Gods Without Men

2008

As she put the car into drive, Lisa saw her hands were shaking. She was on the verge of tears and somehow that made her even more angry, a vicious cycle that tightened her throat and blurred her vision as she drove down the hill toward the strip of fast-food restaurants. She muttered under her breath. Damn Jaz. So often he made her feel like this, playing Mr. Scientist, the peer-reviewed voice of reason. No, darling, do it this way. Not like that, you’ll damage the mechanism.

A truck pulled out in front of her, forcing her to brake. She swore and leaned on the horn, but even as she was giving the finger to the giant white shape she knew she was in the wrong. Come on, girl, she admonished herself. Sleep or no sleep, get a grip. What would happen if you got killed? Who’d look after the poor kid then? Not Jaz, that was for sure. He wouldn’t know where to begin.

She pulled into the parking lot of a Denny’s and sat for a moment, examining her hair in the mirror, putting on lip balm and checking her purse, conjuring up a routine to compose herself. Then she went in and ordered coffee.

So the “healing family vacation” idea was a bust. By the time they got to Phoenix things between her and Jaz would be as bad as ever. Her dad would probably try to mediate, though he didn’t understand the first thing about Jaz, was secretly a little afraid of him, treated him like some impressive but unpredictable exotic pet, an iguana or a kinkajou. Her mother would give her that terrible doe-eyed look of pseudo-sympathy, and Lisa would feel like tearing her eyes out of her discreetly worked-on face.

A group of boys was crammed into the next booth, so young that at first she thought they must be from the local high school, a club or a sports team. Then she took in the cropped hair, a certain coiled surliness in their manner, and realized they were from the Marine base. One had his leg in a cast, stretched out straight into the aisle. A set of crutches lay beside him on the floor. A football injury? Or a war wound? Had these kids been in Iraq? She overheard some of what they were discussing. Not cars or girls but the state of the nation. She caught the words honor, decency, fags.

She’d known more or less what her parents would think of Jaz before she introduced them. Her father was a simple soul: Poppy just wanted his little girl to be happy, for her to hug him sometimes and give him useless golf accessories on his birthday and to never ever stop calling him Poppy for as long as they both should live. So an East Indian was fine by him — he seemed to find it necessary to add the “East,” some tic he’d picked up since they moved down there, as if suburban Phoenix was confusingly full of Hopi and Apache who needed to be filed separately. Jaz was Educated, Polite, earned Good Money, was Kind to His Daughter. Check, check, check and check. Due diligence done. So Poppy had signed off and headed back to the den for the Sunday-afternoon football. Mom was trickier, one of those women who made a picture in her mind of how things ought to be and then panicked when reality deviated. Jaz was a major deviation, an unknown unknown, and Patty Schwartzman’s attempts to figure him showed her daughter an ugly side. She’d insisted on a “girls’ day out” at a spa right before the wedding. It was obvious she had something on her mind. So Lisa had sat through the manicure, the pedicure, the hot-stone massage; Patty waited to say her piece until they were slumped on loungers in matching robes, sipping fancy imported European spring water, a vile chocolate facial (chocolate, of all things) caking fecally on their skin. Within two minutes they were hissing at each other, Lisa raging, Patty feigning wounded incomprehension.

“They’re different from us. That’s not calling anyone names.”

“Mom, if you bring up Jason Elsberg now, I’m going to slap you.”

“You know he got engaged. Don’t look at me like that. I’m just saying, when it comes to women, the men are very old-fashioned. They like things a certain way.”

“And you’d know because, what? You had a thing with an anthropologist? He’s not Osama bin Laden. He wears polo shirts. All my friends think he’s a Republican.”

“You always liked to make things difficult for yourself, even as a little girl.”

“You know, Mom, you look exactly like someone smeared your face in shit.”

