Therapy Mammals

by Jon Methven

  A shooting in a Kansas office, my mind immediately moves to the Gopa lobby, remembering the emergency exits, the location of the back stairs, the sturdiness of the guard’s desk, and whether Lieutenant Misch will be steady enough with the ammunition once the gunmen materialize. A flood in Nigeria, and I wonder at Slancy’s shores, built at a higher elevation but constructed of sediment and miscellaneous dust from illegal construction sites. I find every tormenting headline an attack on my children, a conspiracy to steal their innocence and complicate their lives, and Whitman expects me to snigger with meaning and verve. The UV index is off the charts this month, and my children are defenseless against the sorcery of starlight because I do not want to be one of those parents applying sunscreen in front of their peers. Even though I am one of those parents, the worst kind. Most parents claim they would kill for their children if it came to it. I did kill.

  From my phone, I spend long hours Googling other parents who have taken this difficult course. The Texas father who came across a man raping his five-year-old daughter and promptly beat him to death with a skillet. An Australian man who discovered a convicted rapist outside his daughter’s bedroom door, breaking his neck just for thinking about it. The Indian dad who invited his daughter’s rapist to dinner, then removed his genitals and strangled him. I load all these vigilantes to the Gopa website, the comment sections irate and supportive.

  I cannot blame it on the Luderica. It led to several blackouts, which occur with regularity, but I was there, in tribal form, and I killed Russ Haverly with my four iron. You find out what type of man you are in those situations, whether you will kill or be killed or run screaming into your cell phone for the authorities. I am glad to learn I belong to the other animal, the ones who run toward the violence. The pills found it in me. “That’s what combat used to find in men,” a blog post from Nadir_Father I do not recall writing, “a feral life behind the cloak of safety, but then combat, for much of the population, was replaced by sports: the Yankees are going to war tonight against the Red Sox, the Rangers will take no prisoners at the Garden, the Gopa Worthy must win at all costs. Now even sports are flimsy versions of teamwork with participation trophies. Manhood these days is about being positive and sunny, not dwelling on the bloated hardships of the world, smiling and keeping the chin up and finding the silver lining when some fundamentalist blows up an ice cream truck in Times Square, scattering children and sprinkles all over the spray-washed pavement.”

  “Good set today,” Whitman says. He bumps my fist then twists my hand a bit. “If I can bend your ear a minute.”

  “I know everyone else in the city is forecasting rain. It won’t rain in the northeast. I’m on a streak.”

  “I know about it. Fifty days or something.”

  “Sixty-one.”

  “This is about the other weather. Existential weather.” The kid can turn a phrase. He stops me in the hallway where we are alone. “Have you given any more thought into why you showed me the Moveable Museum portfolio?”

  “I told you. It was an accident.”

  “I think you left it there on purpose.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you want my help. Or for me to talk you out of it. Something.” Whitman stares me down. I cannot escape judgment. “See, the universe has stuck us together, you and I. How else can you explain our involvement?”

  “If you tell me you’ve read Ray McClutchen literature, I will quit right now.”

  He moves close, talks low. “I hate my job, Pisser. I hate the…” he searches for it, “…shallow minisculality, that nothing we do lasts, overrun by the ensuing seconds of interruption and fatigue. I read somewhere that due to the constant influx of data, millennials are suffering midlife crises earlier.”

  “At what age?”

  “About twenty-seven.”

  “How old are you, Whitman?”

  “Twenty-seven. Don’t you see? I am here to help you through this episode. And you are here to help me through my crisis.” Another kid to worry over, just what I need. “Let me in, Pisser. Let me help you destroy this tourism cell. There is meaning in this endeavor. Real, true meaning.”

  I am saved from Whitman’s reckoning by our ubiquitous cell phones—his for Lustfizzle matters, mine for Laura. I take it in my office. Laura and I go through the usual niceties, how are the kids, have a safe drive, my Saturday chores involving yard work and masturbation. We dance around the finer points, the room situation at the hotel, whether a naked Ray McClutchen will be lying on top of her at any point, if Olivia McClutchen will be at her son’s lacrosse game.

