Bible Stories for Adults

by James Morrow

  “And the cops decided it was punks?” Strange to hear cops and punks from Izzard’s Continental tongue.

  “They questioned the local gangs. The Rodman Street Goons, the Corona Avenue Nightwings…a few others, I don’t remember the names.”

  “The cops came up empty?”

  “They never even found the knife. Who would expect it? The punks just threw it in Flushing Bay, right?” Izzard’s whole body became a frown. “Gunther, I have reached a conclusion. The analysis cannot proceed until we know exactly how many personalities inhabit you. Dawn-to-dusk sessions are not normally a useful technique, but in your case…”

  “All day? I could never afford that.”

  “I have a sliding scale. Like a parking garage.”

  I pictured Izzard running a parking garage, speeding away in his customers’ catatonic Volvos and manic-depressive Saabs, presenting them with sane cars at day’s end. “All right,” I told him. “Dawn-to-dusk.”

  NOVEMBER 9, 1999

  Antichrist is hopeless. Satan’s White House orgies are derivative and ludicrous. In Chapter Fourteen the real Jesus will appear and team up with Richard Nixon’s ghost, the two of them forming a kind of ectoplasmic hit squad out to get Satan. This sounds promising, but I can’t seem to write the intervening scenes.

  The woman down the hall makes concrete phalli. We do not communicate. The young male misanthrope on the third floor writes poems without words in them. I have nothing to say to him. When a man suffers from dissociation and writer’s block, dearest diary, he needs friends.

  NOVEMBER 14, 1999

  When Izzard said dawn-to-dusk, he wasn’t kidding. He insisted that I meet him at six A.M. All this special effort—my case must really fascinate him. Perhaps he’s envisioning one of those multiple-personality cover stories for the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, or maybe he wants to take me to the upcoming International Psychoanalytic Association congress in Bonn. Look, sehr geehrten Doktoren, behold this most curious fish. It didn’t get away.

  Izzard had brought coffee and donuts. We feasted, and then he said, “I’d like to speak to William Orange now.”

  “Is that really all it takes?”

  A volcano erupted in my brain, the lava smothering my resented self.

  Fugue state…

  And suddenly I was asking, “What did you discover?” Odd. Izzard had claimed we would go till evening, yet ripe sunlight poured through the window. “It didn’t take as long as you thought?”

  “Longer,” Izzard muttered, loading his Frederic March pipe.

  “Longer?” I marveled at how Izzard could stretch out on the floor with so little loss of dignity. Scraps of paper, each decorated with notes and doodled faces, encircled his recumbent form.

  “It’s Sunday morning,” he said.

  “Sunday morning? Are you serious?” He was. My vacant stomach tugged at me. Exhaustion hung on my bones. “Let’s get it over with. How many?”

  Izzard lit Frederic March. “In your case, the sheer quantity of selves may be less relevant than—”

  “How many?” I insisted.

  “It’s difficult to say,” snapped Izzard, his tone clarifying who the therapist was in this case, who the patient. “Some of your selves reported the existence of personalities whom I failed to draw out. In other instances, I was told of personalities who sounded so innocuous that I decided against soliciting them.”

  “Just give me an estimate, Dr. Izzard. I’m going to burst.”

  “If I absolutely had to put a number on it, I would say about…well, three thousand.”

  “Three thousand?”

  “Give or take a dozen.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “They kept flipping past, one damn persona after the other. It was like scanning the Manhattan phone book.” Izzard began sketching Frankenstein stitches on his doodles. “The really interesting feature is the organizational scheme that’s emerging. As you may know, Gunther, the human family is truly a family. Everyone on earth is everyone else’s fiftieth cousin—if not closer. So it’s not surprising that certain personalities are claiming blood kinship to each other and grouping themselves into surname categories.”

  “Surname categories? I have families inside of me?”

  “The Greens, the Silvers, the Siennas, the Pinks…”

  “Be honest. This is bad news, isn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily. Remember, our goal is to fuse your various selves into a ruling ego. Within a given family, the challenge of assimilation should prove no harder than in a conventional multiple-personality case. Between families, however, we must contend with feuding, religious intolerance, ethnic pride, and similar schisms.”

