Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

“I’m here,” he said, to encourage her to talk, to affirm something to himself.

“I am in such trouble,” the young voice went on. “I don’t know what to do.”

Matt recalled Vassar saying very similar words only twenty-four hours earlier, after they’d gotten past the roles of buyer and seller, predator and prey (which one being which depending how you looked at their unique situation), man and woman.

Matt suddenly knew what to do. “No trouble is so bad it can’t be helped by talking to someone else about it. What kind of bad is it?”

Very bad. She thought she was pregnant. She was in high school. Her boyfriend, forbidden of course, was older and wanted nothing to do with her or her condition. Her parents would never understand. She didn’t dare confide in a girlfriend; she didn’t have many … any … of those.

The classic story had also been classic in the New Testament. The church had resolved it with the concept of the Virgin Mary. Sadly, no other unwed mother since then had received a similar dispensation. In the Holy Land, they were still stoning them to death.

“Just once,” she was saying. “Honest. I never thought … just once.”

If there could be a virgin mother, could there be a sinless sinner? Not in any religion he knew. There could be an innocent sinner. That he had reason to believe.

He coached her into giving birth to some options: a drugstore pregnancy test. Buy it out of the neighborhood, off the Strip. If it came out positive, talk to a school counselor. Her writhing protest was clear even over the phone line. Planned Parenthood, he suggested in desperation, aware that were he still wearing a Roman collar, even figuratively, that would be anathema. But where does a girl desperately seeking impersonality go with this most personal of problems? To people she doesn’t know, since the ones she does have made clear through sixteen callous years that they don’t really care enough about her to inspire any kind of confidence at all. That was the real sin. It starts at home and spreads beyond to school and the larger society. Once the human hen yard decides that you are the chick to be picked out and pecked to death it only gets worse and your predictably nervous behavior only reinforces the bullying.

Matt recalled the awful incident Ambrosia had mentioned of the Pakistani teenager gang-raped by the village elders. If a pregnancy resulted, that fact would only further condemn her, even and especially in the eyes of her own family. She would be doubly dishonored. For this the God of Christians had made himself human and died by torture, to reflect and reject humans’ inhumanity to humans, and two thousand years later it still went on.

His caller was sounding a little more hopeful. Not a lot. A little. She had a plan, a mission. A test to buy. Information. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she’d go to Planned Parenthood.

Maybe, Matt thought, her self-destructive spiral could be halted by contraception. He had mixed feelings about that issue. He knew many “good” Catholic couples who had rationalized using it despite the church’s stand against it. Many others had tried natural family planning methodswith great or not-so-great success. Being orthodox in any religion was always a balancing act.

But given that this girl on the phone, this child, had been conditioned to not care much for herself, preventing her from having another person in her care until she had matured seemed a necessary stopgap.

“Thanks for listening to me, Mr. Midnight,” she was saying, gushing, high on the idea that she had places to go, things to do, that she wasn’t necessarily alone.

“A lot of people would listen to you, if you take a chance. But pick them carefully.”

“I know. Not everyone is mean, is what you’re saying, even if it seems that way. Chuck—” She hadn’t meant to mention his name, not ever and especially not on the radio.

Matt couldn’t help smiling at the notion of all the “Chucks” out there in the listening audience who were doing hasty examinations of conscience.

“I never thought I could get caught. I never thought, I guess. I need to figure out why I did that, and how not to get caught again, right?”

“You need to figure out who you are and what you want and need and care about.”

“Everybody says that: figure out who you are. They never say how.”

“Look at what makes you happy. Look at what makes you hurt. Think about your future, not just now. Think about what you owe to yourself, not anybody else.”

“Isn’t that selfish?”

“No. That’s self-knowledge. We’re all working on it. Every day in every way. We don’t always get it right. Making mistakes is how we learn.”

“Have you made mistakes, Mr. Midnight?”

“Many.”

“But here you are, rich and famous.”

“Not so much of either, but more than I ever thought.”

“ ‘More than I ever thought.’ Maybe that’s it. Being more than you ever thought. Hey, thanks. And say ‘Hi’ to Elvis for me.”

Matt shook his head at her parting shot. A regular listener, there even when “The King” or a darn good imitation had called in a few times. This was Las Vegas. What do you expect if you hang out a counseling shingle on the airwaves? You are going to get what you asked for. The lonely, the lost, the Elvis freaks.

“Only the Lonely.” Was that an Elvis song? Maybe, maybe not, but clearly Elvis had been so lonely he had never been alone until he died that way in his own throne room.

The next caller was a crank, insisting that aliens had taken over the famed Area 51 outside Las Vegas and were all masquerading as Elvis impersonators.

God save him from Elvis freaks.

Another caller was back in the all-too-real world. She was, she said, a devout Catholic widow. But the Social Security system screwed seniors out of their earned benefits, so she was going to live without benefit of matrimony with Stanley, who wasn’t Catholic and had no problem with it, so they’d both collect the SS they needed to underwrite their monthly prescription-medicine bills.

Both of them had distant adult children they would tell they were married. They hated lying to the kids, but wait until the juniors found out what prices the seniors had to put up with.

Matt heartily encouraged her. To live so long and still find the courage to bond and then pay a survival-threatening penalty struck him as the heart of social injustice.

He couldn’t believe how much this job forced him to endorse positions contrary to Catholic doctrine. He was out in the real, secular world now, not within the enchanted circle of a parish. He had faced a true ethical dilemma, and come out of it more uncertain and confused than ever. Was Miss Kitty winning? Or was he coming to terms with things he had been able to avoid in his vocation? He wouldn’t know until, like his first caller, he went through the process, took action, found himself.

The phone line clicked as another caller came on. “Mr. Midnight.”

The clock said eight minutes to go on his expanded two-hour stint.

“I’m here.” It had become a catchphrase for his show.

The station had commissioned new billboards around town with those two words. Mr. Midnight is here for you. (Even if he isn’t here for himself, Matt would add whenever he drove past one of the billboards.) They ran spot ads on radio stations the nation over, wherever his program was syndicated. “I’m here.”

That’s why he had to be here, tonight, the hardest time he’d ever put in. He should have been somewhere with Vassar, even if it was at the city morgue. Ashley Andersen, she had told him, finally, last night. Confessed her true identity. Ashley Andersen from Wisconsin. On scholarship to Vassar and never fitting in. And look at her now. Glamorous. Well-off. Scandalous. Dead.