Therapy Mammals

by Jon Methven

  I reach around my back, my hand on the gun.

  “She’s not as nice as she looks.” He growls again. “She’s worse than any Gopa mom, ruthless. And sometimes moms have to be ruthless.”

  My hand shakes. My neck heaves sweat down my back. I imagine aiming the gun at his greasy face and unloading terminal BBs into his eye sockets until his veins explode from the tiny steel orbs. The tribe demands it, winning out over my patience. I pull the gun and fire off a round into his thigh, which does nothing. I unload a second round that tears through his pants.

  “Fuck, Pisser.”

  “Come near my family, Harry.” I shoot him twice more—once in the shin, another in his left shoulder. “I’ll kill you. And I’ll fucking destroy your business.”

  He massages his leg, checks the fabric to see if I ruined his outfit, then skips into his house as though he’s being hunted. He slams the door and yells something through the glass, but it only sounds like a mumble as I unload the gun into his face, the door cracking and speckling as Harry disappears.

  Marriage Is A Strange Institution

  That evening, in the solitude of my backyard, I submit to the forces I can no longer tame, a lineage that has existed dormant too long. The part of me forced into silence and sensitivity and order and teamwork, everything it takes to be a successful parent in the complicated world of Gopa Academy. We played by the rules. We did what was required. We joined clubs and hired tutors and employed nannies and volunteered for committees. The system failed us. Everyone failed us except the awakened creatures that I have done my best to contain. Only now I need the creatures to survive, need their instincts to guide me. A part of me, the portion associated with fatherhood, is clinically insane. I have conformed to conceal it from the world. The Luderica liberated it. My actions, while criminal, have summoned my savagery, which may ultimately save my marriage.

  A rustling outside my tent that I suspect is my cat returning home to watch the last of the music video, Clint Eastwood having become a Jason Isbell fan. Instead Laura climbs into the nylon, the scents of shampoo and meat and survival. The rapidity with which she enters implies danger, the children are dead, their throats slit by a madman, potentially me. She wears a sweater and underwear, wrestling into the sleeping bag until I am thrust against the estranged nostalgia of where I belong.

  “The kids?” I ask.

  “Inside. Asleep.”

  “Are you?”

  “Drunk? No. Some wine. Lots of wine.” She reaches down to undress herself. I am quickly erect. I am relieved to find that my wife is ungroomed, which means sex with Ray McClutchen is not occurring.

  “Are we having an affair?”

  She tenses, then laughs, the situation more erotic that we are clandestinely fucking in a backyard tent. I maneuver inside Laura, the familiarity of her outline and odor, and I feel my composure wane, thinking of anything to prolong the sex.

  “What about the cryobank?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Moveable?” I whisper.

  “Don’t. No pancakes. No homework. No Iliza.”

  Less than a minute, Laura breathing heavy on my chest, my heart beating into her ear, listening to the cell phone trees hum, the singer pining over faith in a girl and prayers for daylight, the darkness as it shifts into a morning when everything is different.

  Part

  Three

  Memorials For Drug Dealers Are Like Normal Memorials

  The Doucereux line of rainwear is made of breathable acrylic camel hair that has been specially treated with waterproofing chemicals. It is available on VillageShop only a few times a year for Zenith Members. We purchased a matching set that sits in our closet for much of the calendar year owing to my previous penchant for poor forecasting. Occasionally, a wet commute would find Laura accusing that she should have had the Doucereux jacket and matching umbrella that morning, a sly piece of passive aggression that, like most conniptions left unquarreled, leveled our marriage in ways I could never have forecast.

  We are the only parents dressed properly for the memorial service. Unseasonably cool temperatures are expected for much of the Eastern seaboard, the latest models showing readings seven degrees below normal and, most likely, a series of fast-moving showers that could turn heavy at times. The models changed overnight, and since many of the lacrosse parents attended a private memorial to which we were not invited, they arrived sans rain gear. Laura wears a black suit and boots with a blacker umbrella, the various shades of darkness inspiring fantasies of throwing her on the wet turf to fuck her gracelessly in front of our children. I wear a large Doucereux camping poncho that could fit seven other parents. A floral umbrella, Florida retiree muumuu, and oversized sunglasses, Gus is dressed like a fucking idiot.