  “Something you should know,” I say. “The other morning, at the house, after you and Iliza left. Toby was in the kitchen with Gus.”

  “Toby Dalton?” There’s only one Toby in our lives. “What was he doing there?”

  “Out for a drive. Said he stopped to offer the girls a ride to school.”

  “Out for a drive?” It’s a foreign concept for Slancy residents. “Did you…”

  Strangle him on the kitchen floor, in front of our son already suffering psychological shrapnel from a death that occurred on the property? Spoon out his eyeballs? Knock him unconscious with the coffee mug? “I told him to leave.”

  “This is very unsettling.” It pleases me to know this will impact her weekend. “We should speak to someone, the police maybe.”

  Laura knows, as well as I do, that it would be a horrific idea to speak to the police. Working with Lieutenant Misch, the police are following up on a coach who went missing in Slancy, Misch likely sharing his investigation opinions with colleagues. They would not look favorably on my dispute with a teenager.

  “Are you okay, Tom?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “You’ll be safe tonight. And not drink too much.”

  “I’m planning a quiet night in the backyard, a soak and a fire.” I cannot resist some psychological torture. “You and Ray just have a nice time. Don’t think about me.”

  I head home after work to shower and change and admire my new trophy that is displayed in my shed. It looks beautiful hung between the sixty-volt cordless hedge trimmer and the heavy-duty two-cycle leaf blower, completing my collection of manliness. The backup leg I carried around lower Manhattan earlier this week, searching for a homeless man in a wheelchair I saw months earlier. He was still alive, still legless, and happy to receive the prosthetic leg even though he was not sure how to apply the contraption. We both agreed that now he only needed one more prosthetic leg to make him whole, and we parted with a handshake, the two of us feeling good about class relations.

  Drinks With Parents

  The party for Whisper’s acceptance into the ECI program is this evening. While Gus was uninvited, Sharon Li never officially rescinded the invitation to the rest of the Pistilinis, and I arrive to show there are no hard feelings. Dressed in jeans and a tailored jacket over my unwashed physique, I even brought along a gift for the troubled genius, a pair of chess gloves made of breathable fabric so the pieces do not slip out of his nerdy fingers. I stuck a dead chipmunk at the bottom of the package and wrapped it myself, which I later regret. Gus has a birthday party next month, and since he has no friends, we’ll probably have to invite the Li’s.

  The party is being held at an arcade and cocktail bar in midtown, children dashing through the neon lights while the adults enjoy drinks and appetizers and threaten their offspring to stop running, that they may injure themselves in the shadows. Sharon Li ordered two hundred pancakes for the event, a reward for Laura’s unconditional surrender regarding Gus and the party. She is surprised to see me. Seated in a wheelchair, a blanket over her legs so other parents do not have to avoid staring at the stump, the immortal peppiness finally tamed. Congenial and social, the theft has ruined the party for her, a smaller version of me behind her ready to push the chair when she demands locomotion. This is the husband, to
whom I do not introduce myself.

  “Sharon,” I say, taking her hand, my tone offering neither condolence nor celebration, just a record that I remember her name in spite of our falling out. The BB gun grinds into my back when I bend to greet her.

  “Tom,” she says, surprised. “Tom Pistilini.”

  “Sharon.” I place the package on her lap. “We could not be prouder of Whisper.”

  “Well.” She glances around for her husband, steel-eyed and waiting for a directive. “Thank you then. Will you stay for a drink?”

  “Of course, I will.” This surprises her more than the gift. Mothers gawk and whisper. Fathers purse their lips. A nanny darts for her phone, eager to get this encounter onto the Gopa website, the scoop of the weekend.

