Gods Without Men (16 page)

“Oh, so remind me who was oppressing you at your private school?”

“Don’t be an asshole. It’s a symbol. There was … the Holocaust, the pogroms. If I didn’t do this for him, they’d have won. All the bastards who wanted us to disappear.”

“The Nazis.”

“Yes, the Nazis.”

“And the Tsar.”

“Actually, yes.”

“Listen to yourself. Do you even know how ridiculous you sound? You don’t even believe in God. The only time I’ve ever seen you in a synagogue was at our wedding.”

“It’s not about religion. It’s culture.”

“And what about my culture? What about our Guru Arjan Dev, who was executed by the Mughals for refusing to change the words of our holy book? Or Guru Tegh Bahadur, who was so cruelly tortured that he had to be cremated in secret? Sikhs have been persecuted. The Muslims tried to convert us by force. They tried to circumcise us
by force
. Do you understand?”

“I thought you were an atheist.”

“Agnostic.”

“You used to rant about the death of God. You used to wave Nietzsche at me.”

“And you seem to be saying God wants you to mutilate my son.”

“
Our
son, Jaz. And there are health reasons too. Transmission of STDs, for example.”

And so it would go on. Round and round, for days, weeks. She looked up what the Sikh scriptures said. It sounded like a borscht-belt joke, a line delivered by a fat man in a ruffled tuxedo shirt.
I don’t believe in it, O siblings of destiny. If God wished me to be a Muslim, it would be cut off by itself
. She read about the Mughal persecution of the Sikhs. She guessed they had as much right to memory as the Jews, though she couldn’t say she felt it, emotionally. There was something special about the Jewish people. About Jewish experience. At least that’s what she’d always been taught. Perhaps that was all she retained of her religion—a vague sense of election. She wondered if Jaz, for all his passion about the tortured gurus, felt anything deeper.

So they kept putting off a decision. There were other things to think about. She agreed to the naming ceremony, hoping Jaz would compromise on the other thing. Her son Raj (not Seth or Conor) was prayed over in that awful gurdwara, that dingy room that smelled of hair oil and feet. The women scowled at her as the baby yelled, as if she were doing something wrong. Look at the white bitch, who obviously didn’t know how to raise a child. After the ceremony she locked herself into a bathroom and refused to come out. Jaz tried to talk to her through the door, his voice strained. She made him swear that nothing like that would ever happen again, that he’d protect her from those women.

“You have to stand up for me, Jaz. You never stand up for me against your family.”

“I will, darling. I will, I promise.”

He swore. And now he was giving in again, to all their vile superstitions, their primitive crap.

•     •     •

She paid the check and got back into the car, where she sat for a long time, watching customers walk in and out of the diner, having no thoughts about them, barely seeing them as people, just moving shapes. Cars sped along the highway, pulled in and out of the parking lot, disgorging more meaningless forms. Later she found herself driving through town, past plate-glass storefronts. Computer supplies. Weight-Loss Club. She turned onto a side street, then another. Cracked concrete and chain-link fences. A collection of self-storage units fronted by desiccated palms. A community whose landmarks were Laundromats and 7-Elevens, trailer parks for the unlucky and for the slightly luckier, subdivisions of low, mean-looking ranches, bunkers with double garages and dead brown lawns strewn with children’s toys. There were yellow ribbons everywhere, schematic loops on bumper stickers, forlorn sun-bleached rags tied to streetlights and fenceposts.
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
. Win the war. On the side of a McDonald’s was painted a mural of Marines fighting in the desert, men in goggles and helmets shouting and pointing, surrounded by helicopters and burning oil wells. Two soldiers helped a wounded civilian, carrying him between them, his arms flung around their shoulders.

She got out of the car and stared, then remembered she had a camera in her purse. Broken glass crunched under her feet as she walked forward to fill the frame. It was the first picture she’d taken in months. She’d brought the camera as a sign to herself that she was on vacation. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to remember this mural, or if she really did. A shiny black truck went past, blasting bass out of the open windows. The teenage driver stared at her from behind a pair of dark glasses, then blew a kiss. She was startled. How long had it been since someone put the moves on her?

