While an estimated 5–7 percent of the world suffers from claustrophobia, far fewer suffer from its little-known counterpart, claustrophilia—which Dr. Robert Campbell defines as the “pathological desire to be confined and enclosed within a small space.” Confirming Fodor’s work, Campbell adds that claustrophilia is often “interpreted psychoanalytically as an escape from the world and a tendency to return to the womb.”
He could only hold his breath for so long.
If claustrophobia serves as a psychological reminder that our mothers’ wombs are one-way swinging doors, sufferers of claustrophilia might well argue the opposite. While claustrophobia can be acquired at birth or developed later in life, claustrophilia seems to be a biological imperative of birth. It’s as if, in the early stages of development, Fodor’s theory of birth trauma as a gateway to claustrophobia remains momentarily repressed, at least for newborns, who remain the world’s most exuberant practitioners of the claustrophilic life. An industry of baby care books seems to confirm this, including Dr. Harvey Karp’s parental favorite, The Happiest Baby on the Block, which also argues that babies much prefer the tight wrap of a swaddle to the freedom of unrestrained sleep.
Karp’s theory proved particularly true for my then-four-month-old son, whom we tucked tight in a swaddle and inserted into an MRI machine on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. He wasn’t ill, but had simply been selected for a psychological study. Since a trusted friend promised to administer the test, my wife and I signed off on the experiment.
Despite our efforts, we couldn’t swaddle him tight enough to alleviate his fear, nor could I blame him for having it. After all, if my own helpless body had been folded and inserted into a cylindrical tube, I, too, would have cried. But eventually the swaddle did its work, his mother and I keeping careful watch as his wails subsided and he returned to a womblike state. We witnessed no trauma, just contentment, though as he slept, I began feeling claustrophobic on his behalf. I took a seat in a nearby rocking chair and watched as the red glowing numbers kept track of his heartbeat like a basketball score in flux. I rocked to that heartbeat, the quick back and forth of the chair a small comfort as I prayed for him to stay asleep.
Bobby was awake for all of it, conscious and clawing as the water wiggled through the seams like eels.
As I rocked there, I couldn’t help but wonder about the long-lasting ramifications of this trial, if we might forever scar him if he woke while trapped inside the tube.
He did wake eventually, breathless as he struggled to break free from the straitjacket in which we’d enclosed him. Our psychologist friend immediately shut the experiment down, pressing the red button that eased the magnets back into place, killing the buzzing and whirring that had engulfed us all moments prior. The damage was done, though we hoped nothing was permanent. Not as it had been for the fictional Bobby Watson—or far worse—for the real-life Larry and his cousin Paul, for Cynthia and her brothers Joseph and Martin, all of whom drowned above water.
We left the lab and did not return there.
We don’t swaddle him anymore; he doesn’t let us.
If we were to be subjected to a bombing attack, what type bombs would probably be used against us?
“Questionnaire Used at Meeting of Residents Residing in
Zone 2, District 1, Section #2, Ft. Wayne” (1942)
III.
DROPPED
Fabricating Fear
We searched for a lake monster on the shores of Lake Superior. This was in July of 2012. My wife, Meredith, son Henry, and I had headed north from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in the hope that the vacation town of Duluth, Minnesota, might momentarily insulate us from the horrors of the world.
It didn’t.
Didn’t drown out the drone missiles dropped in Pakistan or silence the Syrian uprising.
In the days prior to our trip, I’d found I could hardly turn on the television without learning of the latest in a long line of disasters—flash floods in Russia, drought in West Africa, a car bombing in Kandahar. Not to mention an earthquake in New Zealand and Ireland’s torrential rains. For days on end, cable news had little trouble confirming that every last vestige of the planet was crumbling or washing away, bombed or broken or both.
Except, of course, Duluth.
By the time we arrived at Minnesota Point beach, we were disheartened to find that we’d already lost most of the daylight. Still, I kept my six-month-old son confined to the safety of the shore by using what little light remained to search for monsters.
“Keep your eyes peeled for an arched neck,” I said as we sat in the sea grass, “or a couple of dark humps in the water.”
Henry knew little of lake monsters, though his cryptid-loving father knew plenty.
I filled him in the best I could, but Henry’s interest had little to do with the lake or the creatures that may or may not inhabit it. Instead, he focused on the sand, deemed it edible, and proceeded to sprinkle it into his mouth.
Sighing, I put our monster hunt on hold to deal with more pressing matters.
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” I said, scraping the sand from his tongue.
Surely the monsters would wait for us.
Was it Dr. Spock who said parents should scare the living daylights out of their kids in order to expose them to fear? Perhaps I misunderstood. Nevertheless, I manufactured our lake monster hunt for the same reason my family has instilled fear into offspring for generations—because much in the way a flu shot works, we believe a small dose of fear in a controlled environment is far safer than the alternative.
Though I fancy myself a fiction writer, my mother’s fictions were always best, especially her creation of Mr. Green—a much-feared, nonexistent neighbor who terrified both my brother and me throughout our childhoods. We never so much as glimpsed the guy, knew startlingly little about him, yet the mysterious Mr. Green became the manifestation of everything that scared us. Our imaginations concocted a creature so vile, so cruel, that we never dared cross my mother for fear she’d make good on her bluff to introduce us to the man.
