Therapy Mammals

by Jon Methven

  We are joined around the fire by Harry and Ray and Jason. Harry and Ray have sons on the lacrosse team and are aware of the strangling rumors. I am an accomplished weatherman, a member of their investment club, and have a reputation of being an out-of-shape weenie. They know the nannies tend to exaggerate. The wives congregate inside around the breakfast bar. Some of the children have departed for home or to their phones. I pop a pill and am blithe and ornery and content and drunk, and I smile at what it would be like to carve open Ray McClutchen’s stomach with a serrated knife and barbecue him over a spit. Someone tells a joke and I laugh in contemplative wonder if optimists burn as awkwardly as the rest of us.

  I am aware of the passage of time. Everyone is gone and the lights inside have dimmed. Jackson hugs me goodbye, tells me to see a doctor. I am alone with the fire pit, the Jacuzzi gurgling. Not alone, exactly. I have my phones and Clint Eastwood, who occupies one of the chaise lounges, staring into the embers catatonic, a chilly night. I pull up the Gopa website and, using my third handle in as many weeks, Feralocity, I post a picture of third graders dining in our cafeteria, a professionally staged shot, along with a photo of Liberian children starving, a photo of buzzards picking at a raccoon corpse. My other pocket buzzes. It’s time to deal with my seeker.

  Tug Doppelganger

  For several days I have been carrying an extra phone that does not belong to me. It is an older model with a small screen, a faulty camera apparatus, none of the bells and whistles that keep humans living inside our palms. When it buzzes, only numbers appear, no names. I answer it but say nothing. I listen to decide what is happening on the other end but it is always a standoff, two parties breathing, waiting.

  I know nothing about the owner. It belongs to a man named Tug Reynolds, although in this day I suppose that could be a woman. I keep it charged in case the owner calls and asks for his or her phone, at which point I will be eager to assist, but they must speak first, a rule I am certain means something. Occasionally someone asks for the owner. “Tug, you there?”

  The phone has buzzed several times, Friday night, a busy evening. I push the cool aluminum alloy against my cheek. Someone chews on the other side, a small mouth, fast rhythm. The caller is nervous, multitasking, ambitious for something.

  “Is this Tug Reynolds?” I say nothing. “I’m calling about some items you ordered from VillageShop.”

  VillageShop.com is an online retailer and the main supplier of all consumer products for the Gopa community. If every family orders all their needs through our communal VillageShop account, we get discounted items and special gifts and free shipping and vacation vouchers. Our materialism will also help fund a school in remote parts of South America or the Middle East, I cannot remember where exactly, but that is not the main impetus to shop. It is the deals, the membership advantages, our lifestyle shipped free in neat boxes so that every day is Christmas morning. Most of the items in my backyard were purchased via VillageShop at a discount: the grill, the fire pit, the blue rape lights that line the northern walk so that guests are not inconvenienced by accidentally stepping in damp grass while creeping through my darkness. Based on the amount I have spent in the past decade, I have achieved Zenith Member at VillageShop.

  “I hear you breathing. I’m going to continue,” the voice says. “Your items shipped to a residential address not affiliated with your account.” It is the address of the Hendersons, my neighbors to the south who are retired and travel for much of the year. “We’re aware some of the items are pet-related and might be important. Can I read you the items?”

  I keep silent but do not hang up.

  “A luxury two-door, two-tier cat cage, four twelve-ounce canisters of organic catnip, some…” I do the math. The items I shopped for to trap the cat staring at my fire pit were purchased using this phone, but how did I access the account? Credit card theft is certainly a possibility. I could probably claim it was an accident, except “…an elite series combo air rifle with scope, a 250-count of double-point air pellets, the 825 self-cocking tactical crossbow—these last items did not ship because we’re not permitted to ship more than one weapon to a residence in the New York City area. Are you there, Mister Reynolds? Legally we’re required to notify the authorities.”

  She waits. “I hear you breathing,” she tells me again.

  “I’m here. It’s probably a mistake.”