Her stomach was growling. It was lunchtime and all she’d had was coffee. She thought about going back to the motel. It would be the right thing to do. But, on the other hand, fuck it. Across the street was a Mexican place with a fake mission bell tower and a pizzeria offering a three-ninety-five dinner special.
YES, WE’RE “OPEN,”
said a hand-lettered sign taped to the door. “Open” was obviously not the same as open. Trash was blowing about in the parking lot. The windows were smeared with
soap. She drove back toward the highway and found the UFO Diner, a cheesy theme restaurant that looked like it had seen better days, probably during the Nixon administration. The place was pretty full. She ordered a chicken Caesar, dressing on the side. She watched the teenage waitress wobbling about taking orders, the Latino busboy. Shapes. The salad arrived. She’d just started picking out the croutons when two women in head-to-toe Muslim tents—hijabs, or whatever they were called—walked by the window. One was pushing a stroller, the other leading a small boy by the hand. Slouching along behind them was an older boy in jeans and T-shirt, carrying a skateboard. The effect was jarring, like a transmission from Baghdad.

She needed to pull herself together. What would her father say?
Suck it up, girl. Put your troubles in your pack and hump them on down the road
. But Poppy, I can’t.
Can’t? No such word, baby
. When they first got Raj’s diagnosis, her parents had been amazing. She’d sobbed down the phone and her dad, who never knew what to say, had said exactly the right thing, which was nothing at all, just
There, there, baby girl, there, my little one
. Whispering it down the line:
All better now, all better
. At least she’d be with him in a few days, would be able to crawl into his arms and smell his comforting smell, that den fug of pretzels and old magazines.

To fall for that evil-eye crap! To put that nasty little string on her boy!

When they found out about Raj’s autism, Jaz had seemed completely floored. For weeks he barely spoke, just hung around, listlessly watching as she tried to cope with yet another tantrum, another screaming fit. His passivity made her so angry. Why couldn’t he man up? She’d been raised not to give in to a challenge. Her poppy had taught her to fight. Of course they both felt guilty; try as she might, she couldn’t rid herself of the suspicion that they’d done something wrong. What rule had she broken during the pregnancy? Used a cell phone? Eaten a tuna steak? A couple of times when they were with friends at a restaurant she’d drunk a glass of wine with her meal. Jaz had never raised an eyebrow, had even encouraged her. They’d made their decisions together. So why could she deal and he couldn’t?

Nothing happened without a reason. No problem was without a solution. If her husband wasn’t going to provide one, then it was down to her. She started browsing support forums, reading posts from mothers who sounded just as desperate as she was. She took notes, ordered books on Amazon. One night she found details of a conference for parents of autistic children and booked herself a ticket. She told Jaz she had to go and see a friend; he’d have to look after Raj by himself. He stared at her like she was insane.

She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want to let him know where she was going; he wouldn’t have stopped her. She could tell it crossed his mind that she was going to see a lover, but neither of them had enough energy to sleep with each other, let alone anyone else, and he knew it. He’d hovered in the bedroom doorway as she packed, a stricken look on his face. Stop watching me, she snapped. You’re coming back, he asked. Of course I am, she stuttered. Don’t be ridiculous.

The conference was in Boston. On the train up, she stared out of the window and fretted. There was a thunderstorm and she took a taxi to the convention center, which was jammed with people wearing stickers saying
HI MY NAME IS
, dripping water onto the carpet tiles. She walked down aisles lined by little stalls, each manned by someone, usually a parent, passionately promoting magnesium injections, antifungal creams, biofeedback, craniosacral massage, hyperbaric oxygen, Chinese herbs, antibiotics, vitamin B
₁₂
.… There were blood tests, eye tests, tests on saliva and hair and urine and brain waves. Some of these treatments were plainly ludicrous, and she found it hard to make eye contact with their proponents, scared she’d find her own need reflected back in strangers’ faces. She collected leaflets and tried not to feel the energy that filled the hall, the shared yearning for a magic bullet, a royal touch to ward off evil.

