisted to a position identical to that which Fochs’s dream had described. I do not believe this information was available at the time Fochs told me his dream, though I may be wrong. His other descriptions were similarly vivid but, for the most part, nothing he could not have gathered from reading the newspapers.

  The mind uses the material available to it and reforms it to satisfy its own needs. In addition to scene changes and time gaps, there were always details in his dreams that did not correspond to the newspapers, the most notable of these being a piece of paper Fochs dreamed had been placed under the girl’s tongue:

  Fesh: Did you see who placed it there?

  Fochs: No.

  Fesh: Did you place it there yourself?

  Fochs: God told me to put it there, but I have no memory of doing so.

  Fesh: You put it there?

  Fochs: It was a piece of paper. Something written on it. A B and an H.

  Fesh: What do you think the letters referred to?

  Fochs: I don’t know. I didn’t choose them—God did.

  Because Fochs was the provost of a congregation, I believed he felt responsible when something serious happened to one of his members. Since Christ in the Bible has the shepherd leave the ninety-and-nine to go search for the one lost sheep, Fochs felt that he should have done the same. He was blaming himself for not having prevented the girl’s death, playing this guilt out in his dreams.

  Fesh: How could you have prevented the murder?

  Fochs: I don’t know. I could have been there for her. I could have known something was wrong.

  Fesh: You couldn’t have known someone was going to kill her. You were her provost. You were helping her as best you could.

  Fochs: Yes, but maybe if I had said just the right thing . . .

  Fesh: The only person who should feel responsible for the murder is the person who killed her. Can you believe that?

  Fochs: I want to believe that.

  In Place of a Conclusion

  I have reached an end of the information currently available to me. Before drawing anything but tentative conclusions, however, I want to know more about Fochs. Since Fochs suddenly broke off his interactions with me at what I felt was the most productive stage, the analysis feels incomplete.

  Fochs strikes one initially as a well-ordered, well-adjusted man. Yet looking back over my notes and listening to the tapes again, I am surprised to find that statements he made that originally felt convincing to me now feel disingenuous. Fochs is a more complex study than he initially appeared.

  Fochs seems able to function in society, though it is clear his sleep disorder is part of a condition both deep rooted and quite complex.

  I remain convinced, for the moment, that Fochs
is suffering primarily from Dissociative Disorder NOS. However, there are enough other symptoms to suggest other possibilities, and thus I believe this to be only a partial diagnosis.

  I am convinced as well that at least a few, though far from all, of the symptoms Fochs has described to me are factitious, and that he has on occasion been purposefully deceptive.

  PART TWO

  MAN OF GOD

  CHAPTER 1

  Blessing

  Near evening the girl passes the house again, this time looking distraught. I watch her walk before the front window, slowly, swaying her slight hips. The salad tongs are motionless and caught in my hands.

  She disappears beyond the hedge.

  At the other end of the table, my youngest daughter is refusing to eat. My wife attempts to interest her in bits of chicken, eventually resorting to pushing them between the girl’s teeth. My daughter keeps her lips closed. My wife begins to threaten, my daughter to cry.

  I quickly finish my plate, then pull my youngest from her high chair. I take her to the sink, splashing water on her face and hands. Removing her bib, I dry her face with the reverse of it, then lower her to the floor. She takes a few awkward steps along the side of the cabinet, then lets go, staggers out of the room.

  “She’ll never learn to eat if you keep doing that,” my wife says. “You spoil her.”

  “Be gentle with her,” I say. “Give her time.”

  The girl outside is still transfixed in my head, the ghost of her still passing the window. She was distraught, I tell myself, or so she appeared. Perhaps she is in need of a little spiritual counsel. It is my duty to care for my flock, to look after the sheep, to give my life fully over to them and to the Lord. I should, the Holy Spirit tells me, seek her out to offer her comfort. But I can hardly just leave, can I? What would my wife think?