  “It happens. Let me ask, Mister Reynolds…”

  “Tug is fine.”

  “Were you planning to hurt animals with the weapons?”

  “Of course not. I’m an animal lover.” Despite the Shop-Vac full of chipmunk parts, I really do enjoy animals. “This sounds like a big misunderstanding. Any chance we can leave the authorities out of it?”

  “Well…” I hear her type on her side. This is a minimum wage task, calling in the middle of the night to check on retail fraud. Most people just hang up, but I have been cordial. “Probably a computer glitch. I can go ahead and make the adjustments.”

  “I appreciate that very much, Miss…”

  “Angela. Have a good evening, Mister Reynolds.”

  Saturday Morning Chores

  I awaken in front of a hapless fire, daybreak not yet cresting my house, BB gun in hand. Clint Eastwood is gone. I am slightly hung over and my eyes do not adjust in time, but I have the strangest sensation there is a naked creature running through the woods. It is slightly bulkier than Iliza, its breasts swinging in the chilly air as it dashes behind a tree. It could be the flu, or the pills, but this would be the first occurrence of hallucinations. Mostly it has been blackouts until now.

  The backdoor opens and my estranged wife appears with coffee. She is dressed in a white blouse, a skirt that stops just below the knee and articulates beauty and decisiveness and order but also vulgarity. I would give anything to hike it over her back and fuck her obscenely in the flowerbed, her knees scratching into the fresh mulch. I am lying on a chaise, covered in a blanket, and clutching the gun. Laura is disappointed, but not enough to have come out the night prior to fetch me. Saturday is our busy time, activities and seminars and classes and school events and practices and chores and later, once the children are in bed, discovering little projects to avoid each other. There is a lacrosse game in Montclair, which most parents attend, though I will not be one of them. My wife has Standcake deliveries and will be gone for the day, handing me coffee along with a list.

  “You didn’t forget?”

  “I didn’t forget.”

  “What am I talking about, Tom?”

  I should know the answer. Considering the hour, I require caffeine.

  “The semen sample,” she says. “It has to be at the clinic by ten. You forgot.”

  The Manhattan Cryobank is our storage unit for a kid we may or may not bring into this world to obsess over, depending on what the Sedlocks do. Because I have been erratic lately, going on two years depending on the source, Laura wants to stockpile some inventory. It is not important that she have my baby. Instead, she wants the children to share the same DNA, which studies show will give them a firm sense of camaraderie once we are gone.

  “Of course I didn’t forget.” I assumed since Allie Sedlock left tipsy, there would be a reprieve in the semen collection.

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “As soon as I finish my coffee.”

  “I’ll call shortly to make sure it’s done.”

  “You don’t have to call,” I say loudly, the start of a fight.

  “Another thing,” she says. “I overheard something last night. I have to ask. But I want to be clear. I cannot hear answers. Standcake,” she says, which is how she distances herself from all my failures. “The business cannot be compromised. Understood?”

  “Okay then.”

  “Toby Dalton. Did something happen the other day?”

  “Well, it had to do with the thing we spoke about—”
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br />   “Don’t answer. You know these lacrosse tailgates are important for business. We need this. Don’t fuck it up, Tom.” She watches me sadly, feels badly for me, then feels badly that she must always feel badly. “Is that how you got all scratched up?”

  “I didn’t want to—”

  “Don’t answer.” Irate replaces sympathy. “He’s a child, for fucksake. We have to be careful. Do you remember why? Did he injure you?”

  “He didn’t really injure—”

  “Stop talking.” She turns angrily. A book escapes her bag, a Ray McClutchen title, Rescuing Your Inner Wolf. She bends to retrieve it, embarrassing both of us. “Oh, Tom,” she says. “What happened to you? Where did you go?”

