Free God Is Dead by Ron Currie Jr. Page A

look for a job?”
    â€œIt’s a tough choice,” I agreed. “What do you think?”
    â€œI don’t know. I asked Boo where he thought I should put the money.” Boo was Ricky’s four-year-old son, Ricky Jr. “He said I should buy ten sets of Hungry Hungry Hippos.”
    â€œCute,” I said. “That’s the luxury of being a child, of course. You don’t have to make hard decisions.”
    â€œI don’t know, Doc,” Ricky said. “Boo’s a really smart kid. I mean, supersmart, and I’ve had it with worrying about all this crap. I’m thinkin’ the hippos might be the way to go.”
    It got worse in a hurry. God, hamstrung by a spotty track record, and dead besides, was out; kids, tangible, blameless, and cute as all hell, were in. Soon the phenomenon blossomed into a two-tiered crisis. In the majority of adults, who comprised the less acute tier, the behavior was not all that dissimilar to the ways in which parents had indulged children before God died. Tantrums were permitted, even smiled at. Landfills bulged with excised bread crusts and untouched vegetable portions. Toys “R” Us shares rose 90 percent in three weeks. The worst upshot of this was a moderate loss in productivity, as time normally spent in the cubicle and behind the checkout counter was instead squandered at Chuck E. Cheese’s or the local petting zoo. This problem would have been manageable without radical intervention, though, if it hadn’t been for the smaller but more acute tier.
    These parents were found in the country’s traditional bastions of religious piety—the Deep South, the rural Northeast, Utah. In these places the transition to child worship was brisk and absolute, and Laura and I witnessed it firsthand. Seventy percent of the adult population stopped going to work, choosing instead to watch the same animated feature for weeks on end, play Game Boy, and partake of grilled cheese sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly, and chocolate chip cookies. Basic infrastructure dissolved. People were dying in the streets because there were no paramedics to take them to the hospital, and no doctors there when they arrived.
    The National Guard was mobilized yet again, but when they arrived they found there wasn’t much to be done, other than keeping people from entering or leaving the affected areas. The functions for which they were trained and equipped—policing duties, riot control—were not indicated, and it wasn’t as if they could force people at gunpoint to stop spending time with their children. Another, more sublime solution needed to be found.
    Soon word came through that FEMA, in conjunction with an unnamed intelligence agency, was convening an emergency meeting of mental health professionals in Washington. I had to go, if our baby was to have a future. I dusted off my hiking boots and filled a backpack with canned soup and turkey jerky from the abandoned 7-Eleven. Laura and I shared a cry.
    â€œYou’re doing the right thing,” she said.
    I held her close, pressing her belly to me. “I’d curse God for forcing me to make such a choice,” I said. “But, you know.”
    â€œGo,” she said, and gently pushed me away. She laced her fingers together over the globe of her abdomen and smiled. “We’ll be waiting.”
    She spoke the truth. When I returned from D.C. three months later, accompanied by an Army recon platoon and armed with a Ryder truck of antipsychotic medication and the government’s brutal but effective therapy plan, I found Laura and the son she’d died giving birth to, curled together on the kitchen floor, waiting for me to bury them.

    Mrs. DerSimonian is the last patient of the day, so when she’s gone I make a few idle notes in her file, lock up the office, and head outside. I find Jeff Pauquette sitting on the trunk of my Celica. The sleeves of his signature flannel