Love, in Theory Read online

  INRI? Give me a break.

  But certain things did happen. That pretty, young nurse Pederson was caught in a compromising position in the linen closet with one of them (I think it was the Viking Christ, which we call him because of his big red beard). I didn’t see it myself, so I can’t be sure, but they say that when they pulled her off him she was wearing only orthopedic shoes, reenacting what she called her favorite temptation. It’s not true that her name was Magdalena, though. It was Helga. Helga Pederson of Verdon. For the record. In case somebody out there’s keeping track.

  To tell you the truth, I wasn’t much interested in our little trinity until Karen came around. She arrived in Moose Lake a few weeks before Dr. Davidson to set things up. She had been his assistant in the Twin Cities, a “psych resident,” she called it, having just finished up a degree at the university. She was there to observe, she told us, to take notes, to get a lay of the land. We figured she was sent ahead to make sure Dr. Davidson wasn’t embarrassed, to make sure our guys were the real thing and not some publicity stunt, as they’d started to become. Somebody had been leaking stories to the local paper and TV news and we’d been fighting off reporters for most of a week. There was starting to be a lot of talk about miracles. A local kid claimed he’d seen one of our guys under a full moon strolling across the surface of Moose Lake. But of course there was never any proof, and those of us at the hospital knew better. Let’s face it: Miracles don’t happen here.

  It’s not that ours is a bad town; it’s just unexceptional. If you overlook the fact that our principal industry is locking people up or tying them down (of the 2,126 people in town, 592 are in the prison or our patients), we’re like a lot of little towns up here north of the Twin Cities—farm towns and fishing towns along Highway 35, which runs like a shaky line north to Canada—places city people stop for gas or fishing tackle and drive on past on their way somewhere else. Sometimes when I’m driving home after work, looking at the buildings in town—one-story aluminum sheds, fake log cabins, tractors on the main street alongside the cars—a place long and low as a distant train whistle, I feel a longing like heartburn. An ache right there.

  But like I said, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to any of it till Karen showed up. We were still keeping the three Christs apart in those days to avoid any trouble; each one was in a separate group-therapy session, each one sleeping on a separate corridor. When Karen arrived to observe afternoon group, I was assigned to help restrain some of the bigger patients if things got out of hand, as they sometimes do.

  She wasn’t what I expected. I was thinking she’d be older, sort of stern as the medicals often are. But she was kind of pretty and really young. I felt sorry for her actually, sure the patients would roll right over her. She had straight brown hair that fell like a curtain; that first day, she wore a skirt the burnt-red color of the autumn leaves you could see beyond the bars on the windows. She looked like a teacher or a mother. Or a school girl. Not like a doctor at all. “Stoical,” that’s how she looked; it was a favorite word of hers. I looked it up after she’d said it a few times, like I did a lot of things when she was here.

  Which is why—after group that first day, when I showed her to the cafeteria and she asked me if I wanted to get lunch—I said, “Sure.” Staff don’t usually fraternize with medical, but she wasn’t a doctor yet and she seemed nice, like she meant it, and of course she didn’t know anyone here. I could feel some of the other guys looking at us, when we walked up to the line to get our trays, especially the new guy, Jackson, but I didn’t care. I felt a little good about it even. Sort of proud, special. She asked a lot of questions about the hospital, the Christs, the other patients and staff; she asked a lot of questions period. Personal things, like how I got here and why this line of work. But I didn’t mind the way I usually do when a woman starts asking me a lot of questions. She was a good listener, and I found myself telling her all kinds of things. Things I don’t usually think about, let alone talk about.

