“Interesting,” Dr. Roxy said. The method in which she worked with her patients was that she liked to let them talk a lot first before she gradually began joining in with her questions, and that day’s session was no different. “So could it then be claimed that the stage act of Le Pétomane was a form of public exorcism?”
“Not quite,” I said. “It is often mistakenly believed that the passing of intestinal gas was a part of Pujol’s theatrics, but such was not the case. Rather, it was his extraordinary control of his anal muscles, his ability to inhale air up his rectum and then control the release of said air by a manipulation of his sphincter muscles, which allowed him to achieve the anal auditory effects he was able to recreate onstage. But I digress. We were talking about my fear of the sky. I can’t believe that I neglected to mention my crippling childhood fear of rainbows.”
“What you’re describing is iridophobia,” Dr. Roxy told me. “That means ‘the fear of rainbows.’”
Upon receiving this tidbit of trivia, I had to smile. “My, they really do have phobias for everything, don’t they?” I asked with a laugh.
“More so than most people think. To name just a few of the more exotic ones, there’s anatidaephobia, which is the fear that somewhere in the world, a duck is watching you, and ectophobia, which is the fear of vomit, and masklophobia, the fear of costumes and mascots, and xanthophobia, which is the fear of the color yellow, and who could forget Paraskavedekatriaphobia, which is the fear of Friday the 13th? To use myself as an example: growing up, I had a fear of buttons, especially buttons on clothing,” Dr. Roxy told me with a grin.
“Really?” At that I laughed a little harder. “You were afraid of buttons?”
“The clinical name for such a fear is koumpounophobia,” Dr. Roxy went on. “It’s more common than you would assume. Steve Jobs suffered the same fear, which is one of the reasons why the elevator in Apple’s Tokyo store has no floor buttons. In my case it was so chronic that, when I was growing up, I would refuse to wear any type of clothing that had buttons on them. Just the act of touching a button would leave me feeling physically ill. Of course, with some people the phobia is so severe that the sight of a button is enough to induce vomiting.”
The date was September 14th, 2013: a Monday. I was seated in the office of my therapist, Dr. Roxy, who I had been a patient of for around 5-6 months. Her office was situated towards the back of a medium-sized three-story office building in downtown Thundermist known as the Plaza Center. This building was quite modern looking, and on its façade there was a giant angular piece of diamond-like glass that served as the entrance to the building’s atrium: it looked like something that might have fallen off the dress of Lady Gaga if Lady Gaga had been 500 feet tall (incidentally, I think the idea of a 500-foot-tall Lady Gaga is one of the most awesome ideas ever). Dr. Roxy’s office was a small room, which contained a desk and computer and a framed picture of some black girl, a bookshelf where one could find standard titles by Freud and Jung (along with books on hypnotism and post-hypnotic command techniques), a few comfortable chairs with plush cushions and wooden frames, and a file cabinet or two. The walls were decorated with wallpaper that sported a “fluffy white clouds floating through a blue sky” design, and hanging up on these walls were two framed posters, one of which depicted a photograph of the planet Earth as seen from outer space, while the other was an Ansel Adams print, a photograph of Redwood Forest, Founder’s Grove, with the words “FIAT LUX” at the bottom of it. On the wall facing the chairs where the patients sat there were large windows (made of tinted glass) that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. They gave one not only a good view of Broderbund Street, but also the massive structure known as St. Durtal’s Church, which was located next door, behind Plaza Center. Sometimes during my sessions with Dr. Roxy I would find myself getting distracted by the enormous church: a friend of mine, a librarian named Timothy, was obsessed with the world-famous frescoes that could be found within the church’s walls, and he was always bugging me to visit it with him on Sundays, when tours were held there.