Lisa would rather have died than admit she’d ever had doubts herself. Back when she and Jaz first met, she’d probed for signs that he was about to tear off his genial mask and reveal an Oriental Bluebeard who’d keep her cooped up in the kitchen and beat her for showing her ankles to other men. Of course all that turned out to be ridiculous, but at the same time there were things about him, sore spots — the pitch of his jealousy about her exes, a certain physical prudery — that you’d have to call Indian, or Asian, or Punjabi, or whatever. Or maybe not; maybe it was all just Jaz. By that time Lisa had long since worn herself out with such questions.

She had breezily assumed Jaz’s problem with his family was more or less in his head. She was a good person, and she loved their son; surely anyone — anyone who got to know her — would be pleased to have her as a daughter-in-law? She’d even entertained one or two pleasant fantasies of being absorbed into an old-fashioned extended family, a sort of subcontinental version of Little Women, with meals around a big table and parties where she’d get dressed up in beautiful fabrics and silver jewelry, one of a crowd of giggling brown-eyed sisters. Then came the terrible trip down to Baltimore, the desolate neighborhood, the cramped strange-smelling house full of inscrutable angry people. She tried everything she could, every tactic to ingratiate herself, but it was plain they didn’t want to know. To be hated just for who she was, and not to be able to do anything about it! To be hated behind a mask of dogged politeness, by people who ate off plastic plates and had a cabinet of cheap tourist tchotchkes and a decaying Tercel parked on the street outside, people who lived like immigrants. A shameful thought. An unsayable thought. That was the worst of it, the way those people made her feel like some red-state bigot, made her feel like her mom.

Lisa was too proud to let anyone know how much the visit scared her, and Jaz was so sweet and tragic that somehow it made everything OK. He wasn’t his family; he wasn’t a bit like them. As he drove her back to the motel, nervously making jokes about their terrible day, she reminded herself of the things she loved about him, his tenderness, his nerdy way of treating her problems like Rubik’s Cubes, puzzles that he could solve to be helpful. He was the kindest, most decent man she’d ever known. Their life together was beautiful. Of course she wanted to marry him.

The first wedding was the day she wanted. Surrounded by all their friends, she felt so charged with happiness that she coasted through the Sikh ceremony a week later, contentedly sitting in the gurdwara with her eyes lowered while her in-laws chanted hymns and adjusted the cloths covering their holy book. It was fun to have her old roommate Sunita by her side, squeezing her hand and helping her mother lead her in — yes, Patty Schwartzman, wrapped in a sari, goggling with concentration as she tried not to upset the natives. Poppy sat on the men’s side, legs crossed, handkerchief on his head and camcorder in hand as if it were all no more strange than a luau or a ceremony at his lodge.

After that the two of them were married enough to please everyone who felt they had a stake in the matter. They went back to their life, cocktails and book parties and tasting menus and theater tickets, and everything was fine, family-wise, until she got pregnant and once again the whole world started acting like it had a right to interfere. Jaz would hunch over the phone for hours, listening to instructions from his relatives, saying nothing but ji, haan ji. Her mother angled to come and stay, “just for six months or so,” to help them get settled. That catastrophe averted, Jaz broke the news about the baby’s name. Lisa had always expected a ceremony of some kind, but hadn’t realized God would want such a say. She’d filed away names for her child — Conor or Lucas or Seth, if it was a boy, Lauren or Dylan for a girl — names she liked, that felt connected to her life. The idea that there’d be a lottery element, opening up the Guru Granth Sahib at random to find the initial letter, seemed like an imposition. It was one thing to dress up and get bored for a couple of hours to placate your in-laws, another to allow them to dictate the sounds you murmured as you held your infant to your breast. When Raj was born, rigid and screaming, they just called him “baby” or “the egg,” deferring the question. Then Jaz let her know that circumcision was strictly prohibited in Sikhism and the full extent of their trouble dawned. She wished she and Jaz had been less good, more independent, had been happy to say to hell with family and tradition and God in whatever hat or turban or yarmulke he was currently wearing; but as they talked, she realized with a sinking feeling that both of them half believed, that in some sentimental way they both wanted to do right by their people.