  “I’m crazy as a bedbug, aren’t I?”

  “Complex, Gunther. You are very, very complex.”

  NOVEMBER 19, 1999

  Voices chatter within me, a cacophony of failed communication and successful disgust. My liberals scream at my conservatives. My racists spew epithets at my minorities. My fundamentalist Protestants condemn my Catholics to hell.

  “Voices, Dr. Izzard. I’m hearing voices. Schizophrenics hear voices.”

  “How do you feel about these voices?”

  “They scare the crap out of me.”

  “Good.” Izzard opened my file and removed a sheaf of doodled faces. “A true psychotic does not fear his voices. He takes them for granted. It never even occurs to him that they might indicate madness. You, on the other hand, have the reaction of a sane person. I’m most encouraged.”

  “The reaction of a sane person suffering from history’s worst case of dissociation.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Can you make them stop?”

  “I don’t know.” Izzard drew halos above several faces. “I think we should go back to your sister’s death.”

  “We did that last week.”

  “Tell me again.”

  I spoke at twice normal speed. Walking with Brittany through Kissena Park. Her disappearance. The screams. My flight. The terrible funeral…

  “You heard screams?” Izzard interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  “You never mentioned screams before.”

  NOVEMBER 22, 1999

  Screams. I would settle for mere screams now, wouldn’t I? Mere screams would be soothing compared with recent developments.

  When my inquisitors burn my heretics, I feel the flames in my heart. When my bigots lynch my blacks, my windpipe constricts and I fall gasping to the floor. Call it psychosomatic, but it hurts.

  NOVEMBER 24, 1999

  I have become a sleepwriter. I doze off upon the couch and awaken in the dinette, a ballpoint pen in my hand, a legal pad pressed against my chest like a poultice. I cannot identify the various flags, national seals, military insignia, and infantry uniforms littering the pad, but the renderings have indisputable flair. Even the income tax forms boast a certain elegance.

  My favorite flag depicts a rainbow arcing like a flying buttress between two mountain peaks. Most inspiring. Clearly I have hidden talent.

  NOVEMBER 25, 1999

  Insomnia.

  A walk through Washington Square.

  Lighting flared everywhere, revealing a circle of Caucasian males in eighteenth-century greatcoats whipping a naked, dark-skinned, aboriginal woman.

  When I got home, I found welts on my back.

  NOVEMBER 27, 1999

  Saturday. Another dawn-to-dusk session. This one, at least, truly ended at dusk.

  “You’ve gone political,” Izzard announced when I had regained myself. “The families have started forming…well, as you might imagine…”

  “I know all about it. Countries, right?”

  “You’ve got countries,” Izzard corroborated in the tone of a blunt but compassionate internist offering a diagnosis of AIDS. “And, naturally, alliances of countries. There’s a communist pact, a free enterprise treaty, and a collection of poor, developing nations that view both blocs with grave suspicion.”
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br />   What can a man do under such circumstances but laugh? “I don’t need a psychiatrist, Dr. Izzard, I need a diplomatic corps.”

  Instead of echoing my laughter, Izzard offered a smile of corroboration, as if I had taken the words from his mouth. “I spent most of this afternoon talking with the secretary of state from Sovereigntia and the foreign minister from Proletariat.” His earnestness left me impossibly depressed. “Gunther, it is my sad duty to inform you that, come midnight, a state of war will exist between your two superpowers.”

  NOVEMBER 28, 1999

  Izzard called to ask how I’m doing—and to cancel next Friday’s session. A therapists’ convention in Philadelphia.

  “The war has begun,” I told him.

  DECEMBER 9, 1999

  War. I look in the mirror and behold an amalgam of cancer patient and auto-accident victim. The main theater is above my shoulders. Bombs detonate, and my vision blurs. Shells explode, and my teeth rattle, sometimes working free of my skull. A patrol is ambushed, and the blood rolls from my ears and nose. Both sides are using mustard gas. My cough has become one continuous convulsion. I am as bald as Izzard.