Prior to my appointment with Dr. Roxy, I had been seated in the waiting room of her office, deep in the heart of Plaza Center, flipping through a magazine, this really old back issue of Life & Style Weekly that had first been published all the way back on January 3, 2011. The cover story dealt with Heidi Montag’s plastic surgery disasters, and it promised world exclusive shocking photos of “Horrific Scars,” “Botched Implants,” “Lumpy Liposuction,” and “Mangled Ears.” Bored, I flipped to the story, which began on page 24 and consisted of 6 pages, mostly photographs analyzing Montag’s plastic surgery flaws in such a detailed, almost fetishistic way that I had to remind myself that it couldn’t have been written by J.G. Ballard, who had died on April 19, 2009. The best page was page 26, which consisted of a full-page photograph of Heidi Montag, clad in only a white Land’s End bikini and top, her hands on her hips. At the top left-hand corner of the page were the words “THE REAL SIDE OF SURGERY” in bold capital letters, and on this page there were a number of lines pointing out where all the plastic surgery flaws could be found on Heidi’s body, including a “horrifying jagged line” behind her ears (“They basically cut off your ears and sew them back on”), the two “caterpillar-size bald spots” along her scalp, a 2-inch-long raised blemish on her chin, a nose that has been operated on twice and was apparently so fragile she was afraid it would break off, lumpy legs, the fluid-filled scar beneath her butt cheek, excessive scar tissue on her nipples, and of course, her breasts, with her right boob being larger than her left: the cumulative effect was that of a travelogue of scars. In the interview portion of the article, Heidi mentions how she has trouble sleeping at night because her breasts are so large, and that she’s forced to massage her boobs for an hour or so a day. “People have fewer scars from car accidents than I have on my body,” Heidi says about her “grizzly operation-room battle wounds.” Her makeup was done by Brett Freedman, her hair was done by Giovanni Giulliano, and her dress was from Free People, while the pink cami she wore in one of the photographs was from Cosabella. For some reason, the mental image of Heidi Montag massaging her freakish boobs gave me a guilty erection, and I wondered if maybe I should make a quick visit to the men’s restroom and rub one out, when Dr. Roxy entered the waiting room and looked at me and smiled and said it was my turn. So I smiled back, put the magazine back down on the coffee table, and followed her to her office, hoping that she didn’t notice that I was walking a little funny (on account of my boner).
“Hello? Earth to Christopher Oz?” Dr. Roxy asked me with a grin as she waved a slender hand a few feet away from my face, causing my attention to snap back into the present. Dr. Roxy Pomo was a thin middle-aged woman with short red hair and heterochromatic eyes, these eyes being framed by a pair of old-fashioned looking glasses that looked almost exactly like the ones worn by Eileen Brennan’s Mrs. Peacock character from the 1985 film Clue (in fact, they were the exact same pair of glasses, as it just so happened that Dr. Roxy was a distant relation of Eileen Brennan and had received the glasses as a gift many years ago). As always, she was wearing some sort of Native American necklace along with Navajo sterling-silver and turquoise dream catcher dangle-earrings. I couldn’t help but notice that her outfit had no buttons on it: she had on that day faded denim jeans, a black short-sleeved t-shirt (on the front of which was an image of three wolves howling at a moon), and no shoes or socks. I myself was wearing black jeans and a custom made white t-shirt, on the front of which was an illustration of the Doomsday Door that appeared on an episode of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon show back in 1987, during its second season (an episode that had given me nightmares when I was a kid: in the show, which was entitled “Knock Knock,” some construction workers digging a subway tunnel encounter an ancient Sumerian gateway built beneath New York City, a door that leads to the “Nether Regions” and which has a demonic face on the front of it that resembled a monstrous black-skinned bull/human hybrid, with two curvy horn
s, a nose ring, a mouth filled with sharp teeth, and two black tentacles coming from beneath its chin. The demon face on the door can speak, and it warns the workers in a deep, echoed voice to not open the door until doomsday, this warning being followed by a maniacal laugh. One of the workers, seemingly blasé about all of this, chooses to ignore the warning, claiming that they have a subway tunnel to dig and that they weren’t going to stop “just because some nutty door says so.” Naturally, the door flies open, all kinds of ghosts and demons commence causing havoc in NYC, and once again the Ghostbusters are called upon to save the world. Man, that was a great cartoon show).