“But what does it matter? It’s just a piece of skin.”

“It’s — I don’t know, Jaz. It’s about identity. We’ve been oppressed for so many generations—”

“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 B₁₂.… 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.

One night Jaz came home to find her emptying the kitchen cabinets, throwing cans and packets into the trash. GFCF. Gluten-free, casein-free. Jaz asked if she really thought autism was caused by not eating organic. She told him to stop patronizing her. If Raj had allergies, a change in diet would at least alleviate some of his gastric symptoms. Jaz sat down at the breakfast bar and held his head in his hands. “Are you really going to put us all through this?” he asked. Never had she despised him so much. Was she really married to a coward, a man so spineless he wouldn’t even fight for his own son?

So the family embarked on a wheat- and dairy-free diet. Already, seafood was banned on the grounds of mercury contamination. Jaz absolutely refused to countenance vegetarianism, claiming that without meat, he’d feel he’d lost his culture altogether. Lisa scoffed. Did he really feel so threatened? They’d already put off the decision to circumcise Raj because of his “cultural sensitivities.” She put sneering air-quotes round the phrase. He began to find excuses to eat out, with clients or people from the bank.

She started researching other remedies. Could injections of an intestinal hormone help Raj with his bowel problems? What about sessions in an oxygen chamber? Increasingly, the particular treatments were less important to her than a stance, a hopeful habit of mind. She read books about self-healing, positive visualization. Former colleagues would sneak proofs to her from the publisher where she used to work, which had an imprint dedicated to New Age thought.

Be in the moment. Walk the path that leads in the direction of your dreams. Instead of imagining the worst, bring to mind the best. Go about your daily business with a light heart and a mind full of love. You have to learn to let yourself fully experience the joy each one of us has present inside them. Once you can let your joy bubble up to the surface, you are halfway toward a new kind of consciousness, one that will bring to you abundance, happiness and material wealth. If you can emanate positivity out into the Universe, it will be returned to you a thousandfold, a transcendent light with the power to totally transform your existence.

She read these books in a semi-clandestine way, like an Eastern Bloc dissident poring over samizdat copies of Havel or Solzhenitsyn. She derived something vital from them, something fragile she could never share with Jaz. Visualize what you want to happen. That’s the first step toward making it come true. Soon she’d abandoned her old reading altogether, the literary novels with bleak endings, the books about environmentalism or human rights. Those things felt like luxuries now, baubles for people who had no battles of their own. She wasn’t sure she had enough hope for herself, let alone Somalis or street kids or Yanomami Indians.

The midday light poured through the windshield, harsh and white. How long had she been circling the back streets of the little desert town? It could have been hours, days. Sooner or later, she’d have to go back to the motel. It was all lurking in wait for her there. The monstrous trap of her life.

On the other hand, fuck it. She turned onto the highway heading out of town. Dutifully the buildings fell away, leaving her in a basin pocked with Joshua trees at the head of a ribbon of blacktop that led off toward a mountain range. There was little sign of human beings. A hand-painted sign, bleached almost white by the sun, saying FEAR GOD, a few trailers and cabins scattered across the desert floor like loose change. She drove on. Soon even these remnants of life disappeared. It was just her, piloting her little craft through the void.

She pulled over and opened the door. A blast of warm air hit her as she stood up, shielding her eyes from the glare. Above her the blue shaded into purples and blacks, the colors of space. The atmosphere was thin, tenuous. She switched off the engine, but something in the car, the air-conditioning or some cooling fan, kept running, a whirring sound like a long slow exhalation of breath. Finally it cut out and there was silence. She took a few steps into the desert. Plastic scraps in the scrub at the roadside. The tracks of some small mammal, a rabbit or a rodent. A few more steps. A few more. Now the car was a long way off, a white gleam in the distance. Up ahead, perhaps a mile or two away, was a peculiar rock formation, three stone towers like fingers pointing up into space. If I were to lie down here, she thought, I would die. I would step out of my body like a dress and float straight up into the blue.