  I help myself to a pancake dressed as what I imagine is Whisper Li and guillotine the head. The tangerine ones are my favorite, a smoothie ooze crashing the shores of my tribe. I sip whatever drink the husband was sent to the bar to procure, smiling at the other mothers and delighting in their discomfort. I am surprised to find Jackson and Jason at the party, and recall that Whisper is in the honors program with Damian. Having heard about Gus’s uninvite through the nanny chain, Jackson avoids me until I approach. Jason shares with me the gossip that no one dares mention.

  “Stolen from her gym locker. Are any of us safe? It’s hor-rib-le,” Jason says, over pronouncing which causes me to chuckle. I am not laughing at her missing appendage. I have previously laughed myself into apathy over it. But rather at how dramatic Jason finds the theft, how he equates it back to his existence, the safety of his children, the way all of us do with extraneous news from the far corners of the world. A capsized ferry in South Korea, hundreds missing: should we double down on swimming lessons? How does Sharon Li’s missing leg impact Jason? If anything, Damian should have been the first, maybe second, student selected for the program, so this party should be an abomination to the Jays’ parenting skills. “It’s not funny, Pisser.”

  Jackson smiles covertly. “It’s not funny, Pisser.”

  “I’m more surprised than entertained.”

  “You shouldn’t be surprised or entertained,” Jason says.

  I am not in control of my reactions, I want to say. I am not directing Tom Pistilini’s operations any longer. I am on my third drink. I think it is an Appletini, or maybe a fruity beer. It’s a terrible party, everyone morose and crowding around Sharon Li, who sits forlorn as though she just lost the actual flesh leg this morning. Jason excuses himself to make nice with the moms, leaving me alone with Jackson. We still have not discussed our felony.

  He turns his back to the moms and gives me a serious reproach. “What are you doing here, Pisser?”

  “It’s a party. I was invited.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “I wasn’t uninvited.”

  “Laura and Gus and Iliza were invited. No one thinks to invite you to anything.” It is true, of course, though it makes both of us feel badly. He grinds closer. “Something about you, Pisser. You’ve always been strange, but you’re getting stranger. The stolen bus. Your trouble with the parents. Items I’m reading on the website. You smell awful.”

  “You stole the bus, too.”

  “Careful, Pisser.” He places a giant hand on my shoulder and squeezes the back of my neck. It feels good, this human contact. “And don’t for a minute think I don’t see it coming.”

  “See what coming?”

  “Another breakdown. I don’t want to be anywhere near it when it happens.” Even closer, into my ear. “I’m willing to bet you know something about that missing leg. Come on, Pisser, why’d you really come?”

  “For camaraderie. To chat with other parents.”

  “Or to look at them. To enjoy someone else’s misery.” He runs his hand down my back to the gun handle and slaps my fat, indicating he has not abandoned our friendship entirely. “This the Ray and Laura weekend?”

  I nod. The nannies again, or maybe Jason. Hell, everyone knows, probably even Sharon Li, both of us not pitying one another.

  “Tough times. How you holding up?”

  “I’m doing okay.”

  We sip our drinks and watch the parents who stare viciously into the blinking lights looking for signs of their children. The arcade is full of pedophiles and drug-dealers and sex traffickers lurking to steal our youth, and at any second one of the moms will dash from Sharon Li’s side to defend her young who brushed too closely against a clown’s arm.

  “Did you and Jason find time to talk?” He knows without me suggesting a topic, but I do it anyway. “About Moveable Museums.”

  “Argued mostly. It’s all we do anymore.” Jackson shrugs. “I’ve been doing some research. Most of what Harry says is true.”

  “How so?”

  “The money. The returns. If it wasn’t us starting this business, then someone else would.” He shakes his head, which has grown sweaty beneath the alcohol and lights. “I don’t know what the answer is, Pisser. Jason and I cannot afford to lose this investment, not now.”