“Sorry… though you know I have a tendency to daydream,” I said, with a lopsided grin of my own on my face. “Uh, what were we talking about again?”
“You were telling me about your fear of rainbows, and I told you about my fear of buttons. Why are you afraid of rainbows, if you don’t mind my asking?” Dr. Roxy asked, her gold Cross pen poised over the surface of her legal pad, ready to jot down notes.
“It all dates back to a sermon I heard once when I was a kid. I was raised as a Roman Catholic, you see… I went to Mass with my family every Sunday,” I said.
“What church did you go to?” Dr. Roxy asked.
“Our Lady of Sorrows,” I answered. “It’s near the border of North Smithfield, right across the street from the Super Stop & Shop, on Park Ave.”
“Okay, I think I know what church you mean,” Dr. Roxy said. She herself lived in Massachusetts.
“I was never that crazy about the place,” I went on. “I always thought that visually it was kind of bland, especially when compared to the pictures of the old European cathedrals from the Middle Ages that I would look at in my history textbooks at school. It had, like, no stained glass windows or anything like that. It almost felt more like a Protestant church, you know?”
“I’ve never really been in many churches,” Dr. Roxy admitted. “I am a Neopagan, you know.”
“Anyway, there was this one priest, Father Severin Doyle. He was the assistant pastor. He wasn’t like most of the other priests at Our Lady of Sorrows. He was like an actual human being, someone who I could relate to. He was a fat, jovial fellow; heck, his cheeks were practically rosy. I don’t think that I ever saw him without a smile on his face. He had his little vices, of course, like all of us: he smoked all the time, and was somewhat obsessed with his golf game, though he freely admitted that he was terrible at it. He was really popular with the rest of the parishioners. At the start of each of his homilies, he would warm the crowd up, so to speak, with a little joke. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of the jokes he told, but here’s one that I still recall, after all these years: a guy goes into his kitchen, opens up the freezer door of his refrigerator, and he sees a Bugs Bunny-like rabbit sleeping in his freezer. When the guy asks the rabbit what he’s doing in the freezer, the rabbit answers, ‘I thought it said Westing House!’ As I said, Father Doyle wasn’t like some of the other priests at Our Lady of Sorrows. The other priests there were, for the most part, grim old fossils with no sense of humor. I remember one summer when one of those pastors was away on a religious retreat for a week, leaving Father Doyle in charge of the parish. That Sunday, when Father Doyle stepped out from behind the lectern to deliver his homily, he simply said, ‘When the cat’s away, the mouse will play. You guys get the week off.’ Or words to that effect. And that was it. It was easily the shortest sermon I’ve ever heard in my life, lasting not even ten seconds. Needless to say, the congregation loved that: they laughed and even applauded. And yet, the irony is, it was one of Father Doyle’s homilies that scared me more than any other homily that I’ve ever heard in my life.”
I suddenly found myself reminiscing about Our Lady of Sorrows Church, the church of my childhood. Our Lady of Sorrows Church had been founded back on September 1953, though the church itself hadn’t been completed until March of the following year. The inside of the church was made from red cedar imported from Oregon (funded almost entirely from small donations), and visually it resembled the interior of an ark. In the 1970’s, the decision was unfortunately made to modernize the place, and the tile floor was replaced by red carpeting. Also, two furnished reconciliation chapels adorned with bronze decorations were created for the sacrament of penance, and a special devotional chapel was erected near the main entrance. This devotional chapel was dedicated to the Virgin Mary (who, after all, was the Lady of Sorrows that the church was named after), and within it was a statue of the Blessed Mother, a statue that was continually spot lit and surrounded by red and blue votive candles. The fourteen Stations of the Cross could be found on the walls to the left and right of the main aisles in the nave. Above the doors leading to the vestibule was a large statue of Christ on the cross, while high up on the wall behind the altar was a statue of Christ resurrected. That was pretty much the extent of the decoration of Our Lady of Sorrows Church.
