In the Age of Moloch
Yet Roeder’s bullet failed to pierce the sternum in the style of Tiller’s own executions. It merely burst Tiller’s eye on the way to his brain, where it laid waste to the most legally sound mind in the history of serial killers.
Tubeworms teeming in the Mariana Trench, the harshest, most abyssal region of this planet, reveal a moribund fact: that life is always everywhere relevant. If you think I am posturing, then gray your hair with the following paradox; its parts, when taken together, inspire a vexed dimpling of the brow.
Act One. Momentarily suffering what is strategically labeled a “depression,” a woman hires Dr. George Tiller to drive a needle through the muscular tissue of her abdominal wall and into the bloated, ripe plumb of her uterus. There, digoxin, the same chemical agent by which the serial killer Charles Cullen collected the forty-five trophies of his nursing career, induces a series of strengthening spasms, kicks, and convulsions until the chaos of cardiac arrest has stilled the hideous strength inside her. Waiting, vegetating, out in a motel somewhere among the unmemorable cornfields of forgettable Kansas, the woman picks the lint off the comforter on her bed, glad she does not have to stir night-long in the sweet stink of a hospital, whose nasal moxie would bully her into remarking her location; she can begin to repossess herself now, well before she’s returned to St. Louis, where she contracted the Thing and abided it as long as she could tolerate. Four days later, after the expanding dowels wedged through her cervix have warped it to the requisite size, the woman squats over a commode and squeezes, pushes, in the defecatory manner, as webs of sweat thicken on her temples like the trappings of any both strenuous and healthy exercise. Then a clunk resounds, bone-hard and heavy, on the porcelain sole of the gaping maw beneath her birth canal: “It is finished,” she seems to say. This is not like an egg-white, a tadpole, or even an eerie figurine; in fact, the blue-faced gaze could be mistaken for the vacant stare of a nine-month-old in a neonatal ward. It is, whatever it is, still a Thing.
Nine-months grown and four-days decayed, the fat homunculus of the brown-stained swaddle, the Tom Thumb of the garnet gangrene, turns in the latex hands of Dr. Tiller.
Act Two, Scene One. The boyfriend, whom can be called “Reggie” (because this act is different insofar as it can present things as human), enters the recovery room behind the snapping Crocs of Dr. Tiller, OB/GYN. Unacquainted with the initiatory rites of fatherhood, Reggie bothers the nearest orderly for an antacid, for his groaning bowels bemoan his latest contribution to this comedy of errors; that is, since “It’s a boy,” he was told, the suction of cheap-cigar smoke would have been a sensible pretense for him and the pediatrician of his heir manqué. (Alas.) Having survived her second round of waiting, presumably by tearing shapes off the baking sheet that lines the plastic pseudo-divan on which she now poses, “Regina” sights Reggie and shows her ecstasy in the celestial altitude and goalpost position of her arms. They perform an embrace suiting the common-law stage of intimacy and then, each assured of the other’s satisfaction, turn to their steadfast George Tiller, whose countenance is no longer the very image of a canker sore.
Act Two, Scene Two. Two hours have expired since Regina passed her gallstone into a commode, and one hour since Tiller filtered out the jellyfish of her afterbirth. Interrupting these family matters with a mannerly cough, the couple’s stork has announced the return of the portable toilet, which the orderly conveys carefully, as though it were a manger. Nine-months grown and four-days decayed, the fat homunculus of the brown-stained swaddle, the Tom Thumb of the garnet gangrene, turns in the latex hands of Dr. Tiller, a duet of spiders wrapping their prize, until the moldering midget emerges clothed from his crapper crib, having knocked his bleeding crown on the way out of the head (Aghast, the boy looks like he’s had a heart attack). In cuddles with the onetime “temporary depressive” Regina, whom the boy can’t call “Mom,” he humors a poke from Reggie, or sleeps like a rock, while Tiller reviews the medical report and tells them that nothing was wrong with their “baby.” Regina, Reggie, and the baby have up to three hours before the big bye-bye and decide, as Tiller told them is normal, to make the most of their life together. Once the orderly arrives with the clinic’s camera, available to patients for no additional charge, the couple crowds around the late-term abortion for a prideful portrait to be hung above the cracked mantle in their happy home. Then, helped by hands shoved under his camel-toe armpits, the baby steps from an inkpad onto a certificate that, when framed, will display footprints the imagination can follow on a rainy day. Having resisted the urge to name him before they saw him, Regina and Reggie now decide it’s “Thing” and are convinced they’ve got it right. Not three hours but seven minutes have flown, and that’s the lucky number, so black-footed, baby-photo Thing is back in the toilet. Come as soon as gone, Tiller wheels the porcelain perambulator through a sterile hall and a febrile quarantine, where he tips Baby into the crematorium whose fire has curled and closed the hands of sixty-thousand Things in the gesture of a droll farewell.