  Iliza wears jeans, a Gopa sweatshirt, and a scowl. She does not stand with her friends because she is grounded until I decide to speak with her about the charges, which she damn well already knows. She insists on explanations of my anger, but I cannot properly address her discretions without implicating myself.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I begin each interaction. “I will wipe that glare off your brow.”

  I have informed Laura about the video’s contents, and while we are relieved, all things considered, we are appalled at our daughter’s drug use. Making moods worse, the revelation came on the heels of Gus’s fourteenth birthday party, for which none of his “friends” showed. We knew the attendance would be shoddy, but there were a few strays that rarely get invited to parties we hoped would attend out of desperation. None of the Slancy neighbors came. A rumor out of the nannies is that Olivia McClutchen made reference to a rabid cat living on the property, which sent the sanitized and virtuous into ritualistic distress, lobbing elaborate excuses of truancy. Three hundred vertical pancakes, a dozen pizzas, and a showing of “Mary Poppins” on the big screen, Gus’s choice, all for naught. He did not seem sad as the four of us hunkered close on a chilly May night, the fire pit wild and gregarious, as Julie Andrews made a mockery of the heartaches of childcare and I contemplated vengeance, a destructive blow from my enemies.

  “Don’t even think about looking at that phone,” I intermittently hollered at Iliza. “This is a goddamned party.”

  The memorial is held at the soccer turf on the East River that doubles as our home lacrosse field eleven days of the year. Off to the south, if you crane your neck, you can get the general direction of Slancy without actually seeing home, the edges of Governors Island and the Brooklyn shipyards blocking eyesight. Here come the Worthy’s fifth grade girls, done up with makeup and short skirts, and who seem positively whorish in their rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The song is an odd start to a memorial, but we all feign patriotism and sympathy even though the singers’ mothers painted their lips hot pink and are obviously treating this as a hired gig for their resumes. Because we rent this turf, even the memorial seems transient, the passing boats a wayward reprieve as we bow heads and try to remember what Russ Haverly meant to us. Lacrosse coach. PTA ambassador to the ECI program. Recreational drug dealer. Pedophile. The beginning of the end, really, of our Gopa community as our federation has unwound into affluent warfare.

  Like many wars, we do not know how the fighting began. Lacrosse parents will claim it was the stolen equipment bus that initiated our strife, but other parents will nod further back in our history at the various privileges and misdeeds that are associated with the sports teams. Perhaps the dead coach launched our squabbles. Or maybe, for those privy to the footage, our pampered coach should not have been fucking teenagers in showers at high school narcotic buffets. What we can all agree on is that even at Gopa there is a deficiency of raw materials needed to build the perfect human, which in our case comes down to the last sixteen spots in the coveted ECI.

  The Jansens’ nanny was deported. This came after a series of checks by immigration, which was tipped off to illegal employee
s working under the table at our school. Rumor has it the Youdles’ housekeeper was bribed to provide dirt on her family and, even though she refused, the Youdles fired her anyway. She was compromised and would expect a raise for her loyalty, and they could not have that sort of thing around the children. The help has long been off limits when it comes to family disputes, in the way that mob families did not pick off each other’s landscaping crews. That has changed in the new ECI conniptions. The nannies circle their wagons.

  My seventh handle this spring, Cloudy_Dad9, has been revoked from the Gopa website even though I only commented on, and did not post, the blog entry about rumored lesbianism on the girls’ volleyball team, which everyone knows about.