Even though I hadn’t been baptized at this church (as at the time of my birth, my parents had been members of a different parish), Our Lady of Sorrows Church was pretty much the church I was raised in: my First Communion had taken place there on May 14, 1989, while my Confirmation had been done there in 1996. Around 1998 or 1999, I pretty much stopped going to Mass weekly, partly because I had moved away to be a student at Fludd University in Massachusetts, but also because at that point in my life I had lost interest in Catholicism.
For some reason, though, I’ve always been nostalgic about my First Communion. I had even kept all of the cards I had received from my friends and relatives for my First Communion, though some I preferred more than others. One of my favorites was a white card manufactured by Alfred Mainzer, Inc. and given to me by my grandparents. On the front of this card were the words “God’s Blessing on Your Communion DEAR GRANDSON” in gold gilt lettering, and below that was an oval-shaped image (also surrounded by gold gilt) which depicted a young boy with shaggy Justin Bieberish brown hair, and this boy was dressed in a white robe and his hands were held up before him, clasped in prayer, and floating in front of him was a golden grail, and emerging from this grail was a Communion wafer inscribed with the letters JHS, and this wafer was surrounded by a golden halo. Inside the card there was a generic inspirational message and a quote from the Bible, Proverbs 28:20, “A faithful man shall abound with blessings.” Another card I received that day was a pale blue card, also manufactured by Alfred Mainzer, Inc., though this one was given to me by my parents. On the front of the card were the words “For you, dear Son, on Your Communion,” and below those words there was an illustration of another young boy, this one clad in a white and blue robe, his hair blonde, and he was standing in the middle of some field and in his right hand he was holding up a fistful of palms and in his left hand he was holding a golden grail, yet another Communion wafer emerging forth from it like a tiny white sun. There was a biblical quote inside this one as well, from Isaiah 60:19: “The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light.” I’m not sure why I still remember those cards so fondly: perhaps because they remind me of a paradise that’s been lost, innocence that can never be regained.
Dr. Roxy cleared her throat. “Christopher?” she spoke up. “I think you’re daydreaming again.”
“Sorry,” I apologized. “I realize I’m mentally digressing again. Where was I? Oh yes, I was talking about Father Doyle, and how one of his sermons had frightened me when I was a child.”
“Why don’t you just describe to me what it was about this sermon that frightened you when you were a kid,” Dr. Roxy suggested.
“Okay, let me think back… I forget exactly what year it was, or how old I was… I think I was still in middle school at the time, so I want to say probably 1991, when I was 11 or so. The homily of which I speak consisted of a story Father Doyle told us, no doubt as a means of explaining that week’s Gospel reading. I forget if this story was something he had read in a book, or if it was a dream he had had, or just something he made up: the fact that I’ve never been able to
track down the story to its original source is something that has haunted me throughout my life. I forget the exact details, but this is what I remember about the story he told us that day: one day, a rainbow appears in the sky, a rainbow that can be seen at any point on Earth. As people look up at the rainbow in shock, burning letters begin to appear across the rainbow itself. The letters spell out the following message: that all people’s sins will be unveiled, and that the world will end in seven days. And sure enough, everyone’s sins begin to manifest as words on their faces. By that I mean, say you were guilty of the sin of lust: then the word ‘LUST’ would appear on your face. People all over the Earth start to panic. They try to wash and scrub the words off their faces, but the words remain, despite their best efforts. At one point in the story, Father Doyle mentioned a couple, a husband and wife I think, who decide to remain married, even when they can plainly see that they’ve been unfaithful to each other. Then on the seventh day the rainbow reappears and the world ends. That’s the gist of the homily, as best as I can recall it.”
Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking Page 6