  She asked if I’d grown up in Moose Lake and I told her how I was from Chicago and how for years I couldn’t figure out what my Dad did for a living. My mother said he was in merchandising; I thought he played golf. All I knew was that I used to wake up in the night to the sound of the garage door opening and from my window I’d watch trucks unload TVS and boxes and stuff into our garage, things that disappeared a few days later. I was fourteen before I figured it out, understood what should have been obvious, that he was kiting merchandise, a fence; I was twenty before it occurred to me to ask a friend on the force to run my dad’s Social as a favor; he came back with a rap sheet long as my arm. She said that must’ve been hard, to find out something like that about your father. I shrugged; it’s better to know the truth, I said. Still, I don’t judge him; a man does what he has to. Let’s face it, times are tough. These days even being the son of God is a competitive business: survival of the unfittest you might say.

  We’d been warned to keep the whole thing quiet to avoid the kind of controversy that could get our funding cut. The head honchos in Admin said local religious folks might get the wrong idea, think we were trying to cure people of their faith in God. You got to wonder what goes on in the minds of some people. I mean, these are the same folks who want to stop little kids from trick or treating in Ohio, where my sister lives, because they think Halloween’s a kind of devil worship. “Pagan” is the word my sister used. Now I ask you, what kind of person thinks like that?

  If anything, having the three Christs around got us more interested in religion.

  They got us talking. The usual divisions dissolved. Suddenly it didn’t matter if you were kitchen staff or janitorial, ward nurse or nurse—briefly, we were all of us in it together, guardians of the sons of God. Heated conversations went on even after we’d punched out on our time cards. Almost any night of the week in those days you could walk into the staff lounge off the kitchen and find two or three of us chain smoking and speculating on the three Christs.

  You could tell a lot about a man by his opinion of our trinity. Jackson, the new guy, made jokes. He has those movie star looks women fall for, a real Brad Pitt type (Brad Pitt with a mullet)—all blond hair, blue eyes, and Old Spice. He said (to make the nurses laugh) that when you got them together in group therapy they’d “be beside themselves.” He said, “When you get those three together, they’ll crucify each other.”

  But others of us were of a more serious turn of mind. We wanted to know if God returned, what would he be like? (One of the younger nurses insisted God could be a she.) What would God want? What would God do?

  Karen had her own concerns. She told me about them sometimes as we did our rounds together, as we walked the halls or grounds, we’d talk. She wondered if it was kind to cure them. “We all have our illusions,” she said. I asked if she believed our boys were the real McCoy. But she said I misunderstood, that she meant something else entirely. She’d studied literature at college, like I mentioned, and was often quoting beautiful things other people had said. There was a guy named Ibsen who had this idea that he called “the vital lie,” the thing we need to tell ourselves to get out of bed in the morning. She wondered if we were really curing these guys or simply robbing them of “the illusions that sustain a life,” if we were restoring sanity or just a more acceptable craziness.

  And she got me thinking, I mean, what’s so wrong with believing you’re the son of God? What harm does it do? If it weren’t for the linens they kept pulling off their beds for robes, they’d have been pretty nice to have around. They weren’t violent or anything, except for the occasional stigmata scratched into a palm and a tendency to bellow the Psalms in group. Mostly they were a quiet bunch.

  A lot of the staff preferred the red-haired one—the Viking Christ—a little spark plug of a guy, muscly, maybe thirty, with bright green eyes and a bushy beard. He’s the least self-righteous of the three, which is how I like to think God’s messenger would be if I met him. Mostly he smiled and raised his h
ands over us and said, “Bless you, Bless you”; he hummed little songs to himself. He never gave me any trouble.

  Mrs. Weimar, our resident theologian, preferred the skinny Ethereal Christ, a young Swede, twenties, blond and tall and scrawny. He was serious and sad and quoted scripture to the others. She said he was a dead ringer for the real thing.