  “It’s more of a trendy sexual romp, not one based on actually appreciating the pussy, but rather the stigma of being told licking pussy is wrong. If we all just back off and stop making an issue out of what is, essentially, fairly mild and unhygienic foreplay when it comes to what these kids are capable of, it will cease to be an issue. Do you know they stick things in their assholes, record the most outrageous items, and share it on social media? It’s a thing. It’s called ‘assholing.’ I’ve included a link to LustFizzle’s ‘41 Things You Don’t Have To Stick In Your Anus Because Someone Already Did.’ Which begs the question: how much of our children’s behavior is a product of our eagerness to overcompensate for our own failures at relevance? Digging into our kids’ sex lives is a reaction to our own miserable sex lives. We demand perfection in their studies because we are consistently stupid creatures. Our shock at kids doing drugs and drinking alcohol is because we know, in some small sense, that we depend on these features more than we like.”

  Another student, a sophomore, was taken out of Branding Shop class in an ambulance. The parents spread the word that it was complications from a juice cleanse, but we all know it was drugs. The nannies claim Luderica is again the culprit, the pills provided by the mother, although this time the child was going through withdrawal. I have tried to reach out to Sharon Li, warning her that children should not ingest the medicine, but foreseeably she will not take my calls.

  There was a slapping fight last week at a spinning class between two moms. They both claimed later to their respective circles that it was over the last bike, though everyone knew better. The website is rife with accusations of child abuse and quiet affairs between various family members, faculty blunders, and foiled plots. Mothers are randomly uninvited to lunches. Fathers are kicked off committees without reason. Cliques are reimagined. Loyalties changed. There have been subtle repercussions for Standcake: orders canceled, nothing large enough to spark our paranoia, but enough to send a message. We spoke to an attorney and went over the paperwork. With the certainty that we will see no return on our Moveable Museums investment, every pancake counts, every morsel and dab of cream, every ingredient and box and fork. Wedding season is here, and this is a make or break year. The Ferguson wedding, a major springtime event scheduled to take place at the Slancy Clubhouse, must be preserved at all costs; Laura making weekly, often daily calls to the bride, to the mother of the bride, to the cousins and wedding planner and father of the groom, all who express continued excitement over Standcake’s participation in the nuptials.

  The lacrosse parents have it in for me, rumors that I strangled their star face-off player, ordered a hit on their coach, and planned the heist of the now infamous bus. They associate me with the bad luck that abruptly terminated their championship season: Tom Pistilini 1, Gopa Worthy 0. The Gopa moms have also turned, a phone call from Josey Mateo warning me about the fallout. A man who resembled the Channel Fourteen meteorologist was spotted near Sharon Li’s health club the morning of what Gopa moms refer to as “the assault.” My image was not captured on camera. Someone ratted. Thoughts drift to Jackson, who I dismiss as a neighbor and a confidante, and who I have not heard from since the last investment club.

  Lacrosse parents and mom cliques go about things differently. The lacrosse repercussions are mostly psychological—fathers staring me down too long, shaking their head disapprovingly at my oversized parka. They will go to their phones and cowardly comment about me on the website. The moms are blunt, cohesive. Someone contacted the Channel Fourteen news desk and asked to speak to my manager. Whitman is an idealist, calculating, too arrogant to let viewers dictate who will call the weather. He strangely takes my side, the two of us united in what he perceives as solidarity.

  “They’re coming for us, Pisser,” Whitman whispers as we watch the morning lead-in, waiting for my set.

  “I can feel it.”

  He is in awe of my superpowers. “You feel it? Like the weather?”

  “Not like the weather, Whitman. Stronger than the weather. Forces of the soul at work. Good versus evil.”

  My struggles give him meaning. “I feel it as well.”

  “Lieutenant Misch.” We never discussed it. “You talked to the police about me.”

  “Only to help. I’m on your side. So is Misch.”

  “Josey?”

  “I stole her number from your phone. I thought you were having an affair.”

  “I’m having an affair with my wife.”

  “What about the semen?”

  “I don’t know. It just sits there, next to the ice cubes. I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “I meant the stuff you store at the cryobank. What happens to that?”

  It’s an intuitive question. What will happen to the millions of children I am storing for our future? “You should stay away from Josey,” I advise my young boss. “She’s not what you think.”