Except for the time my brother did cross her.
Who can remember his transgression? All I know is that the punishment could hardly have fit the crime. I watched helplessly from the windows of our Fort Wayne, Indiana, home as she buckled him into the backseat of the Ford Taurus and drove toward Mr. Green’s supposed house.
My brother later recounted all of it. How our mother pulled into Mr. Green’s alleged driveway, turned off the engine, and waited.
And how as he sweated bullets in the backseat, my brother prayed to the God of little boys that Mr. Green might take pity on a wretch like him.
I’ll never be bad again, I’ll never be bad again, I’ll never be bad again . . .
Miraculously, God answered.
My straight-faced mother had put on quite a performance, but just as my brother’s anxiety reached its apex, she shrugged and reversed the car out of the drive.
“Looks like he’s not home,” my mother said, shaking a finger at my brother in the rearview. “You got lucky this time, mister.”
As my son and I sat in the sea grass on that Sunday night in Duluth, I realized just how much I needed him to believe in our lake monster. I needed it the same way my mother needed us to believe in Mr. Green. I felt that if I could expose Henry to a tiny dose of a lesser fear, then I could shoulder the heavier burdens myself. And not just your everyday, run-of-the-mill global upheaval, but the more pressing matters, the threats that hit closer to home. Such as the burden of knowing that any number of once seemingly innocuous household objects—from bookshelves to coffee tables—take on a far more menacing role when a child’s in the room. And the burden of recognizing that even if I did manage to beat the needle-in-a-haystack odds at successfully childproofing our child’s life, it was impossible to childproof his future. There were simply not enough latches or plug covers or antibacterial soaps. Not enough bubble wrap, or water wings, or luck.
Desp
ite teeth brushing, and hand washing, and practicing stop, drop, and roll, I would never be able to predict when the drunk driver might barrel into our lives. Nor would I know which dog would bark and which would bite and which of the two had rabies. Would never know which square of sidewalk would bloody the knee, or who would break whose heart in the schoolyard. I am not alone in my worry. All any parent can predict is that none of our children will ever be immune to everything, and that at some point, our years of nonstop parental anxieties might come to fruition just as we’d feared.
And so, for that brief moment in Duluth, I dreamed up a fear for him that I could still control. I assured myself that fabrication would serve Henry well down the road. That a lake monster would shield him from drone attacks and flash floods and car bombings in Kandahar. But more importantly, it might also make him think twice before leaping into the bacteria-filled lake, or choking down any more sandcastles. I was just being a pragmatist. Just a pragmatic, monster-hunting father.
My mother likely confirmed the value of her own parental indiscretions with similar rationalizations. Sure, a bit of minor therapy might be in order as a result of our Mr. Green–induced traumas, but wasn’t it a necessary means to the end? Was it not better for her to frontload our fears rather than expose us to a larger dose of a harsher reality? After all, thanks to my Mr. Green anxiety, for several years I was able to naively believe that the two Gulf wars were fought exclusively with nine irons and putters. Ultimately, I was no worse off for my mostly bubble-wrapped childhood. I lifted the lighter load, while Mom bore the weight of the world.
That night on the beach, we saw no evil, we heard no evil, there was none; though months later, there was plenty of it all over the world. Televisions piped horrors into households from Duluth on down. Thankfully, Henry was still too young to know the difference between Sandy Hook and Hurricane Sandy and the sand he devoured in Duluth.
There will be plenty of time for differentiating later, I thought.
For now, when the news reports on the latest tragedy, Meredith and I carry our twenty-eight-pound boy to his bed and return him once more to the safety of his room.
On one particularly depressing news day, we take to his Legos and construct our Lake Superior monster, complete with arched neck and dark humps.
Henry laughs at our creation, and we laugh, too.
“We’ve found him!” I say. “We’ve found that scary scalawag at last!”
But the very next moment he’s destroying that monster faster than a flash flood.
As we watch him, our stomachs drop as our own worst fear pulls into sharp focus: no matter how hard we try—or how much we love him—the fear we fake for him today might well turn true tomorrow.
Fort Wayne Is Still Seventh
on Hitler’s List
For Michael Martone
In the 1940s, citizens would tell you that Fort Wayne, Indiana, was so wrapped in magnetic wire, superchargers, sonar systems, bombshells, pistons, amplidynes, and dynamotors that for a brief moment the people there became important enough to fear obliteration. Employees at General Electric, Rea Magnet Wire Company, and International Harvester clocked in seven days a week to support the war effort, churning out all the necessary parts.
Without Fort Wayne, perhaps there would be no B-24 bomber.
Without Fort Wayne, perhaps there would be no atomic bomb.
When Little Boy was dropped over Hiroshima, a small piece of Fort Wayne was lodged inside. On Taylor Street, Joslyn Steel Manufacturing shaped uranium into ingots, contributing to the killing of 160,000 people 6,700 miles away.