  I have spent enough time with Jackson to know his past, the courage of a Southern man marrying a Protestant teacher for whom no one much cares. The struggles they have been through. His dream of running his own orchestra, having the talent and drive to do that, but falling short and training Broadway musicians because that is where the money exists to pay the bills and nurture his dreams. I have failed in my own dreams as well, and glancing around the arcade, the smell of fried food and chemical cleaner, the arcade violence of war and sport and space vengeance, the Americanish of all of us, I cannot help but feel defeat, a metaphorical checkmate.

  “What happened to us, Jackson? Where did we go?”

  “We became parents.”

  Don’t Call It A Comeback

  The second letter from the homeowners association arrives. It is the same as the first letter although they have upped the rancor with bolded headers and, if I’m not mistaken, a slightly larger font. On the shuttlebus ride into Manhattan I order a foldable weatherproof storage bag that regularly retails for $400 on VillageShop but is on sale for Zenith Members for $175. I do not need a storage bag, but it was one of the bestselling items and I could not pass up the discounted price. Hours ago, a terrorist in London detonated a bomb in a crowded tourist area, making us hug our children firmer. Seventy girls were kidnapped from a Nigerian school, several of whom were reported murdered hours later, resulting in a blog post and comments on the Gopa website questioning school security. On Lustfizzle, “17 Ways to Sculpt An Avocado Before Eating It” has garnered over four million views.

  No one speaks on the shuttlebus. I review a Gopa post I wrote about the merits of having your child quit an athletic team so they are not accidentally murdered during practice, their neck snapped like a twig by a more evolved student, a lacrosse ball bursting their sternum, a freak flesh-eating rash. The volleyball crew, as if anyone cares about volleyball, has gotten together to flag Nadir_Father for profanity, even though I only used the word “cocksuckers” once in the comment section. Several rugby dads are suggesting I am fostering a culture of failure. Some mothers who despise the sports teams are soft proponents of the post, although they prefer the word “decease” to “murder,” so we argue the semantics on the commute.

  Gopa’s world-renowned daycare program is a waste of personnel and space that could be better spent on older children, namely mine. I consider this from the stroller penalty area where I blow smoke over the mothers who furiously sanitize and cover the wee ones with blankets. The penalty area is open air on one side, which means I am not breaking any laws by smoking, or carrying the BB gun in my jacket, because I do not actually step inside the school. I receive a firsthand look at the Gopa Method each morning; a system that fluctuates with what the experts claim is trendy. One minute, we address the toddlers with baby talk, making them feel adored and special. Mo
nths later, nannies and parents and teachers speak to the rubbery dwarves like adults. No cooing, no fawning, no pretend voices, rather monotone directives, none of which the children understand.

  Ages one to three, parents spend the same amount of money to enroll these sucklings into rolling and napping and diversity etiquette, assigning one teacher to every three kids, a ratio unheard of in private school curriculum. The little fuckers take up two floors of prime real estate that could be transformed into a second gymnasium or science labs. They have their own manners studio. There’s an allergy-free ball pit. They have a tumbling room I am told resembles a giant pillow, though no parent has ever set foot inside. Not one of them appreciates this gift, this elaborate purgatory into the real-world hell of kindergarten in which children must understand complicated addition and dual languages.

  “Is Teddy having a bad day?”

  Teddy is wanting nothing and expecting everything. Teddy is a manufactured elitist who should sit in his stroller and patiently await entrance into a world where my children have already laid down financial roots. In my pocket is a two-week old sample that later this morning I must deposit into the Manhattan Cryobank, actually harnessing another parody of this thing called civilization.

  “Ah, what’s a matter Teddy?” I dab a finger at his snotty chin. He reacts with a blind scowl, and the mother smiles dubiously as she measures the temperature inside the cradle chamber, not sure whether the friendly Channel Fourteen meteorologist hovers near her child or if word of a madman is accurate. Was my nanny really fished out of my Jacuzzi? Did I have something to do with the missing coach? Did the police help me cover up the murders because I’m a mild celebrity in the Gopa livestock? Did I really steal a busload of lacrosse equipment and a prosthetic leg?