  “Not now that I know she’s out there. The ink. Those animals. That skin.”

  The Today show has asked to do a segment on my weather prognostications, which have gone on a remarkable seventy-one days. Other stations have delayed their meteorology segments toward the end of the broadcast, which means weather reports in the New York City region have been increasingly accurate the past two weeks. Lustfizzle’s lawyers and Today’s lawyers cannot work out a proper arrangement with Whitman worried I will jump ship if the right opportunity arrives, despite the fact I have not shaved in weeks, my mane an untamed mess of ramshackle and fatigue. Complicating matters, Whitman also has bosses, who have heard the rumors of my malfeasance and enjoy watching Penelope Garcia as much as the rest of our viewers. If I could just whisper the weather into her perfectly contoured ear, an atmospheric Cyrano de Bergerac.

  With my guesses and Penelope Garcia’s talent, our ratings have soared. The entire Channel Fourteen crew arrives for our show, many confiding that I am their favorite weatherman, that my impossible streak inspires them vocationally in ways that a college education never did. Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six game hit streak. The Boston Celtics’ eight consecutive titles. Tom Pistilini’s forecasts.

  “Bring an umbrella. Put down your phones. Watch the sky trickle, showing us how we shall know better days.” Twenty words is my forecast today, and everyone smiles and nods. “Over to Penelope Garcia. Quick, Penelope, tell a story about the rain.”

  “Oh, geez, oh my, oh well, back in Cuba.” Penelope is quick on her toes, her mind and body built for television, her lovely buttocks bouncing in trampoline fits. She pronounces it Koo-bah, the accent thick and gamey, even though I know she is not from Cuba. She is from Columbia. But research shows that there is renewed interest with viewers for Cuba, so we produced a Cuban weather girl. “When it rain it come off the muddy hill behind our houses and form a creek through town. Kids sit in the hill and it carry our bodies, dunking us in the muddy water all the way to the bottom. Oy vey.”

  I know the viewers the way I know clouds. Who would not want to hear a story about Penelope and her consummate breasts covered in mud and water, trying to maneuver the contours of some fictional Cuban hillside? It is why Penelope Cruz is taking over Thursdays. This, and rumors that I assaulted a crippled minority. Melanie dabs her eyes
with a tissue, the beauty of weather. Several of the interns hug.

  “It’s all connected,” Whitman says as I exit. He is witness to something ethereal, though he cannot say what, and is preposterously tormented by the possibility he is not doing the worthy thing with his life. “The threats. The weather. Moveable Museums.”

  “I feel it, Whitman. I see it as well.”

  Adultery Talk, With Ray McClutchen

  Rocky V is an underappreciated film in the Rocky canon. His fighting days behind him, he returns broke to his old neighborhood to pick up the pieces. It’s easy to appreciate the films when Rocky is busting up Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago, and running up the symbolic stairs. But to be a true supporter, one must be down in the trenches with Rocky and Paulie, living hand to mouth, training young boxers even though the viewer must accept that no amount of training can prepare Tommy Gunn to be the type of fighter that Rocky was—the grit, the determination to stand up no matter how severe the beating. Rocky is us. Rocky, like death, is a reminder of the sanctity of life, the wonder of children, the fortune of having problems with which to contend. Once problems cease, breath ceases, life terminates.

  The cell phone trees give off a glowing ambiance, a quiet flicker without the corporeal crackle, proving that technology cannot improve on the campfire. Overhead, Rocky and Adrian argue in a dark street, and I turn down the volume to listen to the city. Laura and Gus joined me at the fire earlier. Josey was a no-show. Ever since our meeting at the bar a week ago, things have been strange. I put it together: Whitman talking to Misch, Josey to Whitman, all of them conversing behind my back. Slancy’s security chief, Bill Chuck, has been a regular in my backyard. Tonight it is only me and my mortal enemy, Ray McClutchen, who comes bearing a bottle of wine and heartache.