  In my torso, a second front has opened. My nipples drip pus. I quiver with third-degree burns, raw and weeping, black craters on the landscape of my chest.

  The emergency staffs at Beth Israel Hospital and NYU Medical Center know me on sight. I am running out of lies.

  DECEMBER 10, 1999

  “My God,” said Izzard, beholding my torn and leaking self. Normally unflappable, he could not watch me without flinching.

  “Help me,” I bleated.

  “I’ll try. Believe me, I’ll try.” He guided me toward the couch, eased me onto its understanding plush. “I assume you’re getting medical attention?”

  “The best an emergency room can offer.”

  “We’ll cancel today’s session if—”

  “No!” How pathetic I must have sounded. Yes, Doc, I know I’m doomed, but give me some of your prettiest pills anyway. “Please!”

  “I think we should talk about those nightmares again. Your sister is always killed by a sphere, correct?”

  “Always.” With my tongue I probed a gap between two of my extant teeth.

  Izzard procured a fat manila envelope from his top desk drawer, resting it on my chest. I opened it, and a dozen photographs tumbled out.

  “Study them,” Izzard urged.

  A snowball, a pumpkin, a hot-air balloon, a melon, the moon, a large female breast, a buttock of indeterminate gender, a globe, the Perisphere from the 1940 New York World’s Fair, the Unisphere from the 1965 New York World’s Fair, a soccer ball, an apple.

  I reversed the exhibit. Apple, soccer ball, Unisphere. My intestines became a Laocoön, a mass of murdering serpents. “This one,” I groaned, shoving the Unisphere toward Izzard.

  “It distresses you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because it’s a sphere?” A cough ripped through the delicate netting of my lungs.

  “Every picture I showed you is a sphere.” Izzard stuck the Unisphere in my file. “I would like to speak with Donald Puce,” he said abruptly.

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “Director of international security policy for Sovereigntia’s Department of Defense. Just give him to me, Gunther. The situation is deteriorating rapidly.” Headache…

  Fugue state…

  “Exactly as I feared,” said Izzard after I was restored to myself.

  “What is?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “I don’t like anything you tell me these days.”

  “It would appear that…”

  “Yes?”

  “It would appear that Sovereigntia and Proletaria have both started crash programs to develop a thermonuclear bomb.”

  DECEMBER 13, 1999

  I black out constantly. Antichrist is a lost cause. I awaken to find my diary defaced.

  CAPITALIST PIG!

  COLLECTIVIST BASTARD!

  WE SHALL DANCE ON YOUR GRAVE!

  WE SHALL EXHUME YOUR CORPSE AND SPIT ON IT!

  DECEMBER 17, 1999

  The rumors are true. Izzard has checked and rechecked, talking with dozens of high-level officials in my Politburo.

  Proletaria has the bomb. Bombs, actually. Dozens of them, plus delivery systems. If Sovereigntia does not surrender unconditionally within the next seventy-two hours, an all-out attack will ensue.

  “An all-out attack?” I said, shivering with the pain of my newest burns. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” Izzard replied. “But when I look at what conventional war has done to you, Gunther, I incline toward a grave prognosis. I pray that Sovereigntia sues for peace.”

  “This is crazy.” A dribble of blood exited my right nostril. “It’s like I’m committing suicide.”

  “True, true.”

  “What can we do?”

  Izzard offered his handkerchief. “I want to delve into your Unisphere phobia.”

  “I’m about to blow myself up, and you want to talk about the 1965 New York World’s Fair?”

  “Normally I would have you free-associate over the course of several sessions until the truth popped up. But time is—”

  “I’m dying.” I pressed the handkerchief against my nose.

  Ever so slightly, Izzard nodded. “We must act quickly. For all its crudity, hypnosis is our best card now. So with your permission…”

  “Do it.”

  No hypnotic crystals, no gold watch swaying before my eyes. Izzard merely told me to relax. Fat chance, I thought, but the gnome persisted, and finally the world dropped away…

  And I slept…

  And slept…

  And the world came back…

  Izzard’s eyes, those popping gelatinous transplants from Peter Lorre, told all.

