Michael Dibdin: Dark Specter

Here’s what happened. A single mother living in some tenement in New York set out to bathe her baby. Since there was no running hot water, this involved heating a pan of water on the stove. The mother in question was a junkie, which gave us an out to some extent. We didn’t approve of hard drugs, although if anyone had managed to score some cocaine we would have given that a try because word was it wasn’t physically addictive. But heroin, no way. We were drug users -radical, innovative individuals for whom illegal substances were just one more tool in the unending search for personal growth and enlightenment. People who took heroin were mindless addicts. The distinction in our minds was absolute.

Anyway, while the mother is waiting for the water to heat, she decides to fix up. When the water is nice and warm she pops her six-month-old in the pan, only unfortunately she forgets to turn off the burner. I think it was this simple domestic detail which got to us. It was the kind of thing we were doing all the time. None of us would forget the night Larry set the kitchen on fire when he got the munchies and started to fry up some food, then switched trips and wandered off leaving the pan on the stove. But there were five of us, and at least one usually had his head straight enough to keep track of what was going on. The woman in New York wasn’t so lucky. She was alone, and she’d miscalculated the dose when she fixed up. Result, she passed out and the baby was boiled alive.

OK, it was a real bummer, whichever way you looked at it, but any other time we’d have had a moment of silence and moved on. These things happen, life’s a bitch, gotta keep on truckin’. But that evening, for some reason, we all got hung up on this thing. Maybe the grotesque nature of the tragedy had something to do with it. People getting boiled alive sounded like something from the Middle Ages, or some wacko late movie scenario. Plus the details were hard to work out. How big was the pan? Couldn’t the kid climb out? How much water was there? Why didn’t it drown? How long did it take to die?

The only way to exorcize all this was to find someone or something to blame. For the TV people there was no problem, of course. They blamed the mother, and the dealers who had supplied her habit. But even though we disapproved of heroin, and despised anyone who let themselves become enslaved to it, we couldn’t get off the hook that easily. We’d all been equally out of it at one time or another, and although dropping when alone was against our code, who was to say what we might have done if we’d had kids to raise and poverty to contend with and nothing else to ease the pain? There was no way we were buying into the newscasters’ smug, judgmental line.

But if the mother wasn’t to blame, who was? For a while it looked like society was going to take the rap. If the woman had been brought up in a caring, supportive, communal environment, like the indigenous peoples before the white man fucked everything up, this would never have happened. There would have been plenty of old people with time on their hands who were only too glad to look after chores like bathing babies, leaving the mother free to go out and get royally laid by a selection of superstuds like us. Plus she’d be living in harmony with nature, so she wouldn’t need drugs or other artificial stimuli to combat the colonialization of her mind by the propaganda machine of late-capitalist consumerism, right?

We had all more or less agreed on this solution when Sam put a new spin on the whole thing by bringing up the religious angle. This was a personal thing with him. He’d never talked much about his fundamentalist background until a couple of months earlier, when his mother was killed by an intruder at her home in Milwaukee. They caught the guy right away, a local loser who’d already done time for break-ins. Another conviction would send him to the pen for ten to fifteen, so he’d taken a gun along and, as guns will, it had gone off.

Sam had never given the impression of having much time for his parents. When he talked about them at all it was as a big joke, a couple of hicks given to quoting the “good book” and dwelling at great length on the moral failings of others, so we were surprised to see how hard he was hit by his mother’s death. His father had succumbed to cancer five years earlier, and his mother had begged Sam to attend the University of Wisconsin so as to be near her. He had been equally determined to keep his distance, but when the old woman died in such a shockingly gratuitous way he naturally felt guilty for having left her all alone in the house. Rather than admit this, however, he deflected his feelings into an all-out assault on God. His parents had given up everything for Him, laying waste to their lives, pursuing a scorched-earth policy lest Satan find a crumb of comfort, and what was their reward? His father was consumed by a slow and agonizing illness, his mother gunned down in a robbery gone wrong. Thanks a lot, God.

So Sam’s line on the boiled baby story was fairly predictable: it was just one more proof that the idea of a wise, loving, all-powerful God was a crock of the ripest bullshit, and that anyone who believed in Him was mentally deficient and in dire need of counseling. We’d heard all this before, and duly nodded, murmured “Right on!” and reached for another beer. Then Larry, who hadn’t said anything much up to then, suddenly broke out, “I believe in God anyway.”

For a moment no one said anything. We were too stunned. If Larry had remarked that personally he enjoyed eating boiled baby, maybe with a little relish on the side, that would have been fine. But this abrupt declaration of a faith whose existence none of us had imagined left us deeply shocked. It was uncool.

“Anyway, it’s all like a matter of faith,” Larry went on a little sheepishly. “I’m only saying there’s no way you can prove God doesn’t exist just ’cos bad stuff happens.”

We belatedly realized that Larry must have been suppressing this statement for a long time, not wanting to challenge Sam on the sore point of his mother’s death. But this was neutral ground, and the time had come to take a stand.

“Sure, you’re right,” Sam replied in a slightly patronizing tone, as though he was managing Larry the way you did someone who was having a bad trip. “All it proves is that if God does exist, then He’s an evil fucker.”

“God is love,” Larry retorted heatedly. “Evil is the work of Satan.”

Years of Bible study had left Sam well prepared for an argument such as this.

“That’s the Manichaean heresy, Larry,” he replied cheerfully. “Couple of hundred years ago you’d have got burned at the stake for dividing up good and evil like that. Listen, according to the Scriptures, God is all-powerful, right? ‘I am the Almighty God,’ Genesis seventeen, verse one. ‘The Lord God omnipotent reigneth,’ Revelation nineteen, verse six. But we are also expected to believe that ‘God is love,’ First Epistle of John, chapter four, while Psalm Thirty-four tells us that ‘the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in Him.’ All I’m saying is that you can’t have it both ways. If God is all-powerful, He could have saved that baby. If He is good and loving, He would have.”

This broadside understandably left Larry reeling. Apart from a theological expertise which none of us had suspected Sam possessed, we’d each had about fifteen beers by this time, to say nothing of the joint we’d passed around in the car on the way there.

“Religion isn’t about that, it’s about eternal salvation,” Larry protested. “It’s about the soul, not the body.”

Sam rolled his eyes and nodded earnestly. His lean, angular face and sharp, close-set eyes made him look like a ferret going in for the kill.