Days later, when Fat Man was dropped over Nagasaki, once more Fort Wayne was to blame. Twenty-one-year-old assistant flight engineer Corporal Robert J. Stock of 415 Downing Street—just five miles from where I grew up—peered down from his instrument panel at the mushroom cloud ballooning thirty thousand feet below.
His mission: measure destruction.
Which he did, admirably, making him better prepared than most to know the effects of the bomb had Hitler dropped his own upon the steeples of the churches of Fort Wayne.
A handout from a May 18, 1942, citywide meeting responded to Fort Wayne citizens’ questions on how to respond if Hitler bombed the city.
Q. Aside from ordinary fires due to combustion or any other natural source, do you feel there is any danger from fire that we might expect?
A. Yes there is another danger we must face now that we are at war. That danger is from enemy airplanes dropping incendiary bombs.
Q. What is an incendiary bomb?
A. It is a small bomb weighing about two pounds.
They burned at 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
In a coffee shop on Broadway, old men still talk about the planes humming over their city.
“Probably twenty or thirty of them,” a retired mailman shrugs, sipping his coffee. “We had to look up and try to figure out if they were our planes or theirs. We were always waiting for the day when we saw a swastika on the back wing.”
That day never came.
With their heads tilted skyward, they spied only skywriters or C-47s droning high above.
The only strike they ever knew was lightning.
In October of 1941, in the months prior to Pearl Harbor, Charles Lindbergh spoke to a crowd of ten thousand at the Gospel Temple on Rudisill Boulevard. His noninterventionist group, the America First Committee, was opposed to the American invasion of Europe and Lindbergh looked forward to sharing his feelings with Fort Wayne. The city was proud to host him, with onlookers crowding the streets and sidewalks to catch a glimpse. But in the early afternoon of December 7, 1941, as Fort Wayne citizens stepped from their churches and received word of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh and his isolationist policy were quickly forgotten. The American First Committee disbanded within days while the men of Fort Wayne rushed to recruiting stations. Six hundred and twelve men who were raised on streets like Wayne and Sherman and Clay would die in places they never knew existed.
My father gets his oil changed at a service station on Covington Road.
“Eighteen bucks for the full service,” he says. “You can’t beat it.”
Once, many years back, I attended Lindley Elementary with the owner’s son. His name was Ryan, and for a time, our desks sat in the same row. During free-reading period, Ryan and I often hunkered into beanbag chairs that swallowed us whole, taking turns holding The Illustrated Guide to Fossils, pointing out which fossils we would most like to find on our way home from school. We had never heard of Hitler, nor had we ever been told that Fort Wayne—our beloved home—was important enough to make it to the top of any list.
“I want to find a trilobite,” Ryan once told me, so I said, “Okay. I want to find one, too.”
Nearly twenty years later, Ryan died. Small-arms fire from insurgents in Balad, Iraq. He was a corporal. He was a paratrooper. He was no longer in the beanbag chair beside me.
Once, during an oil change, my father asked his father how many tours his son had served. Ryan’s father didn’t speak, just held up his grease-stained fingers.
In the coffee shop on Broadway, just a few blocks from General Electric, old men still talk about the German prisoners of war.
“Probably thousands,” the retired mailman continues. “I was just a little boy then, but we used to sit on my grandmother’s porch and wave to them as they jogged by for their daily exercise.”
Reports show that by 1945, six hundred German prisoners of war had infiltrated our city.
Camp Scott was originally constructed for the 130th Railroad Battalion, but by 1944, it had transformed to a prison camp. Guard towers were erected, barbed wire rolled out.
The camp was situated just beyond McMillen Park, between Wayne Trace and the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Germans were captured from Rommel’s Afrika Korps before flying into Fort Wayne.
The men at the coffee shop recall Sunday afternoons spent driving past the camp, the prisoners peeking out from the fences. O
nce the prisoners arrived, some parents no longer allowed their children outside after dark. But some parents did. There are stories of German POWs playing soccer in the park, of children accepting the prisoners’ nickels to buy them sodas from nearby drugstores. The prisoners had access to radios and received more generous beer and cigarette rations than American soldiers overseas. They enjoyed Ping-Pong. They found girlfriends. They stuck around.
You ask them, they’ll tell you—Fort Wayne is a good place to live.
The night after 353 Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, the General Electric factory on Broadway turned off its glowing sign for the first time since 1928. The GE symbol had become a stalwart of the Fort Wayne skyline, but the red-encircled letters remained dark until war’s end. Nine hundred and twenty-five bulbs quieted their hum, and six months later, GE produced its last civilian motor before focusing entirely on war production. Security fences were constructed around the factory, and employees were given high-level identification badges. Armed guards were stationed in guardhouses. The war had reached our backyard.
Nearby, at the Wolf and Dessauer department store on Calhoun Street, the forty thousand lights depicting a glowing Santa and sleigh flickered into darkness as well.
The citizens of Fort Wayne knew one thing for certain:
They did not want Santa Claus in the German crosshairs as the bombs began falling from the sky.
Cloistered in the backroom of Fort Wayne’s History Center sits a gray box filled with various manila folders, one of which reads simply “Bombs.” Inside, a list of the threats that Fort Wayne most likely faced, as well as information related to how citizens were to respond if Hitler bombed the city.
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