  The Angry Christ, as we called him, was our least favorite. He was a big guy, a bruiser like me, but older, maybe fifty, always raging about how we are squandering his father’s gifts to us. One week he broke out of art therapy and ran into the hall shouting, “We must love one another or die” (which Karen said is not even scripture, but poetry, some guy named Auden). He had a point maybe, but he seemed a long way from holy. Another time, not long after he arrived, the Angry Christ escaped from rec therapy and Stevens caught him in the parking lot kicking the bumper of an SUV (shouting “Selfish, Ugly, Vain” over and over). When the president gave his speech about the need to bomb other guys before they bombed us—preemption, he called it, or presumption, something like that—the Angry Christ got so pissed he had to be removed from the common room. The TV shorted out as they took him past, and I felt pretty sure the Angry Christ was behind it, that he’d given the set a good punch on his way by, just before the screen went black. He’s tall enough to do it. And he is mad as hell.

  It’s weird to be guarding the Christs. It’s rare these days that we got to keep anyone around, what with deinstitutionalization and all. Most of the adult admits are in and out in less than two weeks, “assessed and stabilized” they call it. So we were kind of pleased to get to keep our Christs. Only about one in ten stay on here, and that’s only because they’re what they call “nonresponsive” or a “difficult placement.” So maybe that’s what happened with our boys.

  I’m not what you’d call religious. I don’t spend much time in church, though I’ve been with friends, y’know, at Christmastime here in Moose Lake. Everyone goes to the services at Good News Lutheran; everyone who’s at liberty that is. But my father was a Jew; Cohen was his father’s name, which he changed to Corn when he settled in the Midwest, convinced it was as Middle American as you could get. Not wanting to stand out.

  But who knows, maybe if the son of God did come back, he would go crazy from the mess we’ve made of everything. The air pollution and the poverty, the suffering and the wars and the waste. We’ve learned so much and what have we done with our knowledge? After two thousand years in the Christian era, what do have we to show for ourselves? Lady Gaga.

  Now I have never been a religious man and I don’t want to claim that I became one. It seems to me the ordinary physical world we live in is hard enough to tackle without going looking for the supernatural to contend with. I’m not an educated guy. But Karen, who knows more about these things than I do, seems to think that the two things aren’t so different; she says that the material things of this world are just energy looked at from another angle, moving at a different speed (“think of E = mc2,” she says), and that we make too much of the distinction between what she calls “the solid and numinous worlds.” She says, “Divinity is found in the most unexpected places.” I didn’t claim to understand all she said, but when she talked I felt my heart lurch. I began to look up words, to read in bed at night instead of falling asleep to the TV; I began to want to be better. With Karen, it seemed, I might be and that life might after all be miraculous.

  This was not as crazy a hope as it sounds. I’m not saying that I’m so great to look at, but I have inherited some of my father’s gangster charm. I got a nice enough mug, a decent build, I work out with weights. I was a skinny kid, but since I hit my thirties women have liked me. Pretty women. Helpful. Looking for a fixer-upper. I’ve been flattered, and sometimes I have mistaken that for love. But when I met Karen, I knew it hadn’t been. Not the kind of love you see at the movies, that kind of big love you come to resent after a while when you begin to believe that the truth of the matter is nobody in real life loves like that—big as the sky over cornfields. I knew that I had never been in love before, because I loved Karen like that. With her I had the feeling that anything was possible; that I might surprise myself. That we all might.

  In time of course we began to get critical. To debate the fine points.

  There was talk about scriptural accuracy, complaints that the Angry Christ was not playing his part well, that he was “untrue to type.” Mrs. Weimar called him “anachronistic,” “too Old Testament.” She said he had it all wrong, that any self-respecting Christ would “leave God’s fury and the suffering of Job to the Jews.” I didn’t understand everything she said. But I got the gist: Christ was a nice guy and our Angry Christ was anything but. He was more like that billboard you see in the cornfields outside Northfield, the black one with white lettering that reads: “God is coming and boy is he pissed.” Our Angry Christ must’ve had a look at that before he lost it.