  “You’ve learned something,” I said accusingly.

  “You will too, shortly. During your trance, I instructed you to recall the whole scene, every detail of your sister’s murder, the moment I tap on the desk.”

  Izzard pulled Spencer Tracy from his mouth.

  Every detail? Did I want that?

  Izzard inverted the pipe, using it as a mallet. Tap, tap, tap.

  Floodgates opened, releasing not water but my mind’s foulest effluvium…

  Brittany and I hurry through the nocturnal park.

  Moonlight.

  Thick summer air.

  “What park?” Izzard demanded.

  “Kissena Park in Queens. You know all about it.”

  “Might it have been Flushing Meadow Park?”

  “Kissena, Flushing Meadow—they’re contiguous. What’s the difference?”

  Something catches Brittany’s eye. She runs. I begin my fruitless search. Her screams come. They are wild and oddly metallic. They crack the moon. I turn and run…

  “Home?” Izzard asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No,” Izzard insisted.

  “No?” I winced. Izzard was right. “Deeper into Flushing Meadow Park,” I said.

  Flushing Meadow Park. Site of the 1965 New York World’s Fair.

  “I see the Unisphere,” I told Izzard. “But it is 1970.”

  “They kept the Unisphere after the fair closed,” Izzard explained.

  So I truly see it. A huge hollow globe flashing blue-white in the full moon, seven continental slabs affixed to its weblike shell.

  The screams have stopped.

  Four boys, youthful monsters in thrall to God-knows-what narcotic, stand inside the Unisphere, balancing on the network of steel girders. They have hauled Brittany up with them. Her clothes are gone. I have never seen all her skin before. She is supine and spread-eagled, tied to the back of Argentina, a bandanna on each wrist and ankle, another in her mouth.

  I am ten. I do not understand. One gang member seems to be getting dressed. Another is lowering his trouser
s. From the posture he assumes, I believe he intends to urinate on her. Then he presses forward, kneading her breasts. I avert my eyes. I seem to hear my sister’s bones grinding against Argentina. At last I look up. Another boy is doing the same terrible thing. He finishes. A third boy works himself into her, laughing as she rolls and twists on the torture rack that is the world.

  And now, suddenly, I do understand, because knives have appeared, flashing in the moonlight.

  “I’ve seen enough,” I told Izzard.

  “Not quite,” he replied.

  The knives enter her quivering flesh from everywhere, and blood spills out, quarts of it, staining the continent’s underside, blood on Argentina, blood on Chile, now raining through the vast interstice called the South Atlantic…

  And I am off, running, tearing out of Flushing Meadow Park, careening wildly down Roosevelt Avenue, my psyche a breeding ground for dissociation.

  “Shattered,” I said.

  “Shattered,” Izzard agreed.

  So now you know why I ripped Izzard’s couch apart this morning, dearest diary. He was polite about it. He simply carried his wastebasket over and filled it with the scattered gobs of stuffing and upholstery. “The question, of course, is where this gets us,” he said.

  I made no reply.

  “Knowing the source of a multiple’s dissociation is only the beginning,” said Izzard.

  I pulled more stuffing from the couch, wadding it as if molding a snowball.

  “I’ll tell you where I think this gets us, though I don’t like it,” Izzard confessed.

  I remained silent.

  “Weeks ago, Gunther, I informed you that a multiple typically suffers from repressed hatred. Normally the object of that hatred is a family member. In your case, however, the nemesis lies elsewhere. I believe your psychoneurosis is focused on…do you want to know the object?”

  I said nothing.

  “Gunther, your psychoneurosis is focused on the Unisphere in Flushing Meadow Park…and everything it stands for.”

  DECEMBER 19, 1999

  So I hate the world. There is no hope. Proletaria has the bomb, and I hate myself, the world.

  The voices know it. Their chatter has decayed into a single wail coursing through my brain. Tomorrow, despite Izzard’s noble effort to cure me, I shall hold a nuclear revolver to my temple and pull the trigger.