That evening she attended a seminar where a doctor with a headset and the breezy manner of a late-night television host claimed that autism was caused by thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative in vaccines. The answer, apparently, was something called chelation therapy, drugs that would cleanse the heavy metals out of a child’s blood. The doctor’s own son had been autistic. After chelation, the boy had smiled. The
doctor knew the other parents in the audience would understand how this had felt for him personally. For the first time his kid had smiled and looked his daddy in the eye! The doctor spread his arms wide. He looked elated, transfigured. Lisa bought a copy of his self-published book. On the train home the next day, she gave in to her excitement. Could this be the root of Raj’s problem? She and Jaz had dutifully followed the vaccination schedule imposed by their physician—hepatitis, polio, meningitis, diphtheria, MMR.… What if they’d poisoned their baby? What if they’d hurt him through their very eagerness to keep him safe?

When she told Jaz where she’d actually been, she burst into tears. He asked why she hadn’t told him before and she sobbed on his shoulder, trying to describe the horrible neediness of the other parents. She knew instinctively from the limpness of his arm round her, the tightness in his voice, that something had changed between them. By going up to Boston she’d taken the initiative. From now on it would be up to her to decide what they’d do for Raj. The next day she took a urine sample and sent it off to a lab with a check for three hundred dollars. Two weeks later she received a letter confirming that Raj’s mercury levels were slightly elevated. By that time Jaz had been doing some reading of his own, and objected that the link between mercury and autism wasn’t proven. It was, he said in one of his infuriating scientist phrases, “highly contentious.” This led to a vicious fight. Had he given up? Was he really too weak to fight for his son? He seemed to have no answer, and she triumphantly entered his credit-card number into a website to buy a course of chelating drugs, which arrived in a UPS box a few days later.

Raj hated the treatment. It smelled foul and made his pee sulfurous. But she persisted, forcing it down his throat, even when he struggled, and Jaz claimed she was being too violent. And it seemed to make a difference. Raj was calmer. His concentration was better. She phoned girlfriends to exult. Yes, that’s right. He played with his blocks for fifteen minutes without getting distracted. We were in the park and he held my hand.

Jaz was compliant, but she began to resent his lack of enthusiasm for the struggle. One evening she confronted him and forced him to admit that he didn’t see much change in Raj’s behavior. Are you blind,
she asked. Are you actually blind? He shrugged and held up his hands defensively. The pathetic little gesture made her so angry that she threw a lamp at him. It arced across the bedroom, smashing against the wall. His face took on a strange look, a mixture of fear and pity she’d never seen before. In a gentle voice he told her he thought she was taking on too much. She needed a rest. That was when she attacked him properly, kicking his shins, beating her fists against his head and chest until he gripped her wrists and forced her down onto the bed. They were both in tears. She could hear herself yelling how dare you, how dare you.
How dare you tell me I’m taking on too much when you won’t even try?

It became a battle of hope against measurement. Jaz thought she was being irrational, and rationality was everything to him, his way of trying to limit the chaos that had overtaken their life. She got that. She wasn’t stupid. But really?
Measurable improvement. Objective criteria
. Such tone-deaf, boneheaded phrases. When he talked like that, she wanted to tear down his pomposity like old ivy off a wall. There was something so smug and unimaginative, so
stupid
, about his assurance that there was no alternative to the medical establishment’s current theories. After all, how many times had they been wrong? Once upon a time, people had swallowed radium as a cure-all and thought women’s wombs were damaged by train travel. Glumly, Jaz accepted all this was true, and even began to help when it was time to get Raj to take his meds, but it was not enough to win him more than a truce. She could tell he was getting involved not because he believed in the treatment, but because he wanted her to realize for herself it was wrong. Somehow this made things worse. It was as if he didn’t want Raj to get better. The drugs
were
having an effect. She was clear on that. Then, as a month became two, then three, she felt less sure. The early signs of progress hadn’t continued. Finally she admitted to herself that Raj was as withdrawn as ever. In some obscure way she blamed Jaz. He’d contaminated the treatment. If he’d believed,
really
believed, maybe it would have worked. She knew she sounded like Peter Pan, but she didn’t give a damn.