  The whole thing must’ve been getting to me, because one night around that time when I was doing night rounds—checking that lights were off, doors locked—I passed the room of one of the Christs and out of the corner of my eye I saw this, well—radiance. This glow. I pushed open the door and looked in, but the room was dark, lights out. I figured it was probably a streetlight, reflection off the hood of a car outside. A trick of the light. I was disappointed. I’d hoped to have something to tell Karen. We’d been spending a lot of time together, and I found myself saving up things to tell her. Interesting things I’d observed about the Christs or the staff. Little stories about my dog, Herman. I began to try to be, y’know, better—to read the newspaper, look up the words I didn’t know instead of skipping over them, I began to drink eight glasses of water each day, lift weights at the gym, eat broccoli. Floss. I started to hope that maybe she liked me, or could.

  I wasn’t the only one who started imagining things.

  Maybe it was all the talking we were doing, all the hours of speculation, but after a while some of the staff began to see signs. The giant TV in the rec room, the one suspended out of reach of patients, which only the staff can control, started switching channels spontaneously. Others claimed their watches stopped. A car that had been stalled in the parking lot for days started up all of its own.

  Some of it was easy to explain away. The Angry Christ is a big man, over six feet, and he might have slapped the TV set with a palm as he went past that one time, shorting out a wire. Watches run down; they break. As for the car stalled in the lot for three hours waiting for a tow, Karen said that “outside of Pascal good luck does not prove God’s existence.” She called it “Deus ex jumper cables.” No miracle there.

  Still, I understood the desire to believe. I was hoping for a miracle myself.

  I have observed that if you give a man a mystery you will end up with one of two things—a cop or a philosopher. Because one kind of man will look for someone to blame, he’ll try to find a culprit to punish until everything is under control again; the other kind of man will marvel at what he hasn’t seen before. That’s why the young are naturally philosophical, why kids wonder where they were before they were born and why a banana is called a banana; kids can spend hours watching clouds. Everything amazes them.

  People argue about what distinguishes man from the lower animals now that we know that chimps can sign and elephants remember and dolphins think and chimpanzees kill for sport (I saw this on a National Geographic special the other night). Karen said that what makes us unique as a species is that we make art, but I think maybe we’re the only ones who pray and who wager, which, depending on how you look at it, maybe boils down to the same thing—faith in a power beyond our own, whether God or luck.

  So it’s not surprising that it wasn’t long before people started to calculate the odds. At the height of it, the irreligious were placing bets (which Christ would crack first and how); the religious were praying for a sign. The miracle I prayed for was for Karen to fall for me. I had a vision of our life together, how I’d maybe go back to sch
ool—community college in Minneapolis or Fargo, y’know, two-year, then maybe move up to something bigger. Study anthropology. Maybe teach in a high school. I could see our house, a living room with a fireplace and a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and dinner parties with educated people, where we’d discuss philosophy and politics and all the big questions, like what distinguishes man from apes.

  Then a week before Dr. Davidson’s arrival the trouble started.

  The Christs were getting to be a handful: Keeping them apart was taking up more and more time; we had teams assigned to supervise the activities of each and a careful schedule that ensured they would not meet even in passing on the way to lunch or art therapy or rec hour. Karen and I were spending more and more time together. Then one day I came in and saw on scheduling that Jackson had been switched with me, assigned to Karen, so that I could assist in electro-shock; I ached with disappointment.

  And the next afternoon, as I was returning from C Ward, I came around a corner and saw Jackson all cozy with Karen in the hall. His hand braced against the wall above her head, his face dropped down near hers in a way that made me want to strap him into a straitjacket, and I was thinking about doing just that when we heard the scream up the hall and saw Mrs. Weimar race out into the corridor with a Dixie cup full of a liquid dark as blood. Mrs. Weimar claimed it was the miracle at Cana all over again, that she’d given the gentle Christ a glass of water and he’d transformed it into wine.

  Jackson stuck a finger in the cup and popped it in his mouth and shook his head like a dog shaking off water, then said, “Yup, it’s wine all right. Pretty shitty wine, but wine.”

  The desire to believe is strong. And for a while, we all believed in the wine that Weimar found in that Dixie cup. We wanted to believe those things are possible, that things like that could happen to people like us.