  Is she referencing last night, how I ended up asleep on a chaise in the backyard, holding a BB gun? Or is it a metaphor of my life, something I think about in front of the mirror now and again? Where did I go? What happened to us? What happened to me? To where did Laura disappear, my hard, exotic, intelligent woman now brandishing self-help manuals and vegan batter recipes? I sip the coffee and review the list, not eager for the first task: drop off sample. It sounds easy enough, but what it does not include is that I first have to obtain the sample, which means finding a suitable website to energize myself and maintain an erection long enough to finish the chore. I swallow the rest of the coffee and review my Saturday.

  Drop off sample (by 10!)

  Groceries (list on counter)

  Drive Gus: therapy, piano, wrestling, chess, thrift store

  Make sure Iliza has a ride to kickboxing this morning, theater this afternoon

  Fix the bathroom faucet

  Get rid of the cat. It trapped the Rotchfords in their garage this morning. Three calls about this shit, Tom. Deal with it!

  What Happened To Us

  All the shitty, insignificant episodes that occur in wedlock become harmless plaque. One day, suddenly, the marriage clutches its chest, cardiac arrest; everyone is surprised even as the signs of poor health are present for years. I was less than Laura deserved and more than she could throw away. We had two children, a Gopa news network that thrived on misfortune and countless studies that insisted divorce would rob their innocence and tarnish their happiness. The catalyst arrives, the life-affirming or altering or crippling event from which good marriages have difficulty surviving, much less people not having regular intercourse, or even talking that much. Dead kid. Affair. The holidays. Cancer. In our case, the catalyst was Tilly, our nanny.

  I left work early on January 12, hoping to take a long soak. I found the body floating in the lagoon and calculated the logistics: our nanny of ten years, deceased, I would have to drain the tub to remove the now-red water, have the interior specially treated, and most likely wait for warmer weather to refill it if I wanted to prevent cracking. Tilly was likely drunk, an afternoon problem that became a morning problem, that turned into her showing up to occupy our couch each day. It was bad form, among the other nannies, to fire one of them for the sins we all practiced. I had been on Luderica for a month at the time.

  The death was not ruled suspicious, the gallon sized buckets too heavy for her frame, toppling her into the water with the girth. There was no evidence that supported foul play, but there were suspicions in the Gopa community, mostly from me. Initially I found nothing strange about the two blood smears on the concrete that were an awkward distance apart. Blood marks were what occurred during death, and if the authorities did not spread tape and check arithmetic and call in technicians, who was I to question their conclusions? Even so I began bringing it up at school events and on the Gopa website.

  “Why two blood smears?” I wrote, the first comment in a blog that I posted alluding to overheard suspicions. “Did she fall, smack her head, get up, and fall again? Highly unlikely.”

  “I didn’t use the word suspicious,” I told the nannies one morning, eight of us sequestered near the free coffee. “But now that you bring it up, two blood stains, five feet apart, one a streak much smaller than the other. Yes, I’d say suspicious is fair.”

  “I think she was probably murdered,” I offered to Laura during a wrestling meet, when a kid from Bay Ridge dragged Gus around the mat in a legalized lynching, eventually pinning his lifeless body and invoking applause. Laura went to sit with the other parents.

  Four weeks later, neuroses that had been building steam for a decade left me bedbound. What used to be referred to as a nervous breakdown, Devin Brenner diagnosed as CRCB, or complex regional chakra blockage. Whitman ordered me to take sick leave. Laura threatened to move out if I did not stop talking about the death as though someone, myself perhaps, was responsible. Iliza refused to be in the same room with me. Gus made it worse, dressing in Tilly’s old clothes and dusting the house, the early stages of his Transgeneration. Devin offered prescriptions. Instead I stuck with what Russ Haverly turned me on to, the new wonder drug still in the testing phase, though completely safe, that some of the other parents found successful to cope with marital disputes, long-term depression, the dreaded weekends when we schlepped our brood from enlightenment to enlightenment. According to Russ, once it got FDA approval, the Luderica would replace Ritalin and Xanax as parents’ preferred remedy.

  “One day people will pop these like aspirin. Helps rough out the edges, dig out whatever is missing from your personality,” Russ explained. “It’s perfectly safe in small doses. I hear the teenagers love it,” a comment that would later haunt me.

  It was my good buddy, Ray McClutchen, who suggested I sign up for one of those retreats people who read Ray McClutchen books attend. Laura thought it would be good for us. Ray told me he would maintain the property, that Michelin star chefs cooked the meals. I went to Malibu looking for God or one of its neighbors.

  Taking a sabbatical from work to find oneself at a resort with other like-minded answer seekers is not a white privilege thing. It’s a wealth privilege thing, an American thing. Ray got me a discount. There was yoga at sunrise. Coffee at dawn. Breakfast seminars during which motivational speakers told us about vibrations and erogenous zones. We napped. We played volleyball on the beach. We lunched on catamarans and discussed our feelings, or lack thereof. We sipped cocktails free of judgement and smoked marijuana as part of the recuperation. We ate fish and stews, drank wine, talked late into the evenings about divine missions. I should have been there vacationing with my wife. Instead I was there with my fears and other cowards who could not handle the pressure of showing up each day.

  I was discharged with a peculiar thrill that there was nothing in the universe to hope for or know, just skin and grit and lack and luck. I learned something. I was a man, am a man, who does not do the right thing most of the time, unless it is for my own needs, for my children and wife and possessions. There exists duty in that role, but duty that comes with regret: treating my privileges like they are something I earned, taking more than my share, neglecting my fellow human, not doing good. It’s who I am.

  Three weeks later, everything was different. I was twenty pounds heavier still with no God and no more playful about my world. Laura had been left to manage the farm, pay the bills, worry over the finances, truck two kids to school and theater and therapy and kickboxing and chess and wrestling and dentist appointments. Iliza had aged seven years in a month. Gus was a full-on geriatric crossdresser. Ray had gotten Laura hooked on the worst type of drug, his self-help books—all the furniture rearranged into Feng Shui mazes, healing candles in every room, the kids each had their own crystal, Laura in a karmic daze, hibernating from her ruthless self. I did not know about her and Ray until I was told by Olivia, who enjoyed breaking the news of the Cooperative Marriage. I laughed in her miserable face at the suggestion a woman like Laura would ever be interested in a weenie like Ray until I saw the way my children looked at me. They were sorry for me.

  I did not feel rage or jealousy. I did not punch anything, the natural reflex a
man in love should display. I shrugged, nodded, promised to be open-minded about my friend stealing my wife while I was in God rehab. It was me; I made her weak. Marriage does not always end with domestic violence; more often tiny patronizing glimpses into our eerie failures, subliminal battle fatigue that wages on for years. I pushed her into a cloying, sentimental creature visualizing solutions, meditating on positivity and abundance, waiting for a wilted hand to sprinkle goodness on bills and dead nannies and worn-out husbands.

  Navigating A Cooperative Marriage

  The news out of the Gopa website is that Russ Haverly did not show for Saturday’s game. Outside of the occasional girlfriend, he is a lone wolf, no family in the area, no siblings or cousins, no one to phone. Along with local authorities, the school is doing all it can to find answers. The immediate answer is Assistant Coach Hunter Herman, who made several rookie mistakes on Saturday pandering to the referees over calls that should not have gone our way, when he could have been concentrating on the first midfield line, starring Toby Dalton, that was dogging it on defense all afternoon. We were still able to eke out a three-goal win, but we were easily ten goals better than Montclair.

  Hunter Herman is young, wants what’s best for the team. He does not have the clout to handle the complexity of private school parents, nor the rapport to order kids like Toby Dalton and Rhen Sedlock into his system, especially this year. The private school title is within reach. A state title is not out of the question. And I suppose everyone is concerned about Russ’s wellbeing.

  Seventeen. That’s how many tablets of Luderica I have left. I never call Russ since I see him so often, a pattern I do not intend to break. There are other drug dealers I could contact. The nannies probably know someone, but Russ is safe. He plays golf at the club. He dines with us some Fridays. He invests in the Sedlocks’ start-up. He sits on the ECI committee, which the Slancy parents admire and never discuss. He is one of us.